Global Standards in Action: Insights from Anti-Money Laundering Regulation

As organizations have come under the increasing influence of global rules of all sorts, organization scholars have started studying the dynamics of global regulation. The purpose of this article is to identify and evaluate the contribution to this interdisciplinary field by the ‘Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research’. The latter’s key proposition is that while global regulation often consists of voluntary best practice rules it can nevertheless become highly influential under certain conditions. We assess how innovative this approach is using as a benchmark the state of the art in another field of relevance to the study of global regulation, i.e. ‘International Relations’. Our discussion is primarily theoretical but we draw on the case of global anti-money laundering regulation to illustrate our arguments and for inspirations of how to further elaborate the approach

Nonunion Employee Representation in North America: Diversity, Controversy, and Uncertain Future

The diverse conceptual perspectives and practical experiences with nonunion employee representation (NER) in the United States and Canada are reviewed. We first propose a 6 dimensional descriptive schema to categorize observed NER practices. Dimensions of diversity include (1) form, (2) function, (3) subjects, (4) representation characteristics, (5) extent of power, and (6) degree of permanence. We then turn to the NER controversy, which is a tangled skein consisting of many different threads of values and prescriptions. To unbundle the controversy, we develop four "faces" of NER - (1) evolutionary voice, (2) unity of interest; (3) union avoidance, and (4) complementary voice -- so that future research can more consciously test the validity of competing perspectives with hard data. Generalizing about NER is problematic because of these many dimensions of diversity, and because NER is viewed through different ideological and conceptual lenses. We conclude that NER's future trajectory is uncertain due to conflicting trends but in the short-run is most likely to remain a modest-sized phenomenon. Working Paper 06-4

NAVDEX, a helpful tool for the classification of environmental legislation

Since its launch in 1998 the thematic indexation of the Flemish Environmental Navigator is carried out manually by legal experts of the University of Ghent, Belgium. However, due to the exponential growth of legal documents a physical indexation process eventually was no longer tenable, nor desirable. Hence, a semi-automatic indexing tool for environmental legislation, called NAVDEX, was developed. A specific algorithm was determined, based On the presence of similar terms in law objects. A parameter was defined, reflecting the strength of the relation between law objects in order to computerise the return on a user's query. 1/7 view, of managing the relations between law objects, a visualisation tool was created in order to provide the legal experts with a detailed overview of all associated law Objects. The testing corpus was decided to be VLAREA, a Flemish order concerning waste prevention and management. The evaluation of the test results was carried out by experts in environmental legislation, who computed the relative recall of several search terms. With an average score of 0.63 NAVDEX is able to retrieve nearly two third of the associated law objects. Consequently the evaluators' conclusions were unanimous so as to define NAVDEX as a useful tool to determine and visualise associated LawObjects

PRES: A score metric for evaluating recall-oriented information retrieval applications

Information retrieval (IR) evaluation scores are generally designed to measure the effectiveness with which relevant documents are identified and retrieved. Many scores have been proposed for this purpose over the years. These have primarily focused on aspects of precision and recall, and while these are often discussed with equal importance, in practice most attention has been given to precision focused metrics. Even for recalloriented IR tasks of growing importance, such as patent retrieval, these precision based scores remain the primary evaluation measures. Our study examines different evaluation measures for a recall-oriented patent retrieval task and demonstrates the limitations of the current scores in comparing different IR systems for this task. We introduce PRES, a novel evaluation metric for this type of application taking account of recall and the user’s search effort. The behaviour of PRES is demonstrated on 48 runs from the CLEF-IP 2009 patent retrieval track. A full analysis of the performance of PRES shows its suitability for measuring the retrieval effectiveness of systems from a recall focused perspective taking into account the user’s expected search effort

Meeting of the MINDS: an information retrieval research agenda

Since its inception in the late 1950s, the field of Information Retrieval (IR) has developed tools that help people find, organize, and analyze information. The key early influences on the field are well-known. Among them are H. P. Luhn's pioneering work, the development of the vector space retrieval model by Salton and his students, Cleverdon's development of the Cranfield experimental methodology, Spärck Jones' development of idf, and a series of probabilistic retrieval models by Robertson and Croft. Until the development of the WorldWideWeb (Web), IR was of greatest interest to professional information analysts such as librarians, intelligence analysts, the legal community, and the pharmaceutical industry

Sub-word indexing and blind relevance feedback for English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR

The Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) provides document collections, topics, and relevance assessments for information retrieval (IR) experiments on Indian languages. Several research questions are explored in this paper: 1. how to create create a simple, languageindependent corpus-based stemmer, 2. how to identify sub-words and which types of sub-words are suitable as indexing units, and 3. how to apply blind relevance feedback on sub-words and how feedback term selection is affected by the type of the indexing unit. More than 140 IR experiments are conducted using the BM25 retrieval model on the topic titles and descriptions (TD) for the FIRE 2008 English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi document collections. The major findings are: The corpus-based stemming approach is effective as a knowledge-light term conation step and useful in case of few language-specific resources. For English, the corpusbased stemmer performs nearly as well as the Porter stemmer and significantly better than the baseline of indexing words when combined with query expansion. In combination with blind relevance feedback, it also performs significantly better than the baseline for Bengali and Marathi IR. Sub-words such as consonant-vowel sequences and word prefixes can yield similar or better performance in comparison to word indexing. There is no best performing method for all languages. For English, indexing using the Porter stemmer performs best, for Bengali and Marathi, overlapping 3-grams obtain the best result, and for Hindi, 4-prefixes yield the highest MAP. However, in combination with blind relevance feedback using 10 documents and 20 terms, 6-prefixes for English and 4-prefixes for Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR yield the highest MAP. Sub-word identification is a general case of decompounding. It results in one or more index terms for a single word form and increases the number of index terms but decreases their average length. The corresponding retrieval experiments show that relevance feedback on sub-words benefits from selecting a larger number of index terms in comparison with retrieval on word forms. Similarly, selecting the number of relevance feedback terms depending on the ratio of word vocabulary size to sub-word vocabulary size almost always slightly increases information retrieval effectiveness compared to using a fixed number of terms for different languages

The other War on Terror revealed: global governmentality and the Financial Action Task Force's campaign against terrorist financing

Abstract. Despite initial fanfare surrounding its launch in the White House Rose Garden, the War on Terrorist Finances (WOTF) has thus far languished as a sideshow, in the shadows of military campaigns against terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. This neglect is unfortunate, for the WOTF reflects the other multilateral cooperative dimension of the US-led ‘war on terror’, quite contrary to conventional sweeping accusations of American unilateralism. Yet the existing academic literature has been confined mostly to niche specialist journals dedicated to technical, legalistic and financial regulatory aspects of the WOTF. Using the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as a case study, this article seeks to steer discussions on the WOTF onto a broader theoretical IR perspective. Building upon emerging academic works that extend Foucauldian ideas of governmentality to the global level, we examine the interwoven overlapping national, regional and global regulatory practices emerging against terrorist financing, and the implications for notions of government, regulation and sovereignty