Beaten paths towards the transnational corporate elite

The transnationalization of economic activities has fundamentally altered the world. One of the consequences that has intrigued scholars is the formation of a transnational corporate elite. While the literature tends to focus on the topology of the transnational board interlock network, little is known about its driving mechanisms. This article asks the question: what are the trajectories that corporate elites follow in driving the expansion of this network? To answer this, the authors employ a novel approach that models the transnationalization of elites using their board appointment sequences. The findings show that there are six transnationalization trajectories corporate elites follow to expand the network. The authors argue that while the transnational elite network appears as a global social structure, its generating mechanisms are regionally organized. This corroborates earlier findings on the fragmentation of the global network of corporate control, but also provides insights into how this network was shaped over time.

Education network pirates, corporate control and the inverted panopticon: about the unfulfilled pandemic promise

There are two issues in the article. The first concerns the educational dimension of the pandemic in social spaces. The second issue is about the possibility that the pandemy opens up for academic education. I believe that the pandemic crisis could have provided a progressive lessons and an impetus for a pro-democratic change, both in society and in institutionalized education. However, this lesson has not been learnt, and the pandemic itself has been used to intensify authoritarian tendencies in the womb of the (post)neoliberal world.

When Young Playwrights Are Kept Awake Because of History: Cultural Memory and Amnesia in Recent American Plays

Borrowing from both a painting and the retrospective exhibition of David Wojnarowicz, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, this paper targets two recent American plays: Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013) and Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (2018). In both, the playwrights point to the neglect of history, or rather cultural memory, as I will insist on calling it, as one of the ills affecting a “historicidal” society such as that of the United States. An immersion into the present and concurrent obliteration of one’s cultural inheritance results in a populace easily manipulated in the interests of corporate control, and more importantly for the plays under consideration, into unhappiness and disconnection, an erlebnis, in sum, which proves lethal for individuals and the larger groups of which they form part. Both plays further seem to argue that the most troublesome of such a thing is how little consciousness of the problem there is, a surefire indication that induced amnesia is making alarming headway among the younger generations.

LEGAL AND REGULATORY FUNDAMENTALS OF CORPORATE CONTROL IN COMMERCIAL BANKS OF UZBEKISTAN

This scientific article analyzes the issues of creating a corporate control system in commercial banks. were carefully familiarized with the ideas and comments put forward in the course of researchwork on the implementation of corporate control systems. The regulatory framework for organizing corporate control in commercial banks of the Republic of Uzbekistan was also studied.Keywords: corporate control, joint stock company, compliance, corruption, supervisoryboard, general meeting of shareholders, bank management, corporate governance

ALGORITHMIC IMAGINATIONS: RETHINKING “ALGORITHMIC” AS A HEURISTIC FOR UNDERSTANDING COMPUTATIONALLY-STRUCTURED CULTURE

How we imagine our place within the structure of sociotechnical-human relationships—specifically, in domains of life affected by data-analytics and the probabilistic bets institutions and people in power make on the future of our credit worthiness, political leanings, shopping habits etc.—is our “algorithmic imagination.” The purpose of this panel is to explore the “algorithmic imagination” as it manifests in particular scholarly, historical, socio-cultural, and technical contexts. The panelists prioritize how social actors, situated in distinct settings, go about constructing an “algorithmic imagination” in conversation/opposition with how computational systems have “imagined” them; they will also reflect critically and self-reflexively on the implications of an algorithmic imagination, so conceived. Collectively, the panelists demure from monolithic understandings of the “algorithmic imagination” while also embracing algorithmic intersectionality. The primary contention of this panel is that the ways in which algorithms have been “thought,” or imagined, have made it difficult to conceive of practicable strategies for transforming algorithmic cultures and, indeed, for delinking them from both state and corporate control. The panel, thus, makes three primary contributions. First, we situate, define, and distinguish the concept, “algorithmic imagination.” Second, the panel provides analyses of key facets of the algorithmic imagination, in specific historical settings and life-worlds defined by intersectionality. Lastly, it aims to contribute, however provisionally, to a political theory that recognizes the deterministic power of computational systems but rejects the notion that power is inherently democratic or monolithically insurmountable.

Socially responsible investing through the equity funds in the global ownership network

We analyze the connectivity of equity investments to the firms in the global ownership network that are reported as non-compliant with Environment, Social, and Government (ESG) benchmarks. We find that a large number of shareholders have ownership linkages to non-ESG firms, most commonly with three or four degrees of separation. Analyzing the betweenness centrality for shareholders connecting the ultimate owners and non-ESG firms, we find that the investment management companies play important roles in channeling the investment money into non-ESG firms, where largest American asset managers commonly have one to two degrees of separation on their ownership linkages to those problematic firms. Since asset managers collect capital from investors by running the equity funds, we analyze the ownership stakes and the associated voting rights attributable to the equity funds investors. We estimate the distribution of the power of corporate control over non-ESG firms among specific asset managers (such as BlackRock and Fidelity) and among different types of the equity funds (such as mutual funds and exchanged-traded funds), and explores how investing in the equity funds rather than ownership investing may have shifted the distribution of the power to control those non-ESG firms.