Varieties of Capitalism and the Learning Firm: Contemporary Developments in EU and German Company Law - A Comment on the Strine-Bainbridge Debate About Shared Values of Corporate Management and Labor

Research in corporate governance and in labour law has been characterized by a disjuncture in the way that scholars in each field are addressing organizational questions related to the business enterprise. While labour has eventually begun to shift perspectives from aspirations to direct employee involvement in firm management, as has been the case in Germany, to a combination of \u27exit\u27 and \u27voice\u27 strategies involving pension fund management and securities litigation, it remains to be seen whether this new stream will unfold as a viable challenge to an otherwise exclusionary shareholder value paradigm. At the same time, recent suggestions made by Delaware Chancery Court Vice Chancellor Strine, to dare think about potentially shared commitments between management and labor - and UCLA\u27s Stephen Bainbridge\u27s response - underline the viability - and, the contestedness - of attempts at moving the corporate governance debate beyond the confines of corporate law proper. While such a wider view had already famously been encouraged by Dean Clarke in his 1986 treatise on Corporate Law (p. 32), mainstream corporate law does not seem to have endorsed this perspective. This paper takes the questionable divide between management and labor within the framework of a limiting corporate governance concept as starting point to explore the institutional dynamics of the corporation, hereby building on the theory of the innovative enterprise, as developed by management theorists Mary O\u27Sullivan and William Lazonick. Largely due to the sustained distance between corporate and labour law scholars, neither group has effectively addressed their common blind spot: a better understanding of the business enterprise itself. In midst of an unceasing flow of affirmations of the finance paradigm of the corporation on the one hand and \u27voice\u27 strategies by labour on the other, it seems to fall to management theorists to draw lessons from the continuing co-existence of different forms of market organization, in which companies appear to thrive. Exploring the conundrum of \u27risky\u27 business decisions within the firm, management theorists have been arguing for the need to adopt a more sophisticated organizational perspective on companies operating on locally, regionally and transnationally shaped, often highly volatile market segments. Research by comparative political economists has revealed a high degree of connectivity between corporate governance and economic performance without, however, arriving at such favourable results only for shareholder value regimes. Such findings support the view that corporate governance regimes are embedded in differently shaped regulatory frameworks, characterized by distinct institutions, both formal and informal, and enforcement processes. As a result of these findings, arguments to disassociate issues of corporate governance from those of the firm\u27s (social) responsibility [CSR] have been losing ground. Instead, CSR can be taken to be an essential part of understanding a particular business enterprise. It is the merging of a comparative political economy perspective on the corporation with one on the organizational features, structures and processes of the corporation, which can help us better understand the distribution of power and knowledge within the \u27learning firm\u27

A further study of \mu-\tau symmetry breaking at neutrino telescopes after the Daya Bay and RENO measurements of \theta_{13}

Current neutrino oscillation data indicate that \theta_{13} is not strongly suppressed and \theta_{23} might have an appreciable deviation from \pi/4, implying that the 3 \times 3 neutrino mixing matrix V does not have an exact \mu-\tau permutation symmetry. We make a further study of the effect of \mu-\tau symmetry breaking on the democratic flavor distribution of ultrahigh-energy (UHE) cosmic neutrinos at a neutrino telescope, and find that it is characterized by |V_{\mu i}|^2 - |V_{\tau i}|^2 which would vanish if either \theta_{23} = \pi/4 and \theta_{13} = 0 or \theta_{23} = \pi/4 and \delta = \pm \pi/2 held. We observe that the second-order \mu-\tau symmetry breaking term \bar{\Delta} may be numerically comparable with or even larger than the first-order term \Delta in the flux ratios \phi^{T}_e : \phi^{T}_\mu : \phi^{T}_\tau \simeq (1- 2\Delta) : (1 + \Delta + \bar{\Delta}) : (1 + \Delta - \bar{\Delta}), if \sin (\theta_{23} - \pi/4) and \cos\delta have the same sign. The detection of the UHE \bar{\nu}_e flux via the Glashow-resonance channel \bar{\nu}_e e \to W^- \to anything is also discussed by taking account of the first- and second-order \mu-\tau symmetry breaking effects.Comment: RevTeX 12 pages, 1 Table, More discussions added, accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.

The Boltzmann equation for colourless plasmons in hot QCD plasma. Semiclassical approximation

Within the framework of the semiclassical approximation, we derive the Boltzmann equation describing the dynamics of colorless plasmons in a hot QCD plasma. The probability of the plasmon-plasmon scattering at the leading order in the coupling constant is obtained. This probability is gauge-independent at least in the class of the covariant and temporal gauges. It is noted that the structure of the scattering kernel possesses important qualitative difference from the corresponding one in the Abelian plasma, in spite of the fact that we focused our study on the colorless soft excitations. It is shown that four-plasmon decay is suppressed by the power of $g$ relative to the process of nonlinear scattering of plasmons by thermal particles at the soft momentum scale. It is stated that the former process becomes important in going to the ultrasoft region of the momentum scale.Comment: 41, LaTeX, minor changes, identical to published versio

No Weight for “Due Weight”? A Children’s Autonomy Principle in Best Interest Proceedings

Article 12 of the un Convention on the Rights of the Child (crc) stipulates that children should have their views accorded due weight in accordance with age and maturity, including in proceedings affecting them. Yet there is no accepted understanding as to how to weigh children’s views, and it is associated strongly with the indeterminate notion of “competence”. In this article, case law and empirical research is drawn upon to argue that the concept of weighing their views has been an obstacle to children’s rights, preventing influence on outcomes for children in proceedings in which their best interests are determined. Younger children and those whose wishes incline against the prevailing orthodoxy (they may resist contact with a parent, for example) particularly lose out. Children’s views appear only to be given “significant weight” if the judge agrees with them anyway. As it is the notion of autonomy which is prioritised in areas such as medical and disability law and parents’ rights, it is proposed in this article that a children’s autonomy principle is adopted in proceedings – in legal decisions in which the best interest of the child is the primary consideration, children should get to choose, if they wish, how they are involved and the outcome, unless it is likely that significant harm will arise from their wishes. They should also have “autonomy support” to assist them in proceedings. This would likely ensure greater influence for children and require more transparent decision-making by adults.</jats:p