Dewey on Organisation

In some of his later contributions Dewey places particular emphasis on the category of organisation. Organisation features prominently both in his later metaphysical writings and in some of his more substantively focussed contributions. Organisation is also a central category for two contemporary ontological projects, namely Tony Lawson’s perspective on social ontology and the interactivist framework developed by Mark Bickhard and his collaborators. In these modern naturalist perspectives, the thorough theorisation of organisation is seen as crucial in accounting for emergent phenomena, resisting ontological and causal reductionism and resolving ambiguities associated with certain formulations of downward causality. This paper compares Dewey’s remarks on organisation in his later writings with these contemporary treatments of organisation and argues that Dewey anticipates some of the insights that have been systematically set out in these modern programmes of research

Reinventing the Market? Competition and Regulatory Change in Broadcasting

The reforms instituted by the Broadcasting Act 1990 led to a period of turbulence and upheaval within British broadcasting with results that were at best unintended and, at worst, seriously undermined the ideal of public service broadcasting. A Hayekian economic perspective would suggest that the reforms failed because they did not go far enough in the direction of full 'marketisation'. The paper develops an alternative perspective, based on an adaptation of systems theory within the context of law and economics. This approach offers a broader methodological foundation for the understanding of 'economic law' and a different normative perspective on the broadcasting reforms. It is suggested that the difficulty with these reforms was not their failure to go further in the direction of the market, but rather their lack of clarity in articulating a clear alternative to the market as the basis for the organisation of television production.

Competitiveness Policy and Economic Organisation: The Case of the British Film Industry

The British film industry has long been characterised as highly volatile, chronically unstable and liable to recurrent crises. The traditional policy response up until the 1980s involved support through a mixture of quotas, fiscal support and industry levies. During the 1980s this policy stance was reversed as deregulation and the exposure of the industry to market forces were seen as key to enhancing its economic performance. More recently, a new policy preoccupation with, and orientation to, the film industry has emerged. The film industry on this view is characterised as possessing inherent but unrealised potential which it is the role of government, albeit operating in tandem with the market, to unlock. The aim of this paper is to examine more precisely the nature of this emerging 'competitiveness policy', using film as a focus for a conceptual and theoretical examination of the issues involved. We explore the relationship between competitiveness and organisational form and consider the potential of various kinds of policy intervention to transform the prospects of a sector such as film in the face of the weight of its historical development. We suggest that a 'path-dependent' perspective on competitiveness supports the belief that policy can most effectively operate through identifying the distinctive capabilities of British producers and by promoting 'structural' change, that is to say, the development of forms of contractual cooperation which can allow for the effective management of risk and uncertainty. The success of film policy in promoting organisation innovations of this kind will show whether, in a wider context, competitiveness policy can succeed in its goal of moving the market 'in the right direction'.

Search for eccentric black hole coalescences during the third observing run of LIGO and Virgo

Despite the growing number of confident binary black hole coalescences observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary formation channels. Identifying binary eccentricity, however, remains challenging due to the limited availability of gravitational waveforms that include effects of eccentricity. Here, we present observational results for a waveform-independent search sensitive to eccentric black hole coalescences, covering the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We identified no new high-significance candidates beyond those that were already identified with searches focusing on quasi-circular binaries. We determine the sensitivity of our search to high-mass (total mass M>70 M⊙) binaries covering eccentricities up to 0.3 at 15 Hz orbital frequency, and use this to compare model predictions to search results. Assuming all detections are indeed quasi-circular, for our fiducial population model, we place an upper limit for the merger rate density of high-mass binaries with eccentricities 0<e≤0.3 at 0.33 Gpc−3 yr−1 at 90\% confidence level

Ultralight vector dark matter search using data from the KAGRA O3GK run

Among the various candidates for dark matter (DM), ultralight vector DM can be probed by laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors through the measurement of oscillating length changes in the arm cavities. In this context, KAGRA has a unique feature due to differing compositions of its mirrors, enhancing the signal of vector DM in the length change in the auxiliary channels. Here we present the result of a search for U(1)B−L gauge boson DM using the KAGRA data from auxiliary length channels during the first joint observation run together with GEO600. By applying our search pipeline, which takes into account the stochastic nature of ultralight DM, upper bounds on the coupling strength between the U(1)B−L gauge boson and ordinary matter are obtained for a range of DM masses. While our constraints are less stringent than those derived from previous experiments, this study demonstrates the applicability of our method to the lower-mass vector DM search, which is made difficult in this measurement by the short observation time compared to the auto-correlation time scale of DM