In recent years, there has been a shift in among Kentucky rural electric cooperatives in regard to their stance on economic development. With this has been the employment of electric cooperative staff to help attract new industries and forge relationships with other local economic development-geared groups to facilitate growth. Cooperative businesses have historically proved their resilience and deep-rooted connections within the communities they serve. In exploring two similar-sized electric cooperatives in Kentucky located in two very different regions of the state, considering socio-economic status, and interviewing key informants with local affiliated economic development groups, it becomes evident that electric cooperatives possess a great potential to serve as a catalyst for economic development within their respective service territories.

Hong Kong is considered to be the most economically free country in the world, but also has the highest amount of income inequality of any developed country. The Hong Kong government is able to sustain laissez faire policies due to its monopoly on land supply. Maintaining high property values allows the government to maximize revenue from property tax, which acts as a hidden tax. A major contributor to income inequality is the formation of oligopolies in Hong Kong that creates an anticompetitive environment. The interests of the government and oligarchs are aligned as both obtain significant portions of revenue from the property sector. As globalization makes Hong Kong even more vulnerable to external shocks, the government faces the challenges of increasing competition, diversifying its revenue streams, and closing the income gap while standing by its principles in order maintain regional competitiveness as an international business hub.

This thesis is an in-depth discussion and analysis of the alternative dispute resolution process of arbitration in the United States. It begins by providing a basic explanatory overview of arbitration clauses and the arbitration process. It then goes on to highlight the various benefits over traditional court litigation that arbitration has to offer. From there, the paper presents a detailed discussion of the many shortcomings of the arbitration process. It identifies the overall lack of procedural fairness that exists in arbitration today due to the fact that arbitration currently tends to favor businesses over consumers and workers during dispute settlements. The paper then identifies the various negative potential consequences that exist as a result of the unfair nature of arbitration today. This thesis concludes by presenting various ways that the arbitration process can be improved upon to make for a fairer, more neutral dispute resolution alternative.

The object of this work is the development of business regulation Skoda factory from 1859, representing the company's own foundation in 1946, when it was nationalized. In the context of this development work also deals with economic and social aspects that influenced the nature of this business. Research will focus on legal standards and their implementation in the Skoda factory. The analysis of most of the legislation under which developed the legal form of the company should show a benefit or adverse effect on the positive development of the company.

La persistance des fraudes financières depuis les origines de la création de la bourse conduit au constat selon lequel la sanction est un élément fondamental du bon fonctionnement des marchés financiers. En l’état actuel du droit positif, notre système de sanction repose pour l’essentiel sur l’Autorité des marchés financiers. À première vue, le droit français offre le visage d’une architecture moderne. Pourtant, l’actualité n’en finit pas de démontrer l’existence d’affaires et de fraudes sensibles affectant drastiquement la confiance des investisseurs dans le système. En vue d’une amélioration de notre système de sanction, la comparaison avec le droit canadien se révèle très enrichissante. Il en ressort que le système de sanction en droit des marchés financiers français pourrait être rendu plus efficace par la création d’une juridiction spécialisée à laquelle serait confiée l’ensemble du contentieux relatif aux marchés financiers. Une telle réforme favoriserait l’harmonisation et la cohérence du système de sanction. / The persistence of financial frauds since the creation of the stock exchange has made it clear that sanctions are a fundamental aspect to ensure the effective functioning of financial markets. Currently, our sanction system relies, for the most part, on the action of the financial regulator, the Autorité des marchés financiers. At first sight, French law offers a very modern system. However, frauds keep on happening, affecting drastically the trust of the investors in the system. In order to improve our sanction system, the comparison with Canadian law has revealed to be very rewarding. It is possible to make our system more efficient by implementing a special jurisdiction, which would be responsible for all the financial markets disputes, in order to make our sanction system more coherent and unified.

Diploma thesis Innominate Contracts in Business Relations deals with a legal basis of innominate contracts in the Czech private law. It focuses mainly on so the called Modern innominate contracts. The purpose of the thesis was to answer whether leasing, factoring and franchising contracts should be codified. Consequently, it aimed to prove or disprove that the Czech legal regulation does not reflect the recent developments in business environment. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the first chapter an analysis is carried out on the legal regulation of innominate contracts in the Czech business law, civil law, labour law and international private law. The legality of innominate contracts and the applicability of an analogy is discussed in this part. Based on the Czech legal regulations and court decisions it was concluded that innominate contracts were valid and that courts may use analogy when deciding on civil or commercial contracts. The second chapter deals with the contents of leasing, factoring and franchising contracts. It concludes that there are reasons against the codification of the above mentioned contracts. The content of an operating leasing agreement very much resembles a rental contract which might be used for this kind of leasing contract.A leasing purchase contract does not present any new answers to issues which had already been dealt with by court decisions. The substance of a factoring contract -- assignment of a receivable is already regulated by the Civil Code. A franchising agreement involves parts of many types of codified contracts and interlocks with multiple legal areas. Moreover, all the above mentioned contracts are challenged by a fast pace of development therefore a codification could hamper the progress or it could become obsolete. Based on the above mentioned facts the thesis concludes that leasing, factoring and franchising contracts should not be codified in the Czech private law as separate contract types and therefore disproves the primary proposition of this thesis and subsequently infers that the Czech legal regulations do not reflect a recent business development.

