2,111 research outputs found
Bad Social Norms rather than Bad Believers â Examining the Role of Social Norms in Bad Beliefs.
People with bad beliefs â roughly beliefs that conflict with those of the relevant experts and are maintained regardless of counter-evidence â are often cast as bad believers. Such beliefs are seen to be the result of, e.g., motivated or biased cognition and believers are judged to be epistemically irrational and blameworthy in holding them.
Here I develop a novel framework to explain why people form bad beliefs. People with bad beliefs follow the social epistemic norms guiding how agents are supposed to form and share beliefs within their respective communities. Beliefs go bad because these norms arenât reliably knowledge-conducive. In other words, bad beliefs arenât due to bad believers but due bad social epistemic norms. The framework also unifies different explanations of bad beliefs, is testable and provides distinct interventions to combat such beliefs.
The framework also helps to capture the complex and often contextual normative landscape surrounding bad beliefs more adequately. On this picture, itâs primarily groups that are to be blamed for bad beliefs. I also suggest that some individuals will be blameless for forming their beliefs in line with their groupâs norms, whereas others wonât be. I draw attention to the factors that influence blameworthiness-judgements in this context
Spectrum auctions: designing markets to benefit the public, industry and the economy
Access to the radio spectrum is vital for modern digital communication. It is an essential component for smartphone capabilities, the Cloud, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, and multiple other new technologies. Governments use spectrum auctions to decide which companies should use what parts of the radio spectrum. Successful auctions can fuel rapid innovation in products and services, unlock substantial economic benefits, build comparative advantage across all regions, and create billions of dollars of government revenues. Poor auction strategies can leave bandwidth unsold and delay innovation, sell national assets to firms too cheaply, or create uncompetitive markets with high mobile prices and patchy coverage that stifles economic growth. Corporate bidders regularly complain that auctions raise their costs, while government critics argue that insufficient revenues are raised. The cross-national record shows many examples of both highly successful auctions and miserable failures. Drawing on experience from the UK and other countries, senior regulator Geoffrey Myers explains how to optimise the regulatory design of auctions, from initial planning to final implementation. Spectrum Auctions offers unrivalled expertise for regulators and economists engaged in practical auction design or company executives planning bidding strategies. For applied economists, teachers, and advanced students this book provides unrivalled insights in market design and public management. Providing clear analytical frameworks, case studies of auctions, and stage-by-stage advice, it is essential reading for anyone interested in designing public-interested and successful spectrum auctions
The Crossroads We Make: Intergenerational Trauma and Reparative Reading in Recent Asian American Memoirs (2018-2022)
This project extends reparative reading practices to recent Asian American memoirs, specifically trauma memoirs from the past five years (2018-2022) that detail personal trauma and communal, intergenerational trauma. Reparative reading is explored within five memoirs: Stephanie Fooâs What My Bones Know (2022), EsmĂ© Weijun Wangâs The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), Phuc Tranâs Sigh, Gone (2020), Cathy Park Hongâs Minor Feelings (2020), and Nicole Chungâs All You Can Ever Know (2018). In considering the reparative turn in Asian American memoirs, this thesis draws on and extends Eve Kosofsky Sedgwickâs reparative frameworks and bell hooksâ theories on pedagogy and love. A critical analysis of self-writings through pre-existing reparative reading models alongside traditional Asian American scholarship on racial melancholia resists the monopolistic dominance of overwhelming negative affects (such as shame, guilt, and anger) that saturate Asian American lives and life-writing. Instead, this alternative interpretative practice exposes how authors seek love, pleasure, and positivity within their texts and within their own lives, while also exploring the methods through which the memoirists themselves embody the reparative in writing and self-analysis. Thus, shaping the reparative turn for Asian America illuminates the productive ways reshaped methods of writing and criticism, and its resultant ethics of living, can push back against lived racial oppression and pain as well as decades of cultural erasure and intergenerational trauma. This varied engagement with love-based and reparative frameworks allows Asian American authors to begin healing from trauma, and this is evidenced through non-traditional psychiatric healing methods, literary methods, and strategies of communal formation
