Resistant Transparency and Nonprofit Labor: Challenging Precarity in the Art + Museum Wage Transparency Campaign

Drawing upon contemporary academic debates about nonprofit worker precarity combined with needed theoretical re-orientations toward transparency, this paper explicates the situated communication practices and politics of resistant transparency. Resistant transparency describes communication aimed at revealing and publicizing previously obscured or hidden wage data and employment conditions to challenge powerful actors. Resistant transparency involves dynamic shifts in control over information, modes of in/visibility, and surveillance of powerful actors. We develop the case of Art + Museum Transparency, a collective of arts and museum workers employing Google spreadsheets and Twitter to publicize salary information and challenge norms of self-sacrifice and unpaid labor. Moving beyond an understanding of transparency as an institutional demand, our analysis develops how technical affordances shaped the collective’s efforts. We argue that transparency functions as a resistant communicative practice with potential for increasing worker voice and furthering the goals of collective resistance to precarious work across sites of employment.

Overconfident Institutions and Their Self-Attribution Bias: Evidence from Earnings Announcements

Institutional demand for a stock before its earnings announcement is negatively related to subsequent returns. The relation is not attributable to the price pressure of institutional demand and is stronger for stocks with higher information asymmetry and/or greater valuation difficulty. These findings support the notion that overconfident institutions misprice stocks. Following announcements, institutions’ behavior exhibits the outcome-dependent feature of self-attribution bias. Whether they become more overconfident and delay their mispricing correction depends on whether earnings news confirms their preannouncement trades. This behavioral bias also offers a new explanation for the well-known post-earnings-announcement drift.

Bothering to Believe: Acts of Faith in J. M. Coetzee's Late Novels

J. M. Coetzee's late fictions display a recurrent fascination with attitudes of faith and belief. This preoccupation has been read sometimes as an effort to reinvigorate the novel's engagement with materiality and embodied life, other times as an elegy to the waning power of belief in fiction. But belief is not a monolithic term in Coetzee's late work, nor does his disposition toward it remain static. This article examines two texts that display a related yet evolving concern with faith and belief—Elizabeth Costello (2003) and The Childhood of Jesus (2013). These works not only share a thematic interest in various forms of belief; they are also linked by the scene of a petitioner “at the gate.” In the final lesson of the earlier novel, aging novelist Elizabeth Costello finds herself in a purgatorial border town, where she must produce a statement of belief in order to pass on. In the opening paragraphs of Childhood, the characters arrive on the other side of a similar portal, entering a world whose institutions reject belief as a form of unreasoned, passionate commitment. Where Costello refuses the institutional demand for belief, insisting that belief in fiction is incompatible with the stronger form of commitment in excess of reason, Childhood's characters attempt a reconciliation between reading and believing. Read together, these texts present an apocalyptic vision of the novel after the end of formal realism, when readerly belief requires more than a weak trust in fiction's mimetic capacities.

Support for smallholder farmers through Islamic instruments

Purpose In societies with strong presence of Islam, Islamic instruments with more scope for fairness and equity can be innovatively harnessed to play an increasing role in the development process and poverty alleviation schemes. Poor smallholder farmers dominate agricultural production in many developing countries and contribute a significant portion of global food production. This paper aims to develop a scheme to improve poor smallholder farmers’ vulnerable financial situation through the application of Zakah and Salam contract, using Bangladesh as a case study. Secondary goals are to show the effect of the scheme on food security and relevance to Nigeria. Design/methodology/approach The authors explore the existing traditional modes of financing available to poor smallholders, identify their challenges and propose an appropriate Islamic financing scheme. Findings With the Zakah-based Salam forward contract, the proposed scheme would procure food through Institutional Demand to offer interest free financing, fair price and access to new marketing channels and reduce income uncertainty for the rural smallholders. The discussions indicate that the local food security will be enhanced through incentivized farming activities and disbursement of food from the food bank to the Zakah-eligible food insecure local people. Research limitations/implications This proposal brings forth a potentially powerful idea that needs further empirical validation. Originality/value The religion-based Institutional Demand initiative to promote smallholder agricultural development and social protection is a novel one. The attempt to apply the framework to Nigeria context shows the potential of the framework to generalize for other Muslim developing countries with similar characteristics, especially the poorer agriculture-based countries.

How do institutional investors respond to patent announcements?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine institutional investor demand for shares of firms that announce patents. Design/methodology/approach There are three important dates in the process of obtaining a patent. First, a patent filer requests the right for intellectual property on the application date. Next, the content of a patent becomes publicly available on the publication date, if authorized by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Third, once the patent is validated, it is issued on the grant date. The authors focus on the publication date, as it marks the time when the patent-specific information is disclosed to public. In a regression framework, the authors analyze how institutional investors respond to patent publications. Findings The authors document a significant increase in institutional demand for a firm’s shares around patent announcements. Institutional investors react more strongly to patent publications announced by firms that have published frequently in the past. The increase in demand is also greater when the firm’s shareholder base consists of a higher percentage of long-term institutions. Institutional trading around patent announcements is associated with higher levels of stock price informativeness. In addition, firms that announce patents exhibit long-term outperformance relative to a control sample. Overall, the results suggest that institutional trading conveys information about the value of patents. Originality/value This study is the first to explore changes in institutional demand around patent publications and to show that such events attract institutional investors and have an impact on shareholder wealth, price informativeness and liquidity.

The UN Secretary-General, role expansion and narratives of representation in the 2016 campaign

The contribution of bureaucratic actors, such as those of the United Nations Secretary-General, has been a focus in the study of individuals’ contribution to international relations and the study of United Nations reform. In this context, role expansion has been a central concern. In January 2017, a new Secretary-General took office on the 38th floor of the United Nations, following a successful campaign to reform the selection process by increasing its transparency. Despite different campaign foci, campaign groups framed their claims for reform in the context of ‘representation’, which shaped expectations and understanding of the role and its authority. Expectations play a key role in role expansion beyond personality, leeway or institutional demand. This article discusses the representation of states, gender and the people as referents for the Secretary-General’s role, which corresponds to campaign claims regarding regional rotation, a woman Secretary-General and greater independence for the Secretary-General.