Search Results (119)

This essay examines six depictions of the 1898 suicide of New Zealand businessman and politician William Larnach: four historical narratives and two dramatic/fictional depictions. Drawing on the insights of postmodern historiographers like Hayden White, I argue that these tellings reflect an increasing influence of the Hippolytus myth, a culturally authorized narrative rooted in traditional British colonial education structures and Antipodean reception of classics. In particular, as New Zealand shifted away from British identification to a distinctly Kiwi identity, classics legitimized New Zealand culture within a global north from which the Antipodean nation is geographically isolated. Analyzing depictions of Larnach’s death and the possible incestuous scandal leading up to it reveals important historiographic insights both into how history is conceptualized and emplotted and into how Antipodean cultures navigate their positions on the fringes of a larger global north primarily seated in Europe and North America. Full article

This paper examines “film as a medium of religious experience and moral imagination” in contemporary Russia through the legal–moral politics of “insulting religious feelings.” Using the controversy over Aleksei Uchitel’s Matilda (2017) as a case study, it analyzes how the portrayal of Nicholas II’s premarital romance was construed as sacrilegious and mobilized by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and State actors to police the boundaries of the sacred and public morality. Read alongside the Pussy Riot (2012) and Tannhäuser (2015) scandals, the case illuminates how claims of offense structure ROC-Kremlin bargaining over “traditional values”, showing how these values are articulated through references to Romanov memory and the sacralized figure of Nicholas II. Drawing on ROC statements, appeals to historical memory, and State responses to protests, the article reassesses what the film, and its reception, reveal about Church-State equilibrium in post-Soviet Russia. Full article

This paper conceptualizes institutional resilience as a core condition of democratic sustainability in post-transition Europe. Building on neo-institutionalist approaches and recent scholarship on democratic resilience, we argue that democracies endure when three capacities align: policy coherence, procedural legitimacy, and civic/monitory participation. Using a comparative, theory-guided design, we analyze Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia (2007–2025), triangulating V-Dem/Eurostat indicators with documentary evidence (EU Rule of Law reports, CEPEJ) and interpretive analysis. Romania illustrates “reactive resilience” anchored in judicial independence and civic vigilance; Slovakia shows “restorative resilience” after corruption scandals; Poland exhibits “societal compensatory resilience,” where civic mobilization offsets institutional regression; Hungary demonstrates “instrumental resilience without democracy,” combining administrative capacity with normative decay. We integrate these findings into a three-dimensional model—institutional, normative, and communicative—showing how feedback loops convert crisis into learning. The paper concludes that sustainable democracy depends less on constitutional design alone and more on the institutionalization of learning: redundant veto points, impartial procedures that generate trust, and a monitory public sphere that sustains continuous accountability. For EU policy, the shift from conditionality to capacity (e.g., RRF) can foster endogenous resilience when supranational norms are domestically internalized rather than externally imposed. Full article

Recent decades have seen a rise of anti-science rhetoric, fueled by scientific scandals and failures of peer review, and the rise of trainable generative AI spreading misinformation. We argue, moreover, that the continued erosion of scientific authority also arises from inherent features in science and academia, including a reliance on publication as a method for gaining professional credibility and success. Addressing this multifaceted challenge necessitates a concerted effort across several key areas: strengthening scientific messaging, combating misinformation, rebuilding trust in scientific authority, and fundamentally rethinking academic professional norms. Taking these steps will require widespread effort, but if we want to rebuild trust with the public, we must make significant and structural changes to the production and dissemination of science. Full article

