The UK: Financial Globalization and Formalization of Banking Supervision

Among the developed economies, the UK was the latest to formalize banking supervision as we define it in this book. The process began in the mid-1970s following the fringe bank crisis and the simultaneous beginning of international cooperation on banking regulation matters in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The crisis led to the reforms of both the Banking Act and the Bank of England Act in 1979—the Bank of England was assigned its first formal duties and responsibilities for banking supervision, and the commercial banks had to meet bank-specific requirements instead of the general corporate law. However, given the reluctance of the Bank of England to conduct banking supervisory activities as well as the Bank’s behavior to stick with the conventional informal “governor's eyebrow,” we deem the formalization process ongoing until the reforms of 1987. The Banking Act 1987 clarified the Bank of England's responsibilities and mandate regarding banking supervision, and the Board of Banking Supervision was established as a permanent formal organization to monitor and council the Bank of England on supervisory matters. The UK is an interesting case where the banking supervision remained informal until quite recently—compared to other countries. The formalization process can be explained by the crisis and the international push for harmonized banking regulation.

Care Facilities for Older People With Long-Term Substance Use: Promising Practices From Sweden

The stigma of alcohol and long-term substance use is well-known and may be even greater for older people. This is a presentation on “wet” eldercare facilities, i.e. care settings designed for older people with long-term substance use problems, where abstinence is abandoned for well-being. Wet eldercare facilities exist in several European countries and the Swedish ones have a hybrid formal organization: They target people over 50 years, but are regarded as nursing homes and residents lease their own flats inside the setting, which makes it correct to describe residents as tenants. Guided by symbolic interactionism, the aim is to analyze how residents in wet eldercare facilities manage to view these places in a positive light. Forty-two residents of four facilities were interviewed, revealing how the hybrid status of these places enabled residents to frame their situation as being “in the right place”, but for different reasons. Some framed the place as a nursing home, others as an ordinary flat. Although wet eldercare facilities are undisputedly linked to stigma and the inability to become sober, the formal hybrid organization enabled residents to construct less stigmatized characterizations of the place and of themselves. The study suggests that it is an (often-neglected) gerontological responsibility to counter stigma and improve the sense of dignity for older people living in stigmatized settings. Based on promising practices in the Swedish system, the study therefore presents strategies that enable older people to ascribe positive characteristics to themselves and to the place where they live.

Emotions of Medical Personnel versus the Status and Power at Work in Hospital Wards

The hospital is characterized by one of the most formalized structures with a strict division of tasks and responsibilities. An essential element of any formal organization is the system of authorities and power. There is a hierarchy and a system of power between hospital departments and within each of them. This hierarchy structure overlaps with the level of power and status felt and perceived by each employee, which implies the emergence of specific emotions. They influence interactions, shaping their course. When describing emotions in the context of power and status, I will refer to Theodore Kemper’s concept that interactions and changes in the relative power and status (prestige) of individuals have an impact on arousing both negative and positive emotions. The aim of this article is to show how an individually-determined level of power and status can shape relations between employees, their methods of communication, and emotions in the workplace. The paper answers the question of whether and how having and/or feeling a certain status and level of power implies the emergence of certain emotions. It is important to reveal those activities and interactions which, as a result of a specific position in the hospital structure, shape and modify the emotions of medical personnel. All the considerations are based on ethnographic qualitative research conducted in three hospital departments, differing in terms of the nature of work in the department and the type of patients treated in each of them. The article describes three of the distinguished categories, i.e. “disrespect game,” ”holding emotions,” and pride. In the course of the analyses, it was found that hierarchy and a specific level of power implies the appearance of emotions of pride, satisfaction, and contentment, as well as it leads to an increase in the level of trust between members of medical personnel. Pride results from belonging to a specific profession and a specific group of employees, and it appears as the consequence of a well-conducted procedure or performance of a difficult activity that took time to master. Pride also emerges as a result of the prestige of the profession or workplace (hospital, ward).

