Immunization, sensibility, and the ressentiments of finance

Vogl describes how digital economies and current financialization have a common genealogy that hinges on protocol and information. How should we understand the anatomy of power that governs this contemporary configuration? As argued in this review, the notion of ‘immunity’ can help illuminate the techniques of power at work in digital economies, social media, and finance

Kampklare jagerflygere utviklet av godt lederskap eller selvgående praksisfellesskap?

Masteroppgave i bedriftsledelse (MBA) - Universitetet i Nordland, 201

The Economy and the Foundation of the Modern Body Politic: Malthus and Keynes as Political Philosophers

My dissertation explores the making of the modern division between the political and the economic realm. To modern political reason, the economy appears like a self-standing reality, internally related in terms of functions and understood to follow regulating laws of its own. The dissertation counters this account of the relation between the economic and the political realm. It analyzes the epistemological claims to objectivity, on which this division rests and shows how the allegedly neutral depictions of economic necessity remain inextricably linked to political imaginations of order. The main thesis of the work posits that the modern rendering of economic reality in terms of a self-contained and functional realm stems from the desire to establish secure foundations for a viable body politic. The works of Malthus and Keynes are the exemplary cases for this study of the intimate relations between political reason and accounts of economic objectivity. The writings of Malthus crystallize in important respects the emergence of the specific modern objectivity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. With him, the notion of scarcity gained its important role for defining economy. It is shown that the definition of economy in terms of scarcity is tied to Malthus? attempts to envision a regulatory epistemology for the social body, which ensures a silent and visceral order against the uncertainties of the political world. The economic realm is thus conceived as the foundation of the body politic. The writings of Keynes witness the crisis of this economic foundation at the beginning of the twentieth century. The dissertation explicates Keynes? critique of the epistemology of scarcity, which underwrites modern accounts of economy. He opens a perspective on economy in terms of temporality, conventions and power, which traverses the closed boundaries of the economy. But this different view on economy is overlaid by Keynes? political desires to procure new foundations for the body politic: the envisioning of a national economy under the guidance of the economic expert, for which Keynesian economics is known, fulfills this desire. The thinking of economy is thus shown to be inextricably tied to the question of the political

Foucault and the Invisible Economy

This paper discusses the extent to which governmentality provides a critical visibility of the economy beyond its liberal imaginary. It argues that Foucault’s conceptual and historical understanding of liberal governmentality has two traits that encumber a de-centering of the economy from a Foucauldian perspective. The first obstacle results from a persistent asymmetry of the concept of governmentality as it remains solely geared towards replacing the monolithic account of the state. Governmentality is therefore in danger of rendering the economic invisible instead of advancing an analytics of power appropriate to the specificity of this field. The second impediment relates to how Foucault reads the invisibility of the economy asserted in liberal discourse. While Foucault emphasizes how the “invisible hand” imparts a critical limitation towards the sovereign hubris of total sight, the paper unearths a more complex politics of truth tied to the invisible economy. Drawing on selected historical material, the papers shows that the liberal invisibility of the economy rather functions as a prohibitive barrier towards developing novel and critical visibilities of the economy. A Foucauldian perspective on economy, the paper concludes, benefits from piercing through this double invisibility of the economy

Don\u27t Let the Digital Tail Wag the Transformation Dog: A Digital Transformation Roadmap for Corporate Counsel

