Browsing Ph.D. theses by Title

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Essays on market discipline in commercial and central banking

Forssbæck, Jens (Frederiksberg, 2009)

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Abstract:

The thesis studies how financial markets discipline commercial and central banks’ behavior in various ways. In the first part, two papers test different aspects of market discipline of commercial banks’ risk taking, using a dataset of several hundred banks worldwide. In the first paper, it is shown that the risk-shifting opportunity of shareholders introduced by deposit insurance depends on ownership structure and the extent of market discipline by uninsured creditors. I find that the effect of shareholder control on risk is convex, and that creditor discipline tempers this effect but has little individual influence on risk. The second paper tests the monitoring dimension of market discipline and formulates a two-step procedure which makes it possible to sidestep the common methodological problem that banks’ ‘true’ risk is unobserved. Results suggest that if the quality of institutions is sufficiently high, some market-based indicators may be more accurate measures of banks’ true risk than a set of commonly used accounting-based benchmark indicators – a possibility effectively precluded by much of previous research. In the second part of the thesis, three papers study constraints on central bank behavior introduced by financial markets, using data from a set of small, open European economies during the 1980s and 1990s. The first of these papers tests how capital account liberalization and exchange-rate regime constrain monetary policy autonomy. Contrary to traditional theory, the paper finds no autonomy effect of exchange rate flexibility, whereas capital controls provided some (albeit limited) independence from innovations in foreign money market interest rates. The remaining two papers address how deregulation, innovation, and growth in domestic money markets interplay with central banks’ choices of monetary policy operating procedures. The analysis of the European countries suggests that while deregulation and the emergence of short-term financial markets constrained central bank discretion and compelled increased reliance on open market operations, the paths of money market development in different countries were also partially determined by the respective central banks’ decisions. In the final paper, the same framework of analysis is applied to China, which has announced its intention to rely increasingly on market operations in monetary policy. The results suggest that the disciplining effect of domestic financial markets on central bank behavior in China is so far very small, largely due to remaining de facto financial repression.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7785

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EU Law on Food Naming

The prohibition against misleading names in an internal market context

Rørdam, Mette Ohm (Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Abstract:

This thesis investigates how food naming is regulated in the European Union with the aim to structure and explain the different rules regulating food naming and the interactions between the different rules, thereby clarifying de lege lata. Further, the thesis sets out to determine to what degree the Member States within the EU are free to regulate the naming of imported as well as domestically produced food, by way of legislation and/or by enforcement of the prohibition against misleading names. The interaction between the prohibition against misleading names and the obligation to mutually recognise names which have been legally used in other Member States are central in this thesis. The first part of the thesis introduces the thesis subject and provides an explanation to the approaches taken. The empirical data used for identifying practical real-life cases concerning potentially misleading names is presented. The second part of the thesis elaborates on the various EU rules in secondary law, their scope and objectives, including an examination of the rationales behind the rules based on application of economic theory. The borderlines between the rules are clarified. Part three of the thesis contains legal dogmatic analyses and discussions of the different EU rules regulating food naming. The analyses of the rules are based on practical real-life cases in which food naming has shown to be a challenging task. The difficulties addressed relate to: precision of names (the task of finding a name precise enough to provide adequate information to consumers without narrowing the product’s competitive field); product identity (difficulties in naming products that refer to specific ingredients and in which traditional ingredients have been replaced); the use of geographical names (which potentially mislead consumers) and language difficulties. In the last chapter of part three an analysis is provided of the concept of fairness and general prohibition against misleading consumers in order to clarify the criteria for applying these in real-life cases. Despite the existence of rather detailed rules on naming and labelling of food, which provides clarity in relation to food naming, the application of these rules is dependent on consumers’ expectation and potentially deception which must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, whereby the predictability of the rules is weakened. Part four of the thesis focuses on the borderlines between primary and secondary EU law and on answering the second part of the research question. Primary EU law defines the fundamental borderlines for EU law on food names and limits how food legislation can and must be applied. First part of this analysis focuses on the naming of imported food products, while the second part focuses on the naming of domestically produced food. The relevant sources of law are analysed and discussions are provided. It is concluded that the principle of mutual recognition takes precedence over the prohibition against misleading names, which prevents Member States from regulating the naming of imported food, by way of legislation and by enforcement of the prohibition against misleading names. Secondary EU law also limits how Member States can regulate the naming of domestically produced food. Part five provides the conclusion to the research question.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8670

