Chapter 6 discusses the attempts of the European institutions, especially the European Commission and the European Parliament, to change the way in which corporations are structured and operate. This chapter tracks the European Commission’s initial ambitions to transform corporations by simultaneously improving their administrative capacity (due diligence) and reforming certain corporate fundamentals (civil liability and the remuneration of directors). After pushback by its own internal body, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission retreated from its more transformative plans, narrowing its focus mostly to due diligence. At the time of writing, however, even the resulting less ambitious proposal was facing intense (and to an extent even unexpected) resistance. Despite the drawbacks, there may be other avenues for the EU to transform corporations. In the last section, I discuss the possibilities for engaging more directly with the fundamentals of corporate activity – by legally facilitating those organisations consciously founded on different principles (ownership and governance), such as social enterprises, which are more distributive and inclusive by design.

The profit-maximisation problem (for production of one good) is introduced as motivation for the development of general optimisation techniques. The general concept of a critical (or stationary) point is presented, together with the method for finding such points and classifying their nature in two different ways: by examining the sign of the derivative around the point and by using the second-derivative test. Optimisation on intervals and infinite intervals is then discussed (where the end-points must be taken into consideration). Additional economic and financial applications are given.

In this concluding discussion, key aspects of Hellenistic economic development are discussed and related to the presence of military wage labourers. In particular, the presence of paid soldiers and a market for labour are connected to the increased production of goods and services for the market, to the period’s rapid and significant monetization, and to the apparent rise in private wealth generation and profit-seeking behaviour. As a key part of this argument, military wage labourers are discussed as the driving force behind the Hellenistic world’s budding market economy.

Advanced age affected the performance of mastery, and some slavers saw the declining fortunes of another as providing them with the opportunity to rise at their expense. Concerns with – and contests over – the authority of aged enslavers did not end at their death. Wealth generated by slaveholding needed to be passed on, and the quest for profit and status that animated southern enslavers saw ferocious disputes erupt over the transferal of property between generations. Contests over wills and inheritance help reveal the complex and contested relations between enslavers, intergenerational tension in the American South, and shifting social hierarchies shaped by the passage of time. Antebellum enslavers prized the presumption of authority and craved respect from family, kin, and community. And yet, in legal challenges to wills, deeds, and bills of sale recorded posthumously, antebellum southerners revealed the disregard they held for aged enslavers’ claims of dominion, and their willingness to trash the reputation of fellow “masters” both before and after death.

Having addressed exploitation and violence towards elders, the book moves to consider how some enslavers chose the less physical – but no less cruel – route of abandoning, selling, or simply neglecting enslaved people once they had become “old and broken.” Chapter 2 covers manumission laws and the efforts of enslavers to work around these; the significance of age to the dynamics of, and experiences in, the internal slave trade; and the tragic consequences of neglect for elders deemed unproductive by those whom enslaved them. Proslavery claims of “retirement” or of care from cradle-to-grave were no match for the economic self-interest of enslavers, small and large, and the driving force of slavery revolved around taking the “best years and the best strength” from enslaved people. This chapter shows how enslaved people understood this exploitative dynamic, and the horrifying consequences of it for Black elders, all too well

This chapter focuses on the institutions of middlebrow culture in America, exploring their role in disseminating and also critiquing modernism. The smart magazines, reprint series, and book clubs of the interwar and midcentury period worked to create new audiences for modernist writing and to make difficult texts more accessible. Yet the discourse of the middlebrow – with its emphasis on affective response and its skepticism about experiment – formed a counterpractice to modernist and New Critical formalism. Middlebrow institutions were oriented toward self-improvement and the education of taste, and debates raged about whether their effect was to democratize culture or to standardize it. The chapter considers the tastemakers of the era, ranging from Vanity Fair and The Crisis to the members of the Algonquin Round Table. It also discusses the novelists – such as Anita Loos and Sinclair Lewis - who satirized the culture of upward mobility that emerged in the US following World War I.

Much has changed in the fifty years since the passage of Title IX. Although opportunities for women have shifted from wholesale exclusion, full equality remains unrealized. Our findings reveal a series of institutional barriers, many of which are baked into the structure of college sports. Sex segregation, intransigent androcentric culture, and lackluster market demands impede women’s progress. This concluding chapter includes discussion of steps that could be taken to move toward improving equality, addressing the hurdles, and making inroads on the way to major policy shifts. We also consider the implications of our findings for understanding the possibilities for using policy to address the concerns of marginalized groups more generally. We discuss the ways in which addressing these concerns will also benefit inclusion for transgender and gender-diverse athletes. Institutional context and embedded hierarchies of power can constrain such groups’ possibilities in their quest toward equality and inclusion.

Chapter 4 provides the first empirical assessment of the pathways developed earlier in the book. It focuses on access to judicial remedy mechanisms, defined as any process initiated in the court of law. This chapter asks: how does confrontation shape governance outcomes in terms of access to legal remedy efforts? I draw from political science and legal scholarship on the logic of deterrence to illustrate how Institutional Strength represents an important pathway to judicial remedy mechanisms. The Corporate Characteristics pathway is developed by engaging with political economy and management scholarship to explain the ways in which firm-level characteristics (e.g. foreignness, profitability, and size) explain variation in access to judicial remedy. Finally, the Elevating Voices pathway draws from the human rights scholarship, which illustrates how civil society participation (e.g. NGO or INGO involvement) can shape governance outcomes. Using case studies from the CHRD, this chapter also provides rich illustrations of victims’ access to judicial remedy mechanisms.

