Commonplace View Research Articles

The Powerpoint Imagination: visualization and managerial vocabularies in sustainability reports

Sustainability reporting has been established as a dominant but problematic communication practice in global sustainability management. In this paper, we challenge the commonplace view of reporting as the simple and textual transmission of information, by interpreting corporate sustainability reports as visual artefacts that encourage particular views of environmental issues. We discuss visualization as a key practice in communication and rhetoric, asking what visual managerialism looks like in corporate reports, focusing on a corpus drawn from the Swedish United Nations Global Compact. We engage in a three-stage rhetorical critique to identify three kinds of visualizations: numerical, diagrammatic, and pictorial, establishing how they emphasize communicative characteristics such as logic, simplicity, and clarity. We consolidate these characteristics with the term ‘Powerpoint Imagination,’ arguing that they construct environmental problems in terms of a technocratic solutionism, i.e., efficiency, standardization and control. We discuss some issues with the Powerpoint Imagination by contrasting it with other images from sustainability reports, concluding with implications for future research.

The ‘two faces’ of cross-border, transactional legal practice during Covid-19: how and from where have lawyers mobilised China's capital flows under lockdown?

AbstractThe narrative that banks, government departments and state-owned enterprises are the foremost protagonists in shaping China's outbound capital flows has been a commonplace view. This article seeks to expand the focus to include other under-scrutinised players: lawyers. With reference to exporting industries (such as shipping and natural gas), this article explains how lawyers – in tandem with China's governmental and judicial organs – have shifted from enabling outflows to postponing them, as a result of China's Covid-19 force majeure regime. Even with capital on pause, Covid-19 has also kept lawyers busy, prompting them to think about how to maximise their firm's proximity to the clients they have and to new clients that they want to win. Accordingly, this article also provides an overview of the techniques used by predominantly Anglo-American law firms to gain access to new legal markets during Covid-19, with a view to winning more work from Chinese capital-exporters and their foreign counterparties.

The Nose Plays: Nasiform Negotiations at Newington Butts

ABSTRACT Shakespeare’s Shylock, Marlowe’s Barabas, and other Jewish characters are often thought to have been portrayed on early modern stages with a large false nose. This essay will explain how this commonplace view began as a falsified proposition by John Payne Collier in 1836, which subsequent scholarship has failed to properly dispel, instead projecting a post-Enlightenment stereotype onto early modern culture. I argue that by studying the use of the false nose in recycled fashion across contiguous plays in repertory it becomes possible to recognise that this stage property called on its audiences to negotiate its meanings from a range of possible sources, including the other plays in the same sequence. Using the repertory of the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Chamberlain’s Men at Newington Butts in 1594, I discuss some of the ways in which the stage nose represented villainy, risibility, and ribaldry without necessarily signifying Jewishness at this time. That Barabas could signify all of these things and also be a Jew may nevertheless have contributed to later generations identifying the nose as one of the stereotypical features of the early modern depictions of Jews on stage.

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Arts in Dark Times

This article explores Palestinians’ representations in visual art of the existential crisis they faced following the destruction of Palestinian society during the 1948 War, known as the Nakba. The article explores how this colossal event has been conveyed artistically, and discusses artworks that revolve around Palestinians’ subsequent states of being, which are represented by two main motifs, the ‘good Arab’ and the cactus tree. In particular, it assesses how these motifs were used to convey varied, and even opposite, states of being and consciousness, as well as survival strategies, that go beyond commonplace views and perceptions about Palestinians in Israel after 1948. Moreover, this article discusses how the allegorical language of these artworks augments their meanings and might open a window into the world of the Palestinians, who lack archives, official historical narratives, and institutions of remembrance.

