Environmental sanitation and pollution control measures in the Odaw-Korle River catchment,Ghana

This article reports on a study that sought to understand the major factors to consider in changing poor environmental sanitation practices in urban communities in Accra, Ghana. The study focused on three main issues: the drivers of sanitation and pollution control measures in the communities; community members’ perceptions on the influence of poor planning on environmental sanitation and pollution; and how existing local governance arrangements influence environmental sanitation and pollution control. It found that efforts are made at the city, community, and individual levels to control poor environmental practices. In order to control environmental pollution, policy initiatives on sanctions should be coupled with the provision of efficient sanitation facilities and services.     

Liberty without Equality: The Property-Rights Connection in a "Negative Citizenship" Regime

Why, in comparison with other liberal capitalist democracies, is the social welfare state so poorly anchored in American law and public discourse? Surely American political and social history have contributed much to the weakness of our “social state.” But law, too, has played a significant material, as well as ideological, role and has provided the terrain for much of our social development. This essay explores the particular contribution of the property-liberty nexus to the stunted development of positive liberty and social citizenship in the United States. It traces this connection from the natural rights and bourgeois Founders through several key conjunctures in American history, including Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the civil rights periods and compares some of the results with developments in Germany and the aspirations of American progressives. The essay contends that left and right alike have operated within a highly resilient and constricting framework that has made progress in the area of social citizenship both awkward and fragile. Although some possibilities for forward movement have always existed and still remain, the prospects for positive-liberty social-state law are not abundant: The master's house is not about to be taken down with his own tools.     

Books in review

Abraham Edel is research professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York. The most recent of his many books are Interpreting Education; Aristotle and His Philosophy;and Morality, Philosophy, and Practice.     

OUT OF THE WHITE BOX

The authors enjoin professionals and service delivery systems for mediation to look at the current and future demographics and specialized needs and responses of Hispanics and other groups, suggesting that, with certain changes, mediation can become more available to these important segments of our society.     

Inducing resistance to suggestibility in children

Thirty 7-year-olds, 30 12-year-olds, and 39 adults were administered the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale, which consists of a story followed by 20 questions, 15 of which are misleading. After subjects were told that their answers were not all correct, the questions were readministered to look for shifts. Approximately half of the subjects in each age group had been warned that the questions were difficult or tricky and that they should only answer with what they confidently remembered. Results indicated that younger children recalled less of the story and were more likely to acquiesce to leading questions than older children and adults. Children also changed more of their answers upon the second questioning. Recall was negatively correlated with both acquiescence to leading questions and likelihood of changing answers, even within age groups. The warning significantly reduced the effect of misleading questions across all age groups.We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Jeffery N. Swartwood in analyzing the data and the staff, parents, and students of St. Jude School for their cooperation.     

The new World Bank programme for the self‐liquidation of the third world peasantry

For many years, the World Bank, whose task is to expand and strengthen the private enterprise system throughout the world, financed agricultural development projects whose beneficiaries were almost exclusively the s landed oligarchy in the underdeveloped countries and, directly or indirectly, the multinational concerns. Many of the Bank's loans helped to finance the modernization of the large estates and progressively weakened thereby the status of the underdeveloped countries’ peasants. Recently, in what at first sight might appear to be an about‐face in its strategy, the Bank added a credit scheme to help 100 million smallholders. Upon closer analysis of this scheme and how it would operate within the framework of underdeveloped agricultures, it is found that it is in reality the most antisocial programme yet to be invented by this so‐called development agency. It is bound to have such catastrophic consequences for the peasantry that it will make the ‘green revolution’ and similar modernization programmes look like child's play, although it guarantees significant additional sales and profits for the multinational concerns.     

Lists as Social Grid: Ratings and Rankings in Everyday Life

It is argued that the inundation of lists in our everyday lives has become part of the social grid, which tells us who and what we are and how we relate to the world. Using Baudrillard's three mutations of the sign, this paper examines the relationship between lists (rankings and ratings) and social life. This updated grid, which is increasingly defined by market capitalism, makes for not only a greater commodified self but a simulated self based on the external statistical world.