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This chapter inquires into the particular difficulties minority shareholders face where they seek redress against wrongdoing directors. Section 3.2 discusses these problems and Section 3.3 outlines the common law responses to these problems. Through extensive discussion of case law and emerging so-called principles and rules this section illustrates how procedurally and substantively English law has developed to provide disincentives to prospective shareholder claimants in this context. Subsequently, two policy responses are analysed. First, Section 3.4.1 examines and assesses the competence of three alternative bodies which may assess the merits of a derivative action: a committee of independent directors, an ‘independent organ’ of the company, and the courts. It concludes that courts should discharge the task of deciding this critical question. Section 3.4.2 explains that once a gatekeeper is put in place, the focus should be on establishing an expeditious means for screening and dismissing non-meritorious cases. It evaluates how well (or rather, badly) current legal screens work.

Ian Bache considers the utility of multi‐level governance in relation to the implementation of EU regional policy. This chapter provides an examination of multi‐level governance on its ‘own ground’: the concept was developed from a study of EC/EU regional policy and is said to be most prominent at the implementation stage of the policy process. However, in addition to discussing multi‐level governance and EU regional policy across Member States, particular attention is given to its implementation in the UK, which, for reasons suggested above, presents a ‘hard case’ for multi‐level governance theorists.

This chapter illustrates the conduct of population-based studies by describing the implementation of a large school-based survey of substance use in several Central American countries. The project's methodology followed an etic approach although considerable work was conducted to validate and harmonize the instrument across countries and sites. The project's implementation involved a number of activities that required collaborators to navigate different cultural and geopolitical situations, some of them of a very sensitive nature, some of which we describe in this chapter. Through these examples, we hope readers will acquire a better understanding of the inner workings of these complicated multi-national projects. We also highlight the importance of building partnerships between country researchers and international organizations, including a discussion of protection issues for human subjects, and we provide an example of power analyses and an analytic strategy of accounting for clustering when conducting statistical analyses with these large studies.

Scientists have conflicts of interest that, operating outside of awareness, cause them to inappropriately favor their preferred theories and disfavor competitors' theories. These conflicts of interest can be traced to implicit affective-cognitive processes that have only recently been described theoretically and empirically. They threaten objectivity in performance of four types of scientific roles: gatekeepers, reviewers, expert witnesses, and researchers. Eliminating the undesired effects of these conflicts of interest may require development of ethical codes that specify satisfactory conflict-management strategies.

Turns to the counter‐measures to the open border in the fifties, adopted by East German authorities forced to walk a tightrope between repression and liberalization, either of which could accelerate flights to the West. The regime's inbuilt tendency to identify ideological factors and conspiracy theories as motives was coupled with a blind spot to the fundamental reasons driving away its citizenry. Instead, the apparatus was often blamed for the superficial handling of policy. Schemes in the early 1950s to recruit West Germans proved fanciful. More problematic was the drastic curtailment of legal travel to the Federal Republic in 1952, which petitions reveal to have caused considerable internal discontent, only partially defused by travel liberalization following the June 1953 uprising. Certain key groups such as the intelligentsia were bought off with privileges which antagonized other sections of the population. The author's research also reveals the importance of ‘legal’ defections on holiday visas in the mid‐1950s, and of the criminalization of Republikflucht in December 1957 in shifting the pattern of flights to Berlin as the easy outlet to the West. The chapter finishes by showing the police and Stasi's frantic efforts to seal off Greater Berlin with a human cordon in 1960, followed by the final decision in 1961 to resort to a physical wall.

This concluding chapter argues that the three cases showcased in previous chapters demonstrate that gatekeeper adoption matters, usually occurs after a period of agenda vetting and often doesn't happen at all. Additionally, while agenda vetting is a function of a cluster of factors, intranetwork relations play an important role in gatekeepers' judgments about when to adopt new issues or to exercise agenda denial. Not only do hierarchies among transnational actors confer power on central organizations to “vet” the advocacy agenda, but network effects also help constitute those organizations' preferences. To conclude, the chapter outlines the implications of this book's study for issue entrepreneurs, for global policy elites, and for students of international relations.