The conflict of interest in tax scholarship

Problems linked to tax injustices have gained worldwide attention recently, as the aggressive tax planning practices of multinational companies have increasingly been exposed. Legislative reforms and enhanced corporate social responsibility practices have been introduced to deter tax avoidance, yet with little enduring success. However, little attention has been paid to the role of tax scholarship or to the statutory interpretation in the problems of tax avoidance. This paper contradicts the commonplace view that tax law scholarship serves the public interest. The paper approaches tax scholarship as a social practice, and argues that conflicting interests emerge when tax scholars conduct doctrinal study of law. As many tax scholars work for the tax advisory industry alongside their scholarly jobs, they have an incentive to propose legal arguments in their scholarly work that advance their private clients’ interests. Since judges use scholarship as an interpretive aid when defining the content of tax law, tax scholarship might bias the development of legal doctrine. It is argued that scholarship may therefore change the distributive effects of tax systems, in favor of the tax advisory firms’ clients. As a result, the democratic legitimacy of tax systems may be undermined. This article illustrates the problematic aspects of tax scholars’ double roles using empirical examples from Finnish legal culture and Finnish law reviews and codes of conduct in universities. This paper develops an argument that if such problems are prevalent in a country with little corruption and strong democratic institutions, they may be widespread in jurisdictions beyond Finland.

Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato

Reviewed by: Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry and Joanne Begiato James Eli Adams (bio) Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato; pp. xiii + 270. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, £85.00, £25.00 paper, $130.00, $36.95 paper. The development of the internet has transformed research across the humanities by providing newly immediate and wide-ranging access to a world of archival material. At times, however, the sheer abundance of that material amplifies a long-standing scholarly challenge: does this archival wealth actually contribute to important new understandings of a field? Can it do more than confirm received wisdom, offer more than the pleasures of anecdotal detail? Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato, brings home this challenge, contributing to burgeoning interest in the social history of military life, which rarely figures centrally in long-standing historical preoccupation with military campaigns and strategy. Attention to the individual soldier’s experience naturally foregrounds norms of masculinity, particularly as they might conflict with those governing domestic life, and as they register the psychic pressures of military service. The most rewarding contributions to the volume address popular understandings of this service, which often obscured its harsher realities. Brown and Begiato’s chapter analyzes late-Victorian recruitment material depicting young and old soldiers together as embodying [End Page 454] an array of values—national, moral, and martial—cast in familial terms as a masculine bond across generations. Barry’s study of the career of Charles Incledon, “a singing sailor on the Georgian Stage,” offers the volume’s most engaging study of “complex masculinity,” as this popular performer, who left the navy around 1783, came to be viewed as “at once a brave British Tar and a ridiculous Regency rake—a patriotic ballad singer, but also an effeminate showman” (83). Attention to soldiers’ more personal experience, however, too often reiterates commonplace views, often by contesting phantom opinions—most notably the notion that military and domestic life were radically disjunctive, both socially and psychically. Thus a chapter on “martial masculinities and family feeling” declares, “The notion that soldiers miraculously forgot family as soon as they left British soil was clearly hyperbole” (38). Indeed, but who ever thought otherwise? “Maintaining a correspondence home,” we learn, was very important to soldiers on the front—as we might have guessed, since letter-writing is a staple of nearly every popular representation of modern warfare (where would war movies be without it?). But the author puts forth this truism to “unsettle the idea that soldiering automatically entailed a denial of family life” (40). We are offered no clear sources for this “idea.” Better to begin with the obvious—“thoughts of family and home routinely intruded into military men’s consciousness”—as a prelude to examining what the archives reveal about the peculiar stresses to which these thoughts responded (45). Another chapter, “Recalling the Comforts of Home,” takes up this issue more directly, noting that “martial and civilian masculine identities were not as disparate as often supposed,” although again it would be helpful to have evidence of that supposition, since the chapter’s conclusions are unsurprising (60). Varieties of nostalgia in soldiers’ journals and correspondence “reinforced the emotional connection with his family back home” (72) and “receipt of material objects” was “an important coping mechanism” (73). This topic is richly treated in Holly Furneaux’s Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (2016), which deserves even more attention than it receives here. Elsewhere, neglected material derives its significance through the treacherous strategy of argument from absence. An essay devoted to the leg of Lord Uxbridge, severed at Waterloo and accorded the peculiar tribute of a separate burial, focuses on the dearth of attention devoted to this distinctive grave. One might presume that commentators simply found the nobleman’s limb a less solemn affair than the graves of the many thousands of soldiers who perished in the Napoleonic wars. But no, the...

