Islamist Terrorism in Carl Schmitt's Reading

The thought of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) helps to place Islamist terrorism within a certain tradition of warfare and political theory. In fact, this form of violence can be clarified by Schmitt’s theoretical endowment, as this brief paper attempts to do. The end of the legal framework of the jus publicum europaeum and the emergence of non-state actors have put into question centuries-old certainties. Schmitt’s theory could help to put order in political concepts today ideologically misused. And his opposition to any universalistic tendencies questions not only Jihadi ideology but also Western anti-terroristic rhetoric, which is equally part of the ongoing global war of annihilation feared by Schmitt during his entire life

Market-Driven Management, Global Competition and Corporate Responsibility

The aim of the paper is to define the role of corporate responsibility in sustainable development of global firms. To be successful, global firms must be on the alert of emerging environmental trends and do their best to improve the corporate performance in line with key stakeholder expectations. In this respect, the management of corporate social responsibility highlights the criticality of the corporate intangible assets system and the need for overall assessment of corporate performance - not only financial performance but social too.Market-Driven Management; Corporate Responsibility; Corporate Social Responsibility; Intangible Assets; Global Markets

Code of Conduct and Corporate Governance

The purpose of the paper is to examine the code of conduct as a corporate governance communication tool. Drawing on the description of corporate conduct code, an analysis has been conducted on the first one hundred US companies (classified by Fortune Magazine), to verify the importance that global companies attribute to the corporate governance communication. Findings indicate that in the 58% of the cases a code exists and it is usually incorporated into the corporate governance communications.Corporate Governance, Corporate Governance Communication, Conduct Code, Ethics

The Future of the Working Classes: A Comparison Between J.S. Mill and A. Marshall

Both J. S. Mill and A. Marshall had a lifelong concern with the living conditions of the working classes and theorized the possibility of a new age, characterized by a widespread mental and moral cultivation. This paper compares the precise arguments put forward by them in the period ranging from Mill‟s “The Claims of Labour” (1845) to Marshall's "Principles" (1890), against the background of the evidence of progress they had. It is argued that, at different stages and with different specific arguments, their predictions relied on self-reinforcing mechanisms, in which a better life was the cause, no less than the effect, of progress. In order to make similarities and differences more transparent from a logical point of view, two simple mathematical formulations are proposed.

Marco Fanno’s Tax Incidence Theory: A Formal Exposition

Marco Fanno’s contributions to the theory of supply at joint cost and the theory of demand for substitute goods contain some original analyses of tax incidence, based on a “less partial” application of the Marshallian supply and demand paradigm. Fanno’s overall theory, however, soon fell into oblivion, partially due to the enormous success of the emerging Hicks-Allen approach, at the end of the 1930s; and so did his more practical results. In this paper, we present a modern formalisation of Fanno’s tax incidence theory, which tries to do justice to a series of results which have still today some normative validity.

Edge modification criteria for enhancing the communicability of digraphs

We introduce new broadcast and receive communicability indices that can be used as global measures of how effectively information is spread in a directed network. Furthermore, we describe fast and effective criteria for the selection of edges to be added to (or deleted from) a given directed network so as to enhance these network communicability measures. Numerical experiments illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures, 4 table

Updating and downdating techniques for optimizing network communicability

The total communicability of a network (or graph) is defined as the sum of the entries in the exponential of the adjacency matrix of the network, possibly normalized by the number of nodes. This quantity offers a good measure of how easily information spreads across the network, and can be useful in the design of networks having certain desirable properties. The total communicability can be computed quickly even for large networks using techniques based on the Lanczos algorithm. In this work we introduce some heuristics that can be used to add, delete, or rewire a limited number of edges in a given sparse network so that the modified network has a large total communicability. To this end, we introduce new edge centrality measures which can be used to guide in the selection of edges to be added or removed. Moreover, we show experimentally that the total communicability provides an effective and easily computable measure of how "well-connected" a sparse network is.Comment: 20 pages, 9 pages Supplementary Materia