This concluding chapter discusses the fingerpointing going on in southern Arizona concerning the thousands of migrant deaths that have occurred in the wake of heightened federal border enforcement policies, asking once again: How should such a sweeping international border be humanely yet effectively maintained? How might respect for basic human rights be balanced with respect for the rights of the state to secure and protect? The chapter suggests the need to re-interpret the border in a more nuanced manner, beyond the black and white ideologies, fears and frustrations that currently plague conversations about the border. It suggests the need to see the border as the result of myriad interconnected political, economic, social, and moral issues and as part of larger ideas concerning historical and psychological forces, such as capitalism, terrorism, diversity, patriotism, neighborliness and the self-other encounter.

This chapter uses the context of Bosnian literature and a case study of one of its leading translator-gatekeepers, Francis R. Jones, to challenge the advocacy of partiality among translator-gatekeepers. It begins by questioning Mona Baker’s contention that ‘uncritical fidelity to the source text or utterance has consequences that an informed translator or interpreter may not wish to be party to’. Jones is shown to share her view that translator objectivity, impartiality and neutrality are not only fictional, but also that any claim to them is unethical. As a gatekeeper to South Slav literatures, he has chosen to represent what he terms cosmopolitan voices over writers with ethno-nationalist views, to ‘defend and promote the complexity and potential for tolerance in Bosnian culture’ through literary translation. The chapter argues that translators are not responsible for the content of their translations, as long as they are accurate, never mind complicit in it, and that taking sides distorts the complexity of all sides, hindering the intercultural dialogue that translators all work for.

The chapter starts from the premise that the study of cultural diplomacy, dominated by a focus on major world powers since 1945, would be illuminated by a better understanding of the cultural diplomatic activities of small, new or restored European states after 1918. It further argues that attempts to incorporate literary translation into cultural diplomacy quintessentially highlight the difficulties of practising cultural diplomacy. The chapter centrally documents the extent and nature of government support for Czech literary translation in the UK, mapping the networks that facilitated the translation of Czech imaginative literature and assessing their relationship with Czechoslovak cultural diplomacy. The chapter shows that the translation and promotion of Czech literature in the UK, though never the product of direct state strategy or intervention, is always linked to gatekeeper sympathy for the idea and aims of Czechoslovakia, but the reception of translated Czech literature in the UK shows no appreciation of this aspect until after the September 1938 Munich Agreement, when, for Czechoslovakia, it is too late.

This chapter uses an account of the twenty-first century efforts of Catalan literature to break into English-language book markets as a means of examining the opportunities, challenges and strategies that present themselves to smaller literatures in a changing reading and book-buying environment. The chapter first explains the historical significance to Catalan culture of translation, as a means not only of filling gaps in a disrupted history, but also of building and unifying Catalan cultural identity. It highlights the institutional measures put in place to support this effort and assesses the work of the Institut Ramon Llull. Though its initiatives appear to have increased production and visibility of Catalan literature, the chapter argues that the key role has been played by translators acting as gatekeepers. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the relationship between commercial success and major international prizes or choice of genre, noting that Catalan literature has not targeted either.

At a Friday lunch meeting in October 1996, a local fundamentalist pastor spoke passionately to a group of eight IVCF students. The meeting was held, as usual, in the corner of a large multipurpose room in the basement of Divinity College. Several of the students seemed uncomfortable with the young preacher’s zealous approach, somewhat out of place in the midafternoon of the week before midterm exams. The preacher exhorted: Are you excited about your faith? You and you and you [pointing]. I mean, are you really excited that Jesus voluntarily came down to earth and died for each one of your sins? Your sins. That’s pretty exciting if you ask me. I don’t think I deserved it, do you? And now, in this place, how are you sharing your faith? Are you doing all you can to spread your faith in our Lord to the world? Are you sharing your faith with your professors through your papers and with your friends in class? Or do you not believe that the power of God is great enough to protect you? Mac is the most challenging mission field because what is at the forefront of the teaching today will be at the forefront of thinking tomorrow. And some people will tell you that this university is a non-Christian place. But I tell you that this is true, but not completely true. Actually, this university is a pagan place. So, again, what did Paul do? He went to the world of the lost people and did not expect them to come to him. Are you doing this? Are you going to the world of the lost people all around you or are you waiting for them to come to you? . . . And don’t forget: you are disciples of Jesus Christ cleverly disguised as students who have to go to the world of the lost people and not expect them to come to you. It’s like people here don’t know they’re lost. It’s like convincing a sick person they’re sick. But we have to do it.

