Professional Directors Research Articles

Professional Directors on Hedge Fund Boards: Pros or Cons?

We provide the first examination of hedge fund boards and the labor market for their directors. The majority of directorships are held by busy, independent directors, many of whom work for professional directorship firms. Busy directors have more reputational capital at stake, making them independent and credible monitors whose presence can certify fund quality to investors. Busy independent directors are more likely to be hired by high quality funds, and their departure from the board is associated with outflows of investor capital. Moreover, funds with independent directors are less likely to commit fraud or abuse their discretion to restrict withdrawals.

Dialog naukowy czy element polityki – spotkania polskich historyków emigracyjnych i historyków niemieckich w 1956 i 1964 roku

The international realities which existed after the end of World War II and, in particular, after the Cold War began, including the status of the authorities of the Republic of Poland in exile and the fundamentals of the Federal Republic of Germany’s foreign policy, ruled out any possibility of establishing political contacts. However, contacts of social nature were possible. Some, though, involved considerable risk, such as, for instance, the undertaking of conversations with communities of Germans expelled from the territories incorporated into Poland after 1945. The émigrées exposed themselves to criticism on the part of both the émigré milieux as well as those in Poland.Meetings between Polish and émigré historians became one of the forms of contact of this nature. However, browsing through the newspapers of the day leads to the conclusion that they met with mixed reactions among the Polish émigré community.The first meeting was held from 10th to 14th October 1956 in Tübingen and the second, from 17th to 19th March 1964, in London. At both, the German side was represented by numerous professional historians and directors of academic institutes dealing with East Europe and, or including, Poland. Professor Tytus Komarnicki, a pre-war diplomat, was particularly active on the part of the Poles. For the Germans, these contacts were valuable, inter alia, because the Polish expatriate milieu in London, as well as those in the U.S. and France, were very knowledgeable as regards archive resources for the period from 1918 to 1945 and had access to a great many documents concerning the history of Poland and held, for instance, by the Polish Institute and the General Sikorski Museum. There were also numerous witnesses to history among those communities, as well as eminent pre-war scholars. No further bilateral meetings between Polish émigrée historians and German historians were ever held. This resulted, to a large degree, from the fact that their formula had been exhausted. The pre-war generation of Polish historians was passing away. The next generations of Polish émigrée historians moved in general academic circles and were less enclosed within a milieu of their own.The bilateral relations between the FRG and the PRP were changing as well. Interest in a more active Ostpolitik was on a continuing upsurge in Bonn, which resulted in more extensive opportunities for academic contacts as well. The PRP authorities, for their part, were interested in overcoming the state of suspension in relations with the FRG. The domestic academic milieu was changing, too.Both the meetings were a form of academic contact, but they were also of significance to the reconciliation of the two nations, or to the search for opportunities of overcoming their enmity.

The Application of s 6 of the Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1946 (NSW) to Claims-Made Insurance Policies: An Analysis of Recent Developments

Following the litigation over the collapsed Bridgecorp Group in New Zealand since 2011, the application of s 6 of the Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1946 (NSW) and s 9 of the Law Reform Act 1936 (NZ) to claims-made policies has been the focus of considerable interest. Through a review of recent case law, this article examines how the courts in Australia and New Zealand have grappled with the application of these arguably antiquated provisions to the complexities of modern professional indemnity and directors and officers insurance policies.

Insight on professional hospital directors

In view of the mistaken concepts and setbacks found in professionalization of hospital directors,the author rejected the absolute professionalization of hospital directors disregard of the social background and different development stages.He recommended a diversified concept to achieve complimentary advantages of expert-based hospital management and professional hospital administrators.Furthermore,such education systems as MBA and MPA should be developed and improved for the purpose of elevating the capacity and management ability of hospital administrators step by step. Key words: Hospital; Director; Professionalization; Training; Insight

Roles of Illustrators in Visual Communication of Scientific Knowledge

Scientific knowledge is the knowledge accumulated by systematic studies and organized by general principles. Visual, verbal, numeric, and other types of representation are used to communicate scientific knowledge. Scientific illustration is the visual representation of objects and concepts in order to record and to convey scientific knowledge(Ford, 1993). There are some discussions on scientific illustrations in history, philosophy and the sociology of science(Burri & Dumit, 2008), but little has been done on the creation of scientific illustrations by illustrators. This study focuses on the creation of scientific illustrations by illustrators. The purpose is to show how illustrators create the visual messages in communications of scientific knowledge. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with 6 professional illustrators, creators and art directors, it is showed that illustrators select and edit scientific information, add non-scientific information, and organize information into one visual repr...

