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Corporate governance as a catalyst to performance of banks in Ghana: the moderating role of firm controls and strategy
No full textThe aim of the study was to understand the effect of the corporate governance variables on bank’s financial performance. Moreover, the study focused on evaluating the relationship between bank’s
financial performance and board characteristic in Ghana along with determining the moderating role of firm controls and its strategy in the relationship between board bank’s financial performance and
board characteristics in Ghana. The study employed a quantitative approach. The study targeted four hundred (400) management associates using purposive sampling technique, via structured questionnaire for the quantitative analysis. The target respondents were management of commercial banks in Ghana. The study revealed a positive relationship amid financial performance
and board characteristics such as board size and composition whereas firm control moderates the positive relationship between financial performance and board size, composition, foreign ownership. Moreover, the study reveals a need for establishing a connection between top managerial staff and the executives. Founded on actualizing, the expansion of money related execution will lead to greater corporate administration. This is increasing the proportion of non-executive directors on the board, which can bring more independence and objectivity to decision-making elated to strategy and governance
Theorizing ‘Surplus Populations’ in racial capitalism through juvenile justice
Get PDFThe concept of ‘surplus population’ explains how child welfare functions in the context of racial capitalism to cultivate and develop the productive capacities of children to ensure the development of a productive adult. Productive here simply means activity that adds value to privately owned capital. It does not mean: active, alive, creative, generative, dynamic, social, etc. Surplus population is that part of the population that is permanently surplus to the needs of capital and outside of the logic of productivity for capital. It does not, of course, mean that people are surplus for one another or that they are outside of community and family or that their lives are intrinsically useless or lack value. Surplus population is a concept specifically tied to how capitalism values life. This chapter argues that when the imagined future of the child falls outside of the scope of a productive future and locates the child now and in the future as part of a surplus population, juvenile justice and other mechanisms of abandoning and containing children and exposing them to premature death are mobilized
RIBFIND2: identifying rigid bodies in protein and nucleic acid structures
Get PDFMolecular structures are often fitted into cryo-EM maps by flexible fitting. When this requires large conformational changes, identifying rigid bodies can help optimize the model-map fit. Tools for identifying rigid bodies in protein structures exist, however an equivalent for nucleic acid structures is lacking. With the increase in cryo-EM maps containing RNA and progress in RNA structure prediction, there is a need for such tools. We previously developed RIBFIND, a program for clustering protein secondary structures into rigid bodies. In RIBFIND2, this approach is extended to nucleic acid structures. RIBFIND2 can identify biologically relevant rigid bodies in important groups of complex RNA structures, capturing a wide range of dynamics, including large rigid-body movements. The usefulness of RIBFIND2-assigned rigid bodies in cryo-EM model refinement was demonstrated on three examples, with two conformations each: Group II Intron complexed IEP, Internal Ribosome Entry Site and the Processome, using cryo-EM maps at 2.7–5 Å resolution. A hierarchical refinement approach, performed on progressively smaller sets of RIBFIND2 rigid bodies, was clearly shown to have an advantage over classical all-atom refinement. RIBFIND2 is available via a web server with structure visualization and as a standalone tool
Worms: primordial jurisprudence and viral being
Get PDFDasein is radically open to the possibility of viral infection. Thinking through Dasein’s ruined constitution is the task for primordial jurisprudence. Juris-prudence is etymologically the ‘seeing’ of iuris: that which binds or obligates. Prudence is the projection forward from the condition of being bound. Juris-prudence is, of course, conventionally focused on the ways in which legal and moral/ethical rules bind us, but the wager of this paper is that we are bound in a more primordial way to our condition: a condition that is radically open to ill health and to reliance on others. However, this re-reading of Being and Time is not just an exercise in a ‘typology of death’(Heidegger, 1962, 291; 292-3). Viral being connects us with countless others. In the most extended sense, viral being can be seized by Dasein as a resolute response to common suffering. Dasein’s resolute response will enable the link to be made between Heidegger’s notion of conscience, the primordial meaning of hospital and juris-prudence. Primordial juris-prudence thus seeks to understand the ontological articulation of a mode of public responsibility or solidarity for the burden borne by all Dasein
Art and cybernetics: a new ontology for art
