Construction, Concentration, and (Dis)Continuities in Social Valuations

I review and integrate recent sociological research that makes progress on three interrelated questions pertaining to social valuation: (a) the degree of social construction relative to objective constraints; (b) the degree of concentration in social valuations at a single point in time; and (c) the conditions that govern two broad forms of temporal discontinuity—(i) fashion cycles, especially in cultural expression and in managerial practices, and (ii) bubble/crash dynamics, as witnessed in such domains as authoritarian regimes and financial markets. In the course of the review, I argue for the importance of identifying how objective conditions constrain social construction and suggest two contrarian mechanisms by which this is accomplished—valuation opportunism and valuation entrepreneurship—and the conditions under which they are more or less effective

Exposing Politicians’ Peccadilloes in Comparative Context: Explaining the Frequency of Political Sex Scandals in Eight Democracies Using Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis

This article was published in the journal Political Communication [© Taylor & Francis Group]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2012.737434Political sex scandals are largely absent in some democracies but proliferate in others. However, there have so far been few if any comprehensive attempts to document the actual number of sex scandals that have occurred and to explain their presence (and, indeed, absence), and the one study that has (Barker's 1994 study) ended in the early 1990s and had numerous problems in relation to defining and documenting such scandals. Based on extensive research, this article documents the number of sex scandals in eight advanced industrial democracies and tries to explain their occurrence using Charles Ragin's fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The article has three goals: to determine the number of sex scandals in different democracies, explain why this might be, and demonstrate the utility of fuzzy set qualitative case analysis for small- and medium-N comparative research

The Role of Information and Financial Reporting in Corporate Governance and Debt Contracting

We review recent literature on the role of financial reporting transparency in reducing governance-related agency conflicts among managers, directors, and shareholders, as well as in reducing agency conflicts between shareholders and creditors, and offer researchers some suggested avenues for future research. Key themes include the endogenous nature of debt contracts and governance mechanisms with respect to information asymmetry between contracting parties, the heterogeneous nature of the informational demands of contracting parties, and the heterogeneous nature of the resulting governance and debt contracts. We also emphasize the role of a commitment to financial reporting transparency in facilitating informal multiperiod contracts among managers, directors, shareholders, and creditors