Innovation After the Revolution: Foreign Sovereign Bond Contracts Since 2003

For over a decade, contracts literature has focused on standardization. Scholars asked how terms become standard, and why they change so rarely. This line of inquiry painted a world where a standard term persists until it is dislodged by another standard term, perhaps after a brief window of ferment before the second term takes hold. It also overshadowed the early insights of boilerplate theories, which described contracts as a mix of standard and customized terms, and asked why the mix might be suboptimal. This article brings the focus back to the mix. It examines the development of selected provisions in sovereign bond contracts after a widely publicized boilerplate shift in 2003. The adoption of collective action clauses in sovereign bonds five years ago moved the documentation standard in New York closer to the prevailing practice in London. However, contrary to expectations, the shift away from old boilerplate did not lead to convergence around new boilerplate. Issuers in London and, to a lesser extent, in New York, have been experimenting with diverse formulations and institutional arrangements, including trustees and creditor committees. The contracts we study, as well as our interviews with practitioners and officials, suggest that standardization may be a matter of degree, that the degree of standardization may vary across different markets, and that a shock of the sort that led the 2003 shift may dislodge a previously standard term without replacing it with a new standard - erstwhile boilerplate becomes a platform for customization

The Web Science Observatory

To understand and enable the evolution of the Web and to help address grand societal challenges, the Web must be observable at scale across space and time. That requires a globally distributed and collaborative Web Observatory

Alexander Werdmuller von Elgg

This research aims to describe a condition of college level art education and is composed of two parts: an annotated bibliography and a survey. The annotated bibliography describes dissertations, research papers, articles, and books about histories and current trends in college level art education. The survey asks students and faculty at San Jose State University, California about their extent of value toward a variety of experiences in college level art education. Some key findings from the research are that studio space, expressivity, and craftsmanship are some of the most valuable qualities in college level art education.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/lrsp/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Road Less Traveled: Funders' Advice on the Path to Nonprofit Sustainability

(With apologies to Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, 1920.) As part of the Capital Ideas symposium co-hosted by the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University and the Nonprofit Finance Fund in March, 2007, an online survey was conducted about funder practices that support nonprofit sustainability. This article highlights the survey findings and the advice that funders offered from their own experiences as paths to greater nonprofit strength. Rather than a qualitative analysis of funding initiatives, this article presents guidance to the field from the field, as funders grappling with how best to strengthen the long term health of their grantees reflect on their works in progress. This article then goes a step further by annotating these lessons learned with the additional perspective offered from just four of the ten draft funding principles that have evolved from the Capital Ideas symposium with the hope of encouraging more funders to consider these principles and practices in their own work. The Capital Ideas survey generated 48 profiles of funding approaches, practices and strategies that support nonprofit organizational capacity building, long term financial health and or programmatic improvement. The lessons funders learned from those initiatives informed ten funding principles that were introduced at the Capital Ideas symposium on March 15, 2007 at Harvard University. Four of those draft principles, outlined below, offered concepts that resonated throughout the profiles and are offered as key steps for funders to consider as they reflect upon their own giving practices. These principles include: Understand when youre building or buying, and fund accordingly. Actively pool resources when more funds are required to achieve results. Minimize the transaction costs for grantees and funders of applying for and reporting on grants. Fund at the organizational rather than the programmatic level, even when your primary interest is in one program. This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 40. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Capacity building for transnationalisation of higher education

Purpose – Transnationalism and transnational concept are extensively researched in many social science areas; however, transnational management and transnational marketing is relatively a less explored research domain. Also, knowledge management for transnational education (TNE) marketing is not well-researched. Capacity building is an established research-stream, with a key focus on socio-economic and ecological development; however, prior research on capacity building from the context of TNE’s knowledge management and marketing is scarce. The purpose of this study is to analyse TNE marketing mix, to understand the influence of transnational stakeholders’ causal scope(s) on knowledge management in TNE to uphold their transnatioalisation processes through capacity building in TNEs’ marketing management. Design/methodology/approach – An inductive constructivist method is followed. Findings – Organisational learning from the context of transnational market and socio-economic competitive factors, based on analysing the transnational stakeholders’ causal scope(s) is imperative for proactive knowledge management capacity in TNE marketing. Following the analysis of transnational stakeholders’ causal scope(s) to learn about the cause and consequence of the transnational stakeholders’ relationships and interactions, an initial conceptual framework of knowledge management for TNE marketing is proposed. Practical insights from different TNE markets are developed in support of this novel knowledge management capacity building framework of TNE, and its generalisation perspectives and future research areas are discussed. Practical implications – These insights will be useful for TNE administrators to better align their knowledge management perspectives and propositions with their transnational stakeholders to underpin TNE marketing. Academics will be able to use these insights as a basis for future research. Originality/value – This study proposes a novel conceptual stakeholder-centred capacity building framework for TNE’s knowledge management to uphold TNE marketing and supports the framework, based on practical insights from three different transnational markets

Why Water?

The report focuses on what businesses should do to manage the reputational, regulatory, and operational risks of their water usage. Four solutions are presented, and the scale and intensity of each solution will vary by sector, geography, and customer base. Case studies highlighting water management and usage practices of various multinational corporations, and how these corporations are working together to solve the global water crisis, are included in the report