Management is the only window to incentive bargaining. The result of the incentive bargaining, filtered by management’s own incentive, determines the direction of managing the firm. Chapter 3 categorizes managerial incentives into power-related, reputational, and monetary incentives, and compares the characteristics of managerial incentives in the three countries. For US management, monetary incentives are the most important among the three categories. For Japanese management, the monetary incentive is not the priority but is subordinated to power-related and reputational incentives. In China, managerial incentives are different in SOEs and POEs. For SOE management, monetary compensation is not so important, but political rank is more important, which is accompanied by monetary rewards. For POE management, monetary incentives are important, and stock options are widely used. At the same time, the political network is important to POE management, and POE management cares about its reputation in the party-state as well.

A significant percentage of listed companies are under the influence of founding families by stock ownership and/or family managers, even in developed countries, including the United States. In the United States, when the founders retire, they tend to hire professional managers and sell out their shares. In Japan, approximately 50% of listed companies are family firms, many of which are managed by founders’ heirs without substantial family ownership. In China, although family firms are relatively new because Chinese law traditionally prohibited private enterprises, family firms have grown rapidly since the transformation from a planned to a market-oriented economy in 1978. Generally speaking, founder firms’ performance is significantly better than that of non-family firms in most countries, but heir-managing firms’ performance varies in different countries. Prevalent types of listed family firms and their relative performance to non-family firms reflect minority shareholder protection law, the size of the manager market, and the corporate governance practice of each country.

The introduction presents the aims, scope and structure of the book and discusses major historiographical issues: the role of empires in global history; that of slavery in the Atlantic world and that of serfdom in Eurasia; the great divergence debate; the historical meanings and practices of emancipation in a global perspective. The introduction then discusses the question of scales; the role of gender and law; the definitions of institutions, empires and capitalism as well as the qualification of coercion, resistance and agency.

Chapter 4 considers the conduct of business within the framework of the law and upper-class ideology in honouring debts and protecting the family name. How were contracts arranged? How did buying and selling and letting and hiring take place? What protection was there for the buyer? How did the legal process assist this? What were the rules for partnerships? Especially important to the government were tax-collecting companies. There were rules for deposits and loans, for which a stipulatio could establish interest. Banks operated with clear rules for interest, and various types of security were available for loans. One man’s business could be conducted on his behalf by others, often by his son or household slave, but in the Roman concept of agency he could be sued to a limited extent by those who had lost out in the business. In the labour market there was very limited protection for employees.

Chapter 8 departs slightly from the focus on translation activity by shining a light on the translator, in an effort to highlight their role in the translation process itself, often minimized for the benefit of the text. The chapter serves as a reminder that the translator also has an impact on the text. It addresses what is meant by the translator’s (in)visibility and how practicing or aspiring translators can incorporate this notion into their practice and knowledge base. Also addressed are related topics such as norms, codes of ethics, agency, positionality and ideology. Additionally, the chapter helps inform aspiring translators and those who work with translators about the role and professional expectations for translators, including their role as agents of social justice, the translator’s workplace, recent changes in the field, translator profiles, and the qualifications and skills needed to work as a translator. This chapter guides readers to an understanding of the translator’s possible role/s and assists them with the creation of their own professional identity.

This chapter concentrates on a range of literary and extra-literary sources – James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar-Cane (1764), Maria Edgeworth’s short story ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1802), and judicial testimonies of enslaved rebels – to examine how disenfranchised Africans conducted politics in the revolutionary Atlantic. Taking the controversy over the Registry Bill as a pivotal moment between the founding of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787) and emancipation (1838), it investigates how enslaved people aspired for what Steven Hahn has termed ‘socially meaningful power’. The term ‘people’ in current work on political democracy is largely synonymous with the inhabitants of the nation-state. As members of the diaspora, exiled from their native lands, enslaved Caribbeans were stateless people who lived in the extraterritorial space of the colony. Yet they waged struggles for meaningful control over their lives and labour, not to mention for their subjecthood.

This chapter briefly engages with contemporary approaches to the study of nations and nationalisms and offers a critique of the structuralist and agency-centred explanations. The chapter also articulates the theoretical framework that is then applied to a variety of case studies in the book. The chapter outlines the key features of the approach and describes how nationalist grounding operates on coercive-organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional levels.