To make the dominoes fall: A relational-processual approach to societal accountability in the Italian and Spanish anti-corruption arenas
In che modo le organizzazioni della società civile (OSC) contribuiscono alla lotta contro la corruzione? Come possono responsabilizzare i rappresentanti politici? La presente tesi si propone di rispondere a queste a queste domande di ricerca, unendo gli studi sulla lotta alla corruzione a quelli sui movimenti sociali e concentrandosi sul concetto di societal accountability, cioè sui meccanismi di controllo e di sanzione dei rappresentanti pubblici. Negli ultimi anni, gli studiosi della corruzione hanno enfatizzato sempre più il ruolo della società civile come antidoto contro la corruzione, a complemento dei meccanismi di accountability statali ed elettorali. Tuttavia, gli studi empirici sugli effetti anticorruzione degli interventi civici non hanno ancora prodotto risultati coerenti. Questo non dovrebbe sorprendere. Se misurare la corruzione è un compito arduo, valutare se e quanto gli scambi corruttivi vengano impediti grazie alle iniziative della società civile sembra virtualmente impossibile. Per questo motivo, il presente lavoro fa un passo indietro e problematizza lo studio della societal accountability, affrontandola non come un insieme predefinito di meccanismi o pratiche messe in atto da attori civici anticorruzione, ma come il risultato di interazioni sostenute e conflittuali tra più attori, civici e non. Per fare ciò, lo studio si ispira alle teorie dei movimenti sociali e concettualizza la societal accountability come un insieme di conseguenze dell’azione collettiva. Pertanto, questo lavoro mira a capire come e in quali condizioni le iniziative anticorruzione dal basso raggiungano risultati di accountability, quali il passaggio di nuove norme, il miglioramento dell’answerability istituzionale e potenziale sanzionatorio. Con questo obiettivo, la tesi si basa sulle evidenze esistenti negli studi sulla corruzione e sull'accountability e contribuisce ai dibattiti in corso sulle conseguenze dell'azione collettiva. Il quadro teorico si concentra sul concetto di influenza, aderendo a un approccio processuale-relazionale. L'influenza è intesa come un'istanza di causalità relazionale, una forma di potere posizionale che consente a più attori di esercitare un controllo sulle conseguenze dell’azione collettiva. Facendo da ponte tra l'approccio strategico-interazionale e i modelli di mediazione, l'analisi chiarisce le strategie seguite dalle OSC nella ricerca di posizioni di influenza, così come i meccanismi attraverso i quali i modelli relazionali producono cambiamento sociale. Il quadro analitico è applicato alle arene anticorruzione in Italia e in Spagna e si restringe a tre specifiche aree di intervento: l'introduzione di leggi sulla trasparenza, l'approvazione di leggi per la protezione dei whistleblower e lo sviluppo di progetti di monitoraggio civico. Il materiale empirico comprende 37 interviste qualitative semi-strutturate, documenti e dati network. Nel complesso, le evidenze raccolte contribuiscono alla letteratura sulla lotta alla corruzione, dimostrando che le OSC contribuiscono, direttamente e indirettamente, alla lotta contro la corruzione ottenendo cambiamenti nelle politiche, aumentando l’answerability del sistema e innescando sanzioni formali e informali quando necessario. Tuttavia, l’analisi comparata dei casi italiano e spagnolo evidenziano differenze rilevanti. In particolare, l'indagine empirica contribuisce agli attuali dibattiti sullo studio della società della social accountability, dimostrando che l'integrazione con le élite politiche può aumentare la probabilità di ottenere di ottenere un cambiamento delle politiche, mentre l'integrazione orizzontale tra gli attori civici può aumentare il loro potenziale sanzionatorio. In definitiva, questo lavoro dimostra come gli approcci processuali-relazionali possano integrare modelli strategici e di mediazione per comprendere meglio il modo in cui gli attori collettivi influenzano il cambiamento politico e sociale. Le osservazioni conclusive sostengono che le interazioni e le relazioni costruite dagli attori nel corso del tempo e in diverse arene fungono da canali di mediazione a livello micro, meso e macro. Complessivamente, ciò dimostra che i singoli attori, i modelli di relazione nelle e tra le arene e le idee sulle relazioni mediano tra le strategie dei attori collettivi, aumentando o limitando così la loro influenza sulla lotta alla corruzione.How do civil society organizations (CSOs) contribute to the struggle against public corruption? How can they hold their political representatives accountable? This thesis aims to answer these wide-ranging research questions, bridging anti-corruption and social movement studies by focusing on societal accountability, i.e., grassroots mechanisms for controlling and sanctioning powerholders. Over the last few years, corruption scholars have increasingly emphasized the role of civil society as an antidote against corruption, complementing state and electoral accountability mechanisms. However, empirical studies on the anti-corruption