BUILDING ENFORCEMENT CAPACITY: EVIDENCE FROM THE MEXICAN CIVIL SERVICE REFORM

Building enforcement capacity, that is, attaining and sustaining control in order to implement changes, is crucial for the success of public management reforms. However, this aspect of public management reform does not receive much theoretical or empirical attention. This paper analyzes the process of building enforcement capacity for the case of the Mexican Professional Civil Service reform. Although this reform experienced several complications (e.g., limited support, resources, and credibility), important goals were attained and some control was achieved. We study how officials attained control over implementation through the adaptive management of combinations of different types of control strategies (regulatory, normative, and procedural). The case study, focused on the analysis of in‐depth interviews with the highest officials involved in the implementation of this reform, finds evidence for three combinations of strategies next to a general pattern characterized by a trade‐off between compliance and coordination. This trade‐off shows that the process of building enforcement capacity may affect the goals of the reform, deviating from lawmakers' original intentions Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Contingent Effects of Fatherhood on Offending

A growing body of research assesses the relationship between fatherhood and desistance. Qualitative studies typically find fatherhood reduces offending, especially substance use; yet, quantitative studies have produced mixed findings. Guided by life-course theory, this study hypothesizes that fatherhood affects certain kinds of offending and fatherhood’s effects on offending are most pronounced among fathers who reside with their child. To test our hypotheses, NLSY97 data are employed along with fixed-effects regression analyses to estimate the relationship between fatherhood and offending, while controlling for time-varying and time-stable competing factors. Periods of fatherhood are associated with reductions in licit and illicit substance use but not other kinds of offending, and these effects are considerably stronger in periods in which fathers resided in the same household as their child. By contrast, residential fatherhood is associated with reductions in property offending and arrest. These results confirm the findings of qualitative research in that fatherhood, particularly residential fatherhood, reduces substance use but has weaker effects on other kinds of deviance.     

Market Instruments for a Sustainable Economy: Environmental Fiscal Policy and Manifest Divergences

The introduction of environmental taxation policies had reached most European countries by the late 1990s. The pricing of activities considered harmful to the environment has given rise to the design of various economic instruments, such as environmental taxes, aimed at promoting environmental responsibility and at enabling the Kyoto Protocol targets to be met, and at the same time generating a marked increase in tax revenues. The aim of this article is to examine whether convergence in environmental taxation has taken place among 27 EU countries, doing so by analyzing time series and applying unit root tests. Our findings show there has been no such convergence, overall, despite the existence of groups of countries with common patterns of behavior.     

NAFTA: The institutionalisation of economic openness and the configuration of Mexican geo-economic spaces

Since the second part of the 1980s, and with the negotiation and implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico's growth-and industry-orientated policies have shifted from the realm of public policy to a market-driven domain. This paper suggests that economic openness and the empowerment of market actors is provoking a new regionalisation of Mexico's core economic activities that will play a crucial role in the coming century. For Mexico, the core of NAFTA, so to speak, encompasses a cross-border territoriality covering two key southern American states: Texas and California, and key Mexican states located from the border to the Central plateau of the country. I also argue in this paper that Mexico's changing economic territoriality, triggered by the dominance of the outward-looking economic model, is exacerbating regional inequalities that prevailed in the country even before the outset of economic reforms. This is mainly the case of Mexico's southern region, still very agriculture-orientated, and with a deficit of those export-orientated industries currently fuelling economic growth. This region is the least endowed with mobile assets-such as technology, capital, knowledge-in order to exploit the opportunities of market-orientated policies. Consequently, social cohesion is at stake, not necessarily provoked by the market, but exacerbated by it, and the market mechanism cannot by itself address this problem.     

Biotechnology and society in the new century]

The developments and applications in human biotechnology make us face deep social dilemmas, social and ethical, that are associated to the possibility of altering our evolutionary and cultural development, thereby renouncing to the principle of Humanity. From a sociological perspective, this text reflects on this matters taking into account how its past and present has shaped a specific operational matrix that is projected towards the future. We shall offer all the public perceptions held on their possibilities in Spain and in the European nations as every advance in scientific and technological matters must take into account the opinion of the citizenry. Finally, there are some final reflections that rather than close the debate leave some questions unanswered. The future should be constructed through dialogue and consensus in a matter of such importance.     

Contending Tradeoffs: IRCA, Immigrants, and the Southern California Restaurant Industry

The impact of immigrant labor in the Service sector is best understood by focusing on the organization of production within firms and its effect on employer demand for labor. This analysis of the San Diego restaurant industry identifies a two tier occupational structure, where employers have selectively recruited undocumented immigrants to fill back-house positions. Conversely, the target hiring of the U.S.-born for visible front-house positions completes the cost-effective symmetry which has allowed this industry to flourish. Although the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) threatens this arrangement, its policy effectiveness remains extremely problematic.