World energy prices

Futures Dossiers present concise articles that summarize recent developments in major areas. They are intended for the interested non-specialist and contain suggestions for further readings. The first article in the series examines the historic trends and recent changes in the general level of world energy prices, discusses the range and effect of possible future price movements, and highlights the importance of the rate of increase over the actual level.     

Interlocking Directorates, Firm Strategies, and Performance in Hong Kong: Towards a Research Agenda

Filling a gap in the interlocks literature which has been largely centered on the West, we present preliminary data on the pattern of interlocking directorates among the top 200 largest corporations in pre-1997 Hong Kong. Then we identify four separate groups of firms in Hong Kong, and suggest propositions based on the resource dependence perspective on the critical relationships among their interlocking directorates, firm strategies, and performance. These propositions have the potential to form the building block of an emerging research agenda that will shed light on the role of interlocking directorates in an increasingly important part of the world.     

Deepening Democracy or Élite Governance? New Political Management Arrangements in Local Government

This article discusses the introduction of new political management arrangements in local government. It places the Government's current proposals for change in the context of recent research and debate about the strengths and weaknesses of local democracy, and then draws on recent research evidence, which suggests that current reforms may have a contradictory impact. The Government's proposals are likely to bring tighter and more strategic political leadership, more effective partnership with other local organizations and, if certain steps are taken, better 'scrutiny' of policy and performance. However, there are serious concerns about democratic accountability and transparency, community involvement and the implications for many councillors, party groups and a healthy local party politics. It is concluded that more thorough evaluation of the impact of the changes is desirable.     

Anomie and the Marketing Function: The Role of Control Mechanisms

The authors use the theoretical notion of anomie to examine the impact of top management’s control mechanisms on the environment of the marketing function. Based on a literature review and in-depth field interviews with marketing managers in diverse industries, a conceptual model is proposed that incorporates the two managerial control mechanisms, viz. output and process control, and relates their distinctive influence to anomie in the marketing function. Three contingency variables, i.e., resource scarcity, power, and ethics codification, are proposed to moderate the relationship between control mechanisms and anomie. The authors also argue for the link between anomic environments and the propensity of unethical marketing practices to occur. Theoretical and managerial implications of the proposed conceptual model are discussed. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Trade Union Responses to zero hours work in Ireland

This paper examines the strategies adopted by Irish unions in responding to zero hours work in four sectors. It concludes that rather than adopting either a passive or a uniform approach, unions have pragmatically varied their strategies to curtail zero‐hours work through actively combining both bargaining and regulatory approaches.     

Bourdieu Comes to Town: Part II

This essay introduces the second selection of essays associated with the Interventions forum ‘Bourdieu Comes to Town’, the first of which appeared in 2018. There seems to be a tendency to conflate the relevance of Bourdieu for urban studies by focusing specifically on particular contentious concepts that have been fashioned from Bourdieu's own tools. I briefly discuss this point with respect to the concepts of ‘elective belonging', which I helped introduce, and ‘territorial stigmatization’, which Loïc Wacquant himself has popularized. I argue that whatever the virtues or otherwise of these concepts, Bourdieu offers substantially more to urban studies, namely the capacity to synthesize across sites, to link micro and macro, to engage pragmatist concerns with daily life to a wider political economy, and to foreground the role of accumulation. I briefly show how the four essays in this selection exemplify these qualities.