La présente thèse vise à décrire et analyser l’évolution ambigüe du rapport Souveraineté-Intégration dans les cadres européen et africain. A cet effet, elle révèle qu’un tel rapport est part d’un antagonisme de principe entre Souveraineté et Intégration mais débouche cependant sur des réalités différentes qui sont fonction du contexte précis de mise en application de cette relation. En effet, si au départ, on peut noter une certaine convergence de vue en Europe et en Afrique sur la nature antagonique des rapports entre Souveraineté et Intégration ; à l’arrivée, la pratique de l’intégration ne semble pas avoir conduit aux mêmes effets quant au sort de la souveraineté étatique dans les cadres européen et africain. En réalité, alors que la souveraineté de l’Etat a été fortement amoindrie par l’intégration dans l’UE, confirmant ainsi largement leur antagonisme de départ ; du côté africain, cette hypothèse initiale d’antagonisme a plutôt été compromise par la pratique car dans l’UEMOA et l’OHADA, l’opposition entre souveraineté et intégration s’est avérée largement ineffective. / This thesis aims to describe and analyze the ambiguous evolution of the Sovereignty-Integration report in the European and African frameworks. To this end, it reveals that such a relation started from an antagonism of principle between Sovereignty and Integration but nevertheless leads to different realities that depend on the precise context of the application of this relation. Indeed, while at the outset one can note a certain convergence of view in Europe and in Africa on the antagonistic nature of the relations between Sovereignty and Integration; the practice of integration seems to have led to contradictory effects on the fate of state sovereignty in the European and African frameworks. In facts, whereas sovereignty of States has been greatly diminished by integration in the EU, thus largely confirming their initial antagonism ; on the African side, this initial hypothesis of antagonism has rather been compromised by practice because in UEMOA and OHADA, the opposition between sovereignty and integration has proved largely ineffective.

The research problem for this study focused on organizations' inability to derive strategic value from the law due to the lack of integration between legal strategy and business strategy. The purpose of this study was to build consensus among in-house general counsel working across business industries in the United States with regard to techniques that will alter unreceptive managerial viewpoints toward the strategic value of law within the corporate setting. The research question centered on assessing the level of consensus among general counsel relative to those techniques. This 3-round qualitative Delphi study began with open-ended questions in Round 1 and progressed toward consensus in Round 3. The results encompass a consensus by the panel on 25 techniques for altering unreceptive managerial viewpoints toward the law spanning 5 categories: integrating legal considerations with business processes, improving workplace collaboration between in-house counsel and managers, leadership qualities and expectations of counsel, understanding legal implications of business decisions, and demonstration of strategic value. This was the first study to apply the construct of consensus to the generation of techniques by general counsel for altering unreceptive managerial viewpoints toward the strategic value of law. Incorporating the techniques identified in this study into the development of coaching practices, team building sessions, or other collaborative exercises may lead to positive social change through: (a) reduced anxiety stemming from organizational conflict between managers and in-house counsel; (b) decreased managerial burnout, absenteeism, and turnover due to organizational conflict with in-house counsel; and, (c) decreased workplace resistance between managers and in-house counsel.

A proliferation of social movements and a large group of young, politically active individuals have pushed corporate firms to pay more attention to increase resource allocation to corporate social responsibility. As of now, corporate social responsibility refers to a wide definition of general efforts made by firms to support society through social impacts. A review of current literature on corporate social responsibility reveals a gap in the way the quality is calculated as well as does not take into account the influence of social movements in the past couple of years. This paper assesses the specific social and political justice positions that firms have taken and whether these positions have had an effect on financial performance given the more actively conscious consumer base. Tobin’s Q is used to quantify these effects and show that positive corporate social responsibility increases financial performance, supporting the hypothesis, while negative corporate social responsibility does not significantly affect financial performance. Future research recommends a closer look at the industry differences in the subject as well as a clearer definition of the variance between the different issues that constitute corporate social responsibility.

In view of the latest corporate collapses globally, the purpose of this thesis is an attempt to investigate and to theorise how managers make decisions when faced with an ethical dilemma.Philosophers over the years have proposed different moral theories. For example, Kantian’s Categorical Imperative (O’Neil 2001, Peters, 1971) suggests that there are laws that should apply universally. However, its principles are too abstract to guide action, in that it does not provide a detailed set of instructions for following them. Others such as Baier, (2001) suggest that people behave to satisfy their own self-interest. The literature review shows that there is no consensus to define what constitutes ethical behaviour. Kohlberg (1981) divides childhood moral development into six stages. He theorises that greater moral development will be related to the highest social responsibility of an individual. Lagon (2000), Seabright and Moberg (1998), Logsdon and Yuthas (1997) extrapolate Kohlberg’s model to incorporate into organisational and individual moral development.Based on the literature review, research questions were developed. The research methodology is qualitative, based on the realism paradigm using a case research design (Yin 1994). Face to face interviews were conducted with fourteen participants using critical incidents and the findings were triangulated using a semi-structured focus group.The research data analysis is based on grounded theory proposed by Glaser and Strauss (1967). The findings confirm that there is no single theory or approach to business ethics. The findings indicate that a person’s ethical behaviour changes when his/her self-interest is affected. Whilst participants believed that business and ethics can be reconciled, most agreed that they can only be reconciled if the individual’s interest or business profit is not affected. Based on the findings, a new model is proposed in an attempt to theorise an individual’s business ethical behaviour and his/her ethical decision making process.This research also identifies important areas that require further research. These are:• Conflicts between personal values and business values• Should ethics be taught? And if so how?• Should an ethical programme be developed and incorporated in a company’s strategic plan?