Lexical innovation and the periphery of language

Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve the conventionalist assumption and deny that lexical innovations bear semantic content. The second is to dynamize the conventionalist assumption, that is, argue that presentations of unattested expressions trigger an augmentation of the standing semantic resources of the language and instantiate content as a result of this underlying update. Building on a comparison with the production of novel onomatopoeic words, iconic pseudowords and pro-speech gestures, the paper argues that the issue is best addressed by suspending the conventionalist assumption, and describes the metasemantic implications of the claim.

Where do we go from here? Exploring the future of mixed families between Italy and South Asia

Family labor migration from South Asia to Europe is often framed as proceeding in a predictable pattern of “male first-time migrant, ethnic marriage and spouse reunion.” Migration to Northern Italy is no exception. Primary data from recent ethnographic fieldwork reveal a slow rise in mixed South Asian–Italian couples, which might bring into question the quandaries they face in raising children. This article considers the daily struggles in conjugal and parental relations in mixed-culture households formed by spouses, one of whom is from a South Asian background, and the other is an Italian “native.” Applying intersectional analysis to the life stories and aspirations of such cross-cultural new generations allows for revisiting the commonplace view of South Asia–Europe intimate links.

History, Eschatology, and the Development of the Six Ages of the World

The sex aetates mundi was the central framework of Early Christian, Late Antique, and early medieval Christian eschatology and historiography. This article is the second part of a study of the development and history of this motif. Part I (published in Augustinianum 61, 1 [2021]) summarised the emergence of this framework in biblical and patristic writings up to the late fourth-century, concluding with the work of the North African theologian, Tyconius. The second part of this study investigates the treatment of this subject in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, Dionysius Exiguus, Isidore of Seville, and the Venerable Bede. The majority of the examination is devoted to tracing Augustine’s understanding of the six ages – which was strongly influenced by Tyconius – since Augustine is frequently credited with being the main proponent of this conceptualisation of sacred history. This investigation of Augustine’s writings is mostly focused on De civitate Dei, the work that addresses the six ages framework most thoroughly, but analyses references to this historiography throughout his corpus. The conclusion of this examination argues that Augustine engaged with this commonplace view of history, but only insofar as it points mankind towards reflection of the world to come. This study argues that Isidore is the scholar who should be credited with popularising this notion in the early medieval Latin West. How the developments in calendrical reckoning put forward by Dionysius Exiguus and Bede intersect with and influence the six ages model is also charted. Overall, this study provides an in-depth examination of the six ages of history model in the thought of the fathers of Late Antique and early medieval Latin exegesis, pinpointing key moments in the evolution of the sex aetates model.

Medievalism and Political Rhetoric in Humanist Historiography from the Low Countries (1515–1609) by Coen Maas

