Mitigating Intergroup Conflict: Effectiveness of Qualifying Subjective Justice Views as an Intervention Technique in Comparison to Empathy Induction

Social Justice Research - Intergroup conflicts can be triggered and perpetuated by collective perceptions of injustice. In two experiments, we applied the qualifying of subjective justice views, a...     

Gramsci,the peasantry and popular culture

Antonio Gramsci adopted a developmentalist position after becoming a marxist. He thus departed from earlier Italian positions in foreseeing a society in which peasants — understood as a structure of petty property and its dependants ‐ would eventually though not immediately be peasants no more after the introduction of modern methods of cultivation. After the success of fascism in 1922 he began to reconsider his assumption that the peasantry were destined to disappear in a new mode of production, which would replace the backward dual economy of Italy. If the peasantry were not always in secular decline before the onward march of capitalism, but could, as in Italy, increase in numbers and political strength even under capitalism, then this called for a reassessment of their social and political role in a marxism which was not simply developmental in the old sense. In the 1930s in particular, Gramsci therefore started to develop strategies for change which assumed that: (1) the peasantry would remain in the foreseeable future as a significant political force; (2) their ethos and values would therefore have to be incorporated in any marxist theory of transition and socialism, and (3) developmentalism or modernisation would have to be re‐examined as a core part of marxist strategy.     

Local authority performance indicators: Dousing the fire of campaigning consumers?

Much criticism has been levelled at the reliability of the Audit Commission's measures of local authority performance, but less attention has been paid to the reality of their empowering effect on consumer groups. This article reports on the impact of the policy on one consumer group, ALL MOD CONS, a national charity which campaigns for more and better public toilets. It argues that, far from empowering the group, the annual publication of performance indicators has diverted its energies and resources into disseminating the Audit Commision's statistics to their members and drawing misleading conclusions from them which risk undermining the group's credibility. The case raises questions about the role of performance indicators in the democratic process.     

Further Evidence on the Anatomical Placement of the Human Eyeball for Facial Approximation and Craniofacial Superimposition*

Abstract: Recently a small sampled cadaver study (n = 4) suggested that the human eyeballs are placed closer to the orbital roof and lateral orbital wall as first reported in the anatomical literature many years previously. This contrasts with central positioning of the eyeball within the orbit as advocated by the facial approximation literature. Given the limits of such small samples, this study re-examined globe position in nine new cadavers to help clarify which relationship is accurate. The results essentially confirm prior empirical findings except that the mean lateral divergences from the orbit center were found to be larger—the eyeball was found to be “displaced” 1.4 mm superiorly and 2.4 mm laterally. Medians calculated across all 13 cadavers from this study and the above-mentioned recent report refine these measurements to 1.4 and 2.3 mm respectively. Globe projection values were identical to those observed for living individuals (c. 16 mm).