We investigate whether the European regulatory reforms of the credit rating industry have been successful in improving the quality of financial institutions’ credit ratings. A shift to more ...conservative rating behaviour rather than rating quality improvement is identified, which is attributable to increased regulatory scrutiny. This change leads to a reduction in rating inflation and an increase in the number of unwarranted downgrades and false rating warnings in the post-regulatory period. A significant decrease (increase) in the informativeness of rating downgrades (upgrades) is evident. Our findings contrast with prior evidence for US corporates where reputational effects dominated.
This study examines normativity of affect and the affective embeddedness of normativity, instantiated as verbal and embodied stances taken by the participants in adult-child remedial interchanges. ...The data are based on one year of video fieldwork in a first-grade class at a Swedish primary school. An ethnographically informed analysis of talk and multimodal action is adopted. The findings show that the children’s affective and normative transgressions provided discursive spaces for adult moral instructions and socialization. However, the children’s compliant responses were resistant and subversive. They were designed as embodied double-voiced acts that indexed incongruent affective and moral stances. The findings further revealed several ways of configuring embodied double-voiced responses. The children juxtaposed multiple modalities and exploited the expectations of what constitutes appropriate temporal duration, timing, and shape of nonverbal responses. They (i) combined up-scaled verbal and embodied hyperbolic rhetoric when the teachers’ talk required but minimal responses, and (ii) configured antithetical affect displays, e.g., crying and smiling, or overlaid bodily displays of moral emotion (sadness, seriousness, and smiling) with aligning but exaggerated gestures and movements. Subversive, embodied double-voiced responses simultaneously acquiesced with and deflected the responsibility and effectively derailed a successful closure of remedial interchange.
In the context of home, violence remains more accepted when committed against children than adults. Normalisation of parental violence has been documented in attitudinal surveys, professional ...practices, and legal regulation. For example, in many countries violent disciplining of children is the only legal form of interpersonal violence. This study explores the societal invisibility and normalisation of parental violence as a crime by analysing legislation and control policies regulating the division of labour and involvement between social welfare and criminal justice authorities. An empirical case study from Finland, where all forms of parental violence were legally prohibited in 1983, is used to elucidate the divergence between (criminal) law and control policies. The analysis demonstrates how normalisation operates at the policy-level where, within the same system of control that criminalised these acts, structural hindrances are built to prevent criminal justice interventions.
Objective: According to the pecking order theory, in the context of information asymmetry, debt financing can decrease the adverse selection costs, increase the firm value, and serve as a financial ...disciplinary device. The main objective of this research is to investigate the effect of the disciplinary role of leverage on the relationship between information asymmetry and firm value. Method: For hypotheses testing, this paper uses data for 148 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange that are selected, using systematic deletion, during 2007-2017. To control the potential endogeneity of leverage ratio which can create a reverse causality between firm value and leverage ratio, our models are estimated by using the two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator. Results: The results indicate that the information asymmetry and the leverage ratio have a negative and significant effect on the firm value, and the negative relationship between information asymmetry and firm value is weakened by leverage ratio. Besides, the results reveal that the negative effect of information asymmetry on the firm's value is stronger (weaker) for firms with higher (lower) growth opportunities. These findings are consistent with the predictions of the pecking order theory. Innovations: Internal studies have not scrutinized the interaction between information asymmetry and leverage ratios in influencing firm value. Likewise, the issue of endogenous bias resulting from the inverse causality of leverage ratio has never been addressed. In this study, in addition to considering the above two issues, the intensity of the relationship between information asymmetry and firm value in companies with high and low growth opportunities is compared.
The aim of this article is to analyse the construction of learners’ discoursive images by mapping the summaries presented in textbooks of German as a Foreign Language (ALE). Therefore, we aim to ...investigate how these constructions anticipate the kind of insertion that this learner would have / could occupy in this community of production / circulation of texts in the target language. Seen in these terms, the theoretical framework is constructed from the articulation between the polyphonic perspective of language (BAKHTIN, 2011), the notion of discursive practices (FOUCAULT, 2004, MAINGUENEAU, 2008), the disciplining of knowledge (FOUCAULT, 2002) and the relevance of such articulation for a critique of Applied Linguistics from Rocha and Daher (2015). Through the analysis of German as a foreign language textbooks, we observe the construction of a learner image that seems to draw him/her out of situations of interaction, considering him/her as a spectator, who will be responsible for repeating sentences and structures determined by an artificial simulation of communicative situations, rather than allowing him/her spaces of interaction and insertion in these situations. In addition, the materials communicate an image of a learner-consumer-tourist, interested in learning German to make trips, a reality that is distant from the majority of Brazilian learners.