One warm Sunday evening in September 1993, I found myself walking aimlessly around the McMaster University campus. Earlier the same week, I had seen a poster advertising “Church at the John,” an event organized by the McMaster chapter of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). Since I was academically interested in conservative Protestantism, and since at that point I knew no one in the city, I decided, for lack of other options, to attend this meeting. What I found there fell completely outside my expectations, prompted an elaborate series of questions, and ultimately resulted in the present book. Since I assumed that the meeting would be small, I worried that being ten minutes late might draw unwanted attention to my presence. As I descended the stairs of the Downstairs John (or simply “the John”), McMaster’s largest student bar, I could hear the noises of a large group of people. I thought I might have misread the poster a few days earlier; when I entered the bustling room, I was virtually certain I had. Except for the well-lit stage at one end of the room, the John was dark, and almost six hundred people were crowded into a space designed for no more than four hundred and fifty. The room was narrow and long, with a low stage at one end, pool tables at the opposite end, and a bar along the side of the room. People were standing and sitting in the aisles, on the bar, and against the walls beneath the bikini-clad models and slogans that festooned the neon beer signs. I discreetly asked one person who was standing against the wall if this was the right room for the IVCF meeting, and he replied that it was. I looked at him more intently to determine if he was joking, but he just smiled at me politely and bowed his head. After a few confusing moments, I realized he was praying. I turned away from him and noticed that all the other people in the room had bowed their heads in a prayer being led by a demure young woman on the stage.

One of the challenges of ethnography is that it requires one to enter into a community and become enmeshed in the web of affinities, opinions, gossip, rhetoric, and beliefs that characterize this group. Then, at the end of fieldwork, one must step outside the others’ world and interpret it for (other) others and oneself. This analytical stage, however, compels one to condense one’s experiences and, indeed, one’s newly acquired friends, to make them more manageable, less indeterminate elements of an academic study. This challenge constitutes both ethnography’s strength and its weakness. Moreover, such a challenge is what makes ethnography a social science: that the vast array of fieldwork experiences must be distilled and communicated in a nonidiosyncratic manner. Unfortunately, the very analytical processes by which the ethnographer’s personal experiences are rendered communicable often flatten out the most interesting parts of the “other.” Ethnographer David Mandelbaum describes this dilemma with poignant clarity: . . . When an anthropologist goes to live among the people he studies, he is likely to make some good friends among them. As he writes his account of their way of life, he may feel uncomfortably aware that his description and analysis omitted something of great importance. His clear friends have been dissolved into faceless norms; their vivid adventures have somehow been turned into pattern profiles or statistical types. (1973:178) . . . Such diminishing of the unique features of specific individuals is rarely the intention of the ethnographer; rather, this effacement is a natural by-product of analyses in which one attempts to make, as I do, for example, broader claims about the place and coping strategies of traditionally religious individuals in a secular culture. Even when the means of making such assertions is a “thick” description (Geertz 1973) of a religious group, it is inevitable that individual differences are sometimes effaced by broader conceptual reflections. Throughout the following chapters, I refer to and often quote many IVCF members at length. The ideal way to render these students’ comments comprehensible would be for me to provide a life history of each speaker before quoting him or her.

This chapter focuses on an alternative explanation for the wave of accounting and financial reporting irregularities that surfaced in 2001–2002: namely, that the gatekeepers failed. That is, the professionals who serve investors by preparing, verifying, or certifying corporate disclosures to the securities markets that acquiesced in managerial fraud; not in all cases, to be sure, but at a markedly higher rate than during the immediately preceding period. While the gatekeeper concept will be discussed and refined later, this term certainly includes the auditors, securities analysts, and securities attorneys who prepare, review, or analyse disclosure documents. Part II of the chapter develops competing, but complementary, explanations for gatekeeper failure. Part III maps out the range of strategies available to regulators. Part IV proposes alternative reforms intended to make gatekeepers more responsive to the interests of investors.

