Competition for Listings

We develop a model in which two profit maximizing exchanges compete for IPO listings. They choose the listing fees paid by firms wishing to go public and control the trading costs incurred by investors. All firms prefer lower costs, however firms differ in how they value a decrease in trading costs. Hence, in equilibrium, the exchanges obtain positive expected profits by charging different trading fees and different listing fees. As a result, firms that list on different exchanges have different characteristics. The model has testable implications for the cross-sectional characteristics of IPOs' on different quality exchanges and the relationship between the level of trading costs and listing fees. We also find that competition does not guarantee that exchanges choose welfare maximizing trading rules. In some cases, welfare is larger with a monopolist exchange than with oligopolist exchanges.market microstructure; listings; competition; exchanges; regulation

Structure and play: rethinking regulation in the higher education sector

This paper explores possible tactics for academics working within a context of increasing regulation and constraint. One suggested tactic is to move outside of a creativity-conformity binary. Rather than understanding creativity and conformity as separable, where one is seen as excluding the other, the authors consider the potential of examining the relationships between them. The theme of 'structure and play' illustrates the argument. In the first part of the paper, using various examples from art and design - fields generally associated with creativity - the authors explore the interrelatedness of creativity and conformity. For example, how might design styles, which are generally understood as creative outcomes, constrain creativity and lead to conformity within the design field? Is fashion producing creativity or conformity? Conversely, the ways in which conformity provides the conditions for creativity are also examined. For example, the conformity imposed by the state on artists in the former communist bloc contributed to a thriving underground arts movement which challenged conformity and state regulation. Continuing the theme of 'structure and play', the authors recount a story from an Australian university which foregrounds the ongoing renegotiation of power relations in the academy. This account illustrates how programmatic government in a university, with its aim of regulating conduct, can contribute to unanticipated outcomes. The authors propose that a Foucauldian view of distributed power is useful for academics operating in a context of increasing regulation, as it brings into view sites where power might begin to be renegotiated

Математична модель маршрутизації в ТКМ

In this paper, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that academics are enmeshed in power relations in which confession operates, both on and through academics. Drawing on Foucault’s genealogy of confession, I illustrate how academics are not only invited to reflect on performance, faults, temptations and desires in their work and private life, but as teachers they mobilise the same kind of technology in relation to students. These power relations are connected to wider changes in society, where discourses on New Public Management have become all pervasive in organising and governing public institutions. The examples of the use of appraisal interviews and logbooks as governing techniques illustrate how government currently operates through the freedom of the individual. The paper ends with a discussion on how books of life could introduce a different relation of the self to the self in academia, and thus provide opportunities to live the present otherwise.

Caring for the collective: biopower and agential subjectification in wildlife conservation

types: ArticleCopyright © 2014 PionPost Print. Srinivasan, K. 2014. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 32, Issue 3, pp. 501 – 517 DOI:10.1068/d13101pThis paper explores turtle conservation in Odisha, India, to map the complicated ways in which animal well-being is pursued in the contemporary world. Using insights from Foucault’s work on biopolitics, it offers an account of conservation as population politics, questioning the entanglement of harm and care that infuses this space of more-than-human social change. In doing this, the paper elaborates the concept of agential subjectification in order to track the mechanisms that underlie the asymmetric circulation of biopower in human–animal interactions and to develop Foucauldian scholarship for the examination of present-day manifestations of the ‘will to improve’.RGS‑IBGCulture and Animals Foundatio

Designed to fail : a biopolitics of British Citizenship.

Tracing a route through the recent 'ugly history' of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics - a field of techniques and practices (legal, social, moral) through which populations are controlled and fashioned. This article begins with the 1981 Nationality Act and the violent conflicts between the police and black communities in Brixton that accompanied the passage of the Act through the British parliament. Employing Michel Foucault's concept of state racism, it argues that the 1981 Nationality Act marked a pivotal moment in the design of British citizenship and has operated as the template for a glut of subsequent nationality legislation that has shaped who can achieve citizenship. The central argument is that the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design, but is foundational to British citizenship. For many 'national minorities' the lived realities of biopolitical citizenship stand in stark contradistinction to contemporary governmental accounts of citizenship that stress community cohesion, political participation, social responsibility, rights and pride in shared national belonging

How should we do the history of big data?

