Risk perception in newspaper chains: Threats, uncertainties and corporate boundary work

This article presents an analysis of risk perception among chain newspaper CEOs in Scandinavia. Based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the analysis finds that risk is perceived in relation to public trust, corporate expansion and contentious government regulation. We discuss these themes in relation to their uncertainty, and the potential gains and losses that accompany them. The aim of the study is to sharpen the distinction between risks, uncertainties and threats as they are mobilized in research on the news industries, contributing to the research on strategic media management at the firm level. The contribution of the study is furthermore to demonstrate how CEOs’ risk perception can be seen as boundary work performed at the corporate level.

An Indian Gilded Age?

According to Forbes, India has experienced a striking growth in billionaire wealth since 1991. It has also experienced high-profile corruption scams between politicians and business. This chapter develops an interpretative comparison between contemporary India and the Gilded Age in the United States of America. It argues that there are important parallels with the Gilded Age, around private wealth creation on the back of corporate expansion, extensive links between business and political interests, and widespread sharing of economic rents as part of the political equilibrium; this nevertheless coexists with significant building of industrial capabilities. It then explores a contrast with the US Progressive Era. The comparison suggests the medium-term prospect is for a continuance of a mix of connected capitalism and populist social strategies, including in the wake of Narendra Modi’s election. This can be interpreted as a new version of Pranab Bardhan’s collective action problem.

The Persistence of [a] Vision: The Electronically Mediated Corporation

Forgoing an examination of the media industries, Chapter 1 focuses instead on the rise of what one might call the mediated industries. A prehistory of television at work, this chapter traces an intensifying relationship between electronic media and the workplace that follows the development and industrial application of telegraphy, telephony, recorded sound, wireless, applied radio, Muzak, faxing, and nontheatrical film. Situating this discussion in the context of scholars’ treatment of communication and empire, it argues that television occupies a key transitional position for the mediated corporation in which electronic communication’s dual uses as a logistical tool and as a conduit for cultural production converge. These processes illustrate the development of an alternative media sector and the symbiotic relationship between the “knowledge industries” and corporate expansion, as well as the specificities of how media infrastructures are created at scale.

Television at Work

This book explores how work, television, and waged labor come to have meaning in our everyday lives. However, it is not an analysis of workplace sitcoms or quality dramas. Instead, it explores the forgotten history of how American private sector workplaces used television in the twentieth century. It traces how, at the hands of employers, television physically and psychically managed workers and attempted to make work meaningful under the sign of capitalism. It also shows how the so-called domestic medium helped businesses shape labor relations and information architectures foundational to the twinned rise of the technologically mediated corporation and a globalizing information economy. Among other things, business and industry built extensive private television networks to distribute live and taped programming, leased satellite time for global “meetings” and program distribution, created complex closed-circuit television (CCTV) data search and retrieval systems, encouraged the use of videotape for worker self-evaluation, used videocassettes for training distributed workforces, and wired cantinas for employee entertainment. Television at work describes the myriad ways the medium served business’ attempts to shape employees’ relationships to their labor and the workplace in order to secure industrial efficiency, support corporate expansion, and inculcate preferred ideological orientations. By uncovering industrial television as a prolific sphere of media practice—one that continually sought to reshape the technology’s cultural meanings, affordances, and uses—Television at Work positions the medium at the heart of Post-Fordist experiments into reconfiguring the American workplace and advancing understandings of labor that increasingly revolved around dehumanized technological systems and information flows.

Chinese Outbound Investment in Australia: From State Control to Entrepreneurship

This article contributes to our understanding of Chinese corporate expansion into developed economies by using Australia as a case study of how, in the 2010s, Chinese firms began transiting from government-driven resource investment to entrepreneurial expansion in new industries and markets. We contextualize this process by demonstrating how changing market demand and institutional evolutions at home and in the host country created new motivations for Chinese investors. In particular, the decline of active government control in China over the overseas operations of Chinese firms and the more business-oriented regulatory regime in Australia empowered local subsidiaries of Chinese firms to become more entrepreneurial and explorative in their attempts to compensate for their lack of competitiveness and weak organizational capabilities. Consequently, Chinese firms brought their domestic experience and modus operandi to the Australian host market and collectively adapted and deployed dynamic capabilities such as the use of network linkages, experiential learning and corporate reconfiguration. We find that this transfer of capabilities was facilitated by the co-evolution of the Chinese and Australian institutional and market environments and has maintained Australia's position as one of the major recipient countries of Chinese outbound investment, opening the Australian economy to ongoing expansion and disruption.

Embedded Corporatism

This chapter introduces the theory of embedded corporatism to explain U.S. drug enforcement. It argues that drug enforcement is an international regime where the interests and power of American corporations are embedded in drug prohibition. The regime also includes corporate-funded think tanks, some members of Congress, civil society groups, and foreign governments. The power of American corporations within the regime facilitates domestic and international consensus around drug prohibition as a mechanism for corporate expansion and capital accumulation. The chapter demonstrates that democracies in Latin America have a higher level of human rights repression than countries in the developing world that are not democracies. Although GDP per-capita in the region is higher than other developing regions, income inequality in Latin America is significantly higher than the rest of the developing world. And while the United States is the supposed leader of the free world and the richest, its rates of incarceration are greater than those found in autocracies, and its level of income inequality is significantly higher than other rich OECD countries. It is argued that the paradox of human rights and democratization in the Americas along with widening class cleavages are the by-products of the embedded corporatist drug enforcement regime.

Brazilian Solid Waste Policy (PNRS)

Brazil's national solid waste policy (PNRS) took nearly two decades to pass through legislative houses until it was approved as a law protecting the environment. During this period and after its approval, pro-environmental factors led to the right to transform and create protocols, agreements, and new companies in the sense of a reverse logistics or of a reversibility in the environmental effects of the supply chain. This chapter has aimed to present aspects of the Brazilian business reality in the process of implementation of the PNRS as a reflection on the perspective of product recycling and solid waste control and reverse logistics. The PNRS is in the phase of corporate expansion, taking stock of eight years since the creation of the law (2010). As some branches of Brazilian business activity have not yet had reverse logistics regulated, in the coming years there should be a much higher demand for this type of reverse business.