This article introduces the concept of the 'publication regime' into the current discourse on academia. This allows for a much deeper understanding of how publishing conglomerates and appointment and ...promotion procedures in Western universities are increasingly interlocked. It then turns to the global permutations of that regime as it is currently disseminated to other parts of the world. Using empirical examples drawn primarily from the field of tourism studies, we examine the problems engendered by the introduction of the regime's appointment and promotion procedures of early career academic staff in universities in the emerging world regions. We specify the auxiliary mechanisms intended to ameliorate these problems, and draw attention to the neo-colonial implications of the disciplining process which these mechanisms are introducing into the academic life of the universities in the emerging regions. We argue that, as the Western publication regime is becoming increasingly globalized, local intellectual voices tend to be silenced by the regime's growing hegemony, and call for the integration of non-Western perspectives into the framework of the publication regime.
Parental harsh disciplining, like corporal punishment, has consistently been associated with adverse mental health outcomes in children. It remains a challenge to accurately assess the consequences ...of harsh discipline, as researchers and clinicians generally rely on parent report of young children's problem behaviors. If parents rate their parenting styles and their child's behavior this may bias results. The use of child self-report on problem behaviors is not common but may provide extra information about the relation of harsh parental discipline and problem behavior. We examined the independent contribution of young children's self-report above parental report of emotional and behavioral problems in a study of maternal and paternal harsh discipline in a birth cohort. Maternal and paternal harsh discipline predicted both parent reported behavioral and parent reported emotional problems, but only child reported behavioral problems. Associations were not explained by pre-existing behavioral problems at age 3. Importantly, the association with child reported outcomes was independent from parent reported problem behavior. These results suggest that young children's self-reports of behavioral problems provide unique information on the effects of harsh parental discipline. Inclusion of child self-reports can therefore help estimate the effects of harsh parental discipline more accurately.
This paper aims to analyse the way in which disciplining policies were articulated in a context as peculiar as that of Monreale Archdiocese, characterized by the coexistence of two different rites ...communities, Greek and Latin. The study consists of two main parts: the first one reconstructs the Greek-Albanians arrival in Sicily and their specific settlements foundation in Monreale territory; the second one analyses the different disciplining mechanisms for Greeks and Latins by using the pastoral visits carried out in Piana dei Greci between 16th and 17th centuries.
El objetivo de este artículo consiste en analizar la manera en que fueron articuladas las políticas de disciplinamiento en un contexto tan peculiar come el de la archidiócesis de Monreale, caracterizado por la coexistencia de dos comunidades de ritos diferentes, precisamente griego y latino. El estudio consta de dos partes principales: en la primera se reconstruye la llegada de los griegos-albaneses a Sicilia y la fundación de los asentamientos específicos para dichas poblaciones en el territorio de Monreale; en la segunda, mediante el análisis de las visitas pastorales llevadas a cabo en Piana dei Greci a caballo entre los siglos XVI y XVII, se analizan los diferentes mecanismos de disciplinamiento destinados para griegos y latinos.
•I examine the expulsion of Chinese miners from Ghana as a process of subject making.•The making of demonized subjects occurs in landscapes of power and rent-seeking.•The vilification of informal ...miners deflects from failed mining policies.•Social exclusion and violence sustain informality in the artisanal mining sector.
This paper explores the expulsion of >4,500 Chinese diggers and operators from Ghana’s central gold mining areas during a series of raids and swoops enacted through military, immigration, and police and intelligence forces in 2013, arguably to conceal the state’s own failure to sanitize and revitalize a stagnant and neglected artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASM) sector. I draw upon feminist social theory and political ecology to unravel processes of social exclusion that legitimated violent action against a social group rendered both invisible and wholly othered within a remarkably short period of time. The discursive production of less-than-human mining subjects—first the Ghanaian galamsey miners, then the Chinese operators—enables a highly politicized landscapes of power characterized by authoritative ordering of unruly mining spaces. The “making” of demonized, unworthy Chinese miners epitomized the forceful disciplining of these spaces in the absence of more inclusive and genuine development policies. Observed processes of subject-making seem to propagate the sector’s informality and perpetuate the distance from the state’s idealized depiction of a responsible modern miner. The case study demonstrates that exclusion and exploitation of those targeted as not belonging nourishes elite capture and pervasive rent-seeking. Understanding the processes of subjection at work further suggests that better regulation of ASM in itself will be insufficient to move beyond the current impasse and support true partnerships and genuine politics of recognition and belonging.
Space affects bodies but to what extent does it teach? This paper explores the pedagogic dimensions of space and its various permutations. Engaging critically with phenomenological accounts of ...body/space relations, it examines how certain aspects of space-what here are termed non- human didactics-equip the body with skills that have application in terms of a broad notion of social order requisite for cohabitation and the sharing of social space. As Theodore Schatzki (2002, p.1) points out, 'Order is a basic dimension of any domain of entities'. He foregrounds the notion of Zusammenhang or 'hanging together' as a crucial element of social life. Such 'hanging together', however, does not just happen; it involves individuals acquiring certain ways of being, to navigate social space and to operate as part of a larger whole. Importantly, this process of acquisition is not just a matter of learning, it also involves teaching but understood in broad terms as pertaining to the many ways in which, as Raymond Williams (1966, p.15) explains, 'the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches'. This paper explores these processes. It focuses on the neglect of pedagogy within theorisations of space and draws on examples from within the institutional space of the school to exemplify their role in the spatial formation of social order. Author abstract
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