Board leadership, outside directors’ expertise and voluntary corporate disclosures

This study examines the linkages between board leadership structure in terms of CEO duality (CEOs who jointly serve as board chairs), the proportion of expert outside directors on the board (PENEDs) and voluntary corporate disclosures. Regression analyses of observations from 385 Hong Kong companies show that CEO duality is associated with lower levels of voluntary corporate disclosures. However, the negative CEO duality/voluntary disclosure association is weaker for firms with higher PENEDs suggesting that the expertise of non-executive directors (NEDs) moderates the CEO duality/corporate disclosures relationship.

Enacting the violent imaginary : reflections on the dynamics of nonviolence and violence in Buddhism

In this paper, I explore the complex ethical dynamics of violence and nonviolence in Mahāyāna Buddhism by considering some of the historical precedents and scriptural prescriptions that inform modern and contemporary Buddhist acts of self-immolation. Through considering these scripturally sanctioned Mahāyāna ‘case studies,’ the paper traces the tension that exists in Buddhist thought between violence and nonviolence, outlines the interplay of key Mahāyāna ideas of transcendence and altruism, and comments on the mimetic status and influence of spiritually charged texts. It is the contention of this paper that violent scriptural metaphors can create paradigms of enactment that are paradoxically illustrative of the core ‘non-violent’ Mahāyāna virtues of compassion (karuṇā), giving (dāna), patience (kṣānti), and vigor (vīrya). The discussion will show that these virtues are underpinned by the Mahāyāna philosophical mainstays of non-duality (advayavāda), bodhisattvic transcendent altruism, skillful means (upāya), and dependent co-origination (pratītyasamutpāda).

Tenerbrosity scene 2

Tenerbrosity Scene 2, is a large format photographic artwork. The work visually explores memory through the recollection of incidents and the fragility of truth. This is situated within the practice of landscape photography in a post-colonial framework. In Scene 2 of 2, a woodland closed shot is presented for the audience. The scene was shot at night in a forest, and provides a focus on the details of trees and leaves, branches and an emerging blackness that surrounds the scene. The journey has taken a strange turn in Tenerbrosity, with scene 2 suggesting a mirror or reflection, a duplicate of or duality in combination with Scene 1. The size of the work as a large unframed print on canvas, actively seeks a physical engagement with the audience via a centrality of vision. The artwork hangs a metre out from the wall and the work sways in the breeze, to ensure the audience is located at a site for the production of meaning and this captures a mixed reality, between artwork, vision, audience and experience. This is achieved to engage with the multi-sequential narratives surrounding traces of memories and decay visually and theoretically traversed throughout the series. This is part of the ongoing exploration of states of the in-between and forms the 2nd in a series of 2 artworks. The work is exhibited in the Yarra Ranges, because the work explores the narratives of the decay of memory experienced in this location. Exhibiting here allows a cyclic dialogue with notions of place, home, longing and loss.