Reviewed by: Medievalism and Political Rhetoric in Humanist Historiography from the Low Countries (1515–1609) by Coen Maas Christian Thorsten Callisen Maas, Coen, Medievalism and Political Rhetoric in Humanist Historiography from the Low Countries (1515–1609) (Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation, 7), Turnhout, Brepols, 2018; hard cover; pp. xix, 541; 25 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €125.00; ISBN 9782503557113. In this book, Coen Maas takes 'the apparent contradiction between the humanist aversion to the Middle Ages on the one hand, and the meticulous study of the period by humanist historians on the other' (p. 4) as his starting point, and undertakes a critical review of medievalism among sixteenth-century humanists in the Low Countries. Maas focuses his analysis on the political context in which these authors worked, exploring how medieval practices and ideas were [End Page 239] redeployed in the service of contemporary political objectives. In so doing, Maas provides valuable insights into early modern humanist practice, and challenges the commonplace view that early modern humanists saw the Middle Ages almost exclusively as an unproductive, 'dark' period of history, and their role as 'the saviours of the classical heritage' (p. 32). Maas undertakes his analysis through several case studies. To each of these he brings a comprehensive arsenal of analytical tools, variously deploying rhetorical, comparative, and intertextual analyses to interpret the texts at hand. He carefully avoids anachronistic readings of his subjects, taking into account early modern genre conventions; reading and writing practice; and political, educational, and scholarly contexts. Maas establishes the groundwork for this work in Chapters 1 and 2, which introduce the concepts and tools of textual analysis used in the rest of the book, and provide a useful overview of early modern humanist historical practice. Maas's writing is clear and unambiguous, with signposts that support his reader on the journey. Through his case studies, Maas argues that, far from the Middle Ages being an unproductive, barren wasteland for early modern humanists, this period in history served as a rich and adaptable source that could be drawn on and put into service for a contemporary audience. Of course, the classical topoi that are so recognizable in early modern humanist writings continue to be found, and ancient Roman and Greek authors maintain a definitive influence over these texts, yet Maas shows us convincingly that medieval authors also had a significant part to play in shaping his subjects' rhetorical and historiographical practice. Chapters 3 to 7 present Maas's case studies: Reynier Snoy's Historia Hollandie (c. 1516–17); Adrianus Barlandus's Cronica Brabantiae ducum (1526); Petrus Divaeus's manuscript writings on the history of Brabant (c. 1563); Janus Dousa Sr's verse history of Holland (1599); and the Dousas' (Sr and Jr) prose history of Holland (1601). In each of these, Maas demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the contexts in which these men were writing, as well as the contemporaneous practices that shaped their work. He explores each of their political environments, taking into account their professional backgrounds, work, and patronage relationships. Maas also demonstrates how these authors redeployed medieval tropes and ideas in service of their own political objectives. Traversing the better part of the sixteenth century, these case studies illustrate, on a micro scale, the evolution of historiographical practice in the Low Countries during this time. As one progresses from one case study to the next, one sees clear links between the various texts under consideration, and Maas effectively demonstrates how Snoy, Barlandus, Divaeus, and the Dousas deployed different textual and rhetorical techniques to present their preferred view of history. Unsurprisingly, this view evolved in line with the circumstances of the authors and the changing political landscape in the Low Countries. Chapter 8 complements this implicit chronological comparison with an excursus on the evolution of Latin and vernacular languages during this time. [End Page 240] The texts that Maas has analysed in this book used Latin to communicate with their audiences, and Maas is interested in understanding the specific affordances that Latin provided compared to vernacular languages. He is careful to avoid reductionist ideas about the relationship between Latin and the vernacular, using this chapter to explore broader questions around the audience...

For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature ed. by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field

Reviewed by: For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature ed. by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field Mats Karlsson (bio) For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature. Edited by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016. x, 430 pages. $87.00, cloth; $29.00, paper. The present volume is an exceptionally welcome and valuable contribution to the body of translated works of Japanese fiction into English. In terms [End Page 466] of main literary genres there is probably none that has hitherto been as underrepresented as the genre of proletarian literature. Except for the heroic efforts of Željko Cipriš (A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings, The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle), in addition to an older translation of Kobayashi Takiji's masterpiece The Factory Ship plus The Absentee Landlord by Frank Motofuji, what we have had easily accessible in the field so far are occasional well-known proletarian short stories tucked away in anthologies of modern Japanese literature. That we have had to wait for almost a century after the event for translations to appear is probably indicative of a bias working against proletarian fiction in general, as referenced in the introduction: "Despite the commonplace view that ahistorically reduces all literature produced within a leftwing movement to 'socialist realism' and understands this to be a mindless, propagandistic celebration of workers and tractors, these writers regularly warned one another of the pitfalls of formulaic writing" (p. 1). As mentioned in the introduction, the proletarian literature movement that the volume treats was the most vigorous wing of the wider anticapitalism and anti-imperialism proletarian cultural movement that was in operation for about a decade, roughly speaking from 1925 to 1935. Originally a congregation of writers, artists, critics, students, and intellectuals of various leftist, anti-establishment leanings, the movement was gradually bolshevized as it came under the increasing influence of the banned Japanese Communist Party, which pounced on it as it had few other legal channels to spread its ideology. Operating in semilegal circumstances, the movement became tolerated less and less by the authorities until they decided toward the middle of the 1930s that they could no longer risk leftist dissent being disseminated through society. Reading through the stories in the collection that give ample testimony of harassment at all levels, one wonders why authorities even bothered about only interfering with the movement when they surely possessed the means to clamp down on it decisively much earlier. But then again, Japan was ostensibly a democracy that perhaps needed to appear to be adhering to minimum standards of rules of engagement. Perhaps, also, the movement was up to a point a useful tool to authorities in that it constituted a red peril, an enemy on the home front to unite against that warranted close state surveillance and control of its own citizens? The present anthology is the result of collective work by 14 translators including the editors. The translations of the 40 short pieces that go into the collection are organized into seven chapters by topic—"The Personal Is the Political," "The Question of Realism," and "Art as a Weapon," to name a few—each of which is usefully prefaced by the editors. Cross-referencing of works together with biographical notes about featured writers combine to make the volume a user-friendly learning tool. It is a strong merit of the collection that it takes a broad outlook over the field to include aspects such as writings for children and the movement's [End Page 467] internationalist intentions, which tend to be overlooked in treatments of the movement. Noteworthy also, 13 of the translated pieces are penned by women writers, who are otherwise marginalized in a movement perceived to have been a heavily male-oriented initiative. One crucial question regarding the popularization of the movement is raised in the introduction to the second chapter, "Labor and Literature": "What is the relationship between labor and proletarian literature? On the one hand … proletarian literature sought to represent the indignities and aspirations of those with nothing but their labor to sell. On the other hand, proletarian writers anguished...