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The evolution of innovation strategy

Studied in the context of medical device activities at the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk A/S in the period 1980-2008

Stjernholm Madsen, Arne (Frederiksberg, 2012)

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Abstract:

Increased globalization in business competition makes the ability to innovate and to redefine strategy crucial to a company. An interesting question however is if a management team can control innovation and strategic renewal of the company at all; or do such changes emerge, driven by external events or by bottom-up processes in the organization? The present research project addresses some of these issues through the overall research question “How does innovation strategy evolve?” The research question is examined in a specific empirical context. Since 2001, I have worked as an internal innovation consultant at Novo Nordisk A/S; a pharmaceutical firm founded in 1923 operating in a well established industry (insulin for diabetes treatment), characterized by intensive investments in Research and Development. I took advantage of this unique access to the internal life of an organization and consequently set up my research project as a longitudinal in-depth case study of the medical device innovation activities at Novo Nordisk A/S covering the period 1980-2008. The study specifically analyzes the relationship between the classic core product of the firm (insulin) and complementary products (medical devices, such as insulin ‘pens’), which hold the potential to either enhance the value of the core product, or to become a distinct business of its own. Burgelman’s evolutionary theory of strategy making, especially his ‘internal ecology model’ (Burgelman 1991, 2002), has been chosen as the basic theoretical framework for the project. Some expansions of this framework, however, were needed. First, the present study puts greater emphasis on analyzing the external environment and its influence on internal strategy processes. Second, the analysis includes the role of management cognition, especially the notion of the corporate dominant logic (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986; Bettis & Prahalad, 1995), understood as an enduring top management worldview or mindset based on reinforcement of experiences from the past. With regard to results, the present study identifies a more entrepreneurial role of the top management driven induced strategy process than traditionally described in evolutionary theory. In this case study, strategic variation and trial-and-error learning is not restricted to the autonomous initiatives in the ‘internal ecology’; on the contrary, top management cognition creates strategic visions or hypotheses, which are enacted as experiments in the market, for example in the form of new product categories. External feedback determines the destiny of these strategic experiments. Thereby innovation strategy (in case, for medical devices) serves as a strategic laboratory at corporate level, so to speak. The device-based strategic experiments face the challenge of escaping the gravity of the dominant logic, which repeatedly pulls the strategy back towards the well-known success formula, centered on the drug itself (i.e. the insulin). Thus, the induced strategy process mediates core assets (pharmaceutical drugs) and complementary assets (medical devices), by swinging the pendulum between cycles of innovation strategy which define the devices as core or complementary respectively. Hence, the balance between what is defined as core and what is defined as complementary in the corporate innovation strategy seems to be dynamic and negotiable. As a consequence of the cycles of strategic experimentation, the corporate induced strategy process acts as a force of strategic entrepreneurship, seen over extended time. The implications for research point towards a new paradigm of strategic research in the ‘middle ground’ between rational choice theory and evolutionary theory, as proposed by Gavetti & Levinthal (2004). The present research project suggests that a firm’s ability for strategic adaptation depends both on strategic context determination of autonomous initiatives in the ‘internal ecology’ and on ability to enact induced strategic experiments with alternating innovation strategies in the market. This theory of ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ strategic search establishes a dynamic understanding of the corporate induced strategy process. In this understanding, innovation strategies act as hypotheses, which create strategic dissonance between vision and reality and thereby drive strategic learning. The implications for management practice are first recognition of how fortunate it has been for Novo Nordisk to sustain the core business strategy, protected by the dominant logic. This fact relates to a background where the core market proved to hold immense growth potential, and the industry was relatively stable compared to for instance the IT industry. On the other hand, Novo Nordisk’s success is partly due to cycles of strategic experiments with complementary assets for innovation, in case medical devices. Top management initiated these explorative experiments and the learning was utilized for expansion of the position within the core business. Hence, one can conclude that a company should explore and utilize the value of complementary assets, since these are perfect tools for strategic experimentation without risking the core business.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8453

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Fickle Commitment. Fostering political engagement in ‘the flighty world of online activism’

Uldam, Julie (Frederiksberg, 2010)

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Abstract:

In the wake of increasing disillusion with the potential of alternative online media for providing social movements with a virtual space for self-representation and visibility (Atton, 2002; Downing, 2001; Rodriguez, 2001) activists have been adopting online social media into their media practices. With their popular appeal and multimodal affordances social media such as YouTube and Facebook have reinvigorated hopes for the potential of the internet for providing social movements such as the Global Justice Movement, which is often misrepresented as a homogeneous and in a negative light in the mass media (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993; Juris, 2008), with new possibilities for promoting self-representations to wider publics – beyond the echo chambers of alternative media (Cammaerts, 2007; Sunstein, 2001). In the mediation of institutional politics the increasing use of popular online spaces has brought about the term ’YouTube‐ification of Politics’ (Turnsek and Jankowski, 2008). However, two challenges remain: the first relates to fragmentation – the internet’s properties as a ‘pull-medium’ is argued to merely connect likeminded users (Cammaerts, 2007: 138). The second relates to ’lazy politics’ – the internet’s ephemeral properties are argued to facilitate brief participation in single-issue campaigns that fails to foster political engagement (Fenton, 2008a: 52). This thesis focuses on the latter. It addresses the possibilities of popular online spaces for fostering collective solidarity and political engagement in social movement organisations. It explores how these possibilities are played out in the online arena of popular sites employed by the two London-based social movement organisations: the World Development Movement (WDM) and War on Want. Drawing on the cases of WDM and War on Want, the thesis addresses three dimensions of these practices, exploring (1) rationales for using popular online spaces to promote the SMO agenda; (2) the social movement organisations’ online campaigns; and (3) members’ identifications with the campaigns through discourse analysis and interviews with SMO directors, campaign, outreach and web officers as well as SMO members. It is by analysing how SMOs use different online spaces as locations for strategic framing and the formation of political identities that we can begin to study how the internet may contribute to an agonistic public sphere where also voices of dissent are heard. The thesis is based on Mouffe’s understanding of politics and the political as grounded in discourse but also based on a view of political engagement as conflictual, affective and sometimes irrational (Cammaerts, 2007; Fenton, 2009; Mouffe, 2005). Even though this does not mean that SMOs do not apply rational considerations in planning their strategic agendas for public visibility and legitimacy, it does mean that the study of these considerations need to take into account this dual character of political discourse as both rational and affective (Hajer and Versteeg, 2005). Therefore, we need to consider instrumental and affective issues to understand the relationship between strategic protest and the underlying dynamics of intragroup commitment (Griggs and Howarth, 2002; Snow et al., 1986) – the interconnections between strategy and identity, external resonance and internal commitment. In this way, the democratic potentialities of the internet can be seen as not only related to the ways in which SMOs communicate their agenda but also to potentialities for forging political identities and commitment (Fenton, 2008a).

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http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8211

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Foundational hybridity and its reproduction

Security sector reform in Sierra Leone

Albrecht, Peter Alexander (Frederiksberg, 2012)

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The thesis argues that security sector reform (SSR) has failed according to its own ambition of establishing a ‘centrally governed state’. A primary reason for this failure is found in the concept of authority that state-building projects and much of the academic work that underpins it. Since the late 1990s, internationally supported efforts to make and consolidate peace in Sierra Leone have been synonymous with SSR. Support was given by the United Kingdom (UK) in particular to contain and ultimately overhaul the armed forces, which staged two coups in 1992 and 1997. Support was also provided to the central government to institute national security coordination and intelligence organizations, and to reestablish the Sierra Leone Police (SLP). The collapsed, but internationally recognized state was to be rebuilt, and security was seen as not only a prerequisite for this process to begin, but its very foundation. The first question of the thesis revolves around why the western universalist state concept came to guide SSR in Sierra Leone, and why it was considered of such fundamental importance to stability internationally. The second question revolves around how to conceptualize authority when actors such as paramount and lesser chiefs that may neither be categorized as state nor non-state are the primary makers of order in rural areas of the country. Speaking of the weakness or failure of a state is a way of describing what it is not, namely a centrally governed set of institutions that is able to make order within the territorial space that defines it. A focus on the state as an analytical concept does not, however, tell us much about how order is then made, and by whom it is made in Sierra Leone. The thesis rethinks what authority is in a way that does not privilege ‘the state’ as an analytical category, a tendency that has dominated much policy and academic thinking. The thesis’ empirical basis of doing so is data relating to international policy-making processes, interviews among the key actors of Sierra Leone’s SSR process, and ethnographic fieldwork in Peyima, a small diamond mining town in Kamara Chiefdom, Kono District. In a view of authority tied to ‘the state’ lies the conceptualization of a political entity, a bordered power container, which stands above, is detached from, and at the same time encompasses, controls and regulates society. In UK support of Sierra Leone’s statebuilding efforts, the practices of traditional leaders and their productive effects in the justice and security field, and enforcing order, were acknowledged. However, failure to respond adequately to their central role in governing Sierra Leone’s countryside came in two ways, both of which are related to concepts of the western universalist state that continue to guide SSR. The first failure was embedded in misrecognizing the resilience and productivity of local actors and institutions, and their authority to appropriate, interpret, translate and above all shape the elements of what was offered through SSR. The second failure came in not recognizing the hybrid nature of all actors in the justice and security field, based on the fact that they draw authority to act within the field from numerous sources across physical and symbolic space, in local and national domains. Hybridity is integral to state formation in Sierra Leone. It is foundational, and is historically grounded in the colonial era, articulating an infinite mixture of various forms of authority (from state legislation to status of autochthony and secret society membership). Inevitably, this order was reproduced by SSR, even if the aim of the international actors who supported this process of change had been to eradicate it.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8549