Due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, enhancements in technology, as well as shifts in the macroeconomic and socioeconomic dynamics of globalization, Digital Transformation (DT) has become an enterprise-wide imperative for most multinational companies (MNCs). As a result, legal departments are being challenged to embrace enterprise DT and start their own departmental DT journeys. Despite these trends, there is little scholarship and research about how MNC legal departments are addressing the DT challenge. How are General Counsel (GCs) currently approaching DT? Is what they are doing effective and value-accretive? And importantly, how should GCs approach DT to best generate value? This article attempts to fill the literature gap. Based on interviews of 25 GCs and Chief Digital Officers of S&P 500 MNCs along with the authors\u27 professional experience and secondary research, we explore how legal departments are responding to and approaching DT. We identify a Three-Phased Digital Maturity Framework that maps the typical MNC legal department DT trajectory. We argue that this trajectory is suboptimal because it emphasizes technology at the expense of the foundational, non-technological elements of DT that are critical for success. Too often, GCs appear to let the digital tail of DT wag the transformational dog. The legal department itself must be fully transformed before the digital elements can add full value. By failing to transform the non-digital foundations of their departments in collaboration with the business before they introduce new technologies, GCs are leaving the most difficult aspects of DT-the organizational and structural, behavioral, and cultural changes-for last. This post-hoc approach (that leaves client-centricity and change management last) is disruptive, adds unnecessary cost, and threatens the credibility, viability, and timing of the entire DT effort on a go-forward. As an alternative to this typical Three-Phased approach, we articulate a Best Practice 5-Step Model for how GCs should approach DT. Our approach is distinctive in that technology is only considered and applied after the service delivery model has been designed and processes have been optimized in accordance with the broader strategic and organizational contexts of both the legal department and the MNC itself. Moreover, ours is iterative. Our approach is also distinct in that throughout this process, change management principles are thoughtfully and consistently applied in each step. Contrary to standard depictions, we contend that if deployed correctly, DT can significantly transform how a legal department operates and can enable legal departments to add value in ways that go beyond generating efficiencies, reducing costs, and increasing speed-to-market. Our model provides a roadmap to help GCs better execute DT and leverage DT-generated data and insights, moving the legal department away from its standard depiction as a cost center to that of a revenue generator and value creator that is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the MNC. In addition to filling some of the gaps in the literature, this article provides a vision that has broad applicability beyond the MNC legal department context and can be used as a model for law firms and other legal services providers to harness DT in their own contexts, to keep pace with-and better serve-their digitally transforming client base

Ozonvertikalverteilungen aus UV/Vis-Nadirspektren des Satelliteninstrumentes GOME:Optimierung und Sensitivitätsstudien zur Nutzung der achtjährigen Messreihen

The stratospheric ozone layer protects the biosphere from the effects of harmful ultraviolet radiation and is responsible for the temperature structure of the stratosphere. The severe changes of the ozone layer during the last decades clarified the need to monitor the variation of ozone concentrations.The Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) which was launched in April 1995 onboard ESA´s second European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS-2) enables us to investigate height resolved ozone distributions. The grating spectrometer measures direct and backscattered radiances in the ultraviolet and visible spectral range. The inversion algorithm FURM (FUll Retrieval Method) was developed to retrieve ozone vertical distributions from these spectral data using an Advanced Optimal Estimation approach.Internal broadband calibration corrections in the former standard versions of the FURM algorithm were forced by the increasing degradation of the optical components of GOME. Additional observed high frequency structures that inhibited the use of wavelengths below 290 nm resulted in a very weak stratospheric sensitivity above 35 km. Especially the profile retrieval in the low latitude range was affected by these deficiencies and motivated the development of a new calibration correction. The promising results encouraged further investigations of the higher latitude range. Here an additional modification of the broadband calibration correction is required to account for the low differential structure of ozone. Therefore a second approach is developed which leads in combination with the low latitude method to a significantly improved stratospheric ozone profile retrieval. These results make it now possible to investigate tropospheric ozone absorption structures which are otherwise dominated by any remaining stratospheric ozone feature. For the first time this new retrieval algorithm can now be used to retrieve longterm trends of ozone profiles on a global scale

Stationary waves and slowly moving features in the night upper clouds of Venus

At the cloud top level of Venus (65-70 km altitude) the atmosphere rotates 60 times faster than the underlying surface, a phenomenon known as superrotation. Whereas on Venus's dayside the cloud top motions are well determined and Venus general circulation models predict a mean zonal flow at the upper clouds similar on both day and nightside, the nightside circulation remains poorly studied except for the polar region. Here we report global measurements of the nightside circulation at the upper cloud level. We tracked individual features in thermal emission images at 3.8 and 5.0 $\mathrm{\mu m}$ obtained between 2006 and 2008 by the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS-M) onboard Venus Express and in 2015 by ground-based measurements with the Medium-Resolution 0.8-5.5 Micron Spectrograph and Imager (SpeX) at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Infrared Telescope Facility (NASA/IRTF). The zonal motions range from -110 to -60 m s$^{-1}$, consistent with those found for the dayside but with larger dispersion. Slow motions (-50 to -20 m s$^{-1}$) were also found and remain unexplained. In addition, abundant stationary wave patterns with zonal speeds from -10 to +10 m s$^{-1}$ dominate the night upper clouds and concentrate over the regions of higher surface elevation.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 6 supplementary figure