By employing the theoretical template provided by agency theory, this article contributes a detailed clinical analysis of a large multinational Canada-headquartered telecommunications company, Nortel. Our analysis reveals a twenty-first century norm of usual suspects: a CEO whose compensation is well above those of his peers, a dysfunctional board of directors, acts of income smoothing to preserve the confidence of volatile investors, and revelations of financial irregularities followed by a downfall. In many ways, the spectacular rise and – sudden – fall (...) of Nortel illustrates excesses of actors within, and contradictions of the system of corporate governance implied by the agency model. Furthermore, this case illustrates limitations of the agency framework in complex situations with short-term oriented investors. (shrink)

By employing the theoretical template provided by agency theory, this article contributes a detailed clinical analysis of a large multinational Canada-headquartered telecommunications company, Nortel. Our analysis reveals a twenty-first century norm of usual suspects: a CEO whose compensation is well above those of his peers, a dysfunctional board of directors, acts of income smoothing to preserve the confidence of volatile investors, and revelations of financial irregularities followed by a downfall. In many ways, the spectacular rise and – sudden – fall (...) of Nortel illustrates excesses of actors within, and contradictions of the system of corporate governance implied by the agency model. Furthermore, this case illustrates limitations of the agency framework in complex situations with short-term oriented investors. (shrink)

May not one succeed in systemizing confusion and so assist the total discrediting of the world of reality?What is wanted of such a vantage point is that it do justice to the twin aspects of art: as object and as function, as artifice and as living form of consciousness, as the overcoming or supplementing of reality and as the making explicit of forms encountering reality, as autonomous individual creation and as dependent historical phenomenon.The social condition labeled "postmodernism" threatens human creation (...) and significance by denying the existence of reality. One has difficulty resisting postmodernism because doing so would presume that postmodern theory is coherent and unified; it is also erroneous to .. (shrink)

Perhaps more than any other type of artist, visual artists have the unfair impediment of being asked what their work means. The response to such an inane question is often a thinly veiled frustration at the spectator’s inability to tangle with what is present before him. It may be that our evolutionary reliance on sight informs all of our senses to the point that they no longer work together but operate under a sort of hierarchy. Our perception of reality is (...) to first see an object, then name it, touch it, hear it, smell it, and so on. Yet still, we remain unable to totally apprehend an artistic piece when it represents an object differently than what we expect. As viewers of art, we’ve come to accept a .. (shrink)