Chapter 5 explores the same pathways but draws on different scholarship, as non-judicial remedy mechanisms represent a much broader set of administrative or mediation-based activities that can be initiated by state or non-state actors. The Institutional Strength pathway explores how rule of law influences access to non-judicial remedy. To inform the mechanisms that drive the Corporate Characteristics and Elevating Voices pathways, this chapter employs slack resource theory to explain why profitable firms might be more likely to engage in socially responsible practices, such as non-judicial remedy. This approach suggests that when firms have the slack, or extra resources to do good deeds, they will do so. Other scholars explore how firm size can also shape firm involvement in such activities; larger firms are more vulnerable to civil society pressure and, thus, may be more likely to engage in non-judicial remedy mechanisms. Detailed vignettes provide concrete illustrations of victims’ efforts to access to non-judicial remedy mechanisms.

There are often claims that competition law does not or should not apply to entities that operate on a not-for-profit basis. Operating on a not-for-profit is not however accepted as a reason to exclude an entities activities from the scope of competition law. Competition law is applied to non-profit providers and this essay identifies a number of ways in which not-for-profit status can influence the way the law is applied. It then considers whether, particularly when not-for-profit entities are competing with for-profit entities, whether and why modifications in the application of the law are justified.

Shareholder value maximization is the law. It ought to be the law. This is, in part, because the chief alternative available in liberal democratic societies – stakeholder capitalism – is fundamentally flawed. If executives such as those who signed the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement on corporate purpose really tried to run their companies according to the altruistic principles laid out therein, they would find it an impossible task. Developing the set of objective and quantifiable metrics necessary to operationalize stakeholder capitalism will prove an intractable problem. Even if the requisite set of metrics could be designed, boundedly rational managers cannot reasonably be expected to balance the huge number of competing factors necessary to account for the varied interests of the firm’s many constituencies.

Defines the terms corporation, corporate purpose, shareholder value maximization, stakeholders, stakeholder capitalism, corporate social responsibility, and ESG (environmental, social, and governance). Provides the plan of the work.

Stakeholder capitalism results in a loss of accountability, as executives who are responsible to everyone are responsible to no one. Stakeholder capitalism would be extremely difficult to implement. Proposed means of doing so – such as constituency boards, codetermination, and team production – are all unworkable. Stakeholder capitalism is inconsistent with democratic capitalism. Shareholder value maximization is the result that would emerge if shareholder and stakeholders could bargain (the so-called hypothetical bargain). Shareholder capitalism is pro-social. The profit motive results in socially efficient resource allocation. The profit motive is an essential motivational spark for innovation. The profit motive promotes freedom.

This chapter discusses known motives of female serial killers (FSKs). FSKs’ most common motive for murder was financial gain. An evolutionary psychology model of serial murder is presented. The author discusses how killing children, the antithesis of genesmanship, may be understood from an evolutionary angle. The author reminds the reader that evolved psychology is not an absolute determinant of behavior and that multiple perspectives (e.g., clinical, neural, traumagenic) should be considered to understand a given behavior or mental process. This chapter also presents the outcome (disposition) of serial murder cases in that about 80% were sent to prison, with some receiving the death penalty. This chapter further presents a composite of the “typical” female serial killer (FSK) as described in Harrison et al. (2015) in The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology. The author revisits the case of Kristen Gilbert, a FSK whose motives did not neatly fall into a lone typology category. The cases of Judy Buenoano, Rhonda Belle Martin, Lydia Sherman, and Kimberly Clark Saenz illustrate chapter concepts.

Announcing victory in the Trojan War, the Herald has been seen as a cheerful character, thoroughly enjoying life. Why, then, does he dwell on his own grave from the moment of his arrival? Why does he attempt to silence lament and, unsuccessfully, any speech about his fallen companions? The Herald never directly mentions the afterlife and insists on treating death as the end of all ties to life. Nevertheless, his approach to his own death and to the war dead serves as indispensable background for the rest of the trilogy. The Herald’s traumatized approach to warfare and death contrasts with his official function. His attempt at guiding social memory excludes the dead as impinging on society’s profit (kerdos) or glory from war. He reckons them out of the account with the language of calculation and voting. We thus see individual and societal values being formed in response to death as closure, in ways the Oresteia will later overturn and complicate. Moreover, the Herald provides the first mention of heroes as worshipped beings, of Hades, and of the “unseen” forces that affect human fate.

Taking as its starting point a little-known text by George Buck entitled The Third Universitie (1615) and as its endpoint the early years of the Royal Society, this chapter explores seventeenth-century knowledge exchange, research networks and innovation. What began as a civic challenge to Oxbridge ended in an outward-facing institutional sphere that drew its inspiration, founding figures and key personnel from the archipelagic and colonial contexts within which its pioneering interests developed. The Royal Society’s origins lie in a range of institutions identified by Buck, including Gresham College; in later developments such as the Invisible College and the Hartlib Circle; and in the idea for a directory of expertise, or ‘Office of Address’. Colonial investors and adventurers hard-wired into emerging networks of experts working across collaborative communities of scholar-practitioners ensured the advancement of knowledge was intimately intertwined with political intelligence and economic exploitation. There was no new medicine without frontiers, no new husbandry without fresh fields to plant, and, crucially, no knowledge exchange without satire.