Dies Buch gehört dem König (This Book Belongs to the King), written and published in 1843 by the German Romantic author Bettina von Arnim, is a quasi-open letter, presented as a series of fictional dialogues with traces of a novel. Dedicated to the newly crowned King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the letter unfolds social grievances and aims to persuade Friedrich Wilhelm to act like a just king. Due to its delicate socio-critical impetus, the letter does so through strategies of obfuscation and by using a richly pictorial, seemingly naive and lavish way of speech rather than taking an openly reproachful stance. Crucially, von Arnim does not install herself as the letter’s speaker but instead fictionalizes the letter and presents Goethe’s mother, Catharina Elisabeth Goethe, as the letter’s primary voice (‘Frau Rat’). By using a well-respected figure of the ruling class as the letter’s main voice, von Arnim aimed at minimizing its scandalous potential. But even prior to publishing the letter, von Arnim had already managed to trick Friedrich Wilhelm and the Prussian censors herself: by fusing the book’s title and dedication, she paratextually outwitted both the censors and the King, whose permission she sought precisely to bypass Prussian censorship. This article shows how von Arnim managed to avoid a larger scandal both textually by implementing semi-fictional devices and paratextually by presenting the letter as an affirmation of Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his policies. Full article

As Francis Dodsworth argues, histories of nineteenth-century British policing and detection have neglected to examine the extent, influence and legacy of corruption, scandal and organisational mismanagement within the police itself. Rather than face these issues head on, studies generally prefer to touch upon the subject carefully, incidentally, and in a perhaps ‘curated’ manner, leaving a significant gap in the history of police reform driven by public outrage and political influence. However, this also means that the influence of scandal and corruption in the police force on the development and representation of police officers and detectives in contemporaneous fiction also remains under-examined. This essay contextualises the presence of police officers and detectives in popular fiction from the mid-to-late nineteenth century against a swathe of contemporaneous scandals and corruption cases, as well as organisational mishaps and the resultant downturn in public opinion of the police, as they were reported in the periodical and newspaper press. It builds a more sophisticated picture of the relationship between the police, the press, and the publishing industry in the latter half of the nineteenth century, using events such as the 1867 Clerkenwell Prison bombing, the 1877 ‘Great Detective Case,’ the 1888 Whitechapel Murders, and the 1888 Thames Torso Murders, among others, as anchor points, and contextualises them against contemporaneous writing to argue that the history of ‘detective’ fiction should be historicized alongside ‘detection’ itself. Full article

In the winter of 1991, the frenzied scandal around Bret Easton Ellis’s serial killer smash American Psycho overshadowed another, no less serious literary controversy. Published less than two months after Ellis’s blockbuster, Dennis Cooper’s transgressive queer classic Frisk may have been largely ignored in mainstream cultural outlets, but in the queer community the scandal was deadly serious. Seemingly connecting queer sexuality with serial murder and pedophilia, the novel incited intensely angry demands for censorship. The controversy culminated in a very public death threat against Cooper from members of Queer Nation, a gay rights group known for its shock tactics. The critical response has mostly dismissed the scandals surrounding the novels as based on a particular kind of misreading or misinterpretation. Both works use similar narrative strategies to shock and scandalize their audience but aim to mitigate this response through the strategic use of unreliable narration. While scholars have often made the argument that the violence in the novels should be interpreted as mere fantasies of their unreliable narrators, this kind of nuanced interpretation was wholly absent in the scandalized response to the novels. The common critical defense, however, is itself based on a misunderstanding of the scandals. Fictionality and narrative reliability as such have little to do with the responses of imaginative resistance and moral disgust prompted by the representation of extreme violence. In this article, I analyze and compare the public and scholarly receptions of the novels, highlighting how scholarly discourse has often overlooked how the novels anticipated and aimed to incite the scandalized public response they ultimately provoked. Full article

In recent years, scandals regarding the malpractices of many nonprofit organizations (NPOs) for selfish ends have eroded public trust in them. Therefore, it is necessary to consider whether the credibility of NPOs, as one of the three key implementers in cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns, has a transfer effect on enterprise brand image. The aim of the current study is to examine the relationship between NPO credibility and enterprise brand image, along with its underlying mechanism and boundary conditions. Drawing on the affect-transfer model as well as attribution theory, we propose a theoretical model. This model highlights the mediating role of perceived corporate hypocrisy in the relationship between NPO credibility and enterprise brand image. Moreover, it incorporates public emergency, specifically in reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, as a moderator. Three experiments were conducted to test our model. Results reveal that consumers perceive a more negative enterprise brand image when the company partners with a low-credibility NPO compared to a high-credibility NPO. Additionally, the impact of NPO credibility on enterprise brand image is mediated by perceived corporate hypocrisy, which is weakened in the presence of a public emergency. Full article

