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This study explores how financial executives retrospectively account for their crossing the line into financial statement fraud while acting within or reacting to a financialized corporate environment. We conduct our investigation through face-to-face interviews with 13 former C-suite financial executives who were involved in and indicted for major cases of accounting fraud. Five different themes of accounts emerged from the narratives, characterizing executives' fraud immersion as a meaning-making process by which the particulars of the proximal social context (the influence of social actors and contextual characteristics) and individual motivations collectively molded executives' vocabularies of fraud immersion. Our executives' narratives portray their fraud entanglement as typically occurring in small, incremental steps. Their accounts expand our understanding of the influence of socialization on executive-level financial fraud beyond the individualized focus of the fraud triangle model.

Informal settlements have become integral to the urban imagery of the cities across the global South. Forms of urban informality emerge and grow through some generative processes of self-organisation and incremental adaptations. While formal interventions have often failed to put an end to such a resilient and complex type of urbanism, the desire for eradication and demolishment still prevails. Most of the informal settlements can benefit from incremental upgrading and micro-scale design interventions, which then rely on a sophisticated understanding and analysis of informal morphologies and adaptations. However, forms of urban informality and adaptations of informal settlements are relatively understudied. This paper aims to explore informal morphologies and their incremental adaptations drawing on empirical evidence from the case study of Khlong Toei district in Bangkok (Thailand). Direct observation, visual recording, and urban mapping are the key research methods. Five different forms of informality and adaptations have been identified in this study. One of the findings of this study is that informal morphologies emerge in different forms at multiple scales. Another finding of this study is that informal adaptations are often similar across different informal morphologies. The findings of this paper contribute to the growing body of knowledge in urban morphology and informal urbanism.

The traditional Triple Helix innovation model focuses on university–industry–government relations. The Quadruple Helix innovation systems bring in the perspectives of the media-based and culture-based public as well as that of civil society. The Quintuple Helix emphasizes the natural environments of society, also for the knowledge production and innovation. Therefore, the quadruple helix contextualizes the triple helix, and the quintuple helix the quadruple helix. Features of the quadruple helix are: culture (cultures) and innovation culture (innovation cultures); the knowledge of culture and the culture of knowledge; values and lifestyles; multiculturalism, multiculture, and creativity; media; arts and arts universities; and multi-level innovation systems (local, national, global), with universities of the sciences, but also universities of the arts. The democracy of knowledge , as a concept and metaphor, highlights and underscores parallel processes between political pluralism in advanced democracy, and knowledge and innovation heterogeneity and diversity in advanced economy and society. The “mode 3” knowledge production system (MODE3KPS; expanding and extending the “mode 1” and “mode 2” knowledge production systems) is at the heart of the fractal research, education and innovation ecosystem. MODE3KPS universities or higher education systems are interested in integrating and combining mode 1 and mode 2. The concept of open innovation diplomacy (OID) encompasses the concept and practice of bridging distance and other divides (cultural, socioeconomic, technological, etc.) with focused and properly targeted initiatives to connect ideas and solutions with markets and investors ready to appreciate them and nurture them to their full potential. In this sense, OID qualifies as a new and novel strategy, policy-making, and governance approach in the context of the quadruple and quintuple innovation helices.

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) describes policy change as occurring mostly through incremental movements with infrequent periods of dramatic change. An impressive body of empirical literature relating to budgeting supports this view, but virtually all empirical tests have focused on examining distributions of annual changes, thus nullifying chronology. In this article, we focus on the time element. Using the same databases as previously used in canonical PET studies, we explore multi-year trends, not only annual observations. For our analyses, we identify directional series of changes (while allowing for one-year changes in direction if these are immediately offset in the following year) on a U.S. budget distribution dataset covering the period of 1947 through 2014, with 60 categories of spending consistently defined over time and adjusted for inflation. We then assess the robustness of the PET findings when incorporating a longer time units of trending series of annual changes into the analysis. We find that almost 65% of changes occur in series of 4 years or more. Nonetheless, the signature PET literature pattern of high kurtosis is equally present in these series as well as in shorter series. Moreover, within growing and trending series, we find that 21% of these series generate 80% of positive budget change. Within these series, we identify a small group of “super-trends” that account for a large share of the overall change. We conclude that expanding methodologies for the study of budgetary change to incorporate longer-term dynamics helps to better understand policy change, but such findings remain consistent with the PET perspective.

In northeast Brazil, fight-against-drought and cope-with-drought have been identified as two different drought policy paradigms. This article aims to examine the persistence, coexistence, intertwining, and evolution of these drought policy paradigms by studying how they inform national policy responses in human-water systems. The questions guiding our research are what do the paradigms of fight-against-drought and cope-with-drought consist of and how did the competing paradigms develop over time? To address these, the research draws on a systematic analysis of policy documents, multiannual strategic plans from 2000 to 2020 (the most recently published), and interviews with key informants. This study found the paradigms evolved with the persistence of the fight-against-drought paradigm with incremental changes of the cope-with-drought. The coexistence of paradigms started in 2004 and was in 2016 that the persistence, coexistence and intertwining of both were established. We use two theories, Hall’s (1993) policy and Lindblom’s (1959, 1979) incrementalism for analyzing the influences drought policy paradigms in human-water systems. This study provides new insights to understand the role of ideas in policy processes empirically showing how drought policy paradigms gradually evolve influencing policy responses.

