What Do Cities Have to Do with Democracy?

The relationship between urbanization and democratization remains under‐theorized and under‐researched. Radical urban theory has undergone a veritable normative turn, registered in debates about the right to the city, spatial justice and the just city, while critical conceptualizations of neoliberalism present ‘democracy’ as the preferred remedy for injustice. However, these lines of thought remain reluctant to venture too far down the path of political philosophy. The relationship between urban politics and the dynamics of democratization remains under‐theorized as a result. It is argued that this relationship can be usefully understood by drawing on lessons from avowedly normative styles of political theorizing, specifically post‐Habermasian strands of critical theory. Taking this tradition seriously helps one to notice that discussions of urbanization, democracy, injustice and rights in geography, urban studies and related fields invoke an implicit but unthematized democratic norm, that of all‐affected interests. In contemporary critical theory, this norm is conceptualized as a worldly register of political demands. It is argued that the conceptual disaggregation of component values of democracy undertaken through the ‘spatial turn’ in recent critical theory reorients the analysis of the democratic potentials of urban politics around the investigation of the multiple forms of agency which urbanized processes perform in generating, recognizing and acting upon issues of shared concern.     

The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis

This short theoretical paper elucidates a plausible theory about the Global Financial Crisis and the role of senior financial corporate directors in that crisis. The paper presents a theory of the Global Financial Crisis which argues that psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing the crisis. This paper is thus a very short theoretical paper but is one that may be very important to the future of capitalism because it discusses significant ways in which Corporate Psychopaths may have acted recently, to the detriment of many. Further research into this theory is called for.     

Depicting the future strategic plans of the Royal Australian Navy using a roadmapping framework as a visual composite canvas

Strategic planning can be an arduous and complex task; and, once a plan has been devised, it is often quite a challenge to effectively communicate the principal missions and key priorities to the array of different stakeholders. The communication challenge can be addressed through the application of a clearly and concisely designed visualisation of the strategic plan – to that end, this paper proposes the use of a roadmapping framework to structure a visual canvas. The canvas provides a template in the form of a single composite visual output that essentially allows a ‘plan-on-a-page’ to be generated. Such a visual representation provides a high-level depiction of the future context, end-state capabilities and the system-wide transitions needed to realise the strategic vision. To demonstrate this approach, an illustrative case study based on the Australian Government's Defence White Paper and the Royal Australian Navy's fleet plan will be presented. The visual plan plots the in-service upgrades for addressing the capability shortfalls and gaps in the Navy's fleet as it transitions from its current configuration to its future end-state vision. It also provides a visualisation of project timings in terms of the decision gates (approval, service release) and specific phases (proposal, contract, delivery) together with how these projects are rated against the key performance indicators relating to the technology acquisition process and associated management activities.     

Rhetorical profiling: Modes of meaning generation in organizational topoi

Accounting for homogenous action in seemingly apparent heterogeneous organizations is a research question that persists across prominent organizational studies literatures, and which have become more persistent and pertinent as organizations have become more global and diverse. To address how differing forms of relatively homogeneous solutions to practical problems arise from otherwise heterogeneous organizations, we develop a rhetorical framework that depicts the role of topoi, often understood as a theme or motif or literary convention, in an organization's rhetorical activity and facilitates the profiling of organizations according to how members use topoi as modes of meaning creation. We assert 10 propositions reflecting how members invent and legitimize functional meaning and demonstrate how such meaning can direct the organization toward different discursive paths. Copyright © 2013 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Determinants of Performance Appraisal Systems: A Note (Do Brown and Heywood's Results for Australia Hold Up for Britain?)

This article offers a replication for Britain of Brown and Heywood's analysis of the determinants of performance appraisal in Australia. Although there are some important limiting differences between our two datasets — the Australia Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS) and the Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) — we reach one central point of agreement and one intriguing shared insight. First, performance appraisal is negatively associated with tenure: where employers cannot rely on the carrot of deferred pay or the stick of dismissal to motivate workers, they will tend to rely more on monitoring, ceteris paribus. Second, employer monitoring and performance pay may be complementary. However, consonant with the disparate results from the wider literature, there is more modest agreement on the contribution of specific human resource management practices, and still less on the role of job control.     

Assessing the Economic Benefits to Agriculture from Air Pollution Control

Agricultural crop production is highly dependent upon environmental conditions among which air quality plays a central role. Various air pollutants have been identified as a potential influence on commercial crops including SO₂, NOx, O₃ and CO₂. In particular, ozone in the lower atmosphere has been identified as a serious cause of crop loss in the United States and seems likely to be creating similar losses in Europe. In this paper the methods which can be applied to assess the economic damages from air pollution are critically reviewed. This requires measuring pollutant concentrations, relating these to physical crop damages, and estimating the reactions of the agricultural sector and consumers to give welfare changes in terms of consumers’ surplus and producers’ quasi-rents. The approach of the European open-top chamber programme (EOTCP) is shown to have neglected lessons learnt by the National Crop Loss Assessment Network (NCLAN) in the US     

Eskom,its finances and the national electrification programme

Eskom, the national electricity utility, is one of the key institutions involved in delivering the goals of the Reconstruction and Development Programme. From 1991 to 1994, Eskom electrified about 685 000 households, and it plans to make a total of 1,75 million new connections between 1994 and 1999. Notwithstanding real electricity price decreases of 24 per cent from 1987 to 1994 and the operating losses it has encountered to date on the electrification programme, Eskom has consolidated and strengthened its income statement and balance sheet significantly in recent years. The present analysis suggests that its capital expenditure on power stations is fundamental to the utility's financial health. In real terms investment in 1994 was considerably lower than at the peak of 1985, and since supply capacity exceeds current demand electrification can readily proceed. Eskom enjoys a sound financial position and, with rationalisation and restructuring of the electricity supply industry, the utility might play an even more significant role in the electrification programme. The trend, however, appears to be in the opposite direction.     

Local Content Requirements, Vertical Cooperation, and Foreign Direct Investment

Local content requirements (LCRs) have been observed empirically to 1) protect vertically integrated domestic industries and 2) induce inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in intermediate goods production. We examine the effects of an LCR in the context of potential FDI in upstream manufacturing by a foreign multinational and potential vertical cooperation between a host country's upstream and downstream producers. In case of vertical cooperation domestic producers have an incentive to set the price of the intermediate strategically to discourage FDI. Vertical cooperation is found to enhance the rent-shifting effect of the LCR, whereas the FDI response increases price competition and reduces domestic profits. In both cases, manufacturing efficiency and foreign welfare decrease, suggesting the need for multilateral agreement in the WTO to curb the continuing but disguised use of LCRs in industrialized countries.