No full textDespite the disappearance of cybernetics from today’s disciplinary maps, its importance in shaping the course of postwar science cannot be underestimated. Historian Thomas Rid defines cybernetics as a ‘general theory of machines’, arguing that this new discipline emerging in the 1940s ‘transformed what computers stood for over the next half century — from machines of assured destruction to machines of living grace’. Contrary to a commonly held misconception, the influence of cybernetics on art, and of art on cybernetics, outweighs the spheres of digital and computer art. The history of cybernetics and art involves dancing sculptures and biomimetic bodies, plants entering the white-cube gallery space as agents, and electronic music being generated in the dialogue between humans, electricity, and objects. In this chapter I will discuss a definitive moment in this history: the exhibition ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, organised by Jasia Reichardt at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968. I contend that the ascent of cybernetics in art of the 1960s repositioned the machine as central to the making of art, and laid the ground for both embodied and disembodied understandings of interactivity, thereby reconceptualising the artwork as a life-like communicative system. Cybernetic art is a far cry from the semiotics-driven understanding of information in Conceptual art, which also came into prominence in the late 1960s. By contrast, cybernetic art consisted of neither representational nor conceptual artworks, but what we might call ontological objects: objects which, at the moment of their coming-to-life, stage open-ended performative encounters between themselves and multiple participants
The transnational and the local in the comparative law of finance: technics, politics, and the functions of commercial law
Get PDFIn the absence of a global regulator, transnational financial law emerges from the combination of national laws and the contractual practices developed by networks of private, public and hybrid private-public actors who contribute to the engineering and (self-)regulation of financial services largely through contracts. The theoretical question arises whether the process of transnationalisation might determine the dominance of economic rationality over other considerations, and whether a possible nationalisation of the transnational might instead produce a repoliticisation of the economic. Against this background, the article focuses on some of the instruments of transnational financial self-regulation, and considers how these interact ambivalently with local laws and judicial practices. By looking at the role of private law institutions and considering national litigation over financial contracts in different jurisdictions, the article reveals tensions between different objectives, ultimately raising questions about the function of commercial law both within and beyond the state
Temporale
No full textWhat happened to time during the Coronavirus pandemic lockdowns? Acclaimed novelist and essayist Marina Warner recounts how strangely her days and weeks passed, in this highly personal account of a response to lockdown in which she delves into her experience of Catholic convent schools for some clues as to how each day might be marked as significant. She discusses missals, almanacs, Roman and Revolutionary calendars, developing her thoughts into what amounts almost to a manifesto – for a new way of rendering each day different, memorable, human. Her text is accompanied by a further response to lockdown, by the Greek photographer Dimitris Kleanthis, whose haunting images somehow make visible the suspension-and-acceleration of time experienced by so many, while also hinting at how, to the eye that is acute enough, there may always be an event taking place
Michaël Ferrier, transnational novelist: French without borders
No full textThis book is the first ever monograph dedicated to
Ferrier’s works, which explore themes as various as
an African childhood, notions of Frenchness,
inter-identities, and post-Fukushima life in Japan.
It includes an exclusive interview with the writer,
which is rich in insights into Ferrier’s views on
dreams, Japan, the internet, and collaborating with
other artists
Frontline corruption and emigration in the Western Balkans
Get PDFHow does frontline corruption influence individuals’ decisions to emigrate? Existing research has found that perceptions of grand political corruption promote emigration, particularly among the highly educated. In this article, we shift the focus to the role of frontline corruption in driving emigration decisions and distinguish between the effects of the payment of bribes to frontline bureaucrats and those of nepotism in public employment. Using data from the Balkan Barometer for the period 2018–21, we find that both bribe-paying experiences and perceived public-sector nepotism are important emigration drivers. Our findings also reveal that more highly educated an individual is, the greater the influence of perceived nepotism on the emigration decision. However, the influence of first-hand experiences with bribery is larger and remains similar across education categories. Our analysis emphasizes the need to disaggregate the varied manifestations of corruption when examining the determinants of (high-skilled) emigration. This article contributes to our understanding of the drivers of emigration in the Western Balkans and the wider corruption–migration nexus
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