Documenting Territory: Passportisation,Territory, and Exception in Abkhazia and South Ossetia

Despite the crucial role it played in the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, the phenomenon of passportisation has not received a great deal of scholarly attention. Much of the literature has treated the mass distribution of Russian passports to the residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as little more than a strategy to manufacture an excuse to go to war with Georgia. Drawing on recent scholarship on territory and territoriality, as well as with literature addressing Agamben's theories of exceptional spaces, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of passportisation by analysing the territorial effects it produced. It argues that the wholesale conversion of Abkhazians and South Ossetians into Russian citizens did not merely manufacture a casus belli, it also produced exceptional spaces within the territory of the Republic of Georgia, where the norms of international law and the modern state system were effectively suspended.     

Eco-Frontier and Place-Making: The Unexpected Transformation of a Sustainable Settlement Project in the Amazon

An important issue today is the compatibility of agricultural frontiers, which are driven by economic objectives, with conservationist views. In the Amazon, family farmers are concerned with this issue since they are at the same time actors of the agricultural frontier and considered as potential actors of the preservation of the forest. Through the study of a highly symbolic settlement project in the State of Pará, this paper focuses on the role that family farmers can play in meeting sustainability goals. The central argument which is developed in this paper is that this objective may be achieved when projects do not presuppose social and spatial relationships; rather, it advocates an approach which is attentive to place-making processes.     

A Conceptual Model of Medical Tourism: Implications for Future Research

An extensive review of the current literature reveals that no integrated theoretical framework for the holistic study of the medical tourism industry exists. This study, therefore, aims to fill this gap by proposing an integrated model for the investigation of this burgeoning tourism field. It is developed with a view to capturing the current situation of medical tourism in a given country or region from the supply and demand perspectives. Both qualitative and quantitative techniques are suggested as systematic tools to test and validate the model. This study not only has implications for future research, but also provides useful information for practitioners in the medical tourism industry.     

The Effects of Succession Choice Surrounding CEO Turnover Announcements: Evidence from Marathon Successions

This study examines marathon successions, which I define as top executive searches that are extended past the formal departure notice of the incumbent chief executive officer (CEO). Marathons should be used when search costs are high and when little time passes from when the incumbent steps down to when they leave the firm. Consistent with these predictions, marathons primarily follow surprise departures and forced turnovers. Marathons are also likely for firms operating in heterogeneous industries that face early tenure incumbent departures. These findings shed light on an increasingly prevalent form of succession and provide insight into the rationale and implications behind the announcement.     

Strategic Choices,Environmental Uncertainty and SBU Performance: A Note on the Intervening Role of Management Accounting Systems

This paper examines the role of management accounting systems (MAS) design on the relationship between: (1) strategic business unit (SBU) strategy and SBU performance and (2) perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU) on SBU performance. MAS design was defined in terms of the extent to which managers use broad scope MAS information for managerial decision making. The responses of 62 SBU managers, drawn from a cross-section of manufacturing companies in Western Australia, to a questionnaire survey were analysed by using a path analysis. The results suggest that SBU strategy and PEU are important antecedents of MAS design, and that broad scope MAS information is an important antecedent of SBU performance.     

Paternalistic Capitalism

Brazil’s political-economic structure has rapidly evolved over the past decade, shedding its shallow policy alignment with neoliberalism of the 1990s. Brazil’s large, diversified industrial base was painfully constructed over the course of the twentieth century. A major and sustained political realignment, which began in 2003, has resulted in two essential thrusts in development policy: (i) a “growth with equity” strategy that has dramatically reduced poverty and inequality; and (ii) a state-led “industrial policy” designed to upgrade manufacturing and direct the accumulation process toward specific sectors, highlighting and consolidating the National Innovation System (NIS). Nonetheless, as a result of the commodity boom that swept through Latin America, Brazil’s natural resource sector achieved outsized growth from 2002 to 2012. One result has been a shift toward resource intensive activities and a broad opening to low-cost Chinese manufactures. Utilizing an institutionalist framework and method, this article analyzes the cohesion of the NIS and the emergence of the “deindustrialization” debate. Also, it assesses the instrumental nature of the “growth with equity” strategy. The article hypothesizes the viability of an endogenous “neo-developmentalist” strategy, while acknowledging the emergence of fundamental exogenous forces and structural ceremonial/institutional factors that have impeded the consolidation of a Brazilian social structure of accumulation.     

A coalitional theory of unemployment insurance and employment protection

This paper examines the role of coalition formation in the empirically observed negative correlation between employment protection and unemployment benefit. We study an economy composed of four groups of agents (capitalists, unemployed people, low- and high-skilled workers), each one represented by a politician. Politicians first form political parties and then compete in a winner-takes-all election by simultaneously proposing policy bundles composed of an employment protection level and an unemployment benefit. We first show that, in the absence of parties (i.e., in a citizen-candidate model), low-skilled workers are decisive and support a maximum employment protection level together with some unemployment benefit. We then obtain that, under some conditions, allowing for party formation results in all policy equilibria belonging to the Pareto set of the coalition formed by high-skilled workers together with unemployed people. Policies in this Pareto set exhibit a negative correlation between employment protection and unemployment benefit.     

Delegation of Decision Rights and Misreporting: The Roles of Incentive-based Compensation Schemes and Responsibility Rationalization

Our paper examines when and how the delegation of decision rights and incentive-based compensation schemes (two organizational-design choices) and responsibility rationalization affect managers’ misreporting behavior. One hundred and twenty-nine managers from manufacturing firms in the US completed an online survey. Our results suggest that managers’ responsibility rationalization moderates the relationships between the delegation of decision rights and misreporting, and incentive-based compensation schemes and misreporting. Despite our results providing no evidence of a simple mediating role of incentive-based compensation schemes on the relationship between the delegation of decision rights and misreporting, we find support for a moderated-mediation effect. Specifically, our results demonstrate that the indirect effect of the delegation of decision rights on misreporting via incentive-based compensation schemes is conditional on managers’ responsibility rationalization. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.