Cracks in the Creative City: The Contradictions of Community Arts Practice

The recent flurry of research about arts‐led regeneration initiatives illuminates how contemporary arts festivals can become complicit in the production of urban inequality. But researchers rarely engage with detailed empirical examples that shed light on the contradictory role that artists sometimes play within these spectacularized events. Similar research in performance studies connects the political limits and potential of social practice arts — interventions that encourage artists and non‐artists to co‐produce work — as civic boosters strive to stage cities in order to attract investment. In this article, I explore the case study of Streetscape: Living Space at Regent Park, a participatory artistic intervention programmed in a public housing neighbourhood that is undergoing redevelopment in Toronto, Canada. Streetscape was part of the Luminato festival, an elite booster coalition‐led festival of ‘creativity’. I refer to these arts interventions to demonstrate how artists engaging in social practice arts can become complicit in naturalizing colonial gentrification processes at multiple scales. But I also reveal how artists can leverage heterogeneous arts‐led regeneration strategies to make space for ‘radical social praxis’ (Kwon, 2004), interventions that challenge hegemonic regimes. I conclude by interrogating the effectiveness of place‐based efforts in unsettling the ‘creative city’.     

Fraud dynamics and controls in organizations

This paper develops an agent-based model to examine the emergent dynamic characteristics of fraud in organizations. In the model, individual heterogeneous agents, each of whom can have motive and opportunity to commit fraud and a pro-fraud attitude, interact with each other. This interaction provides a mechanism for cultural transmission through which attitudes regarding fraud can spread. Our benchmark analysis identifies two classes of organizations. In one class, we observe fraud tending toward a stable level. In the other class, fraud dynamics are characterized by extreme behaviors; organizations with mostly honest behavior suddenly change their state to mostly fraudulent behavior and vice versa. These changes seem to occur randomly over time. We then modify our model to examine the effects of various mechanisms thought to impact fraud in organizations. Each of these mechanisms has different impacts on the two classes of organizations in our benchmark model, with some mechanisms being more effective in organizations exhibiting stable levels of fraud and other mechanisms being more effective in organizations exhibiting unstable extreme behavior. Our analysis and results have general implications for designing programs aimed at preventing fraud and for fraud risk assessment within the audit context.     

CEO International Assignment Experience and Corporate Social Performance

Research suggests that international assignment experience enhances awareness of societal stakeholders, influences personal values, and provides rare and valuable resources. Based on these arguments, we hypothesize that CEO international assignment experience will lead to increased corporate social performance (CSP) and will be moderated by the CEO’s functional background. Using a sample of 393 CEOs of S&P 500 companies and three independent data sources, we find that CEO international assignment experience is positively related to CSP and is significantly moderated by the CEO’s functional background. Specifically, CEOs with international assignment experience and an output functional background (e.g., marketing and sales) are positively associated with greater CSP.     

Erratum: Shareholder valuation of foreign investment and expansion. Heather Berry. Strategic Management Journal, 27(12): 1123–1140 (2006)

Half of the last sentence in the abstract was incorrectly deleted in the original publication of this paper. The sentence should read as follows: "These results highlight the importance of considering firm location decisions, prior experiences and resources when analyzing the performance effects from multinationality by showing that shareholders value different paths to international expansion for firms that vary in these dimensions."     

Forecasting with the Nonparametric Exclusion-from-Core Inflation Persistence Model Using Real-Time Data

International Advances in Economic Research - This paper contributes to nonparametric forecasting techniques by developing three local nonparametric forecasting methods for the nonparametric...     

Why Susie owns Starbucks: The name letter effect in security selection

We examine whether security selection is influenced by the name letter effect—a psychological predisposition to select items that start with leading own name letters. Two sets of tests reveal evidence that the name letter effect influences investors' security selection decisions. First, breadth of ownership (as measured by the number of institutional investors holding the security) is positively related to U.S. name letter frequency, e.g., stocks that begin with the common name letter “M” exhibit a greater number of institutional shareholders than stocks that begin with the less common name letter “X.” Second, undergraduate students managing university endowment funds are more likely to select securities for evaluation when the stock's name begins with the same letter as their name.     

Isolating the Information Content of Equity Analysts' Recommendation Changes,Post Reg FD

We investigate the information content of equity analysts' recommendation changes subsequent to the passage of Regulation Fair Disclosure. We find that analyst upgrades (downgrades) are associated with positive (negative) abnormal returns. Overall, stock prices tend to react significantly more strongly to recommendation changes accompanied by news events than to those that are not. Even so, returns around recommendation changes not accompanied by news are significantly different from zero. This result holds after controlling for firm‐specific variables and the incidence of multiple simultaneous recommendation changes. We conclude that analyst recommendation changes, in and of themselves, are informative.     

Between the Ivory Tower and the Academic Assembly Line*

This paper considers the impact of managerialism and the reactions it has engendered in university life. It examines the degree to which institutions of higher education in the UK have in recent years been subjected to what some commentators have seen as a managerial assault, alongside economic pressures to restructure and reform, and explores the reactions of academic and administrative staff in middle and junior levels through a case study of two universities. Consideration is given to attempts to introduce managerial controls, including the setting of targets, appraisals and peer review, as well as to the resistances which followed. It is argued that the notion of resistance to domination and control has been underplayed in the literature of organization and management. In exploring its various manifestations it is shown that managerialism is not fully embedded in university life and that matters are far from settled. It is contended that those engaged in academe in middle and junior levels of the organizational hierarchy are actively seeking to keep alive the craft of scholarship by mediating and moderating the harsher effects of the changes through supportive or transformational styles of working.