The Old Boys Club in New Zealand Listed Companies

The board of directors plays an important role in implementing corporate governance in the firm, as directors have a fiduciary duty to the firm’s shareholders. The effectiveness of directors is a key determinant of corporate value and they need to bring a range of skills and experience to the boardroom. This skill and experience cannot be developed solely within the firm, and most boards incorporate non-executive directors who are or have been directors of other firms. Current research on the benefits of interlocking directorships is mixed between the claim that they bring outside feedback to the table and open decision makers’ minds, and those who think outside directors are a waste of money and can reduce company performance. This paper investigates the extent of interlocking directorship in New Zealand and how it affects corporate performance. Our findings of largely no significant impact on firm performance are consistent with the management control theory of director interlocks; the exceptions support the class hegemony theory that links interlocking directorship with a negative firm performance.

The Rise of Authoritarian Corporate Populism

Authoritarian populism in the early twenty-first century is rooted in a global conjuncture of convergent social and ecological crises, but the ways in which the crises shape authoritarian populist politics and vice versa vary across socio-ecological formations worldwide. An analysis of the politics behind the rise of the flex sugarcane and oil palm complexes in Guatemala since the mid-2000s shows that an authoritarian corporate populist agenda is on the rise. Authoritarian corporate populism is especially keen on manufacturing the consent of working people to the elites-led sustainability and development pathway. This involves political concessions to the underprivileged through public grants and multistakeholder governance as in other populist political regimes but additionally, and distinctively, meaningful concessions to working people and the environment in the sphere of private relations of production. Although these concessions go beyond mere greenwashing, they do not compromise and ultimately enhance the flex cane and palm complexes’ profitability and ability to stay in business and the racialized class hegemony of the elites. Violence, however, remains foundational to this political agenda, even if it is now cloaked in the rule of law. Thus, the concept of authoritarian corporate populism showcases a form of politics in which big business, intimately linked to the state and elites, plays a major role in mainstream sustainability transitions. El populismo autoritario a principios del siglo XXI está arraigado en una coyuntura global de crisis sociales y ecológicas convergentes, pero las formas en que dichas crisis dan forma a la dinámica política populista autoritaria y viceversa difieren en diversas formaciones socioecológicas a través del mundo. Mi análisis de la dinámica política tras el avance de los complejos corporativos de los cultivos comodín de caña de azúcar y palma aceitera en Guatemala desde mediados de la década de 2000 muestra cómo una agenda corporativa populista autoritaria está en auge. El populismo corporativo autoritario busca fabricar el consentimiento popular a la perspectiva sobre sustentabilidad y desarrollo de la oligarquía. Esto implica concesiones políticas a la población desfavorecida a través de programas sociales públicos y sistemas de gobernanza multipartes al igual que en otros regímenes políticos populistas, pero adicional y distintivamente, a través de concesiones a las y los trabajadores y el medio ambiente en el ámbito de las relaciones privadas de producción. Aunque estas concesiones van más allá del simple lavado de imagen verde, las mismas lejos de comprometer fortalecen la rentabilidad y capacidad de los complejos corporativos de la caña y de la palma para seguir en el negocio, a la vez que contribuyen a reproducir la hegemonía racializada de las élites. Sin embargo, la violencia sigue siendo parte fundamental de esta agenda política, aunque ahora se trate de justificar su uso como parte del ejercicio del estado de derecho. Es así como el concepto de populismo corporativo autoritario da cuenta de una dinámica política en la que grandes corporaciones íntimamente vinculadas al estado y a las élites desempeñan un papel clave en las transiciones a la sustentabilidad convencionales.

BDSM – the antithesis of good Swedish sex?

In this article, based on ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews with 29 self-defined BDSM practitioners, I explore the incorporation process of BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism) in Swedish society. I argue that the so-called ‘good sexuality’ described by Gayle Rubin (2011) and Don Kulick (2005) is still alive as a normative principle in this context. Drawing on Foucault’s concept ‘biopower’ (1976), I show that to gain acceptance and to fit into a society characterized by ‘good sexuality’, BDSM has to be normalized. This normalization process is closely connected to a middle-class hegemony and results in limitations that in various ways affect the practitioners, as well as impacting the transgressive core of BDSM.

Social histories of exclusion and moments of resistance: The case of Muslim Julaha weavers in colonial United Provinces

Locating the theorisation and practices of caste hierarchies within South Asian Islam with reference to high-caste Muslims (Ashrafs) versus Julaha weavers (Ajlafs), this article argues that class exploitation and class hegemony over the marginalised sections of Muslim society in North India were practised through caste stratifications, social hierarchies and land relations. The horizontal equality of ‘textual Islam’ was transformed into vertical social hierarchies in South Asia. While explaining the conditions of the disadvantageous socio-economic status that ensured their subordination, this article narrates instances of resistance and quests for equality undertaken by the Julaha weavers. The dialectics of these negotiations produced factors such as the stigma of status mandated by their caste, on the one hand, and the weavers’ integration within the capitalist colonial economy and politics, on the other. The article explores this history of hierarchies and the complex resistances offered to it, closely mediated by social and economic structures, prevailing ideologies and notions of colonial legality and mobility. The processes of the weavers challenging their social marginalisation, predicated on their economic status and their quest for new identities may look familiar to other communities which similarly used religion, caste and colonial law to resist and subvert hierarchies. Hence, the politicisation of the colonial public sphere affected the relations among the Indian Muslims in a new milieu. These arguments are significant in terms of rewriting the existing historiography that reinforces the binaries of nationalist–communalist or Hindu–Muslim politics.

Robin Hyde

This chapter explores the novels of Iris Guiver Wilkinson, who wrote as Robin Hyde. Three of her novels— Check to Your King (1936), Passport to Hell (1936), and Nor the Years Condemn (1938)—counter claims of historical absence or irrelevance by fictionalizing historical people involved in key moments in New Zealand's history, specifically the mid-nineteenth century efforts to establish New Zealand as a colony, the First World War, and the Great Depression. Meanwhile, with Wednesday's Children (1937), Hyde turns to history's antithesis, fantasy, as an alternative route to investigating New Zealand's settler culture. Hyde's five novels exhibit a recurring set of concerns: the articulation of New Zealand as a settler nation and its relationship to the international; the lives of those marginalized by respectable middle-class society; the role of social institutions in the maintenance of middle-class hegemony; and the asymmetry of opportunity, mobility, and sexual freedom for women.