A Struggle for Trust: The Comcáac (Seris) of Sonora Under Colonial and Republican Rule, 1650–1850

Abstract This study examines the historical relationship between Comcáac foragers of Sonora, Mexico, and the Spanish/Mexican society between 1650 and 1850. To do so, the concept of trust is introduced, adapted for ethnohistorical research, and discussed as a frequent term in the primary sources. The social organization of foragers is outlined to localize the place of trust within it and to analyze its meaning for interethnic relations. Finally, historical examples are given throughout the article to illustrate and expand the theoretical findings. This article highlights the nonviolent relations in contrast to the commonplace view of perennial conflict between the societies, as given in secondary literature, and aims to provide an alternative reading of this particular ethnohistory.

Problem-Based Learning and Teaching in Construction-Oriented Secondary Vocational Education

Abstract It is a commonplace view today that schools do not prepare students properly for solving technical problems emerging in an ever-changing world. As attested by various PISA surveys, Hungarian students can only retrieve their knowledge situations. Their self-regulated learning, problem solving and cooperative skills do not develop in accord with the requirements of their future career. Positive transfer effects are only slightly expressed in learning, especially in the long run.

Exporting freedom: religious liberty and American power

The book is a constitutional history of the previously unexamined American origins of our contemporary international legal regime on religious freedom. The absence of the United States and the role it played in the creation of this transnational constellation of laws in current debates and literature stems from two misunderstandings: the commonplace view that religion was a marginal factor in the conduct of U.S. foreign relations, and the ever-receding knowledge that the U.S. was once an empire among empires. This new account fills this gap by tracing United States government efforts in exporting and promoting American ideas of religious freedom in various laws and constitutions abroad since its emergence as a global power in 1898 and examines six historical episodes which illustrate this effort. History shows that religious freedom was not always understood in the language of individual human rights as we know it today. It began as a part of the American civilizing mission, and then shifted as a democratizing ingredient before evolving into its contemporary incarnation as a human right. But religious freedom as a human right during the Cold War differed from its post-Cold War version in that while it was previously used as a weapon against the atheistic Soviet Union, it is now a justification of continuing American power. From the Philippines in 1898 up to Iraq in 2004, the legal articulation of religious freedom in these laws and constitutions served as an expression of American national interests and these different conceptions offer a glimpse into the process of changing American views of its own role in the world.

Reforming the Armed Camp: Soulcraft in Plato's Laws

The Laws is often read as Plato’s most political work, in which he departs from the imaginative abstractions of the Republic and offers his more sober reflections on the proper political framework for a real city. Against this interpretation, I argue that the Laws, like the Republic, is primarily about soulcraft or character education. As such, we cannot look to the Laws’ city in speech for direct insight into Plato’s practical political reasoning; it functions rather as a heuristic device, much like in the Republic. Through careful attention to the dramatic framing of the dialogue, the Laws emerges not as a vessel for conveying Plato’s blueprint for an actual city, but as a depiction of one man’s attempt to awaken the passion for learning in two old men from what he calls an armed camp (στρατόπeδον) — a place that, unlike a city, never enjoys any luxuries like festivals or other forms of leisure but rather is always preparing for war against foreigners (666e). Read in this light, it becomes clear that one of Plato’s central intentions in the dialogue is to convey the importance of cross-cultural engagement. Though the stasis characterizing a regime isolated from the outside world seems to allow for the protection of its good elements, such isolation stifles the spirit of learning and thus detracts from the regime’s goodness. In such cases, it takes the voice of a foreigner to awaken the dormant passion for wisdom. Ultimately, my interpretation of the Laws as offering a dramatic representation of the epistemological benefits of cross-cultural engagement not only challenges traditional readings of the dialogue as Plato’s most political work, but also the commonplace view of Plato as xenophobic.