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Franske adjektivisk afledte adverbier, der tager præpositionssyntagmer indledt med præpositionen à som argumenter

En valensgrammatisk undersøgelse

Skot-Hansen, Annemette (Frederiksberg, 2009)

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Abstract:

The purpose of this dissertation is to map the valency structure of a subset of the French adverbs. More specifically, the dissertation seeks to answer the following questions: What valency structure follows from the lexical content of the adverbs investigated? What is the nature of the semantic relation established? What is the status of the valents relative to the adverb and relative to other valents? The empirical object of investigation is focused on adverbs derived from adjectives which take prepositional phrases headed by the preposition à as their complement. In addition, the delimitation chosen for this dissertation is a class of adverbs which share the feature that they carry the suffix -ment, which developed from the Latin noun mens, meaning “spirit/thought/mood/tenor”. It is argued that the fusion of an adverb and mens establishes the general meaning [in an adjective spirit/thought/mood/tenor], i.e. the adverb retains the general quality denoted by the adjective, but the meaning targets the verb situation (at clause level) or the quality (at phrasal level) which saturates the argument of the adverb. Following tradition, the analysis adopted here, takes the verb situation to be realised by the predicate, and the quality to be realised by an adjective phrase, which may be realised by a past participle or, in rare cases, by another adverb. Since the valent is required by the lexical content of the adverb, it is assumed, following Herslund and Sørensen, that the valent is a fundamental valent. Another important feature of the adverbs which are analysed in this dissertation is that they establish a relation between two entities. This means that in addition to its fundamental valent, the adverb takes a further valent which it links with the fundamental valent. This second valent is referred to as the second valent of the adverb. The two valents are analysed as two relata in a relation. Unlike the fundamental valent, the second valent is always at phrasal level. When the adverb functions at clausal level, the second valent is realised as the prepositional object of the preposition phrase headed by à. This realisation is, however, not possible when the adverb functions at phrasal level. It is argued that this is a consequence of the fact that it is impossible to insert other constituents between the adverb and the adjective, adverb or participle which is modified by the adverb. The result is that where the second valent is realised, the adverb moves from preposition to postposition relative to its fundamental valent. In the data investigated the second valent denotes very different entities such as situations denoted by verbs and qualities, but also objects and abstract entities. The individual adverbs which are investigated here each determine their valency. In general there are different sources that allow us to uncover the core meaning of a word. The sources chosen in this dissertation are: the semantic roles assigned by the adverbs, their symmetry, elements of shared semantics or partial synonymy, their morphology and etymological roots. In order to bring together these different sources, the dissertation postulates a denotation design for each adverb. The etymology of the adverbs has been a particularly helpful in determining the relation and valency they establish. In addition to adverb and adjective suffixes, the majority of the adverbs investigated have a preposition in their synchronic morphological make-up which denotes a relation between two entities: some adverbs contain both a preposition and a morpheme from another word class, e.g. comparativement and subséquemment, while others contain only a preposition, e.g. antérieurement and postérieurement. A very small subset does not contain a preposition, but only a single adverb morpheme which denotes the relation in question, so, for instance, the adjectives par and similis, which have formed pareillement and semblablement, denote a relation between two relata. From an etymological perspective, a few adverbs, such as latéralement, do not denote a relation – so it is only through the formal realisation of the preposition phrase that the relation is established. The dissertation maps the etymological and morphological structure of the adverb and the range of functions that the adverb and its valents can have at clausal and phrasal level. The function of the adverb is relevant to the extent that the function affects its semantics and its valency structure. The effect of function is seen in some adverbs when they operate on clausal or on phrasal level and in other adverbs when they modify entire clauses or just the verb.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7944