This study analyzes the ability of machine-learning algorithms to detect financial statement fraud using four financial ratios as inputs: the Altman Z-Score, Beneish M-Score, Montier C-Score, and Dechow F-Score. It also evaluates whether the Wirecard AG scandal of 2020 could have been detected by the model developed in this study. Financial statement data was obtained from the financial data vendor Bloomberg L.P. The dataset consists of 2,014,827 firm years between 1988–2019, from companies across the globe, of which 1145 firm years were identified as fraudulent. A balanced dataset of 1046 fraudulent firm years and 1046 randomly selected firm years was used to train and evaluate multiple machine-learning algorithms via an automated pipeline search. The selected model is an ensemble combining gradient boosting and k-nearest neighbors. On the held-out test set, it correctly classified 82.03% of the manipulated and 89.88% of the non-manipulated firm years, with an overall accuracy of 85.69%. Applied retrospectively to Wirecard AG, the model identified 7 of 17 firm years as fraudulent. Full article

The Windrush Generation (WG) and their descendants continue to experience adversity in the UK, including racism and the Windrush Scandal, with such adversities absent from psychological research literature. Intergenerational trauma is a psychological concept explaining that adverse experiences can be transmitted from one generation to impact subsequent generations. There has been limited consideration of the ongoing impact of adverse experiences that span multiple generations, such as experiences of racism within Western Europe. This paper utilised a narrative research design to study the narratives of members of the WG and those of their descendants in the UK. Eight expert by experience co-researchers were involved in developing the project from design through to dissemination. Eight participants, including four members of the WG and four descendants, completed semi-structured interviews in which they told stories in the context of Windrush. These stories were analysed utilising a narrative analysis framework, looking at content, structure and performance. Collective trauma and racism were apparent in the stories told, yet tended not to be spoken about by the WG to subsequent generations. Instead, emphasis was given to communicating strength and resistance. Implications for policy, healthcare and supporting communities to heal through narrative and liberation practices are discussed. Full article

This paper addresses issues around the viral safety of plasma derivatives, which have led to a spate of public inquiries over the past thirty years. These inquiries have ensued following the infection of recipients of plasma derivatives and have focused on identifying which, if any, parties were responsible for these events. The most recent of these inquiries—the Infected Blood Inquiry in the United Kingdom—ran between 2018 and 2022, and has reached conclusions regarding the allocation of responsibility, some of which are discussed in this review. The published reports of the inquiries, supplemented by evidence sourced from the peer-reviewed literature, the policies of government agencies, and public reactions to these processes, form the basis of this review. In addition, the perspective of the author, who has a background in plasma fractionation science as well as being a recipient of plasma products during the period covered by these various inquiries, is offered as a way of augmenting the issues covered. The benefits arising from these, occasionally controversial, inquiries are described, including the heightened commitment to blood safety by policymakers, the embedment of precautionism as a safety principle, and the need for transparency and informed consent in patient management. Full article

