Using an international sample of firms, we investigate the career prospects of directors of firms experiencing negative ESG issues. By tracking the same director at the same firm over time, we document a significant drop in seats held at other public firms' boards following intense negative media coverage of an ESG problem occurring at a

There is a widespread belief that a credible threat of governmental intervention was necessary to prompt industry to intensify its self-regulatory efforts. However, using the example of self-regulation in the European intermodal transport industry, this article suggests that this belief needs to be refined. The European Commission's threat to tighten the regulatory framework directly led to the failure of self-regulation and, somewhat paradoxically, also triggered a political process at the end of which the existing regulatory framework was relaxed. Based on the theory of policy image and venue shifts, the article provides an explanation of the counterproductive und unintended effect of the shadow of hierarchy

Following Brexit, the rise of populist Eurosceptics across the EU, Central Eastern Europe's flirtation with 'illiberal democracy' and the sovereign debt crisis, which essentially still remains unresolved ten years after it started, even some of the EU's most enthusiastic supporters are today wondering whether the EU could actually break apart. In the paper, I propose the scenario-planning method to address this question and to think about the future of the EU in a structured way. While the method is already well established in the study of socio-technical systems, the paper tests its transferability to the political economy of the EU. Along two drivers, the material struggle to tame globalization and the ideational struggle to fill the void that is resulting from the deconstruction of neoliberalism, the paper maps four plausible pathways into alternative futures. I conclude with a discussion of the potential of scenario-planning to improve the transfer of knowledge from academia into practice.

No abstract

Industry-led technical standardization is often cited as an example for private governance. And the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Project is often presented as a particularly successful case of such governance without government. The successes of the industry-led DVB Project have often been cited as evidence for the superior governance capacity of private industry. While the commercial and engineering success of the DVB Project is unequivocal, this chapter raises the question whether it has been equally successful in governing a complex sector that is confronted by a range of market failures, with direct implications for important public policy objectives such as media pluralism and diversity.