Are Current CEOs the Best Board Members?

By many measures, current CEOs should be the best candidates to serve on boards of directors. They have extensive strategic, operational, and risk management expertise, as well as experiences and leadership attributes that are important for a firm’s long-term success. However, there is currently no widely accepted, rigorous study that demonstrates that current CEOs are better board members or that companies with CEO directors benefit in terms of improved advice or monitoring. In fact, recent survey data suggests that active CEOs might not always be the best board members because of the time constraints of their full time job and personality attributes that may make it difficult for them to contribute constructively to a boardroom environment. We examine this issue in closer detail and ask: 1. Should companies reassess the importance of this criteria when looking for new board members? 2. Does the requirement for CEO-level experience limit the pool of available directors, particularly diversity candidates who may be less likely to have this experience? 3. If the availability of CEO directors is low, should professional directors be recruited to fill the gap? 4. Do the positive qualities of a retired CEO deteriorate, or do they never become outdated? Topics, Issues and Controversies in Corporate Governance and Leadership: The Closer Look series is a collection of short case studies through which we explore topics, issues, and controversies in corporate governance. In each study, we take a targeted look at a specific issue that is relevant to the current debate on governance and explain why it is so important. Larcker and Tayan are co-authors of the book Corporate Governance Matters, and A Real Look at Real World Corporate Governance.

“It’s the Knowledge That Puts You in Control”

Studies have recently begun to attend to the ways paid labor is embodied. However, the literature on embodied labor has not adequately addressed occupations for which the site of labor is the worker’s own body. One such occupation is that of gynecological educators—female-bodied instructors who teach breast and pelvic examinations to medical students using their own bodies as models. Drawing on interviews with current and former gynecological educators and professional directors, I ask how workers use their bodies to produce legitimated forms of knowledge and how workers navigate gendered meanings attached to bodies. Gynecological educators use a distancing technique I call strategic dualism, which draws on using constructions of the body as an object while simultaneously relying on subjective experiences. This technique allows them to maintain their knowledge and authority, and suggests that workers are able to selectively draw on gendered meanings about the female body to pursue their goals.

Reading performance: Spanish golden age theatre and Shakespeare on the modern stage

Oscar Wilde once observed that 'it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors'. This thought is borne out in this volume, which brings together two different and often mutually exclusive constituencies: the academic critic and the theatre practitioner. In looking at the ways in which theatre is a barometer of society, the essays in this book form part of a larger theoretical inquiry into performance as interpretation, contingent upon the cultural context. Engaging with theoretical approaches to culture, and theoreticians from Elam to Brook, and from Derrida to Bakhtin, the author analyzes in detail productions of plays by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderon de la Barca, as well as an adaptation of Rojas' Celestina, on the Spanish, or French, or Anglo-American stage. Two chapters deal with appropriations of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in translation on the Spanish and French boards. As they read performance in (trans)national productions, these essays are not only at the cutting-edge of theatre studies on the 'foreign' stage, but they also bring Spanish Golden-Age plays, long neglected by professional directors of the classics because of the lack of a continuous performance tradition, closer to assuming their rightful place amongst 'the great theatre of the world'. Susan L. Fischer is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Bucknell University.

Transactional Training Resource Guide

The Transactional Training Resource Guide is a bibliography of materials relating to the teaching of transactional skills. It is designed to be helpful both to law school professors and to professional development directors at law firms. It includes training materials that are commercially available, treatises, textbooks, and articles on the pedagogy of teaching transactional skills. If available, the Resource Guide provides the URL of the website where you can purchase or review the resource. The Resource Guide is also available on the website of the Emory Center for Transactional Law and Practice. If you access it there, you can click on a link that will take you to the website for the resource.

Upheaval in the boardroom: Outside director public resignations, motivations, and consequences

We investigate the motives and circumstances surrounding outside directors' decisions to publicly announce their board resignations. Directors who leave “quietly” are in their mid-sixties and professional directors, i.e., retirees, who are retiring entirely from professional life. Directors who announce their resignation are in their mid-fifties and active professionals. Half the time they say they are leaving because they are “busy.” These directors leave from firms with some weakness in their performance, but with no overt manifestations of cronyism such as excessive compensation of either the CEO or directors. The other half of the time directors leave while publicly criticizing the firm. These directors are finance professionals who were members of the audit and compensation committees. They resign from firms with weak boards and financial performance with evidence that managers have manipulated earnings upwards. Public criticism appears to pressure these boards to make management changes associated with improved stock price performance. We conclude that while such public resignations are motivated by the reputational concerns of directors, they can act as a disciplining device for poor board performance.