Sustainable development requires changes in socio-technical systems and wider societal change - in beliefs, values and governance that co-evolve with technology changes. In this article we present a practical model for managing processes of co-evolution: transition management. Transition management is a multilevel model of governance which shapes processes of co-evolution using visions, transition experiments and cycles of learning and adaptation. Transition management helps societies to transform themselves in a gradual, reflexive way through guided processes of variation and selection, the outcomes of which are stepping stones for further change. It shows that societies can break free from existing practices and technologies, by engaging in co-evolutionary steering. This is illustrated by the Dutch waste management transition. Perhaps transition management constitutes the third way that policy scientists have been looking for all the time, combining the advantages of incrementalism (based on mutual adaptation) with the advantages of planning (based on long-term objectives).

The purpose of this research is to conduct two instrumental case studies, one from Finland and the other from Israel. These case studies explain ‘why’ and ‘how’ clear and significant differences exist between these two nations in the area of military innovation and adaptation. Research strategy is not to conduct a comparative case study, but results make it possible to find and evaluate operating methods suitable for building and safeguarding Finnish society in cooperation between private and public actors. The operating methods being studied focus on the early stages in the life cycle of developing military capability. This study utilises the inductive approach, in which data guide the research process. As the research progresses, new information is built on top of the acquired data, and the overall picture of the topic is constructed in an iterative manner. Contribution of the research are propositions that the Finnish Defence Forces would benefit from a competence-based strategic approach to partially replace the resource-based approach. A separate sub-strategy with its foundation in competence-based strategy is proposed for innovation activities. Results indicate that the excellence-based approach chosen by Israel that emerged in the case study and literature review has specifically produced results in the area of developing innovation activities.

Bureaucracy is a much-maligned feature of contemporary government. And yet the aftermath of September 11 has opened the door to a reassessment of the role of a skilled civil service in the survival and viability of democratic society. Here, Ezra Suleiman offers a timely and powerful corrective to the widespread view that bureaucracy is the source of democracy's ills. This is a book as much about good governance as it is about bureaucratic organizations. Suleiman asks: Is democratic governance hindered without an effective instrument in the hands of the legitimately elected political leadership? Is a professional bureaucracy required for developing but not for maintaining a democratic state? Why has a reform movement arisen in recent years championing the gradual dismantling of bureaucracy, and what are the consequences? Suleiman undertakes a comparative analysis of the drive toward a civil service grounded in the New Public Management. He argues that \"government reinvention\" has limited bureaucracy's capacity to adequately serve the public good. All bureaucracies have been under political pressure in recent years to reduce not only their size but also their effectiveness, and all have experienced growing deprofessionalism and politicization. He compares the impact of this evolution in both democratic societies and societies struggling to consolidate democratic institutions.Dismantling Democratic Statescautions that our failure to acknowledge the role of an effective bureaucracy in building and preserving democratic political systems threatens the survival of democracy itself.

Incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) have secured their standing in public policy research when studying change in budgetary data. On the other hand, however, new empirical evidence is constantly developed to confront it with theoretical assumptions. In line with the above, the aim of the paper is threefold. First, it is examined if budgetary outlays in Poland follow either incrementalism or PET's core premises. Second, the paper aims at facilitating discussion on identifying punctuations. It is claimed that any cut-off point should be data-driven, category-responsive, and generalizable across different types of outliers. And third, it is investigated which of the budget categories have the most punctuations. Methodologically, the study is based on descriptive and distributional statistics provided to tackle the above two issues comprehensively. Consequently, the paper aims at filling the gap in theory-driven literature on Polish budget shifts and their empirical rigorous explanations. Thus, it is claimed that the Polish case study contributes to the debate on the verification of empirical research on public policy agendas and public policy change.

The correct approach to the duty of care in tort has long been a source of judicial and academic controversy. The Irish Supreme Court’s decision in UCC v ESB is a landmark case in its development. In its judgment, the Supreme Court abandoned its former position in Glencar in which the duty of care analysis was treated as an integrated three or four-stage inquiry in which principle and policy consideration formed part of an integrated “test” at the frontier of liability. In UCC v ESB, the Court has by contrast adopted a robustly incremental approach to law-making in which policy, if it is relevant at all, is a background aid to making a legal decision as distinct from a self-standing consideration. This article critiques the Supreme Court’s analysis and, more broadly, casts doubt on the coherence and transparency of the “new incrementalism” in the Irish law of negligence.