Corporations

The central question in this book: ‘what we did/didn’t, should/cp learn from activist/movement experiences of security operations, surveillance, infiltration’ and such activities, presupposes some understanding of the architecture of power within which state surveillance operates. The architecture of power is always a concrete historical question. The world wars have formative influence on the architecture of power in the Allied states. At the turn of the twentieth century, faced with the collapse of capitalism and the world wars, the Allied states mobilized all of society to survive the existential threat to economy and state. In the process militarism became the organizing mechanism for the Allied states. Militarism integrated economic institutions, military and civilian arms of the state and civil society organizations to create a ‘warfare’ state. The warfare state forged during the world wars was not dismantled after the end of World War II. Instead the warfare state expanded to become gigantic military- industrial-technology-media complexes with global outreach and dependent on perpetual warfare. Surveillance in such a state is much more than an appendage of the state’s military and police functions. Rather it is embedded in the constitutional structures of post-War Allied states. Limiting understandings of the surveillance state to experiences of opposition movements and protests within the Allied states not only limits our understanding of surveillance but misdirects our understanding of militarism as the organizing mechanism characteristic of imperialism in the post-War era.

This paper offers the concept of " justice failure, " as a counterpart to the familiar idea of market failure, in order to better understand managers' ethical obligations. This paper takes the " Market Failures Approach " (MFA) to business ethics as its point of departure. The success of the MFA, I argue, lies in its close proximity with economic theory, particularly in the idea that, within a larger scheme of social cooperation, markets ought to pursue efficiency and leave the pursuit of equality to the welfare state. As a result, the core ethical responsibility of business actors is to avoid profiting off of market failure. After reviewing this approach I challenge its emphasis on efficiency. I argue that just as we note the suboptimal efficiency of actual markets (market failure), we should also take seriously the suboptimal equality of actual welfare states (what I call " justice failure "). Taking this idea seriously results in a whole other set of ethical responsibilities for businesses to take into account; in addition to market imperfections and regulatory lacunae, managers should also avoid profiting from, and exacerbating, structural inequalities and injustices. I offer an outline of the kinds of injustices and inequalities that would have bearing on business ethics, and the kinds of ethical responsibilities that this approach suggests that business actors should take into account.
*Some copyediting still remains to be done. Please excuse awkward citations, formatting, or typos.

It is hard to define a single set of ethics that will cover an entire computer users community. In this paper, the issue is addressed in reference to code of ethics implemented by various professionals, institutes and organizations. The paper presents a higher level model using hierarchical approach. The code developed using this approach could be adopted easily by the

The historical continuity between Roman and Medieval guilds and Masonic Lodges, fantasy or reality?
The Masonic collective imagination is based on two compelling illustrations of the origin of Masonic lodges: the first is a sort of millenarianism that assigns a rift between religious and secular culture, the so-called "secularization", which would explain the birth of Masonic lodges as a pollution of the secularization of European island and continental society; the second is that the same lodges are the product of the medieval Universitas (Corporations or Guilds) which in turn would be a direct historical continuation of the Roman Collegia ( corporations). There are two levels of interpretation on the similarity between these three distinct phenomena. One level of interpretation, frequent in the Masonic sphere, is that all three have the common characteristics of religiosity and occultism, therefore of a spiritualism both in a general-generic and esoteric-initiatic sense; the other level of interpretation that would justify the first is a sort of historical continuity of them, as if they were intertwined by linear cause-effect relations. The attribution of the generic term spirituality or spiritualism does not allow for an examination of the dynamics of this characteristic and is therefore not examined here. The case of mystical-religious and magical-esoteric characters attributed to corporations and lodges is different. To this range of interpretations is added a thesis of a wider dimension which is the so-called socio-cultural phenomenon of "secularization". This denomination has provoked and still provokes many discussions in the historicalistic field, assigning different definitions and methods of analysis. The thesis of certain Authors in the Masonic sphere is that the establishment and development of modern lodges from the 17th century onwards would be the effect of a slow process of secularization that would differentiate the Middle Ages, understood as an era of high spirituality, from the post-Renaissance period characterized by ever higher levels of secularization. The author proposes as an alternative the concept of " laicalization", a socio-cultural process that reveals the subdivision of culture and society between the secular world and religiosity and also spirituality, in a general sense, that are not dissolved by the new lay reality.The analysis of the three phenomena shows that the Roman Colleges were lay associations that presented elements of religiosity, as in all societies with characteristics of "theological absolutism", equally the medieval corporations and guilds.  For these two forms of associationism there are no documents that attest the presence of initiatory and esoteric-mysterological modalities. With regard to the Masonic Lodges, properly called, which appeared in the seventeenth century and became official in the first twenty years of the eighteenth century, there are no documents proving their initiatory and esoteric character, an aspect that has been consolidated, with a rich publicity and a proliferation of rituals, only since the thirties of the eighteenth century.

