Public-Sector Reform: Employment Security and Quality of Decision Making in the Australian Taxation Office

This article examines the impact of structural reforms and industrial relations changes on the employment security and decision behaviors of middle-level managers in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). This article is based on an empirical study using focus group and survey data that investigated how structural change and public-sector reforms substantially altered the employment environment. This research reveals that the ATO environment can be characterized by low morale, risk aversion, fear, and distrust brought about, in part, by employment insecurity. Where middle managers perceived organizational threats to their employment security, they engaged in self-protective “survivor” behaviors even when no such threats to their employment security existed. The article concludes that a substantial number of middle-level managers, survivors of years of restructuring, downsizing, and organizational change, were unlikely to display high-quality decision-making behaviors.     

Introduction to session 2: Magnitude of the crisis: The fiscal and human costs

Abstract

Many are looking to California and its state housing law for advice on how to deal with the affordability challenges affecting many metropolitan areas throughout the nation. It is thus critically important to go beyond the laws themselves and examine how state and municipal governance structure affects affordability, supply, and production. Some states give broad freedom to localities to develop policies that can potentially meet a range of goals and objectives. Others directly undermine those efforts by limiting local ability to pursue policy reforms while simultaneously failing to engage on the state level.

The redefinition of federalism on the national level, coupled with continued resistance to growth from some localities, establishes the state as at least an equal partner in dealing with housing supply and affordability issues. Understanding these distinctions is important, and the housing community needs to take them into account as it moves on the state front.     

Mapping fears: the use of commercial high-resolution satellite imagery in international affairs

In October and November 2001, the Pentagon purchased the rights to all images of Afghanistan taken by the Ikonos remote sensing satellite, a high-resolution satellite owned and operated by Space Imaging, Inc. Ikonos is one of a growing number of privately owned and operated remote sensing satellites. It is suggested that Ikonos and other high-resolution satellites carry at least two challenges to national security policy makers. The first is a challenge to operational security – the ability to plan, prepare and carry out military operations in a controlled information environment. Second, commercial remote sensing presents a political challenge to policy makers. Policy makers today face a greater challenge in their efforts to maintain control over the content of debate concerning national and international security priorities and objectives. It is argued here that the nature of the security policy debate itself is in the midst of a fundamental shift in tone and quality as a result of remote sensing satellite technology. It was principally this latter challenge – and not a concern over operational security – that led to the Pentagon's purchase of all Ikonos images during the opening phases of the war in Afganistan.     

A note on the effects of graduation under the US GSP on Africa

The Trade and Tariff Act of 1984 includes a new measure, country graduation, designed to shift a greater share of the benefits of the US Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) from the more advanced developing countries to poorer beneficiary countries. This note presents estimates of the effects of graduating Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan on the poorest countries of Africa. Our results show that the removal of these four countries will do little to increase the GSP benefits of the African beneficiary countries.     

Raman Spectroscopy as a Simple,Rapid, Nondestructive Screening Test for Methamphetamine in Clandestine Laboratory Liquids

Raman spectroscopy has found increased use in the forensic controlled substances laboratory in recent years due to its rapid and nondestructive analysis capabilities. Here, Raman spectroscopy as a screening test for methamphetamine in clandestine laboratory liquid samples is discussed as a way to improve the efficiency of a laboratory by identifying the most probative samples for further workup among multiple samples submitted for analysis. Solutions of methamphetamine in ethanol, diethyl ether, and Coleman fuel were prepared in concentrations ranging from 0.5% to 10% w/v, and Raman spectra of each were collected. A concentration‐dependant Raman peak was observed at 1003 per cm in each solution in 4% w/v and greater solutions. Case samples were analyzed and also found to reliably contain this diagnostic peak when methamphetamine was present. The use of this diagnostic indicator can save the forensic controlled substances laboratory time and materials when analyzing clandestine laboratory liquid submissions.     

Justinian's Institutional Classification and the Class of Quasi-Delict

This article examines the records of free-standing proof-of-age hearings from their probable introduction around the mid thirteenth century to their formal consolidation by the beginning of the fourteenth. It traces the gradual establishment of a hybrid legal form, unique to proof hearings, whereby individual jurors were routinely questioned as to the basis of their knowledge of an heir's birth and replied with a statement of plausible personal connection with the birth. It shows in detail how a rationalising legal bureaucracy encountered the expectations and practices of local jurors and recorders and the compromises that resulted in an enduring legal form.     

“Another World is Possible”: Theorizing the Radical Politics of Democracy,North and South

This article examines the cultural politics of organizing in the Occupy LA movement. Utilizing ethnographic methods and the analysis of digital media sources produced by a variety of Occupy activists, this study focuses on how members of Occupy LA, in the post camp eviction period, made efforts to infuse a new kind of class politics among members of the newly and structurally dispossessed in the Los Angeles area. It focuses mainly on their efforts to build bridges among a variety of community based social movements during specific actions such as May Day 2012 and their efforts to ally themselves with organizations fighting the gentrification of Downtown Los Angeles and Skid Row in particular. Utilizing the theoretical lens of David Harvey's notion of “accumulation by dispossession” it concludes that Occupy LA has helped to open up new opportunities for rethinking the concept of “class consciousness” and its relationship to the structural dispossession of black and Latino communities. It also concludes that while this new politics is tentative and fragile, it has also opened up a creativity in thinking through the practical organizational issues of dealing with organizing across lines of race, class, and gender.     

Regulating the race: Aboriginal children in private European homes in colonial Australia

Abstract

This article focuses on the incorporation of Aboriginal children into European families on a private basis in the colonial era. While state-based missions and reserves were central sites where Aboriginal children were placed, other Aboriginal children were privately placed with European families during the colonial era. This article explores the shifting reasons for this practice. It finds that Aboriginal children who entered European families away from the control of the state came under the control of Europeans through a variety of ways. Initially, Aboriginal child removals were conducted during the course of violent frontier conflict or involved children who had been impacted by introduced European diseases. Smaller numbers of Indigenous children were taken as objects of curiosity. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, it became increasingly common for settlers to take Indigenous children for labour purposes. The article argues that the white middle-class family was positioned as a site for “civilising” children, where the moral regulation of childhood was conducted. This article adds a new dimension to colonial understandings about the role and structure of the family. It also expands understandings about Indigenous child removal in Australia's past.