effects of civic interventions have yet to yield consistent results. This should hardly come as a surprise. If measuring corruption is a challenging task, assessing the extent to which corrupt deals are prevented due to civil society initiatives appears virtually impossible. Hence, this work takes a step back and problematizes the study of societal accountability, approaching it not as a pre-given set of mechanisms or practices deployed by anti-corruption civic actors but as the result of sustained and contentious interactions between multiple players. To do so, the study draws on social movement theories and conceptualizes societal accountability as a set of consequences of collective action efforts. Therefore, this work aims to understand how and under what conditions bottom-up anti-corruption initiatives achieve accountability results such as legal claim attainments, answerability, and sanctioning potential. With this goal in mind, the thesis builds upon existing evidence from corruption and accountability studies and contributes to ongoing debates on the consequences of collective action. The theoretical framework focuses on the concept of influence, subscribing to a processual-relational approach. It understands influence as a relationally emergent instance of causality, a form of positional power that enables multiple players to exert control over the consequences of collective struggles. By bridging the strategic-interaction approach and mediation models; the analysis elucidates the strategies followed by CSOs in seeking positions of influence, as well as the mechanisms through which relational patterns produce social change. The analytical framework is applied to the anti-corruption arenas in Italy and Spain and is narrowed down by focusing on three specific campaigns in each country: introducing transparency laws, passing whistleblowers' protection acts, and developing civic monitoring projects. The empirical material comprises 37 semi-structured qualitative interviews, documents, and network data retrieved through Action Organization Analysis. The corpus of data is analyzed by combining thematic analysis, frame analysis, and a theory-building process tracing through a qualitative network approach. Overall, the evidence collected contributes to the literature on anti-corruption, demonstrating that CSOs, directly and indirectly, contribute to the anti-corruption struggle by achieving policy change, increasing the system's answerability, and triggering formal and informal sanctions when necessary. However, the Italian and Spanish cases' comparative accounts highlight relevant differences. In particular, the empirical investigation contributes to current debates on the study of societal accountability, showing that integration with political elites may increase the likelihood of obtaining policy change, whereas horizontal integration among civic actors may enhance their sanctioning potential. Ultimately, this work shows how processual-relational approaches can help integrate strategic and mediation models to understand better how change-oriented collective actors influence political and social change. The concluding remarks maintain that the interactions and relations built by players over time and across different arenas serve as mediation channels at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Overall, this demonstrates that individual players, patterns of relations in and across arenas, and ideas about relationships mediate between players' strategies, resources, or frames and their contextual conditions, thereby increasing or constraining their influence over the anti-corruption struggl
Collective agency:From philosophical and logical perspectives
People inhabit a vast and intricate social network nowadays. In addition to our own decisions and actions, we confront those of various groups every day. Collective decisions and actions are more complex and bewildering compared to those made by individuals. As members of a collective, we contribute to its decisions, but our contributions may not always align with the outcome. We may also find ourselves excluded from certain groups and passively subjected to their influences without being aware of the source. We are used to being in overlapping groups and may switch identities, supporting or opposing the claims of particular groups. But rarely do we pause to think: What do we talk about when we talk about groups and their decisions?At the heart of this dissertation is the question of collective agency, i.e., in what sense can we treat a group as a rational agent capable of its action. There are two perspectives we take: a philosophical and logical one. The philosophical perspective mainly discusses the ontological and epistemological issues related to collective agency, sorts out the relevant philosophical history, and argues that the combination of a relational view of collective agency and a dispositional view of collective intentionality provides a rational and realistic account. The logical perspective is associated with formal theories of groups, it disregards the psychological content involved in the philosophical perspective, establishes a logical system that is sufficiently formal and objective, and axiomatizes the nature of a collective