: Brain-computer interface (BCI) research deals with establishing communication pathways between the brain and external devices. BCI systems can be broadly classified depending on the placement of the electrodes used to detect and measure neurons firing in the brain: in invasive systems, electrodes are inserted directly into the cortex; in noninvasive systems, they are placed on the scalp and use electroencephalography or electrocorticography to detect neuron activity. This WTEC study was designed to gather information on worldwide status and trends in BCI research and to disseminate it to government decision makers and the research community. The study reviewed and assessed the state of the art in sensor technology, the biotic/abiotic interface and biocompatibility, data analysis and modeling, hardware implementation, systems engineering, functional electrical stimulation, noninvasive communication systems, and cognitive and emotional neuroprostheses in academic research and industry.

In this article, I focus on the ways advertising language has helped precipitate the idea of corporate personhood, and how corporate 10.1353/bio.2014.0013personality has come to supplant human personality in particular aspects of U.S. culture. Corporations use advertising to create an impersonal persona to convince people they have a relationship with the things (products) they buy. Drawing on Sharon Cameron’s work regarding impersonality in a somewhat different context, I argue that the mechanisms of advertising, which simulate and manipulate human emotions and relations, are intertwined with the creation of corporate personhood and corporate biography. While noting that the concept is fluid, Cameron proposes that “representations of the impersonal suspend, eclipse and even destroy the idea of the person as such, who is not treated as a social, political or individual entity” (ix). In addition to the “nonhuman” attributes Cameron identifies with the impersonal, I would add, in the context of corporate personhood, the mechanical, generic, and parasitic: that is, impersonal systems function as simulacra of the personal and siphon personal qualities from people or imitate human processes (x). Advertising, the corporate speech I depict as impersonal and depersonalizing, provides a primary register for creating corporate “autobiographies,” which I define as the networks of representation that reify corporations as coherent and personalized entities, rather than treat them as legal fabrications. As one would expect in a zero-sum game, these issues related to advertising, language, and corporations are intimately connected—one can’t apprehend the corporate person separately from the corporate language of advertising. I argue that, though it is mediated, advertising is the most (quasi-)autobiographical utterance a corporation can make; most biographical representations of a “corporation” embody and ratify it as a coherent entity.

At the end of the first Millennium A.D., trade in Constantinople was administrated and disciplined, specifically regarding: strategic sectors of the economy; essential services in daily life; and finally goods with a symbolic value, among which purple-coloured silk.
The production chain of the latter, even if belonging to a particular segment of the market, as a luxury item, was widely and stringently regulated in a normative text: the so-called Book of the Eparch, which outlined the tasks of the highest imperial official, responsible for the supervision of the Guilds; at the same time revealing some of the political and economic dynamics of the Byzantine Empire with their consequences on Private Law.