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From Disinterestedness to Engagement

Towards Relational Leadership In the Cultural Sector

Friis Møller, Søren (Frederiksberg, 2012)

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The thesis is an inquiry into how leadership is performed narratively in the cultural sector. Chapter 1 draws the cultural sector as a narrative landscape, and the reader is invited on a tour around this narrative landscape as seen through the eyes of some of the top guns in the cultural sector. Seen from this vantage, leadership in the cultural sector seems to be predominantly performed by relating narratives with reference to the metanarrative of the Enlightenment. The inquiry, however, draws on Lyotard (1984) to argue that such extralinguistic legitimization is in a crisis of legitimacy, wherefore the inquiry embarks on a problematization of the dominant understanding of leadership in the cultural sector with the activist aspiration of suggesting a postmoderning understanding of leadership in the cultural sector being performatively legitimized. Chapter 2 argues in favor of a relational, non-entitative understanding of narratives and it points to emplotment as a process of finding the best fit. This relational understanding of narratives allows the project to inquire into leadership performed narratively in all kinds of empirical settings, not confining itself to formal leadership contexts. Chapter 3 offers a genealogic approach to what the project has defined as the dominant narrative in the cultural sector, the narrative of art for art’s sake (the AFAS narrative), which the project argues function as an implicit standard. This includes notions of aesthetic autonomy such as suggested by Kant in 1790, artistic freedom and art for its own sake such as claimed by artists in the Romantic era, and the arm’s length principle as the ‘constitution of cultural policies’ in the post WW2 Western world. Chapter 4 provides an overview of alternative voices which have challenged the dominant narrative. These include post colonial studies, cultural entrepreneurial studies and consumer behavior studies which in various ways propose alternative ways to lead and support the cultural sector. Chapter 5 links the discussions in chapter 3 and chapter 4 to leadership studies, notably to discussions of leader-centered orientations versus leading relationally orientations. The chapter concludes by suggesting a new sensibility towards understanding leadership and meditates on how this might be achieved, paying attentions to the possibilities of overcoming the putative crisis of legitimacy the inquiry is placed in. Chapter 6 relates a case-study of Malmoe City Library which endeavors into a difficult, yet very promising process of reformulating what a library may become in a contemporary context. This process challenges the dominant narrative and thus the current understanding of what a library should be, and this deviation from the dominant narrative challenges leadership. Chapter 7 assembles three different approaches to challenges the dominant narrative and to make new interpretive resources available to the understanding of leadership in the cultural sector. First, givrum.nu, a social movement working with arts, second, Mogens Holm, a leader in the cultural sector in a transition phase, and third, Copenhagen Phil, a classical symphony orchestra striving to avoid becoming a parallel society phenomenon. These case studies are conducted as written interviews with the cases, in an attempted un-edited form to also introduce relational processes informed by a power with relation to my own research project. Chapter 8 reflects on the case-studies in chapter 6 and chapter 7 in light of the two approaches to leadership discussed in chapter 5. It does so by linking my study to relational leadership theory in order to see how this theoretical field might inform my inquiry and how my inquiry might inform this field. It equally offers five possible reconstructions of the cases before concluding the research project by summing up contributions to the empirical field and the research fields, as well as by pointing to areas which could be further developed in future research. In line with the aspirations of the relational constructionist framework of the project, the inquiry does not offer a conclusion. Instead it encourages further reconstructions, thus submitting itself to the performative legitimization it argues in favor of.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8590

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Abstract:	Afhandlingen består af en introduktion og fire selvstændige kapitler. kapitlerne omhandler dels forskellige aspekter af valutakurseksponering og dels prisfastsættelse af valutakursrisiko, og alle de empiriske data er gennemført på danske data.
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7926