Sports, Inc. Volume 3, Issue 1

The ILR Cornell Sports Business Society magazine is a semester publication titled Sports, Inc. This publication serves as a space for our membership to publish and feature in-depth research and well-thought out ideas to advance the world of sport. The magazine can be found in the Office of Student Services and is distributed to alumni who come visit us on campus. Issues are reproduced here with permission of the ILR Cornell Sports Business Society.https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/sportsinc/1003/thumbnail.jp

Inside Debt Financing. Theory, Practice, and Regulatory Approaches

Debt finance raised from corporate insiders has attracted the attention of legal scholars over the past several years. Such an interest comes as no surprise. The variety of legal treatments reserved for insider loans across Europe, the United States and in other jurisdictions attests to an intriguing absence of any regulatory uniformity despite similar financing patterns. After reviewing the literature on the benefits and costs of inside debt financing and illustrating the diverse regulatory approaches adopted by prominent jurisdictions, the book reassesses the risk of opportunistic insider lending based on the state of a company’s finances. In doing so, the book sheds light on the net costs associated with financially sound firms issuing senior debt, whether secured or unsecured, to their insiders and, by contrast, the net benefits of allowing insiders to make senior unsecured loans to firms that are in or near insolvency. Following the re-examination of the benefits and costs of insider lending, novel requirements are recommended for an efficient and fair legal response to inside debt as a source of funding for both solvent firms and financially-distressed ones

Game Production Studies

Video games have entered the cultural mainstream and in terms of economic profits they now rival established entertainment industries such as film or television. As careers in video game development become more common, so do the stories about precarious working conditions and structural inequalities within the industry. Yet, scholars have largely overlooked video game production cultures in favor of studying games themselves and player audiences. In Game Production Studies, an international group of established and emerging researchers takes a closer look at the everyday realities of video game production, ranging from commercial industries to independent creators and cultural intermediaries. Across sixteen chapters, the authors deal with issues related to labour, game development, monetization and publishing, as well as local specificities. As the first edited collection dedicated solely to video game production, this volume provides a timely resource for anyone interested in how games are made and at what costs

Animators of Atlanta: Layering Authenticity in the Creative Industries

This dissertation explores post-authentic neoliberal animation production culture, tracing the ways authenticity is used as a resource to garner professional autonomy and security during precarious times. Animators engage in two modes of production, the first in creating animated content, and the other in constructing a professional identity. Analyzing animator discourse allows for a nuanced exploration of how these processes interact and congeal into common sense. The use of digital software impacts the animator’s capacity to legitimize themselves as creatives and experts, traditional tools become vital for signifying creative authenticity in a professional environment. The practice of decorating one’s desk functions as a tactic to layer creative authenticity, but the meaning of this ritual is changing now that studios shift to open spaces while many animators work from home. Layering authenticity on-screen often requires blending techniques from classical Hollywood cinema into animated performance, concomitant with a bid to legitimate the role of the authentic interlocutor for the character. Increasingly animators feel pressure to layer authenticity online, establishing an audience as a means to hedge against precarity. The recombined self must balance the many methods for layering creative and professional authenticity with the constraints and affordances of their tools, along with the demands of the studio, to yield cultural capital vital for an animator’s survival in an industry defined at once by its limitless expressive potential and economic uncertainty

Creative Management: Disciplining the Neoliberal Worker

This integrated article dissertation examines some of the new managerial practices that have emerged to handle cognitive capitalism’s ongoing need for creative, flexible labour power. The three articles included in this dissertation offer a glimpse into the widespread processes employed by management to regulate and discipline a workforce that must also be granted a degree of relative flexibility, creativity, and autonomy in order to be effective under post-Fordist conditions of production. The first chapter looks at the emergence of corporate improvisational training at the turn of the twenty-first century as an attempt to cultivate flexible and innovative workers, a move that ultimately succumbs to what Andre Spicer (2013) calls “organizational bullshit”—the deployment of cynical and self-serving discourse that functions to build confidence and legitimacy within workplaces where a clear sense of occupational purpose is lacking. Chapter two explores the recent trend of workplace mindfulness as a specific element of the now-prevalent \u27wellness\u27 discourses, which inevitably work to align workers\u27 personal values with those of their employer. The final chapter involves an analysis of the working conditions of voice-over and motion capture actors in the video game industry and the processes of rationalization and neo-taylorization to which they are subjected

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Becoming economic: a political phenomenology of car purchases

"The point of this dissertation is to revisit the most ambiguous and perhaps most controversial aspect of Karl Polanyi's embeddedness thesis, namely the implication that socially disembedded economic action (i.e. action guided by a purely calculative disposition, ontologically separate from considerations of sociality) is ""always embedded"" (Block, 2003: 294) nonetheless. I aim, that is, to trouble and interrogate what it means to say that economic action is either embedded or disembedded. Yet what follows is less a re-evaluation of these ideas than a 'reboot,' given that Polanyi is rarely mentioned herein- less still Mark Granovetter, embeddedness' more recent champion. I call instead upon an altogether different set of protagonists: Daniel Miller and Michel Callon, who in 2002 and -5 squared off in a fruitful debate on the nature of economy. The analysis here adopts their terminology - entanglement versus disentanglement - as well as Miller's ethnographic sensibility, specifically of car purchases. Via semi-structured interviews with car buyers (N=39), I have sought to ascertain the determinants of the car-buying calculus and in doing so, to lay bare the socio-technical dynamics of automobile transactions. Putatively disentangled decision-making and -taking is entangled, I argue, with market/power, a neo-Foucauldian neologism emphasizing ways by which the buyer's sense of inferiority acts a focal point of market experience and subjectivity. Becoming economic in the context of an automobile acquisition (or any other major life purchase for that matter) is hence less a matter of optimally formatting one's calculative competencies than of reasonably justifying one's inferiority; of learning, that is, the crucial injunction to stop calculating. Another way of putting it, the market asymmetry that counts most is not the one between the buyer and seller, but rather the buyer and herself.