The Indirect Side of Direct Investment Multinational Company Finance and Taxation Jack M. Mintz and Alfons J. Weichenrieder The recent increase in cross-border flows of foreign direct investment has sharpened the research focus on multinational taxation. In this book, taxation experts Jack Mintz and Alfons Weichenrieder examine how multinational corporations use indirect financing structures--organizing themselves into groups with several tiers of ownership--to reduce worldwide taxes. They spell out in detail how different tax policies affect corporations' choice of financing structures, discussing the issues in both theoretical and empirical terms. Drawing on a unique data set (MiDi) on German multinationals provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt, Mintz and Weichenrieder confirm the prevalence of indirect financing structures for both outbound and inbound German investment. They find evidence of "treaty shopping" to avoid withholding taxes (using a third cou...

Like most egalitarian political philosophers, John Rawls believes that a just society will rely on markets and business firms for much of its economic activity—despite acknowledging that market systems will tend to create very unequal distributions of goods, opportunities, power, and status. Rawls himself remains one of the few contemporary political philosophers to explore at any length the way an egalitarian theory of justice might deal with fundamental options in political economy. This article examines his arguments and conclusions on these topics. It argues that contemporary Rawlsians will reach different conclusions if they take more seriously than Rawls himself did: (1) the implications, for the political culture and the democratic regulatory state, of large firms competing in adversarial markets characterized by the inevitable “fact of market failure,” and (2) the relevance of ownership and governance relationships involving different kinds of business firms. And with respect to the second point, Rawlsians and other egalitarians have much to learn from contemporary economic, legal, and sociological theories of the firm, and their role in studying the structure of and rationale for corporate law. This is the kind of social theory that Rawls believes is relevant to the justification and application of theories of justice, but he himself did not appeal to it in his writings on political economy. Contemporary egalitarians can and should appeal to it now, and in doing so correct errors and omissions in Rawls’s analysis. But taking seriously the two points mentioned above will also force egalitarians who support efficient markets to face difficult dilemmas or compromises of their own.

Монографію присвячено дослідженню природи корпорації як окремої моделі юридичної особи, для якої характерним є стан відносин між нею та її учасниками, що полягає в концентрації приватного інтересу її бенефіціарів навколо мети діяльності. Проведено сучасний аналіз теорій юридичної особи, за результатами якого наголошено на втраті значення теорії Personificationstheorie.
Досліджено структуру корпоративних юридичних відносин, встановлено підстави їх виникнення. Доведена цивільно-правова інституціональність корпоративних відносин. Визначена поліваріативність їх змісту, яка складається з комбінації організаційних, майнових і особистих немайнових сегментів.
Розкрито міждисциплінарний аспект проблеми корпоративного управління юридичною особою. Через аналіз бінарного та монотипового підходів розкрита морфологія моделі управління корпорації, встановлена їх варіативність.
Окрему увагу приділено субстандартним механізмам захисту корпоративних юридичних відносин, зокрема прав учасників в умовах облігаторної консолідації корпоративного контролю.
Видання адресовано науковим та науково-педагогічним працівникам, аспірантам, студентам закладів вищої освіти, іншим суб’єктам правореалізації та всім, хто цікавиться актуальними проблемами корпоративного права

À Rouen comme dans d’autres villes drapières de Normandie, les ententes illicites et les émeutes des tisserands ne peuvent s’appuyer sur des organisations de métiers où ils sont mêlés aux drapiers, qui prennent le parti des autorités urbaines et monarchique. Des groupes plus informels agissent toutefois en justice contre les autres professions ou contre les élites urbaines, et se mêlent aux révoltes contre la fiscalité, notamment lors des harelles de 1382. Les institutions de métiers sont plutôt l’objet des contestations que leur instrument. Les archives judiciaires d’Eu ainsi que des seigneuries d’Elbeuf et de Roncheville montrent que les expertises des gardes suscitent des résistances, violentes ou judiciaires. Mais si les organisations de métiers peuvent être le vecteur de conflits du monde du travail, elles peuvent aussi le protéger des ingérences des pouvoirs.

This was a keynote address delivered Apr. 7, 2018 at the 25th Debs Fellows' Reunion, Indiana State University. It examines relevant definitions of populism, and how a history of American populism can become a usable past to inform the politics of the contemporary left.