Rhetoric in organized anarchies

This empirical case study of a business school internationalisation process investigates the relationship between rhetoric, ambiguity and strategic action in a garbage can context. Our data showed that rhetoric structured the garbage can and reduced the randomness of the strategy-making process in two ways. First, rhetoric enabled actors to distinguish between two uses of ambiguity - maximising ambiguity to avoid action, and minimising ambiguity to enact action. Rhetorics that maximised ambiguity were most frequent at the start of the strategy process; rhetorics that minimised ambiguity were most common later in the strategy process. Second, rhetoric provided structure by linking solutions, problems and participants to choice opportunities to enable action and by negating links between solutions, problems and participants and choice opportunities in order to enable inaction.

An efficient route to highly organized, tunable macroporous-mesoporous alumina

(Figure Presented) Organized macroporous-mesoporous alumina can be obtained via a dual-templating approach. Monodispersed polystyrene beads promote macropore formation, while a P123 surfactant templating agent drives the formation of ordered hexagonal mesopores throughout the alumina framework. These well-defined pore networks coexist over a wide range of temperatures and macropore sizes. © 2009 American Chemical Society.

Who “likes” you … and why? A typology of Facebook fans

Although many managers recognize that Facebook Fans represent a marketing opportunity, there has been little research into the nature of different Fan types. This study explores a typology of Fans, drawn from a sample of 438 individuals who "Like" brands on Facebook. Fans' brand loyalty, brand love, use of self-expressive brands, and word of mouth (WOM) for Liked brands were used to suggest four Fan types: the "Fan"-atic, the Utilitarian, the Self-Expressive, and the Authentic. The results of this exploratory study highlight the value of cluster analysis as a strategy for identifying different Fan types and provide insights to prompt further research into Facebook Fan types.

Analysing the European Union's responses to organized crime through different securitization lenses

In the past 30 years, organized crime (OC) has shifted from being an issue of little, or no concern, to being considered one of the key security threats facing the European Union (EU), the economic and political fabric of its society and its citizens. The purpose of this article is to understand how OC has come to be understood as one of the major security threats in the EU, by applying different lenses of Securitization Theory (ST). More specifically, the research question guiding this article is whether applying different ST approaches can lead us to draw differing conclusions as to whether OC has been successfully securitized in the EU. Building on the recent literature that argues that this theoretical framework has branched out into different approaches, this article wishes to contrast two alternative views of how a security problem comes into being, in order to verify whether different approaches can lead to diverging conclusions regarding the same phenomenon. The purpose of this exercise is to contribute to the further development of ST by pointing out that the choice in approach bears direct consequences on reaching a conclusion regarding the successful character of a securitization process. Starting from a reflection on ST, the article proceeds with applying a “linguistic approach” to the case study, which it then contrasts with a “sociological approach”. The article proposes that although the application of a “linguistic approach” seems to indicate that OC has become securitized in the EU, it also overlooks a number of elements, which the “sociological approach” renders visible and which lead us to refute the initial conclusion.

Europol and the EU’s fight against organized crime: exploring the potential of experimentalist governance

While issues relating to the development, legitimacy and accountability of the European Police Office, Europol, have been intensively discussed in political and academic circles, the actual impact of Europol on policy-making in the European Union has yet to receive scholarly attention. By investigating the evolution and the role of Europol's organized crime reports, this article elaborates on whether Europol has been able to exert an influence beyond its narrowly defined mandate. Theoretically informed by the assumptions of experimentalist governance, the article argues that the different legal systems and policing traditions of EU member states have made it difficult for the EU to agree on a common understanding on how to fight against organized crime. This lack of consensus, which has translated into a set of vague and broadly formulated framework goals and guidelines, has enabled Europol to position its Organized Crime Threat Assessments as the point of reference in the respective EU policy-making area. Europol's interest in improving its institutional standing thereby converged with the interest of different member states to use Europol as a socialization platform to broadcast their ideas and to ‘Europeanize’ their national counter-organized crime policy.

The external dimension of the EU’s fight against organized crime:the search for coherence between rhetoric and practice

SSince the external dimension of the European Union’s Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) began to be considered, a substantial amount of literature has been dedicated to discussing how the EU is cooperating with non-member states in order to counter problems such as terrorism, organized crime and illegal migration. According to the EU, the degree of security interconnectedness has become so relevant that threats can only be adequately controlled if there is effective concerted regional action. This reasoning has led the EU to develop a number of instruments, which have resulted in the exporting of certain elements of its JHA policies, either through negotiation or socialization. Although the literature has explored how this transfer has been applied to the field of terrorism and immigration, very little has been written on the externalisation of knowledge, practice and norms in the area of organized crime. This article proposes to bridge this gap by looking at EU practice in the development of the external dimension of organized crime policies, through the theoretical lens of the EU governance framework.

Organized crime legislation in the European Union. Harmonization and approximation of criminal law, national legislations and the EU framework decision on the fight against organised crime, by Francesco Calderoni

Book review: Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London, and New York, Springer, 2010, 189 pp., £93.55 (hardcover), ISBN 978-3-642-04330-7, e-ISBN 978-3-642-04331-4