Collective Embodiment and Communal Feeling: A Critical Somatics Approach to Performance for Social Change
âCollective Embodiment and Communal Feeling: A Critical Somatics Approach to Performance for Social Changeâ argues for a novel approach to performance for social change that focuses on the sensory and somatic dimensions of collectivity as the basis for countering the atomizing politics of neoliberalism. It proposes a critical somatics approach to the deconstruction and reconfiguration of participantsâ embodied subjectivities, emphasizing the cultivation of conditions that facilitate experiences of collective embodiment and affective interdependence. Whether in the kinesthetic awareness of bodies dancing together, the situational or proprioceptive awareness of a collective engaged in creative disruption, or the physical contact of activistsâ clasped arms forming a human chain in protest, these conditions require multisensory engagement, improvisational coordination, and shared feeling. Based on ethnographic accounts of the phenomenological experience of collective embodiment, I argue that such experiences enactârather than merely argue forâforms of collectivity through their operation on the level of the body. This approach to performance for social change builds on the experience of practitioners and artist-activists in an effort to preserve the core contributions of existing techniques while seeking avenues to overcome their susceptibility to the influence of increasingly ubiquitous neoliberal frameworks. Opening with a consideration of Augusto Boalâs Theatre of the Oppressed as a touchstone example, I argue that the techniqueâs cognitive approach to social change and its emphasis on discursive techniques contribute to the manner in which it individualizes responsibility for combating systemic oppression. Turning to Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porterâs InterPlay as an example of an affective approach to performance for social change, I critique its practitionersâ culture of individualism, but identify the critical potential of its recognition of collective embodiment. Extending this analysis to protest and direct action, I explore the existential prefiguration of communities of care and the cultivation of communal feeling, an affective and collective form of embodied cognition. After offering a series of activities designed to create the conditions for experiences of collective embodiment and develop the affective bonds of communal feeling, I close with a consideration of the broader implications of positioning speculative theory at the forefront of movementsâ political practice.Doctor of Philosoph
Decoloniality and Tropicality: Part Two
The papers collected together in this special issue on the theme âdecoloniality and tropicalityâ discuss and demonstrate how we can move towards disentangling ourselves from persistent colonial epistemologies and ontologies. Engaging theories of decoloniality and postcolonialism with tropicality, the articles explore the material poetics of philosophical reverie; the 'tropical natureculture' imaginaries of sex tourism, ecotourism, and militourism; deep readings of an anthropophagic movement, ecocritical literature, and the ecoGothic; the spaces of a tropical flĂąneuse and diasporic vernacular architecture; and in the decoloniality of education, a historical analysis of colonial female education and a film analysis for contemporary educational praxis
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Alternative Power: The Politics of Denmark\u27s Renewable Energy Transition
Global climate change is one of the defining political challenges and opportunities of the current era. Experts widely agree that technical means already exist for making the necessary transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; the obstacles to doing so are primarily political. Careful observers also recognize that this period of transition creates an opening for political innovation and development. How can the political will be generated to take action to prevent climate catastrophe? And what will the process of transitioning mean for the political systems that have been built on cheap and abundant oil? Political scientists have largely ignored technological development as a lever for political development, or feared that technology could only be a force of domination. Yet renewable energy enthusiasts have often seen democratizing potential in these technologies. What can be accomplished politically by building a wind turbine? As countries like Denmark accumulate decades of experience with renewable energy, it is becoming possible to give such questions close empirical consideration. Denmark generates more of its electricity from renewable sources, and has been doing so longer, than any other industrialized nation, making it a uniquely valuable case for studying an advanced renewable energy transition in progress. This dissertation draws on novel qualitative and quantitative data to present