我国外资并购中的国家安全审查制度

我国对外资并购的监管在不断变化和调整过程中逐渐形成体系。但现行法律关于国家安全审查的规定相对简单，缺乏系统性和可操作性。国家安全审查有其独立性，行业审查和反垄断审查均不能代替国家安全审查。建议我国成立类似于反垄断委员会的国家安全审查委员会，专门处理外资并购的国家安全审查问题，并从审查对象、审查标准、审查机关、审查程序、救济途径等方面完善国家安全审查制度。     

我国中小企业融资困境及对策

我国中小企业由于自身的性质、特点,以及经济转轨过程中政策滞后、制度不完善、渠道不畅通等原因,面临资金短缺却又无处融资的困境.中小企业要摆脱这些融资困境,必须从宏观、微观两个层面双管齐下政府应积极改善中小企业的融资环境,拓宽融资渠道;企业应苦修内功,加强管理,增强企业竞争力.     

基于社会资本提升领导者权力性影响力的探讨

领导者权力性影响力是领导者有效管理组织的必要条件，因此，如何提升领导者的权力性影响力是一个值得我们研究的课题。近年来．随着竞争的不断加剧和环境不确定性的增加，社会资本在领导者有效管理组织中日益凸显其独特魅力.本文通过对领导者社会资本影响力的获取与权力性影响力之间关系的分析．认为领导者对社会资本的占有是提升其权力性影响力的重要途径．提出了领导者获得社会资本并借此提升其权力性影响力的建议．希望对领导者有效管理组织有所裨益.     

地方政府债务问题的法律对策

地方政府债务问题主要是由财税制度的不完善、相关法律和制度的缺失、政府债务信息公开制度和监督机制的不健全、不合理的政绩考核制度以及借款还款制度的缺乏造成的。建立合理、完善的地方政府举债的法律制度使得地方政府举债合法化、制度化。     

从马克思人力资本思想看中国中小企业转型中的人力资本问题

该文分析了马克思理论中的人力资本思想，包括人力资本的类型、形成途径、积累特性、专用性与专有性以及与物质资本的关系等方面，然后指出了中国中小企业在转型升级期间存在人力资本的畸形消费、频繁更替、专有性和运用不充分等问题，并提出了相关的对策建议。     

'These mad abandon'd times'

Abstract

The existing academic literature on financialization points to multiple instances in which firms attempt to demonstrate the vitality of their stock-market position in ways which ultimately prove to be self-harming. I demonstrate, in the first instance as a matt er of immanent logic, that these actions are linked to the interplay of contradictory tendencies in the microfoundations of financialization. Under conditions of financialization, firms create additional sources of credit to capitalize their productive activities by driving their stock price into greater increases than the market average, thereby generating capital gains. Yet, the more it becomes public knowledge that the financing tricks used to inflate the stock price provide no productive benefit to the firm, the more it would seem to create incentives for fund managers to hold portfolios that replicate the stock market as a whole. In this way, they will minimize their exposure to financial misrepresentation. Such a stance undermines financialized business models, but it does in any case conform to fund managers’ basic theoretical training, which revolves around the logical demonstration that an individual stock cannot systematically out-perform the market average. I review the available empirical studies of fund manager decision-making to show that they find against the existence of a simple performativity loop operating between finance theory and fund manager behaviour. However, on many points the empirical evidence does confirm the theoretically derived conclusion concerning the potentially contradictory microfoundations of financialization. Fund managers often do act in a way which is consistent with finance theory's core claim that an index-tracking strategy represents the only equilibrium portfolio, even if this is only rarely as a result of the direct performativity of the theory.     

Currency devaluations and consolidating democracy: the example of the South African rand

Abstract

In 2001 the South African rand depreciated suddenly and steeply against the dollar and euro. This triggered inflation as the prices of imported products gapped upward. To offset the imminent inflationary effects and attract foreign exchange, the Reserve Bank raised interest rates, resulting in slower domestic growth. The critical question was the cause of the currency depreciation. We argue here that the rand's decline was the result of a concatenation of internal and external factors, specifically the way the operations of the global financial markets magnified and exacerbated the effects of internal financial policy decisions. The article illustrates the heightening connectivity between domestic policy decisions aimed at regulating the national economy and the globalizing financial markets that operate on an altogether different logic. The Reserve Bank's attempt to regulate the local foreign exchange regime in concert with the corporate use of financial instruments to circumvent these exchange controls led to a relatively illiquid currency market that was easily susceptible to attack by speculative capital. The end result was a crippling devaluation that especially hurt the impoverished black South African majority in the process of getting on its feet economically, thereby adding a further constraint on the consolidation of post-apartheid democracy.     

Elite mobilities: the semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege

Tourism is immensely powerful in (re)organising large-scale inequalities and privileges. In the rapid expansion of ‘luxury tourism’ we find a wing of this truly global culture industry openly committed to the symbolic production of elite status, distinction and privilege. Our visual essay here offers a series of multimodal, multi-voiced statements arising from a research project that explores and critiques the lavish semiotic economies and strict interactional orders of these ‘new’ elite mobilities. Mimicking the fleeting encounters of super-elite travellers themselves, we undertook a series of ethnographically grounded but patently frugal sorties into five different spaces (or modes) of luxury travel. Drawing on our own fieldwork material and quoting the visual rhetoric of advertisers, we trace the normative production of an ostensibly enclavic landscape that imagines (or re-imagines) limitless aspirations and unbounded pleasures for all consumer-citizens regardless of their power or wealth.     

Advertising and the conquest of culture

Thomas Frank's important The conquest of cool: Business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism usefully described the advertising industry's “conquest of cool” in the 1960s and beyond, the co-optation of the hip and the cool for the purposes of advertising marketing. This article argues that, since Frank's book appeared, the “convergence of commerce and content” – as the advertising industry calls it – has meant that the production of content is even more entwined with advertising than ever before. The first part of this article describes this shift with particular attention paid to the production of advertising music, which increasingly employs well-known rock, hip-hop, and other popular musicians. The analytical portion of this article draws on the studies of Richard A. Peterson and others on the rise of the socially elite “omnivore” consumer of cultural products to argue that advertising has played a crucial role in this shift, emphasizing the cool and the trendy. Last, the article updates Pierre Bourdieu's influential notion of cultural capital, for, if social elites are more omnivorous in their tastes, then cultural capital today must increasingly be associated with knowledge of the trendy, not only the fine arts.     

Comment on Langley C. Keyes et al.’s “Networks and nonprofits: Opportunities and challenges in an era of federal devolution”

Abstract

Housing markets are determined by a complex interplay of consumers and suppliers. The Keyes et al. article discusses the changing landscape for nonprofit housing providers and what recent developments in federal housing assistance policy will mean to them. But this perspective is too narrow to predict the effects of changes in federal housing policy because all housing providers are somewhat interrelated. All housing providers need to be considered, and using the terms “for‐profit” and “nonprofit” to distinguish between the two types of providers is unfortunate and misleading.

For‐profits and nonprofits are fundamentally different: They place a different emphasis on community, and nonprofits can often deliver subsidies that for‐profits cannot. In addition, the strengths and the skills needed to produce housing under somewhat different objectives have led to some specialization. Ultimately, however, determining the optimal provider or mix of providers is best left to local and state governments as federal housing assistance devolves.