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees: The liminal world of Paris in 1919

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees is a modernist ‘curiosity’ which remained largely unknown due to the peculiar conditions of its original publication. In recent years, however, it has regained its place within the field of modernist studies due to the efforts of Julia Briggs and Sandeep Parmar. Instead of approaching the poem through established categories of urban representation, such as flânerie, urban phantasmagoria or the urban palimpsest, this article focuses on Paris, then in the midst of the 1919 Peace Conference, as a liminal space and site of Bakhtinian carnival. This framework advances an understanding of the poem as a complete and complex work of art. The article argues that the peculiar structure and formal organization of the poem, and its relation to the reality of Paris in 1919 and beyond, turns the poem into a liminal space of its own, thus doubling the city it speaks of.

The object of inquiry and organization studies

This essay argues for reinforcing the empirical stance within organization studies by more systematically presuming non-organization. The empirical stance within organization studies thereby comes to revolve around organization as a claim made in empirical inquiries. The presumption of non-organization takes the legal principle of presumption of innocence as its paradigm. It works by placing the burden of proof on the empirical inquiries to establish, beyond a reasonable doubt, that what is inquired into is an instance of organization (where organization may be understood in terms of organizing, organization of something, formal organization etc.). Organization scholars may assume organization — and often for good reasons— when making a restaurant, a market, or something else object of inquiry. However, adopting the presumption of non-organization requires organization studies to make explicit what is understood by organization as well as what findings are mobilized to establish the claim that organization, in the sense subscribed to, is found. Hereby the presumption of non-organization reinforces the empirical stance as ‘a recurrent rebellion against the metaphysicians’ (van Fraassen). Metaphysics is not cancelled out by empirical inquiry, but it may be part and parcel of assumptions that inform empirical inquiry, and the presumption of non-organization calls for a recurrent test of such assumptions.

Formal Organization and Complex Responses to Video Games Narratives

The application of complex systems theories to the study of narratives proved able to offer a high heuristic value for the analysis of movies [24,26], TV series [35,36], music [45] and different other media with narrative capacity [cf. 20]. However, they were not yet thoroughly employed for the study of video game narratives. To address the relation between formal complexity and the complexity of response in video games, this paper conducts a contrastive analysis of two games of the Halo series, namely Halo 3 [6] and Halo 3 ODST [7]. Formal complexity is analyzed by applying Cutting's [13] approach for counting (narratorial) complexity. The evaluation of the responses to the narratives of these games is based on crowdsourced data, through Hven's [24] and Kiss and Willemsen's [26] understanding of audience response. The findings reveal that a complex response is at least partly predictable through an analysis of the formal quantitative and qualitative/organizational aspects of narratives, and, ultimately, that narrative complexity is a factor in the appreciation of games by the audience. The paper also poses the basis for the identification of a "Goldilocks level of complexity', which can maximize the appreciation of video games stories.

The Anthropology of Bureaucracy and Public Administration

Anthropology is a latecomer to the study of bureaucracy. Nonetheless, the anthropological study of organizations—of which bureaucracies are a subtype, as larger organizations are always bureaucratically organized—was initiated by anthropologists as early as the 1920s. Since the 2010s, the anthropology of bureaucracy has slowly consolidated into a discernible subfield of the discipline. It brings to the study of public administrations a double added value: (a) a specific concern for the informal aspects of bureaucracy, (b) the emic views of bureaucratic actors and their pragmatic contexts, based on long-term immersion in the research field, as well as (c) a non-Eurocentric, global comparative perspective. Anthropologists have focused on bureaucratic actors (“bureaucrats”), the discursive, relational, and material contexts in which they work, the public policies they are supposed to implement or to comply with, and their interactions with the outside world, in particular ordinary citizens (“clients”). A foundational theorem of the anthropological study of bureaucracies has been that you cannot understand organizations on the basis of their official structures alone: the actual workings of an organization are largely based on informal practices and practical rules; there is always a gap between organizational norms and “real” practices; large-scale organizations are heterogeneous phenomena; and conflicts, negotiations, alliances, and power relations are their core components. Thus, one of the major methodological achievements of the anthropology of bureaucracy has been to focus on the dialectics of formal organization and real practices, official regulations, and informal norms in organizations “at work.”

On classifiers and affect in the nominal domain

This chapter presents six case studies on the encoding of affective-expressive information in the Dutch nominal domain. Each affective phenomenon that is discussed, displays a formal property that, from a surface perspective, could be qualified as ‘disorganizing.’ It is proposed that disorganization is only apparent and that the affective-expressive nominal expression has an organized structure that falls within the variation space as defined by UG. It is the different formal organization, compared to the organization of nominal expressions with descriptive contents, which yields ‘the feel of disorganization.’ The availability of different grammatical routes provided by UG allows the language user to use her language for distinct communicative functions, including the expression of one’s affective feelings. It is proposed that the Classifier Projection plays an important role in the manifestation of those routes.