We arrive now at the theoretical heart of the book. In Chapters 2 and 3 we describe how the professions are changing. In Chapter 4 we explain these changes by reference to the information substructure and developments in technology. In this chapter we draw these observations and arguments together. First we develop a model to show how professional work is evolving. Then, building on all we have said and done so far, we step away from the professions and describe the people and systems that will replace them in the future. In broad terms, our focus in this chapter is on the way that we handle a particular type of ‘knowledge’ in society. We are, of course, not alone in exploring this concept. All manner of scholars have applied their minds to ‘knowledge’ over the centuries. Philosophers, for example, who specialize in epistemology ask such fundamental questions as ‘what is knowledge?’ and ‘how can we know anything?’, or again, ‘of what knowledge can we be certain?’ Sociologists study the connections between knowledge and power, culture, and class. Lawyers handle questions about the ownership, protection, and sharing of knowledge. Information theorists consider the relationships between knowledge, information, and data. We are fascinated by each of these perspectives, but for the most part they fall beyond the scope of our work. Instead, the particular type of knowledge that is our preoccupation is what we introduce in Chapter 1 as ‘practical expertise’. Now we explore this concept in greater detail, looking at how we currently create and share it, and how we might handle it differently in the future. We seek to show, in economic terms, that knowledge has special characteristics that make its widespread and low-cost production and distribution both possible, and desirable, in a technology-based Internet society. Practical expertise, or our conception of it, is the knowledge that is required to solve the sort of problems for which the professions, traditionally, were the only solution—the knowledge that is used to sort out a health worry or resolve a tax problem, for example.

In the long run, increasingly capable machines will transform the work of professionals, giving rise to new ways of sharing practical expertise in society. This is the central thesis of our book. We cannot commit to timeframes, in large part because the speed of change is not in our hands. But we are confident that the change will constitute an incremental transformation rather than an overnight revolution. In the language of the book, the shift itself can be characterized in many ways: as the industrialization and digitization of the professions; as the routinization and commoditization of professional work; as the disintermediation and demystification of professionals. Whatever terminology is preferred, we foresee that, in the end, the traditional professions will be dismantled, leaving most (but not all) professionals to be replaced by less expert people and high-performing systems. We expect new roles will arise, but we are unsure how long they will last, because these too, in due course, may be taken on by machines. In the post-professional society, we predict that practical expertise will be available online. Our strong inclination is to encourage the removal of current and future gatekeepers, and to provide people with as much access as is feasible to this collective knowledge and experience. The final step in our argument is to explain why we think that it is desirable to liberate practical expertise in this way. When we speak above and throughout about technology and its impact on the professions, we are conscious that it might sound as though we believe the future is already mapped out in detail and is somehow inevitable— that we are hardline ‘determinists’. Our analysis in Chapter 4, for example, makes it clear that we expect machines to become increasingly capable, that devices will be increasingly pervasive, and that human beings will be increasingly connected. And we certainly do anticipate an exponential growth in information technology. While we do not foresee these developments unfolding as a matter of necessity, we do regard them as extremely probable (barring asteroids, nuclear wars, pandemics, or the like). However—and this is where we part company with determinists—this does not mean that human beings have no control over future direction.

There are two possible futures for the professions. The first is reassuringly familiar. It is a more efficient version of what we already have today. On this model, professionals continue working much as they have done since the middle of the nineteenth century, but they heavily standardize and systematize their routine activities. They streamline their old ways of working. The second future is a very different proposition. It involves a transformation in the way that the expertise of professionals is made available in society. The introduction of a wide range of increasingly capable systems will, in various ways, displace much of the work of traditional professionals. In the short and medium terms, these two futures will be realized in parallel. In the long run, the second future will dominate, we will find new and better ways to share expertise in society, and our professions will steadily be dismantled. That is the conclusion to which this book leads. The first step in our argument involves taking stock of the professions we currently have. We do this, in this opening chapter, to provide a foundation of solid thinking about the professions—about their purpose and common features, their strengths and weaknesses—upon which we build later. We start by sketching an informal portrait of today’s professions. We follow this with a more systematic attempt to explain which occupational groups belong to the professions and why. We then discuss the history of the professions and look at the ‘grand bargain’, the traditional arrangement that grants professionals both their special status and their monopolies over numerous areas of human activity. Next, we reflect on various theoretical accounts of the professions, which leads us to identify a series of fundamental problems with our professions as currently organized. We close with a call for a new mindset, and point to a series of biases that are likely to inhibit professionals from thinking freely about their future. To set off at an easy pace, we begin with a set of non-theoretical, everyday views about the professions. On reflection, most people would say that the professions are at the heart of our social and working lives.