Monday morning

Time for elevenses, after reading and commenting on the delayed literature review which arrived first thing. Not a bad effort, the student has done a great deal of relevant reading but it needs a bit of restructuring. And the referencing is poor. I can understand why international students sometimes confuse authors' first names and surnames but misspelling names is very careless and if a citation in the text does not appear in the references my plagiarism detector goes into full alert.

I have been dipping into a weighty tome entitled "The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Governance"

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199642007.do#.Ub7dtvZ4anM

The book has four editors. Editing such a volume must be a real labour of love: everyone I know who has produced an edited book has found it a struggle, even with the most co-operative of contributors.  I've been asked to edit a special issue of a journal but I'm still pondering whether I want to deal with the hassle: a book must be much worse.

The copy editing of the Handbook leaves something to be desired but having struggled with this with our book, with only two authors and the OUP subcontracting system, I'm not surprised. The use of "forward" for "foreword" on page 57 jumped off the page at me. And a reference to "the Cadbury Review" jarred: perhaps working on the book has made me ultra sensitive but how can I correct students' citation errors when the books they rely on for sound scholarship on which to base their work are not reliably accurate? Although published in the UK, all the spelling is US style: behavior and labor are especially noticeable.

And why a "handbook"? It's far too big even for two hands and, to me, a handbook implies something practical, a ready reference source, a manual. This book is not really any of those although it provides comprehensive overviews of a range of topics.

I began by reading the chapter on the history of corporate governance. It is a comprehensive account but, written by a North American legal scholar it takes, as one might expect, a very US-centric approach. I see that I referred to the SSRN draft of this book chapter in my blog post on 30 Dec 2011. In his reply to my message, the author said that he would seek out and include a citation to the Eells book I referred him to ,as an early use of the term "corporate governance", but in the event he obviously didn't think it was important enough to do so. I think that the way such a term, used initially by single individuals, is then adopted more widely and evolves in meaning, is of significant interest in tracing the history of a concept.

I was more interested in the chapter on boards and governance which reports a longitudinal qualitative study conducted by Annie Pye. The insights from this work are very valuable in considering, among other issues, the impact of regulation over time: "Increasing regulation merely indicates increasing one's trust in a system of regulation  rather than increasing trust in the behavior or people being regulated." (p152)

Next I turned to the chapters on board committees and on auditing and was pleased to see my work cited in both, although, where the citation just appears in a list of similar ones in parentheses at the end of a sentence with no other comment, it is difficult to see what the authors might have gleaned from my work. I suppose that's better than where an author has got hold of the wrong end of the stick, though.

I'll save the chapters on nonprofits and financialisation for later.

Following an alert to a paper which looked interesting, I found that, among the acknowledgements, delegates at the Brussels workshop last year were thanked. But although the paper was accepted for the workshop, I remember that neither author actually attended.... This resonated with this article in today's Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-bad-science-scandal-how-factfabrication-is-damaging-uks-global-name-for-research-8660929.html

It will be interesting to see how this requirement filters down into the university bureaucracy.