the first comprehensive history of Denmarkâs energy transition from its roots in the 1970s until the present, aiming to explain how this tiny nation emerged as the worldâs leading wind power producer, and assess whether this process has yielded any democratic dividends. The multi-method analysis sheds new light on internal dynamics of Denmarkâs energy transition, and, more generally, on late-stage evolutionary processes in mature technological systems. Many studies have shown an interest in the Danish case, which is usually presented as a relatively unqualified success story, but few have provided the empirical resolution to identify these complicating factors. This dissertation employs an explanatory strategy adapted from the ecological sciences to construct a more holistic and integrative portrait, resulting in a more thorough and accurate account of how Denmark jumped out to such a significant lead in the energy transition, and why that momentum might be flagging today, with implications for other countries hoping to chart a path toward a sustainable future
Essays in Applied Corporate Economy
This work includes the results of broad research carried out during the PhD course in Economics and Political Economy at the University of Genoa.
The aim of my thesis is to apply empirical methods to investigate corporate finance issues. During these years, I have collected a unique dataset on the compensation and tenure of board members in Italy. In this dataset, each board member is represented by a row containing his or her generalities, role, tenure, and compensation, divided into more components: fixed salary, committee fee, benefits, bonus, equity instruments, and severance pay. This dataset is the starting point for my empirical research.
The first chapter investigates the hardly discussed relationship between the two functions of accounting information in financial reporting: stewardshipâ and valuationâs usefulness. This study explores the current debate on the expandability of the role of the stewardship function within 'decision usefulness' as the purpose of financial reporting. The main contribution of the chapter to the literature is the discovery of the existence of a positive relationship between the two usefulness of accounting information for 'top' board members, while no relationship was found for 'non-top' board members.
The second and third chapters examine the relationship between firm performance and executive pay. In particular, the second chapter addresses this analysis using the 'tournament' model. It considers firm performance as a function of compensation and other firm characteristics. While the third chapter adopts the 'agency theory' model and sets up the reverse models by regressing compensation on firm performance.
Using a wide range of empirical models, the second and third chapters take an innovative approach to studying the relationship between firm performance, executive pay, and other corporate governance indicators. For the first time, this relationship (in both causal directions) is analyzed along two unexplored dimensions: individual directors (rather than the CEO or the board as a whole) and individual components of total compensation (rather than total or cash compensation).
This contributes to the literature by highlighting previously unconsidered variables, such as the different characteristics of different board members and their impact on the performance-payâs and pay-performanceâs relationships.
Both chapters also contribute to an in-depth study of the sensitivity of pay to performance (and vice versa) in a context characterized by a corporate governance model that is very different from the ones typically studied in the literature
The mobilising power of corruption: assessing anticorruption movements in Brazil
Corruption is a long-lasting problem the world over. Capitalism, modernisation, development, and democracy were not able to reduce it. If these global transformations have failed, why would people be expected to do something about it? When conditions are right, people actually do something about it, and they are sometimes victorious. But what are the contextual and institutional conditions under which constructive anticorruption social movements form and thrive? The answer to this research question is related to corruption perception and the nature of information. Using qualitative techniques such as case studies and process tracing, I analyse two anticorruption laws initiated and enacted through popular initiatives in Brazil. As in contrast, I analyse a third bill, the 10 Measures against Corruption, which was not successful, despite also counting on a significant anticorruption mobilisation. These three events depict the conditions under which people organise and react against corruption. In comparing them, information appears as a crucial variable in the mobilising process, being capable of transforming peopleâs apathy and cynicism into political participation.Keywords: social movements, anticorruption, corruption, corruption perception, political participation, accountabilit
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