Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of the Dutch cooperative Rabobank to understand how the structure of an organisation determines how individual employees validate norms within that organisation. Design/methodology/approach: Data over an approximately 10-year period starting 25 years ago are analysed, and the value of relating a historical analysis and narrative approach to ethical and institutional theories in economics and management science is demonstrated. Findings: Regulation in the banking sector appears to have a strong normative aspect. The choice between state and private ownership is based on ideology. The author argues that the private ownership model was based primarily on an ideology surrounding economic efficiency, but that in fact there are other logics that also promote economic development. This contributes to the understanding of the interaction between sector standards, organisational structures and the values of organisations and individual employees. The structure of an organisation enables key employees to deviate slightly from the organisation’s prevailing norms in response to pressures from the wider environment, and those individuals thereby become symbols of that organisation. Originality/value: The perspective on management history put forward in this paper enables assessing the distinction between normative notions in institutional environments and the organisation as a whole as represented in its governance structure and narratives that key employees disseminate about the organisation. This in turn helps us to understand the interaction between sector standards, organisational characteristics and values represented by individual employees. The author reveals the strong normative impact of banking regulation in line with an older ideological model focused on economic efficiency rather than market logics and the interests of society.
In light of increasing cashlessness, platform economies, Open Banking APIs, financial bots and cryptocurrencies, money is on the move - once inert, money is gaining agency, becoming programmable, automated, data-driven and part of 'more than human' infrastructures. These financial futures demand that designers engage with difficult questions of economy and value, while retaining a sensibility to the many subtle and social qualities of money and our everyday economic interactions. This one-day workshop will therefore bring together practitioners and researchers to explore design challenges related to four broad themes: Designing with Transactional Data; Designing Alternative Representations of Value; Money, Automation, Power, and Control; and Financial Futures with Vulnerable Users. Developing scenarios related to these themes, the workshop will cultivate a rich design space to establish the value of design-led research in shaping our financial futures.
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In September, the president of the Dutch central bank wrote what may have been the most remarkable letter of his career: it said that the ECB’s interest rate hikes will lead to losses for De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) for the first time since 1932. Several countries throughout the eurozone are facing a similar problem. To absorb the losses of their central banks, European taxpayers risk having to pay tens or even hundreds of billions of euros a year. Meanwhile private banks get that same amount of money without having to do anything in return. The ECB now stands ready to make a crucial policy decision to determine whether billions in taxpayer money will again flow to the banking sector.
Today, embedded devices such as banking/transportation cards, car keys, and mobile phones use cryptographic techniques to protect personal information and communication. Such devices are increasingly becoming the targets of attacks trying to capture the underlying secret information, e.g., cryptographic keys. Attacks not targeting the cryptographic algorithm but its implementation are especially devastating and the best-known examples are so-called side-channel and fault injection attacks. Such attacks, often jointly coined as physical (implementation) attacks, are difficult to preclude and if the key (or other data) is recovered the device is useless. To mitigate such attacks, security evaluators use the same techniques as attackers and look for possible weaknesses in order to “fix” them before deployment. Unfortunately, the attackers’ resourcefulness on the one hand and usually a short amount of time the security evaluators have (and human errors factor) on the other hand, makes this not a fair race. Consequently, researchers are looking into possible ways of making security evaluations more reliable and faster. To that end, machine learning techniques showed to be a viable candidate although the challenge is far from solved. Our project aims at the development of automatic frameworks able to assess various potential side-channel and fault injection threats coming from diverse sources. Such systems will enable security evaluators, and above all companies producing chips for security applications, an option to find the potential weaknesses early and to assess the trade-off between making the product more secure versus making the product more implementation-friendly. To this end, we plan to use machine learning techniques coupled with novel techniques not explored before for side-channel and fault analysis. In addition, we will design new techniques specially tailored to improve the performance of this evaluation process. Our research fills the gap between what is known in academia on physical attacks and what is needed in the industry to prevent such attacks. In the end, once our frameworks become operational, they could be also a useful tool for mitigating other types of threats like ransomware or rootkits.
