Governing the country through the public broadcasting corporation

Public service broadcasters are a peculiar form of organisation, corporations in name but extensions of the state that call them into being. They share that distinction with other firms, long since privatised: the PTTs of yore – post, telegraph, and telephone providers – or what were once seen as natural monopolies: water and electricity. But they differ in a crucial and paradoxical regard: Among their functions is to hold the state to account. It is, therefore, a corporate form with the agency problem as part of its reason for being. It is a governance mechanism over its own governors. In liberal democracies, states have come to accept that paradox and tolerate its ambiguities as a condition of state legitimacy. In this paper we ask the question: How does a state broadcast retain its legitimacy when the legitimacy of the state in under question

Suppressing higher aims? Buried institutional logics resurface in public service broadcasting in Zimbabwe, 1970-2008

Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation operates in a complex institutional environment, with contestation over logics – some idealised, others cynical – about what it means to be a public service broadcaster. This paper draws upon the institutional logics perspective to analyse secondary data source for signs about how institutional logics might help to explain the curious, periodic resurfacing of ideals of independence, drawn in part from the legacy of its roots in the logics of public service broadcasting developed in the BBC and not always enacted the ideals would have it

Double quantum dot with tunable coupling in an enhancement-mode silicon metal-oxide semiconductor device with lateral geometry

We present transport measurements of a tunable silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor double quantum dot device with lateral geometry. Experimentally extracted gate-to-dot capacitances show that the device is largely symmetric under the gate voltages applied. Intriguingly, these gate voltages themselves are not symmetric. Comparison with numerical simulations indicates that the applied gate voltages serve to offset an intrinsic asymmetry in the physical device. We also show a transition from a large single dot to two well isolated coupled dots, where the central gate of the device is used to controllably tune the interdot coupling.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Applied Physics Letter

How UK local authorities control their subsidiaries: A conundrum in corporate and public governance

The pursuit of greater efficiency in a time of austerity in the past decade has led UK local governments to deliver local services in a new way: using subsidiary companies, many of them taking the form of conventional, non-profit enterprises, rather than outsourcing to private enterprises. The practice has energised service innovation by motivating these new corporate managers to act in entrepreneurial ways alien to the ethos of the civil servants whose work they superseded. It is called “corporatisation”, rather than “privatisation”. However, the rapid spread of the practice has outpaced both our theoretical appreciation of the issues and raised a series of practical concerns about the potential for conflicts of interest and the loss of control. This paper examines the small but growing literature about this phenomenon. Using a combination of theories from corporate governance and ethics, as well as documents from the public policy arena, it develops an agenda for research that will explore the varieties of approach to both the value creation and the governance of this new development

Enhancement mode double top gated MOS nanostructures with tunable lateral geometry

We present measurements of silicon (Si) metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) nanostructures that are fabricated using a process that facilitates essentially arbitrary gate geometries. Stable Coulomb blockade behavior free from the effects of parasitic dot formation is exhibited in several MOS quantum dots with an open lateral quantum dot geometry. Decreases in mobility and increases in charge defect densities (i.e. interface traps and fixed oxide charge) are measured for critical process steps, and we correlate low disorder behavior with a quantitative defect density. This work provides quantitative guidance that has not been previously established about defect densities for which Si quantum dots do not exhibit parasitic dot formation. These devices make use of a double-layer gate stack in which many regions, including the critical gate oxide, were fabricated in a fully-qualified CMOS facility.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.