This study examines the Enron collapse through an integrated theoretical framework combining the financial saturation paradox with the dynamics of a naturally occurring Ponzi process. The central objective is to evaluate whether endogenous market mechanisms—beyond managerial misconduct—played a decisive role in the emergence and breakdown of the Enron stock bubble. A logistic-growth-based saturation model is formulated, incorporating positive feedback effects and bifurcation thresholds, and applied to Enron’s stock price data from 1996 to 2001. The computations were performed using LogletLab 4 (version 4.1, 2017) and Microsoft^® Excel^® 2016 MSO (version 2507). The model estimates market saturation ratios (P/Pp) and logistic growth rate (r), treating market potential, initial price, and time as constants. The results indicate that Enron’s share price approached a saturation level of approximately 0.9, signaling a hyper-accelerated, unsustainable growth phase consistent with systemic overheating. This finding supports the hypothesis that a naturally occurring Ponzi dynamic was underway before the firm’s collapse. The analysis further suggests a progression from market-driven expansion to intentional manipulation as the bubble matured, linking theoretical saturation stages with observed price behavior. By integrating behavioral–financial insights with saturation theory and Natural Ponzi dynamics, this work offers an alternative interpretation of the Enron case and provides a conceptual basis for future empirical validation and comparative market studies. Full article

Small news media organizations are increasingly reshaping the news media system in Latin America. They are stepping into the role of watchdogs by investigating issues such as corruption scandals that larger outlets sometimes overlook. However, this journalistic work exposes both journalists and their organizations to a range of security threats, including physical violence, legal pressure, and digital attacks. In response, these outlets have developed coping strategies to manage and mitigate such risks. This article presents an exploratory study of the approaches adopted to protect information and data, ensure the safety and well-being of journalists, and maintain organizational continuity. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with leaders of award-winning news organizations for their investigative reporting, the study examines a shift from a competitive newsroom model to a collaborative approach in which information is shared—sometimes across borders—to support investigative reporting and strengthen security practices. We identify strategies implemented by small news organizations to safeguard their journalistic work and propose an integrative model of news safety encompassing the following three areas of security: physical, legal, and digital. This study contributes to the development of the newsafety framework and sheds light on safety practices that support media freedom. Full article

In contemporary times, energy sustainability and security have become essential economic concerns globally. Nonetheless, in addition to these concerns, inadequate governance inside a corporation within the energy industry may result in corruption and energy instability within the sector. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the influence of a new array of corporate governance controversies on the energy security of 102 listed energy businesses in Europe. To achieve the purpose of this study, entropy weight and TOPSIS multicriteria approaches were used. The data were obtained from the Refinitiv Eikon database for fiscal year 2024. The findings reveal that the most significant influence, among the identified governance concerns that affect the energy security of European energy corporations, is the detrimental effect of the directors’ people. Moreover, the criteria that constitute bribery, corruption, and fraud scandals seem to be the second most significant element affecting the energy security of the enterprises in this industry. The risk of corruption in governance is exacerbated in the realm of renewable energy due to several converging factors: the urgent demands to implement new projects in response to the climate crisis, apprehensions regarding energy security, potential access to lucrative contracts, and the existence of ‘rent-seeking’ gatekeepers within the processes central to the development and operation of renewable energy assets. Full article

African immigrants in the UK, especially in places such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester, contend with institutional racism, xenophobia, and socio-economic marginalisation. This study analyses how first- and second-generation African diaspora communities understand Jeremiah 29: 4–7 to create resilience and belonging. This study uses desktop research from African diasporic churches and analyses the UK’s Inclusive Britain Strategy (2023) to contend that biblical tales are reinterpreted to confront modern issues, including the Windrush Scandal and racial inequalities in NHS maternal care. The document emphasises the influence of African-led churches in formulating integration plans and promoting policy reforms in the UK. The findings indicate that African diaspora churches reinterpret Jeremiah 29: 4–5 to promote resilience and structural involvement in combating systemic racism and socio-economic disadvantage in the UK. The paper concludes by reinterpreting biblical tales to connect spiritual resilience with systemic activism, promoting hybrid identities, and integrating legislative reforms with community-driven initiatives for equity. The paper recommends the decolonisation of curricula, the enhancement of culturally competent healthcare training, the expansion of church–state collaborations, and the modification of legislation such as the Hostile Environment to foster inclusiveness. This study enhances academic discourse by merging diaspora theology with policy analysis, presenting an innovative framework for the theological examination of migration and elevating African agency within UK socio-political environments through decolonial hermeneutics and hybrid identity paradigms. Full article