Offenders' Risk-Taking Attitude Inside and Outside the Prison Walls

It has long been assumed that risk taking is closely associated with criminal behavior. One reason for placing criminals behind bars-aside from punishment and protecting the public-is to prevent them from engaging in further risky criminal activities. Limited attention has been paid to whether being inside or outside prison affects offenders' risk-taking behaviors and attitudes. We compared risk-taking behaviors and attitudes in five risk domains (ethical, financial, health/safety, recreational, social) among 75 incarcerated offenders (i.e., offenders who are currently in prison) and 45 ex-offenders (i.e., offenders who have just been released from prison). Ex-offenders reported higher likelihood of engaging in risky behavior, driven largely by a willingness to take more risks in the recreational and ethical domains. Benefits attributed to risk taking as well as risk perception did not differ between incarcerated and ex-offenders, indicating that the opportunity to take risks might underlie behavioral risk intentions. Our results also indicate that risk-taking activities are better predicted by the expected benefits rather than by risk perception, aside from the health/safety domain. These results highlight the importance of studying the person and the environment and examining risk taking in a number of content domains.

Corporate ownership and control in Victorian Britain

Using ownership and control data for 890 firm‐years, this article examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern‐day standards. However, this does not necessarily mean that there was a modern‐style separation of ownership from control in Victorian Britain. One major implication of our findings is that diffuse ownership was present in the UK much earlier than previously thought, and given that it occurred in an era with weak shareholder protection law, it somewhat undermines the influential law and finance hypothesis. We also find that diffuse ownership is correlated with large boards, a London head office, non‐linear voting rights, and shares traded on multiple markets.

Promoting Community Renewable Energy in a Corporate Energy World

Small-scale, decentralized and community-owned renewable energy is widely acknowledged to be a desirable feature of low carbon futures, but faces a range of challenges in the context of conventional, centralized energy systems. This paper draws on transition frameworks to investigate why the UK has been an inhospitable context for community-owned renewables and assesses whether anything fundamental is changing in this regard. We give particular attention to whether political devolution, the creation of elected governments for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, has affected the trajectory of community renewables. Our analysis notes that devolution has increased political attention to community renewables, including new policy targets and support schemes. However, these initiatives are arguably less important than the persistence of key features of socio-technical regimes: market support systems for renewable energy and land-use planning arrangements that systemically favour major projects and large corporations, and keep community renewables to the margins. There is scope for rolling out hybrid pathways to community renewables, via joint ownership or through community benefit funds, but this still positions community energy as an adjunct to energy pathways dominated by large, corporate generation facilities

Managerial failure in mid-Victorian Britain?: Corporate expansion during a promotion boom

This article examines the mid-1840s expansion of the British railway network, which was associated with a large deterioration in shareholder value. Using a counterfactual approach and new data on railway competition, we argue that the expansion of the railway companies, and their subsequent decline in financial performance, was not due to managerial failure. Rather, the promotion of new routes by established railways and mergers with other companies was part of a managerial strategy to maintain incumbent positions, and may have been preferable to not expanding whilst their competitors did.

“Local politics and global corporate crime in Irish crime fiction : Alan Glynn's Winterland trilogy",

Why Are Some Subsidiaries of Multinationals the Source of Novel Practices while Others Are Not? National, Corporate and Functional Influences

It has frequently been argued that multinational companies are moving towards network forms whereby subsidiaries share different practices with the rest of the company. This paper presents large-scale empirical evidence concerning the extent to which subsidiaries input novel practices into the rest of the multinational. We investigate this in the field of human resources through analysis of a unique international data set in four host countries - Canada, Ireland, Spain and the UK - and address the question of how we can explain variation between subsidiaries in terms of whether they initiate the diffusion of practices to other subsidiaries. The data support the argument that multiple, rather than single, factor explanations are required to more effectively understand the factors promoting or retarding the diffusion of human resource practices within multinational companies. It emerges that national, corporate and functional contexts all matter. More specifically, actors at subsidiary level who seek to initiate diffusion appear to be differentially placed according to their national context, their place within corporate structures and the extent to which the human resource function is internationally networked.

Corporate Ownership, Control, and Firm Performance in Victorian Britain

Scholars have long debated whether ownership structure matters for firm performance. The standard view with respect to Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on operating profit and shareholder value. Here, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial agency problems. In contrast, we find that directors who were independent of large family owners were more likely to increase shareholder value.