Search results for "Agency"
showing 10 items of 578 documents
The association between board gender diversity and financial reporting quality, corporate performance and corporate social responsibility disclosure …
2017
Purpose (mandatory) Companies, politicians, the mass media, legislators, scholars and society in general have shown a growing interest in how board gender diversity affects a firm’s decisions. This concept has been developed because some nations have introduced voluntary policies to regulate and increase the proportion of female directors on corporate boards. Thus, the aim of this study is to review previous research based on board gender diversity as a corporate governance mechanism and its effect on some firms’ business decisions: Financial reporting quality (FRQ), firm performance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Design/methodology/approach (mandatory) We focus on age…
Dynamics of agency governance: Evidence from the Nuclear safety sector
2021
Public organizations are compound bodies characterized by competing endogenous dynamics of governance. This study makes two main contributions. First, it contributes to an organizational approach to studies of public policy and administration by conceptualizing compound agency governance. Second, by determining how variation in agency governance reflects endogenous organizational factors. Based on a study of the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA), two observations are highlighted: Firstly, DSA staff are torn between two competing behavioural logics: A governmental and a transnational logic. Moreover, portfolios of core state powers are more closely monitored by parent m…
Nordic Cooperation in the Nuclear Safety Sector: High, Low, or Differentiated Integration?
2020
Nordic cooperation has been depicted as eroding due to the increased importance of EU-related cooperation and integration. However, scholars propose that longstanding Nordic networks, grounded in professions and located in the state administration, may prove to be more robust toward external changes. This article discusses this proposal by looking at Nordic cooperation between the national radiation protection and nuclear safety authorities in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The article maps behavioural perceptions of agency staff based on a dataset of 37 interviews to illustrate if the cooperation between the Nordic authorities is characterized by high integration, low integ…
Teacher Agency and Futures Thinking
2022
Problems encountered in top-down school reforms have repeatedly highlighted the significance of teachers’ agency in educational change. At the same time, temporality has been identified as a key element in teachers’ agency, with teachers’ beliefs about the future and experiences of the past shaping their agentic orientations. However, research on teachers’ future orientations is typically limited to short-term trajectories, as opposed to long-term visions of education. To address this, we draw on a futures studies perspective to give more explicit attention to teachers’ long-term visions of their work. We argue that the method of future narratives, already well…
The Public Artist as a Fringe Agent for Sustainability: Practices of Environmentalist Driven Art-Activism and Their Digital Perspectives
2022
The chapter investigates today’s intersection of visual arts and sustainability, which developed thanks to the civic agency of public artists especially concerned with environmental issues. Since its inception, public art operated on the fringe, thus framing a space for new practices and wider audiences. Drawing on an interdisciplinary analysis of the last two decades that shaped sustainable art practices, the chapter explores key concepts, practices, categories, and exemplary artworks that defined public art as a form of activism addressing environmental concerns. The chapter analyzes examples of ecological interventions, community engagement, radical actions, and digital sharing that effi…
Data granularity in mid-year life table construction
2020
[EN] Life tables have a substantial influence on both public pension systems and life insurance policies. National statistical agencies construct life tables from death rate estimates (𝑚���𝑥���), or death probabilities (𝑞���𝑥��� ), after applying various hypotheses to the aggregated figures of demographic events (deaths, migrations and births). The use of big data has become extensive across many disciplines, including population statistics. We take advantage of this fact to create new (more unrestricted) mortality estimators within the family of period-based estimators, in particular, when the exposed-to-risk population is computed through mid-year population estimates. We use actual d…
Expert‑panel accreditation evaluation‑practices: an autoethnographic case study of the Community of Madrid
2017
Accreditation is defined by the European Higher Education Area quality‑assurance agencies as a key element in quality management and continuous improvement in university teaching‑learning processes, and is an institutional practice that started to be developed in 2014 in Spain. This article illustrates the case of the Community of Madrid Quality Agency, as case study analysis through my experience as a panel member for the accreditation of higher‑education qualifications. Methodologically, it is based on an autoethnographic approach and uses the theory of symbolic interactionism to reveal and analyse the evaluative process and culture. For this purpose, two analytical axes were drawn: stude…
ESCR Review: Citizenship and Politics
2020
This chapter describes the analyses and results for the ESRC Domain of Citizenship and Politics, guided by two main questions: How digital technology impacts on our autonomy, agency, and privacy; Whether and how our understanding of citizenship is evolving in the digital age. It first provides an initial overview of the major insights from the literature review and analysis, the Delphi surveys, and workshop discussions about the relevant range of the concepts of citizenship and politics in a digital age. Over time the literature shows a shift from issues of public sphere and use of the Internet by government and candidates to more focus on political participation and engagement, especially …
Goethe's dream
2009
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined living organisms as objects with an intrinsic purpose, which are self‐organized in such a way that every part is a function of the whole and the whole is a function of every part, and in which “nothing is for nothing”. Kant already anticipated the tension between agency and structure, and between forward and backward causation. He also perceived living beings as entities that, being extremely complex, are not amenable to descriptions based on laws that are similar to the fundamental laws of physics: “There will never be a Newton of a grass blade,” he wrote. Less metaphorically, Kant believed that science would not be able to understan…
Manipulation in late life
2019
AbstractWhile youth language constitutes a well-researched field of study, the linguistic manipulations of old people remain understudied. In an innovative approach, the present paper therefore looks at confusing and allegedly unintelligible narratives and conscious linguistic manipulations, silliness and concealing strategies in language as employed by elderly speakers of Kinyabwisha, Kinande, Kihunde and Kiswahili in Eastern DR Congo. A secret cursing register among Banyabwisha, often accompanied by practices of spitting, is analyzed; I also discuss elderly speakers’ confusing stories narrated to younger people, the use of secret modal particles that are restricted to people of old age, a…