Hostile Takeovers and Overreliance

Commentators have argued that employees should be compensated in the event of a hostile takeover; otherwise, the threat of such a takeover will fail to incentivize firm-specific investments by employees. Such deferred compensation is analogous to the payment of damages following a breach of contract. The analogous breach, here, is the breach of an implicit contract between management and employees. Employees trusted management to compensate them for firm-specific investments not explicitly contracted for. This Article uses a familiar result from the contract law literature: There is no measure of damages for breach of contract that can generate both efficient breach and efficient investment by parties to the relationship. While zero damages results in an inefficiently high likelihood of breach, expectation damages result in too much investment. Similarly, in the hostile takeover context, no measure of ex post compensation to employees can generate efficient takeovers from outside bidders and efficient firm-specific investment by employees. Measures of compensation that incentivize only those takeovers that are efficient will lead to overreliance, i.e., excessive firm-specific investments. Essentially, trying to plug one leak exposes another

Strange Correspondences: Late Capitalism and Late Style in the Work of Wilson Harris and John Berger

This article compares the late work of Guyanese author Wilson Harris with that of the English writer and critic John Berger. Taking Theodor Adorno’s reflections on late style as its point of departure, it situates the unconventional aesthetics of both writers in relation to the changes in society and experience unleashed by late capitalism. Focusing on Harris’s The Ghost of Memory (2006) and Berger’s From A to X (2008), the essay argues that the formal logic of these novels registers the pressures generated in the era of late capitalism by the unfolding dynamics of the neoliberal regime of accumulation and the fallout from the increasing financialization of the world-economy since the 1970s. Both texts work to protest the radical simplification of human and extra-human nature central to finance capital’s drive to transform all of reality into generic income streams. Sharing an emphasis on the need to revitalize the sensorium and to overcome the Cartesian separation of mind and body, society and nature, Harris and Berger maintain the possibility of an alternative mapping of global community

Hostile Takeovers and Overreliance

Commentators have argued that employees should be compensated in the event of a hostile takeover; otherwise, the threat of such a takeover will fail to incentivize firm-specific investments by employees. Such deferred compensation is analogous to the payment of damages following a breach of contract. The analogous breach, here, is the breach of an implicit contract between management and employees. Employees trusted management to compensate them for firm-specific investments not explicitly contracted for. This Article uses a familiar result from the contract law literature: There is no measure of damages for breach of contract that can generate both efficient breach and efficient investment by parties to the relationship. While zero damages results in an inefficiently high likelihood of breach, expectation damages result in too much investment. Similarly, in the hostile takeover context, no measure of ex post compensation to employees can generate efficient takeovers from outside bidders and efficient firm-specific investment by employees. Measures of compensation that incentivize only those takeovers that are efficient will lead to overreliance, i.e., excessive firm-specific investments. Essentially, trying to plug one leak exposes another

Estados Unidos, la Unión Europea y el levantamiento del embargo de armas a China

Desde el pasado otoño existe un nuevo y preocupante frente en las todavía tensas relaciones entre Estados Unidos y Europa: se ha cuestionado públicamente la conveniencia de mantener el embargo de armas impuesto por la UE a China en 1989 La perspectiva de que los líderes de la UE puedan levantar en diciembre el embargo de armas que impusieron a China constituye una importante fuente de preocupación, no sólo para los responsables de políticas estadounidenses, sino también para muchos de sus homólogos europeos. Hacer frente al continuo ascenso de China como una de las principales potencias económicas, políticas y militares del mundo tal vez constituya el mayor reto de orden internacional de la primera mitad de este siglo. Si Estados Unidos y Europa adoptaran enfoques divergentes ante este desafío, se introduciría un peligroso elemento de incertidumbre en la estabilidad regional e internacional, además de plantear una difícil y problemática situación para las relaciones transatlánticas al inicio de una nueva Administración estadounidense

“It’s the mass that counts” : striking energies in working-class fiction

This article considers the way in which the political ecologies of coal and oil overdetermine the representation of labour struggles in Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929) and Ralph de Boissière’s Crown Jewel (1952). The historical strikes around which these novels are organized were sparked by conflict over working conditions in, respectively, the coal industry in the UK and the oil industry in Trinidad. Analysing the relationship between the energies generated by mass strike action and the narrative energetics of fiction, the article explores how Wilkinson and de Boissière reshape the novel form in their efforts to represent working-class life

“Time’s carcase” : waste, labour, and finance capital in the Atlantic world-ecology

This article deploys the category of ‘waste’ as an analytical optic through which to explore the connections between the degradation of labour, the contradictions of the value-form, the environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers, and the whirl of finance capital. This investigation forms the basis of a comparison between two very different literary texts: Thomas Hardy’s short-story “On the Western Circuit” (1891), set in England’s semi-peripheral West Country; and José Américo de Almeida’s novel Trash (A Bagaceira, 1928), set across northeast Brazil’s sugar zone and peripheral sertão region

Can alliance networks work? : examining the evolution & impacts of alliance portfolios in healthcare

As the global competitive environment becomes increasingly complex and volatile, organisations look to networks to complement skills, resources, agility and capabilities. This research program aims to achieve a better understanding in the role of alliance portfolios in the development of dynamic capabilities of innovation and commercialisation. Through a case study approach examining the network of The Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences, this research program uses a grounded-theory methodology to construct a conceptual framework, which is generalised to other healthcare firms’, alliance portfolios and potentially to other industries. The central assertion of this research program is that within complex and high-velocity environments, the character of a firms’ alliance portfolio facilitates the extent to which dynamic capabilities are created that result in new market opportunities, ultimately leading to competitive advantage. The results suggest that alliance portfolios develop dynamic capabilities (specifically, innovation and commercialisation) when comprised of individual alliance relationships that establish variables of trust; strategic fit of resources and vision; secure partners that operate within the same industrial sphere and/or core business as the hub-firm; and a personal commitment to the alliance. Further, those individual alliance relationships that experience variables including lofty expectations; fuzzy decision making processes; lack/loss of strategic focus; differences in corporate cultures; and poor transference/application of dynamic capabilities across different industries were unsuccessful in the development of dynamic capabilities. Initial results also suggest that the cumulative experience of the dedicated alliance function (Kale, Dyer, and Singh; 2002), and the resulting dynamic capabilities established therein, have the ability to transition (Arndt, 2008) to the alliance portfolio (Wassmer, 2010). The alliance portfolio not only acts as an egocentric catchment of an organisation’s respective alliances (Baum, 2000), but can also acts as a cumulative set of dynamic capabilities, resources, and opportunities