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We study the impact on a country's economy of sharing a direct land border with a country experiencing conflict. Through analyzing sixty-three major episodes of regional instability during the period between 1990 and 2016 by using panel data methods applied to unrestricted error correction model, the opportunity cost of such regional conflict is examined. The resulting estimates of GDP loss are most profound for countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Regional turmoil resulting from conflict has been found to have significantly reduced GDP growth in Angola, China, Kuwait, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Tanzania, with estimates ranging from over 3% to 7% average reductions in GDP growth rate using both pooled OLS and fixed effects estimations (with an international average of 0.95% and 1.18% respectively). This considerable opportunity costs of military expenditure raise an important and challenging question to the concerned governments about the economic and social rightfulness of this expenditure and whether their people ultimately pay the price for the government decisions of increasing military spending.

There has been a recent identification of a need for a New Business History. This discussion connects with the analytic narrative approach. By following this approach, the study of business history provides important implications for the conduct and institutional design of contemporary industrial policy. The approach also allows us to solve historical puzzles. The failure of the De Lorean Motor Company Limited (DMCL) is one specific puzzle. Journalistic accounts that focus on John De Lorean's alleged personality defects as an explanation for this failure miss the crucial institutional component. Moreover, distortions in the rewards associated with industrial policy, and the fact that the objectives of the institutions implementing the policy were not solely efficiency-based, led to increased opportunities for rent-seeking. Political economy solves the specific puzzle; by considering institutional dimensions, we can also solve the more general puzzle of why activist industrial policy was relatively unsuccessful in Northern Ireland.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how flood management practitioners rationalise the emergence of sustainable flood management. Key to this analysis are differences rooted in assumptions over what flood management is and should do. Design/methodology/approach: The popularity of natural flood management offers a case with which to explore how a dominant framing persists and how individuals at the government-public interface negotiate different visions of future flood management. The authors draw on the perceptions of flood experts, elucidating a deep hold amongst a professional community "grounded" in science and economics, but also their desire to innovate and become more open to innovative practices. Findings : The authors show how the idea of "sustainable" and "natural" flood management are understood by those doing flood management, which is with reference to pre-existing technical practices. Research limitations/implications: This paper explores the views of expert decision making, which suffers from challenges associated with small sample size. As such, the findings must be tempered, but with recognition for the influence of a small group of individuals who determine the nature of flood management in Scotland. Practical implications: The authors conclude that, in the context of this study, a technical framing persists by predetermining the criteria by which innovative techniques are judged. Originality/value: Broadly, these findings contribute to debates over the evolution of flood management regimes. This recognises the importance of events while also emphasising the preparations that shape the context and norms of the flood management community between events.

Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) classrooms is the latest addition to the ongoing quest for transforming pedagogical practices and driving educational development outcomes. Governments and policymakers around the world are embracing the idea of integrating digital learning technologies into educational settings backed by research on the benefits offered like the lifelong development of individual learners. While technological interventions open up unlimited possibilities for accessing information and improving collaboration, thereby engaging learners with more interactive learning activities, a new type of gap between individuals could also take shape as the penetration of technologies and adoption stages advance. Results from past projects of similar nature within educational settings have indicated the possible rise in the gap among individuals based on digital access (i.e., equity in access/ownership of digital learning technologies), digital capability (i.e., equity in digital/information literacy skills and usage) and digital outcome (i.e., equity in knowledge acquisition and progression). Therefore, we have conducted a longitudinal study to investigate a BYOD initiative by a New Zealand School. This study shares rich insights in the context of technology-mediated pedagogies and specifically BYOD classroom, as to how digital divides moved beyond access and skills to ensure inclusive learning outcomes. As a part of the five-year study of the technology-mediated teaching and learning initiative, we have been able to explain some of the unanswered questions around the issue of digital divides in the learning process. We investigated issues pertaining to digital divide in the context of BYOD classrooms to make the following revelations. First, the BYOD classroom initiative did not end up accentuating existing gaps in access to digital tools and technologies, despite earlier studies indicating towards increase in gaps. Second, our analysis strongly indicated the changing nature of digital divides with the presence of gaps in terms of information literacy and critical thinking ability, as the BYOD classroom progressed to mature stage. This was eventually bridged in the later stage, as students slowly adjusted to the classroom curricular structures in the BYOD classroom. Third, learner self-efficacy has been identified as a determinant of learning outcomes. In the earlier phase of ICT adoption, learner self-efficacy is influenced by a combination of information literacy, critical thinking ability, and positive motivation; however subsequently, self-efficacy influences affordances in various aspects of social cognitive abilities related to individual's learning activities affecting how learners engage and apply technology to achieve learning outcomes.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent to which institutional convergence has taken place in the new European Union (EU) member states. It does so by contrasting arguments that are inspired by transaction-cost economics within the mainstream international-business literature and contentions within the comparative-capitalisms perspective. A corollary of arguments within the former is that those countries that have less transparent ways of doing business will post poorer economic growth records than those with more predictable and less costly regulations. By contrast, contentions within the comparative-capitalisms literature lead to expectations that a broader set of institutional factors will shape economic growth. Design/methodology/approach: The article adopts a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis approach to examine the necessary and sufficient causal conditions for economic growth in the region. Findings: There is a great deal of institutional diversity within the new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe. There are no clusters of countries around a specific variety of capitalism or an economic model that has above-average economic growth rates and that is characterized by institutions that lower the costs of market transacting. This, in turn, suggests that convergence pressures are not as great as the mainstream international-business literature has argued. Research limitations/implications: Future research could complement this study by adopting a cross-country, comparative micro- or firm-level approach to examine the ways in which different institutional factors, both individually and collectively, shape the growth of businesses and consequently, economies. Originality/value: Mainstream international business tends to focus on regulation and market-supporting institutions to explain growth in developing economies. This research has shown that a broader view of institutions needs to be adopted, as some countries have been able to post strong economic growth figures despite institutional environments that do not lower the costs of market-based contracting. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Freelancers work for companies, but also apart from them - at home, on site, or in shared workspaces. This chapter examines how clients and freelancers manage and organise the employment relationship at a distance. Utilising interview data with freelancers working in the Dutch creative industries, Henri Lefebvre's method of 'rhythmanalysis', Nitzan and Bichler's theory of 'capital as power', and John Holloway's understanding of human creativity as 'doing', the chapter examines the conflicting rhythms of freelance creative work. It shows that freelancers remain subject to traditional workplace-oriented structures of control, particularly in creative agencies. Freelancers' use of time must correspond to client processes of measurement and valuation. Different client relationships, and the proximity they imply, produce different rhythms of work.

Using Nitzan and Bichler's understanding of the dissonant relationship between creativity and power and business and industry, this paper investigates the rhythms of freelance creative work. It reports findings from interviews conducted with freelancers working in the Dutch creative industries. The findings suggest that freelancers enjoy more responsibility and autonomy than formal employees. But this autonomy represents a risk that their clients must manage. Different client relationships, and the proximity they imply, produce different rhythms. The research explores freelancers' experiences of these rhythms in graphic design, advertising and branding. The research begins from the premise that risk and responsibility are both assumed and apportioned as a function of relationships of power and discipline in the sphere of work. Freelancers are agents of the management of these two interrelated categories. They are subject to the competing rhythms implied by the relation between these two categories. With reference to these rhythms, the research draws upon Nitzan and Bichler's theory of 'capital as power' as an analytical tool. Nitzan and Bichler develop a conceptualisation of the tension between 'industry' and 'business'. This explains how the latter sabotages the creativity of the former. This produces a 'dissonance' between the two. This dissonance is the productive driving force of capital accumulation. Applying this to the relationship of risk and responsibility in freelance creative work, I explore how these differing rhythms manifest. The conflict between the freedom to be creative and the management of creativity is not a deficiency of creative production. Rather, it is its moving principle.

This article critiques postoperaist conceptualisations of immaterial labour from the perspective of Marxian value-form theory. Critiquing the idea of the 'crisis of measurability' created by immaterial labour and the contention that this makes redundant the law of value, it contests the novelty, immediate abstractness and immeasurable productivity postoperaists attribute to contemporary labour using the New Reading of Marx. The first part explores this theoretical conflict, asserting that post-operaismo refutes Marx's value theory only insofar as it holds a productivist understanding of value to begin with. The second reflects upon the political implications through a consideration of the postoperaist advocacy of a universal basic income (UBI). Appeals to reward, recompense and redistribution rest upon the veracity of the claims made in the post-operaist treatment of labour, value and their immateriality and immeasurability. A value-form analysis exposes flaws in the assumptions about value and labour that support their case for a UBI.