Serving Workers in the Human Services: The Roles of Organizational Ownership, Chain Affiliation, and Professional Leadership in Frontline Job Benefits

A growing body of research has sought to understand forces shaping firms' approaches to employee compensation and the impacts of job benefits on both organizational performance and worker well-being. One such line of work has documented advantages from employers adopting generous compensation practices, as evidenced by more successful worker recruitment and retention. Little of this work, however, has attended to benefits provided within nonprofit and public human service settings or to low-level workers. Drawing on a sample of Wisconsin nursing homes, this study addresses this gap by examining the roles of ownership, chain affiliation, and professional leadership in compensation provided to nursing assistants. Results indicate that public and nonprofit ownership and chain membership are positively related to benefit levels. Workers fare unexpectedly less well with professional directors in for-profit and public settings but better within professionally led nonprofits.

Board independence, firm performance and ownership concentration: Evidence from Chile

What determines the composition of companies' boards in the context of high ownership concentration? Are independent directors important as an internal governance mechanism in companies with high ownership concentration? Do markets favor companies whose controlling shareholders use voting rights to elect professional directors? Using a four-year, 160-company panel data, and controlling for endogeneity, this paper addresses these three related questions, finding that an increase in the proportion of outside directors affects company value. The paper also finds that companies that present more exacerbated agency conflicts tend to incorporate professional directors to the boards, in an effort to improve corporate governance and ameliorate the agency problem.

EVIDENCE ON THE MARKET FOR PROFESSIONAL DIRECTORS

AbstractUsing the temporary increase in the supply of directors associated with successful tender offers, we examine characteristics of directors who are valuable in the market for board seats. We find that after a takeover, professional directors are three times more likely to receive new appointments than other types of directors released from their respective boards. We find that the proportion of professional directors in above‐average performing targets is significantly greater than that in underperforming targets. Our results indicate that professional directors generally have valuable general human capital that more than offsets the costs of multiple directorships.

A Portrait of Professional Directors: UK Corporate Governance in 2015

A Portrait of Professional Directors: UK Corporate Governance in 2015

Evaluating board effectiveness: The changing context of strategic governance

Researchers have highlighted various components and measures of board effectiveness. Ranging from their role in the selection of the Chief Executive to their role in protecting the interests of shareholders, many of the elements of board effectiveness have been the subject of extensive investigation. The context within which governance takes place is changing rapidly, however, requiring a re-evaluation of the methodologies by which boards, and their advisors, evaluate such effectiveness. Driven by the strategic requirements of newly emergent forms of business structure, new technologies, globalisation, international harmonisation of reporting standards and new forms of competition, traditional forms of governance architecture are being challenged, with implications for the measurement of effectiveness. This paper utilises an integrated model of board effectiveness to consider how such capability is determined by controllable factors related to the internal dynamics of the board, its composition, the constituency concentration and individual factors related to the directors themselves. The influence of such uncontrollable factors as the industry ethos, industry complexity, legislative environment and economic conditions are also highlighted. The findings of a major study of governance, reflecting the changing dynamics of director selection, board evaluation and performance and their implications for strategic governance, governance architecture and board effectiveness are reported. The implications of the findings are reported in the context of the results of extensive consultation with professional directors as to the implications of the results for their perceptions of the framework and the changes facing boards.

Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre

In his richly detailed, beautifully illustrated history of Shakespeare's most popular play - the first comprehensive study of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the theatre - Gary Jay Williams covers four hundred years of landmark productions in Europe, the United States, and Canada as well as important opera, dance, and film adaptations. Williams shows how the visual and musical vocabularies of production can be read as cultural texts and how these mediative texts determine this play's available meanings from generation to generation. His account, then, is the story of our imaginative and astonishing uses of Shakespeare's play. Williams offers detailed theatrical and cultural analyses of the productions of David Garrick, Ludwig Tieck, Elizabeth Vestris, Charles Kean, Harley Granville-Barker, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Max Reinhardt, Peter Brook, Liviu Ciulei, and other artists. His engaging, intelligent study will be invaluable to scholars and teachers of Shakespeare and theatre history and to professional directors, designers, critics, and actors.

