The Network-Firm as a Single Real Entity: Beyond the Aggregate of Distinct Legal Entities

This paper intends to depart from a critique of the nexus of contracts theory of the firm endowed with its moral personification to propose some theoretical foundations of the firm as a real entity. Some old legal views of the corporation are mobilized to complete the conceptual vacuity of economic theories. This provides crucial insights for modern complex organizations such as the network-firm. The integrating and unifying role of intra-network power relationships is then emphasized and some law and economics of the network-firm are ultimately proposed to clarify the argument that the network-firm − as the firm stricto sensu − is a singular real entity composed from distinct legal entities.Law and economics, contract theory of the firm, network-firm, legal fiction, real entity

Third way urban policy and the new moral politics of community: a comparative analysis of Ballymun in Dublin and the Gorbals in Glasgow

Whilst Third Way Urban Policy (TWUP) often associates itself with a kind of anarchic vision of self-regulating and self-reproducing local communities, it can in fact be thought of as a thinly veiled moral crusade targeted towards vulnerable residents in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Sustainable communities are defined as those who can stand on their own two feet within the terms set down by neo-liberal market economics. When these morally charged crusades fail to connect locally, they have the potential to stir local conflict over who has the authority to judge forms of community life. As third way urban regeneration rolls out across capitalist cities, mapping and accounting for the uneven development of moral conflicts over community is a pressing concern. Focusing upon the ongoing regeneration of two of Europe's most famous social housing estates- Ballymun in north Dublin and the Gorbals in central Glasgow - this paper presents a comparative analysis of the different ways in which moral disputes over community have surfaced in these two neighbourhoods. On the bases of an analyses of both the localisation of TWUP and the prior biographies of both estates, the nature of conflict is shown to be contingent upon who has ownership of the local social capital agenda

Featherweight Generic Confinement

Existing approaches to object encapsulation either rely on ad hoc syntactic restrictions or require the use of specialised type systems. Syntactic restrictions are difficult to scale and to prove correct, while specialised type systems require extensive changes to programming languages. We demonstrate that confinement can be enforced cheaply in Featherweight Generic Java, with no essential change to the underlying language or type system. This result demonstrates that polymorphic type parameters can simultaneously act as ownership parameters and should facilitate the adoption of confinement and ownership type systems in general-purpose programming languages

Can China overcome the difficulties of establishing successful global brands?

Abstract It is clear to most observers that China is taking an increasing role in world trade not only through political interventions but as a result of its strategy regarding acquisitions. There have been a significant number of these recently, some of which like the Rover take over in the UK and more recently Geely taking over Volvo, have been high profile. This paper provides a brief overview of these developments. It is then argued that an important issue facing the Chinese companies involved in these take overs is one of brand equity and country of origin effects. This issue is of equal importance to China’s global competitors as well. A review of the literature shows that consumer perception constructs, such as perceived quality, have been well researched through numerous country-of-origin papers. A key issue to explore here however, is the extent to which the new nationality of brand ownership will have an impact on consumer perception constructs of brand equity. This paper discusses these two areas and examines their relationship in conceptual terms. A research agenda is then suggested, which forms the basis of a proposed interpretative project aimed at establishing the views of consumers regarding the phenomenon of well known brands being taken over by a new country of origin - evidence from the car industry draws on the progress being made in this area. The research aims to examine the implications for consumer based valuations of brand equity and the types of new strategic thinking this could engender. It is argued that the Chinese brand lacks the main components for global success in several areas though in time these factors will be addressed. .In the short term more focus will be made on supplying the local Chinese market though experienced gained from increased exports of components and collaboration in research from abroad as shown in the examples of the car industry will help strengthen the reputation of Chinese products in the longer term as well as helping to establish more Chinese global brands

Action planning for graph transition systems

Graphs are suitable modeling formalisms for software and hardware systems involving aspects such as communication, object orientation, concurrency, mobility and distribution. State spaces of such systems can be represented by graph transition systems, which are basically transition systems whose states and transitions represent graphs and graph morphisms. In this paper, we propose the modeling of graph transition systems in PDDL and the application of heuristic search planning for their analysis. We consider different heuristics and present experimental results