Taking its lead from Ian Hacking’s article ‘How should we do the history of statistics?’, this article reflects on how we might develop a sociologically informed history of big data. It argues that within the history of social statistics we have a relatively well developed history of the material phenomenon of big data. Yet this article argues that we now need to take the concept of ‘big data’ seriously, there is a pressing need to explore the type of work that is being done by that concept. The article suggests a programme for work that explores the emergence of the concept of big data so as to track the institutional, organisational, political and everyday adoption of this term. It argues that the term big data has the effect of making-up data and, as such, is powerful in framing our understanding of those data and the possibilities that they afford

Does the Supreme Court Follow the Economic Returns? A Response to A Macrotheory of the Court

Today, there is a widespread idea that parents need to learn how to carry out their roles as parents. Practices of parental learning operate throughout society. This article deals with one particular practice of parental learning, namely nanny TV, and the way in which ideal parents are constructed through such programmes. The point of departure is SOS family, a series broadcast on Swedish television in 2008. Proceeding from the theorising of governmentality developed in the wake of the work of Michel Foucault, we analyse the parental ideals conveyed in the series, as an example of the way parents are constituted as subjects in the ‘advanced liberal society’ of today. The ideal parent is a subject who, guided by the coach, is constantly endeavouring to achieve a makeover. The objective of this endeavour, however, is self-control, whereby the parents will in the end become their own coaches.

Rights of passage: law and the biopolitics of dying

Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures explores the relation between law and life and the advent of a politics of 'life'. How have recent events focused social, political and cultural attention on the living body and its maintenance and management? The central concept, through which the embodiment of the subject will be examined will be that of 'bio-power'. Articulated by Michel Foucault, but brought to attention more recently in the work of Giorgio Agamben, this concept recognises that the relation between life and law is both historical and necessary: the law must operate on bodies but can only do so by establishing a border between the body of the polity, and the mere life excepted from political concern. The contemporary advent of bio-politics occurs when the polity increasingly and invasively operates on this 'mere' life, and the body or organism – rather than the self – becomes the object of political management. The manner in which the body becomes the focus of contemporary power has led legal theory to explore new questions of the threshold between life and death and has led social theory to question the new extensions of the law and the polity into embodied life. The contributors explore the forensic shift in contemporary social theory and cultural sensibility from a number of perspectives. Description of book from publisher website at: http://www.palgrave.com

‘I don't think I can catch it’: women, confidence and responsibility in football coach education

Whilst women’s participation in sport continues to increase, their presence remains ideologically challenging given the significance of sport for the construction of gendered identities. As a hegmonically masculine institution, leadership roles across sport remain male-dominated and the entry of women into positions of authority (such as coaching) routinely contested. But in powerful male-typed sports, like football, women’s participation remains particularly challenging. Consequently, constructions of gender inequity in coaching were explored at a regional division of the English Football Association through unstructured interviews and coaching course observation. Using critical discourse analysis we identified the consistent re/production of women as unconfident in their own skills and abilities, and the framing of women themselves as responsible for the gendered inequities in football coaching. Women were thereby strategically positioned as deservedly on the periphery of the football category,whilst the organization was positioned as progressive and liberal

State education as high-yield investment: human capital theory in European policy discourse

Human Capital Theory has been an increasingly important phenomenon in economic thought over the last 50 years. The central role it affords to education has become even more marked in recent years as the concept of the ‘knowledge economy’ has become a global concern. In this paper, the prevalence of Human Capital Theory within European educational policy discourse is explored. The paper examines a selection of policy documents from a number of disparate European national contexts and considers the extent to which the ideas of Human Capital Theory can be seen to be influential. In the second part of the paper, the implications of Human Capital Theory for education are considered, with a particular focus on the possible ramifications at a time of economic austerity. The paper argues that Human Capital Theory risks offering a diminished view of the person, a diminished view of education, but that with its sole focus on economic goals leaves room for educationists and others to argue for the educational, social, and moral values it ignores, and for the conception of the good life and good society it fails to mention