Para pensar el humorismo con la risa de Castelao

By means of a selective analysis of Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao’s work, this article examines the problem of humor. The humorist’s graphic and literary work equally allow us to discern –in opposition to the commonplace view that sees only the positive effects of humor in both art and life– that humor is a matter of politics and ideology. For this reason, a critical stance towards humor is not enough; rather, a unique kind of humor is necessary. The value of Castelao’s work resides precisely in the fact that it bears the prospect of a genuinely alternative humor, one that can serve as a stimulus to better understand the world in which we live.

The Gaze of the Blind: Notes on Cézanne and Cubism

Art historians usually distinguish between two divergent trends in modern painting: an expressionist one, and another which the essay calls "thing-ist," with adherents from Cézanne to the cubism of Picasso and Braque, from Léger up to Italian arte povera . But this distinction should be closely examined. While Van Gogh and Munch on the one hand and Cézanne on the other appear to open what is perceived as two alternative approaches in modern art, the essay asks whether this distinction is necessary. Is it, in short, something etched deeply into the project of modern art? There are two ways of perceiving the relation between the subject and the real: the Van Gogh lineage aims at representing above all the painter's gaze on what he sees, while the Cézanne lineage is dominated by a vision or view that aims at eliminating the gaze . This distinction can be gleaned from various psychoanalytic, especially Jacques Lacan's, reflections on the dynamics of the gaze; it is a way of putting new wine in old casks, the casks being the commonplace view of Cezanne's painting in particular as aiming at pure visibility. That distinction—which to many can appear too drastic and vague—finds its factual confirmation, however, in neurology.

Fictions, fractions, factorials and fractures; on the framing of irrigation efficiency

Irrigation efficiency, as a complex and useful measure of irrigation performance, is in a vulnerable scientific position. Knowledge gaps feed through to naïve views of a sector held to be highly inefficient, ‘wasting’ freshwater which could be allocated to other purposes. Confusions and lack of evidence allow room for policy errors – for example the notion that micro-drip technology should replace surface canal irrigation – and underpin an incomplete scientific debate over whether recoverable losses matter resulting in a dismissing of classical irrigation efficiency. Thus with regards to the water challenge of how and why to improve efficiency, society finds itself facing multiple risks; errors in terminology employed, poor engagement with local users on the issue; inappropriate computational methods and a lack of well-executed analyses to challenge commonplace views. In addition, the nuances of an ‘efficiency and productivity’ debate seem not to feed through to interest groups; engineers continue to think in classical terms when not appropriate; incomplete science does little to inform serious policy-making; and scientists seem unable to agree on methods of performance assessment. This paper explores these fault-lines and tensions by taking the view that local losses and classical efficiency matter, and postulates that irrigation systems are locally individuated and have particular distributional and bifurcating properties. As a contribution to the debate, and in framing efficiency, two paradigms are discussed; ‘basin allocation irrigation efficiency’ utilising fractions and effective efficiency, and; ‘socialised localised irrigation efficiency’, utilising classical efficiency.

When are staggered boards beneficial?

We reexamine the negative relation between firm value and staggered boards. We document that firms with characteristics indicating low power to bargain for favorable terms in a takeover, but also indicating high potential agency costs, are more likely to have a staggered board in place. We also find that among these firms, those with staggered boards have higher valuation, as measured by Tobin’s Q. This result is robust to various controls for endogeneity. Our evidence suggests that staggering the board is beneficial for certain firms and challenges the commonplace view that board classification is an antitakeover device that necessarily harms shareholders.