Parental shared reminiscing and positive parenting are important for the development of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Yet, even though parents influence the content and structure of narrative identity throughout the lifespan (Camia et al., 2021; Köber & Habermas, 2018), it is understudied whether narrative themes such as agency and communion are associated with experienced parenting and whether this sustains beyond early childhood. Therefore, we investigated the influence of parenting on agency and communion in life stories provided at ages 26 and 32. Narratives with and without parental topics scored similarly on agency and communion. However, agency in narratives with mentions of parents was supported by an increased understanding of parents and by opposing parents’ advice. Communion in narratives mentioning parents was supported by positive evaluations of the parental relationship and by an increased understanding of parents. These results suggest that parents not only are part of the content of personal narratives but also influence narrative themes well into adulthood.

This introduction provides an overview of the theories and methodologies necessary to reveal the social, economic, and political lives of Afro-descended Mexicans after the abolition of slavery and caste. Beginning with the cofradía del Rosario in what is now Morelia, it sets the stage for the collection by showing how references to Afro-descended communities continued after independence in 1821. The introduction argues that the limited sources about Afro-descended Mexican citizens do not preclude the study of these communities after emancipation. Instead, it requires careful, often against the grain, readings of racial identities as well as of individual and collective agency, historical themes related to slavery and freedom that are better known in the colonial period. Ultimately, the introduction attempts to provide a roadmap for future studies into the history of Afro-Mexicans in the nineteenth century.

This chapter summarizes the main lessons for diplomacy that we derive from our study. These eight lessons are: 1. A major factor separates the crises that escalate to war from those that do not; in the latter, a strong leader reins in any hard-liners who advocate going to war. 2. Individuals make a difference. 3. Contingency plays a more important role than system structure in determining whether or not a crisis escalates to war. 4. Someone must stand for peace. 5. The secret to preventing war structurally is to find a functional equivalent to war. 6. Norms and rules are important for avoiding war – and, therefore, maintaining peace. 7. War can be avoided; it is not inevitable. 8. The realist concepts of the national interest and balance of power do not always accurately describe the behavior of states.

This chapter is an extended argument for the existence of value (including moral) properties in the natural world, refusing thereby the equation of nature with what the natural sciences study. The argument turns on considerations of agency, seeking to establish that we could not be said to have the agency we manifestly possess, if value properties were not in the world we inhabit. Appealing to considerations found in Gareth Evans about the nature of belief, the chapter extends those considerations to take in our notion of desires as well, and draws from that extension the chapter’s grounds for saying that only if there are value properties without can our states of mind within possess the motivational power that makes possible our agency.

This chapter focuses on one of the most important legal solutions in case of insolvency in seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the accord, or composition. It comprises a detailed qualitative analysis of almost 100 accords, combined with quantitative data obtained from the basic details of a broader dataset of more than 600 accords from the entire period covered by this book. These agreements between insolvents and their creditors sought to prevent an execution sale of the estate. At first, accords were concluded privately before notaries, until, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the Amsterdam burgomasters sought to subject their effectuation to prior consent of a public authority. Guarantors played an important role in securing such compositions. If the creditors trusted their debtor and his guarantors to make good on their promises, an accord would yield much higher returns than a simple execution of the estate. The Amsterdam regents thus endorsed, regulated, and added credence to an innovative and beneficial legal practice that had been developed among their own citizens.

The final chapter explores the problems of agency and conformity among the enslaved at both individual and communal levels. I situate the Shepherd among ancient Mediterranean writers who understood enslaved persons to function as extensions of their own personae, as well as in conversation with Africana, feminist, postcolonial, and slavery studies on the agency of enslaved and possessed individuals. I suggest that God’s enslaved persons, as possessed instrumental agents of God, are imagined to be empowered by the enslaver to take particular actions and acquire particular virtues that contribute both to their enslaved obedience and their salvation. I then turn to the construction of a tower, the most lengthy visionary account in the Shepherd. Placed alongside Vitruvius’s On Architecture and Sara Ahmed’s scholarship, I argue that the Shepherd portrays the bodies of the enslaved as (ideally) uniformly shaped pieces of a monolithic ecclesiastical whole. Being “useful for the construction of the tower” is made manifest by how the various stones are shaped, reshaped, or rejected from being used to build a tower that is said to represent both God’s house and the Christian assembly itself.