Suchergebnisse

The ethical dimensions of quantification are seldom analysed. We examine three ethical features that are characteristic of quantification – its capacity to express or mediate power, focus attention, and shape opportunity structures. We do so in the context of three recent examples of new types of quantification : university rankings, the racial classification of Asians in the US, and facial recognition algorithms. Our examples highlight the importance of understanding the varied and complex ways that quantification creates and organizes social relations, and the effect of this on multiple forms of inequality.

Standardized forms of knowledge, such as systems of measurement and money, and the formal arithmetic taught in school, may be thought of as attempts to dominate the definitions of the situations of their use and forms of knowledge in practice. Ethnographic research on middle class American adults shopping in supermarkets, managing family finances, and trying to lose weight in a dieting organisation suggest, rather, that calculation and measurement procedures are generated in situationally-specific terms which both reflect and help to produce the specific character of activities in daily life. At the same time, the values embodied in the standarised forms of quantitative knowledge discussed here, especially values of rational objective utility, appear to be resources employed expressively in everyday practice. A politics of knowledge is thus embodied in mundane transformations of knowledge and value through activity constituted in relation with its daily settings.

AbstractThis paper presents a quantitative index of the level of risk assumed by a contractor in various contract type situations. The definition includes expression of real world uncertainty and contractor's utility for money. Examples are given for the major contract types and special applications are discussed.

The European Commission published a White Paper on 2 April 2008 on damages actions for breach of EU antitrust rules. The content of the White Paper is since then being prepared to be converted into EU legislation on private antitrust enforcement. This paper presents the developments in private antitrust enforcement in Poland after 2 April 2008. It commences with an outline of EU actions in this field which act as an introduction to the more detailed analysis of recent jurisprudential and legislative developments in Poland. The latter part of the paper covers, in particular, the 2009 Act on the Pursuit of Claims in Group Proceedings and the 2011 Act Amending the Civil Procedure Code and Some Other Acts which abolishes all specific elements of commercial proceedings, including the statutory 'non-admission of evidence' principle. These two legal acts are assessed in order to establish whether their introduction is likely to help facilitate private antitrust enforcement in Poland and to consider to what an extent are these developments responding to the challenges outlined by the European Commission. ; Michał Mijal