Is there any room for the doctrine of fundamental rights of states in today's international law?

This article serves as a general substantive introduction to the special issue on the fundamental rights of states in international law. It introduces the concept in theoretical and doctrinal terms, and lays out the questions that will be addressed by the contributions to the special issue. These questions include: 1) What do attributes like ‘inherent’, ‘inalienable’ and ‘permanent’ mean with regard to state rights?; 2) Do they lead to identifying a unitary distinct category of fundamental rights of states?; 3) If so, what is their source and legal character?; 4) What are their legal implications, eg, when they come into conflict with other obligations of the right holder or with the actions of other states and international organisations?; and ultimately, 5) Is there still room in today’s international law for a doctrine of ‘fundamental’ rights of states? The article reviews the fundamental rights of states in positive law sources and in international legal scholarship, and identifies the reasons for a renaissance of attention for this doctrine.

Reflections of professional practice: using electronic discourse analysis networks (EDANs) to examine embedded business emails

Emails have become a central genre in business communication, reflecting both how people communicate and how they go about their professional practices. This chapter examines embedded business emails as reflections of the professional practices of the regulatory and policy department of a multinational based in London, UK. It argues that the nature of online communication in international organisations, with its high levels of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, requires multidimensional analytical approaches that are capable of capturing its complexity and dynamics. To this end, the chapter introduces electronic discourse analysis networks (EDANs) as one example of such approaches. It begins with a brief review of the literature that has informed the study reported on here before it discusses EDANs as its analytical framework. Using a group of embedded emails and a number of networked data sets, the chapter shows how EDANs can be used to further our understanding of professional online communication.

Enhancing Knowledge Acquisition in Pharmaceutical Organisations based in Pakistan

Absorptive Capacity (ACAP) depicts the sequential order of activities connecting externally generated knowledge into an organisation; this involves a company’s ability to acquire new knowledge from an external source, assimilate and transform it, and eventually exploit it via its industrial processes and products/services. The sandwiched role of middle managers, being interlinked between decision makers and employees, has been argued as vital to organisational success. However, their role is often viewed as having conflicts astride management i.e. between employees and decision makers. This study, using a thematic analysis approach, explores and identifies the common and conflicting role of middle managers, as viewed by different respondents in organisational hierarchies. Results, based on a sample of 33 employees operating in the Pakistan Pharmaceutical sector, indicate that conflicting roles of middle managers also persist with more common roles in organisations.