The Role of Smoke Detectors and Carbon Monoxide Detectors in the Fire Safety of Residential Buildings

Purpose: The aim of this publication is to present the most important aspects of using smoke and carbon monoxide detectors intended for households or similar residential facilities as well as to indicate the advantages and disadvantages of the adopted system solutions that affect the number of detectors installed in this kind of buildings. The article aims to present the issues related to the Integrated Qualifications System (ZSK), i.e. newly developed market qualification, dedicated to installers and maintenance technicians of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Introduction: Smoke and carbon monoxide detectors for early detection of existing threats such as fires or escaping carbon monoxide are an important element of fire protection, dedicated primarily to owners of residential buildings. In many countries in the EU it is obligatory to install detectors in homes, whereas at the moment in Poland the only aspect regulated legally is the obligation of the manufacturer of these products to obtain a certificate. Since 2016, the ZSK has been operating in Poland, in which in 2019 the qualifications of installers/maintenance technicians of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors were distinguished. As a result, a person with a market qualification certificate is prepared for independent installation and maintenance of fire safety monitoring devices Methodology: As part of the research process, theoretical research was used, such as: analysis of literature and legal documents, synthesis, general- ization, inference, comparison and analogy. As part of the research, documents from such countries as Poland, Great Britain (mainly England), Germany and France were analysed. The selection of individual countries was guided by the level of development of these systems in a given country and the availability of source documents Conclusions: The presented analysis of the requirements for the installation of the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors shows how different the ap- proach is regarding the use of this type of devices. Depending on experiences and the administrative structure of a given country, a variety of regulations, whether legal or normative, can be discerned in the use of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. ZSK is a well-described system of formal organization and classification of competences and offers the public services at the highest possible quality level. It is also a partial solution to the problem of installing detectors. However, it is necessary to regulate this issue from the legal level, as it was the case in other EU countries, where the installation of detectors in homes is obligatory. Such action will contribute to reducing the victims of fires or inhalation of toxic gases (carbon monoxide) Keywords: Integrated Qualifications System (ZSK), smoke alarm detector, electrical apparatus for the detection of carbon monoxide, carbon monoxide, residential buildings Type of article: review article

NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance and international organization comprising North American and European countries. It is generally considered to be among the most powerful, long-enduring, and successful alliances of modern times. It has influenced both the study and practice of international security and politics for more than seventy years. Created in 1949 by twelve countries as a classic treaty-based mutual defense pact, its substantive focus, formal organization, and membership grew steadily from its earliest years. The legacy of World War II and the trials of the Cold War dominated NATO’s first four decades, when the organization’s first secretary general described its purposes for Europe as keeping “the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the post–Cold War transformation of NATO’s political and military functions. Yet the central issue in politics among the allies has often been the “burden sharing” or distribution of costs and benefits. The United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have often wielded outsized roles in such politics, though NATO decisions are taken by consensus traditionally. The endurance of NATO after the Cold War and through many crises is one of the great puzzles in the academic discipline of international relations, and the Alliance is a common object of study in all the main theoretical schools of thought. While NATO’s political structures resemble other international organizations, its standing multinational integrated military structure is unique. Its military policy and strategy evolved with thinking about deterrence in the nuclear age. NATO first embarked on “out-of-area” military operations in the Balkan civil wars of the 1990s, but its largest and longest-running mission began in 2003 with its involvement in Afghanistan, far from its original geographic area of concern. NATO has entered into political and military partnerships with dozens of countries around the world, and its enlarged membership reached thirty countries in 2020. Its global ties add to a longer-standing debate about trans-Atlanticism versus autonomy in European security. NATO and the European Union give important context to one another, though their institutional collaboration has not always been as close as their greatly overlapping membership and neighboring headquarters in Belgium might suggest. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 inaugurated a period of increased tension with NATO, though the Alliance has alternated deterrence and dialog in its relations with Russia both during and since the Cold War. Primary sources and archival material about NATO are increasingly accessible.