Our moonlight revels: A midsummer night's dream in the theatre

In his richly detailed, beautifully illustrated history of Shakespeare's most popular play - the first comprehensive study of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the theatre - Gary Jay Williams covers four hundred years of landmark productions in Europe, the United States, and Canada as well as important opera, dance, and film adaptations. Williams shows how the visual and musical vocabularies of production can be read as cultural texts and how these mediative texts determine this play's available meanings from generation to generation. His account, then, is the story of our imaginative and astonishing uses of Shakespeare's play. Williams offers detailed theatrical and cultural analyses of the productions of David Garrick, Ludwig Tieck, Elizabeth Vestris, Charles Kean, Harley Granville-Barker, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Max Reinhardt, Peter Brook, Liviu Ciulei, and other artists. His engaging, intelligent study will be invaluable to scholars and teachers of Shakespeare and theatre history and to professional directors, designers, critics, and actors.

Catching the Wind in a Net: The Shortcomings of Existing Methods for the Analysis of Performance

Despite what we often like to think, academics and theatre practitionerfor the most part remain safely segregated, each on their own side of the continually widening gap between theory and practice, between reflection and creation. When actors, directors or designers venture into the realm of philosophy, as is the case with Richard Foreman's concept of "Ontological-Hysteric Theatre," their treatment of the subject is usually not perceived by the academic community to be quite as significant and methodologically coherent as when a similar problem is addressed by a "proper" scholar. Likewise, theoretical approaches to theatre such as Albert Camus's existentialist interpretation of acting in "The Myth of Sisyphus" are regularly seen as bewildering, impractical, or outright amateurish by professional directors and actors. It is certainly difficult to imagine from a purely pragmatic point of view how "complex kinemorphs" or "semiotic ostension" are supposed to be performed.

Priorities for professional training in the 90s: Perspectives of directors of psychology training programs.

Priorities for Professional Training in the 90s: Perspectives of Directors of Psychology Training ProgramsLYNN ALDEN, KERRY MOTHERSILL, RICHARD STEFFY, ROBERT MCILWRAITH, RHONA STEINBERG, LINDA MCMULLEN, AND GEORGE TASCA Canadian Council of Professional Psychology ProgramsAbstractThe directors of professional training programs in psychology offer a unique perspective on the challenges facing psychology. On one hand, these directors are members of programs that are struggling to maintain standards in the face of funding cuts and program reorganization; on the other hand, they bear primary responsibility for ensuring students are prepared for careers in psychology in the 21st century. This paper presents a systematic examination of the opinions of these directors about the issues of primary importance facing their training programs today. Training directors whose programs are members of the Canadian Council of Professional Psychology Programs (CCPPP) completed a survey questionnaire and then participated in a day - long discussion as part of a CCPPP workshop. There was good agreement between the directors of doctoral programs and internship settings regarding the issues of greatest importance to their programs. Directors saw their priorities as honing the clinical training that they offered to students and ensuring that their programs survived. Program expansions and revisions were clearly of lower priority. Issues identified at the recent Mississauga Conference received mixed support.The 90s have seen significant changes in Canadian federal and provincial government policies for funding education and social services. These changes have direct impact on psychology training programs. Both academic graduate programs and predoctoral internship programs are faced with reductions in funding and, particularly in the case of predoctoral internships, with program reorganizations that increasingly force training faculty and staff to do more with less. At the same time, changes in the marketplace for psychological services, as well as changes in training models and treatment techniques, increasingly require training staff to reformulate their programs to prepare students for careers in 21st century psychology.Given the number of challenges facing psychology today, training program directors are feeling the need to define their priorities so that program modifications will be proactive and systematic. It is particularly useful at this point for the Canadian training community to exchange ideas so that programs can work together to establish and meet national training priorities. The first steps in this task are to understand how training faculty and staff across Canada view the challenges facing their programs and to identify the issues they judge to be most important.The Canadian Council of Professional Psychology Programs (CCPPP) is an independent organization developed in 1977 by Park Davidson to serve as the interface between academic programs and internship training sites and to create an arena for program directors to exchange ideas about professional training. The CCPPP, with its 69 member programs, reflects a good cross - section of Canadian academic and internship training programs in clinical psychology and includes some counselling psychology programs as well. One part of the CCPPP mandate is to target member concerns and develop services that meet those concerns. Over the past year, the executive of the CCPPP have been working to identify the priorities of Canadian training programs as they face the challenges of the 90s. This paper describes the results of our efforts to identify those issues considered highest priority by Canadian training programs today.The information presented here was collected through a two - step process. First, directors of CCPPP member programs were surveyed and asked to rate which of a variety of issues were of greatest concern to their training programs. …

Do Schools of Social Work Need Professional Deans and Directors? Con!

Do Schools of Social Work Need Professional Deans and Directors? Con!