In this paper, we explore the standardization of contemporary management knowledge, focusing in particular upon the role of 'standards' in creating and reifying 'organizational objects', with powerful consequences and with often unrecognized ethical implications. It is our argument that modernist beliefs in 'general, abstract and timeless ideas' (Brunsson et al, 2000, p. 173), enshrined in a universal and abstract rationality, results in the marginalization of more reflexive forms of rationality and the suppression of autonomy, creativity and discretion in organizations. To investigate the consequences of standardization, we take as the focus of our analysis a specific management model which has a significant and growing impact on many sectors of contemporary industry; that of project management. Drawing on the work of Timmermans and Berg (1997), Bowker and Star (1999) and Brunsson et al. (2000), we draw attention to the reification of the object of management; in this case, the project itself, as a transhistorical, 'real world' object. By tracing efforts to establish and institutionalize 'standards' in this and other fields of management, in particular through the creation and dissemination of a universal 'body of knowledge' for this field, we draw attention to the political and moral significance of the 'blackboxing' of knowledge. It is our broader intention here to help to denaturalize this organizational object, to legitimize other modes of knowledge and practice in the field, and thereby to reopen debate in this and other arenas of standardization. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.

The financial crisis can be understood in many different terms. In this article, it is analyzed in terms of the unfolding of a series of elite narratives that shaped the agenda of regulation before the crisis, that were damaged by the crisis, and that were then reframed and recounted again in the wake of the crisis. The form of these stories differs in subtle ways by jurisdiction, and thus the fate of postcrisis regulatory practice likewise differs. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A crucial test of whether "management matters" is whether changes in the team at the top of an organization make a difference. Focusing on turnover in the collective senior team rather than successions of individual chief executives, this article argues that the impact of leadership succession is contingent upon prior organizational performance. The evidence on English local government shows that changes in the top management team lead to improvements when initial performance is bad, but result in deterioration when initial performance is good. The results support the view that high-performing organizations should attempt to retain members of their senior management team, whereas low performers should seek to replace them. © 2011 The American Society for Public Administration.

Political and organizational theories suggest that the turnover of chief executives and other members of senior management teams are likely to be influenced by public service performance. We use a panel data set of 148 English local governments over 4 years to test this proposition. The empirical results show that performance has a negative effect on turnover, but that this effect is weaker for chief executives than for members of their senior management teams. In addition, top team turnover is higher in the years following a chief executive succession. The evidence suggests that chief executives can influence top team turnover by attributing responsibility for poor organizational performance to other senior managers. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved.

This paper illuminates how a journal and its editor can initiate and foster a stream of high quality and influential research in a novel area. It does this by analysing Accounting, Organizations and Society's (AOS's) and Anthony Hopwood's nurturing of research into key aspects of accounting for social sustainability for several decades before this research area became established. Our discussion unveils how the initiation of unique research areas may initially involve the publication of risky papers driven primarily by passion. Through the steering of a journal editor, subsequent work can proceed to combine this passion with academic rigour and produce research insights that can benefit society by positively influencing policy and practice. It is this attention to rigour that we argue needs to be central to future research in accounting for social sustainability (and accounting for sustainability more broadly) if it is to continue producing purposeful knowledge. We offer several substantive directions for future research aimed at producing such knowledge.

Recent debates on a sustainable recovery of the global economy have tended to overemphasise the 'savings glut' hypothesis and the unavoidable imperative of higher consumption in China and other emerging Asian countries. That oversaving and not underinvestment is coming in the way of a quicker and more durable recovery is not just simplistic but misleading from a medium-term growth perspective for emerging Asian countries and other developing countries in this region. Drawing upon country panel data for developing countries and a subsample of Asian countries during the period 1991-2007, this study makes a case for a bold and coordinated fiscal stimulus, directed to stimulating agricultural and overall growth, and mitigation of poverty and hunger. Our simulations further suggest that poverty reduction is likely to be larger if the fiscal stimulus is directed to social spending in health and education sectors. Indeed, if our simulations of fiscal impacts have any validity, the dire predictions of millions getting trapped in poverty and hunger may turn out to be exaggerated. The prospects of a strong recovery led by fiscal stimulus are thus real and achievable. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This paper represents something of a history of the future. It seeks to examine, in the context of the USA and Britain, debates over the future of work that have taken place during the 20th century, and have continued into the 21st. Such debates, often classics of the futurological genre, might be caricatured as fantastic predictions of a leisured utopia, but are often in fact both more sober, and more nuanced, than such a depiction would suggest. The present paper will explore the common themes that structure future of work debates, and discourses of the future of work will be placed in social and historical context. Most importantly, the paper will uncover commonalities in understandings of what it means to be creative and free in modern society, understandings that are central to the future of work, and indeed the future in general. The paper will, in conclusion, addresses the possible reasons for a decline in predictions of a leisured future, and a growing awareness amongst commentators that work is very much here to stay. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.