Integrated Governance: A Pre-Requisite for Sustainable Market-Oriented Development in Bangladesh

Using agriculture input sector as an exemplar, this article assesses Bangladesh's efforts towards a market-oriented development approach. It examines the changing role of the state following the market-based reforms undertaken in this sector and assesses whether the outcomes of the reforms are sustainable. Findings reveal that, although the current move towards a market-oriented approach has led to a shift away from a state-dominated hierarchical structure, it has not been associated with adequate changes in institutional arrangements, safeguards, and regulation. As a result, despite notable achievements of the reforms, the sustainability of these successes is in question. To facilitate participatory, accountable, and sustainable, market-oriented development, the paper proposes an integrated governance model linking state, business, and civil society.     

Globalisation and the changing management of migrating service workers in the Asia pacific

The advance of globalisation depends in fundamental ways on the continued flows of transnational labour it has stimulated. For semi-skilled and unskilled service workers these flows are managed through numerous controls imposed by states, employers, labour brokers and even by the expectations of their families and communities of origin. This article concentrates on female service labour originating in Indonesia and the Philippines, destined for Hong Kong and Taiwan. It emphasises the collective (family and community-based) nature of the worker's entry into this type of work. It looks at multiple intersecting discourses that shape, construct and attempt to manage the worker's behaviour at different stages of the migration cycle. It gives particular attention to the receiving workplace: the household, and in some instances, the household-based enterprise. The article shows that workers placed in these households are simultaneously governed by contractual relationships and by historically and culturally derived rules reflecting the household's functions as a property-holding, administrative and patriarchal kinship unit. Globalisation has brought far-reaching changes to patterns of labour migration, but the household as a workplace retains important vestiges of these older patriarchal discourses, and ambiguities remain about the emergence of free labour in domestic work.     

Cognitive bias in line-up identifications: The impact of administrator knowledge

Prior knowledge of the likely or expected outcome of a forensic investigation has been shown to produce biases in the results obtained, reducing objectivity. The wide prevalence of such cognitive biases in many judgments has long been recognised by social psychologists, but its importance is only now gaining appreciation within forensic science communities. It is therefore timely to draw attention to the power of cognitive biases found in a study of the influence of administrator expectations on photographic identifications. Data are presented to show that when a line-up administrator knows the identity and position of a target within a line-up choice, in which the ‘witness’ is ignorant of the actual target, that target is more than twice as likely to be selected compared with when the administrator is kept ‘blind’. These findings, taken together with related studies, support the recommendation that all forensic analyses are made ‘double-blind’—a method that has proven to be effective in reducing such effects within the social sciences.     

Contemporary art and unconditionality: ‘the genus of art’ in the art criticism of Chiba Shigeo

This article examines art criticism of the 1980s that sought to address the context and continuity of postwar Japanese avant-garde art. The emphasis is placed on the notion of ‘the genus of art [rui to shite no bijutsu]’, which the art critic Chiba Shigeo discussed in his Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi (1986). Chiba argued for an autonomous current of postwar Japanese art separate from Western art history but the argument has been largely overshadowed by his ostensible nihonjinron. The term ‘the genus of art’, therefore, has not yet received an adequate critical treatment. The article rephrases this notion as a call for a more inclusive definition of art designed to challenge the conditions that regulate non-Western art. Rather than simply being a nationalist polemic against Western art history from a marginalized place, Japan, ‘the genus of art’ was intended to revitalize and redefine the aims of the avant-garde within the context of ‘contemporary art’. By fleshing out the textual details of ‘the genus of art’ and situating the notion within a larger discourse that interrogated the semiotic role of ‘Japan’ in a global exhibition context, the study repositions Chiba's writing as a potential argument for unconditional acceptance, or unconditionality, as one important ethical contribution of contemporary art.     

A Regulation of Bids for Dual Class Shares. Implication: Two Shares—One Price

This paper examines the consequences of a specific regulatory restriction on bids for dual class shares. Shares of different classes are often argued to have different prices because a premium will be paid to the superior voting shares in the case of a tender offer. This paper assumes a setup where regulations require that a tender offer pays the same relative premium to both classes of shares. In this setup, it is shown that both classes will sell at the same price as long as there is a strictly positive probability that either the current management is sufficiently strong or that a sufficiently strong rival will show up. Furthermore, under this weak condition the regulation is socially optimal in the sense that the management that provides the highest total firm value will be the management of the firm. Finally, the regulation is shown to favor (or protect) the holders of restricted voting shares and this is not necessarily at the expense of the holders of superior voting shares.The practical interest of this paper derives from the fact that some European countries have adopted different regulatory restrictions on bids for dual class shares. This has more or less occurred due to proposed EU Directives. The regulation examined in this paper applies to tender offers in Denmark. Empirical results on the voting premium in Denmark are shown to be consistent with the theoretical results in this paper.     

Welfare effects of forming a criminal organization

This paper develops a simple model to examine the economic consequences of two different criminal market structures in the private protection and extortion industry: (1) horizontal (decentralized) governance and market structure and (2) hierarchical (centralized) governance and market structure with a criminal organization. Forming a criminal organization produces positive or negative effects on its members and social efficiency. These results depend on the potential competitiveness among criminals and the ability of a criminal organization’s boss to target more valuable extortion victims.