Enron's Dabhol power project in India

In the early nineties, Enron USA went to India to set up a $3 billion power plant at the express invitation of the then Indian government. The process and incidents associated with the setting up of the Dabhol Power Company are highly relevant, even in current times, for companies who intend to set up operations in India. The case is a good example of the strategic importance of ethical corporate decision-making and good stakeholder management practices as an inherent part of a company's culture. If a company lacks this understanding, then it is likely to experience stakeholder opposition and stakeholder management disasters that can ultimately have a serious impact on the company's success.

GTES: An optimized game-theoretic demand-side management scheme for smart grid

Demand-side management in smart grids has emerged as a hot topic for optimizing energy consumption. In conventional research works, energy consumption is optimized from the perspective of either the users or the power company. In this paper, we investigate how energy consumption may be optimized by taking into consideration the interaction between both parties. We propose a new energy price model as a function of total energy consumption. Also, we propose a new objective function, which optimizes the difference between the value and cost of energy. The power supplier pulls consumers in a round-robin fashion and provides them with energy price parameter and current consumption summary vector. Each user then optimizes his own schedule and reports it to the supplier, which, in turn, updates its energy price parameter before pulling the next consumers. This interaction between the power company and its consumers is modeled through a two-step centralized game, based on which we propose our game-theoretic energy schedule (GTES) method. The objective of our GTES method is to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio by optimizing the users' energy schedules. The performance of the GTES approach is evaluated through computer-based simulations. © 2014 IEEE.

Pharmaceuticals and the consumer movement: the ambivalences of 'patient power'

Consumer and patient advocacy groups (PAGs) are important participants in the politics of pharmaceuticals. Yet very little is known about the precise nature and extent of their influence. It is argued in this article that PAGs fulfil a mixed role within the health system at national and transnational levels, and that they are at times fully incorporated into economic and political power structures. Their frequent dependence on pharma industry funding is of particular concern. PAGs provide a means of direct industry interaction with the final customer, thereby partially bypassing and putting additional pressure on doctors and regulators. The article presents the case for research to establish a better empirical base for discussions about the role of PAGs within contemporary neo-liberal governance structures.

Sources of poetic power

How powerful are our categories? Some might see these three poets in the categories ``working-class man'', ``indigenous man'', ``educated woman''. But what does this mean? Could they not all be educated, indigenous, working-class? There are sound reasons to think in categories, but poets are implicitly against theory, since each has a peculiar source of poetic power. Even if that turns out to be gender or class or race, it will be more complex than those over-burdened words allow. Poems, like poets, resist classification and gaze back at us like imaginary animals, indifferent to zoology

Governing the working population : knowledge, self and power in workplace health programs

This paper reports a case study of a workplace health programme in an international information technology company. Discourse analysis was used to identify how specific forms of knowledge create understandings of health and influence power relations between employee and organization. These forms of knowledge are shown to make employee health both visible and invisible in particular ways. Workplace health discourse encourages the employee to take responsibility for self-assessment and behaviour adjustment to become healthier employees. This is shown to be an ethical project which results in the alignment of personal and corporate goals.