The Compensation Culture: Cliché or Cause for Concern?

The ‘compensation culture’ has featured frequently in the popular press over the last decade. There have, however, been comparatively few academic studies and such studies as there have been have largely focused on personal injury claims. A compensation culture, if it exists, could extend much wider than that. This article compares the exponential increase in the use of the term ‘compensation culture’ in the national printed media since 1995 with available statistics relating to the Queen's Bench, County Courts, and employment tribunals. Far from spiralling upwards, these statistics show a broad decline across a range of claims with the exception of claims before the employment tribunals, where the government has created a slew of new heads of claim. In order to counter the misconceptions founded by the popular media, and to allow for greater scrutiny, more attention should be paid to the collection and dissemination of judicial and claims statistics.     

Who Do You Trust? Ethnicity and Trust in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article examines the question of trust in Bosnia and Herzegovina with a special focus on the role of ethnicity. We find generalised trust to be low and declining in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moreover, generalised trust is negatively affected by the degree of ethnic heterogeneity in the region. However, a further examination of trust reveals a more complex relationship between ethnicity and trust: people tend to show low levels of trust in all other people irrespective of their ethnic belongings. We argue that ethnic distribution might capture some other regional specific characteristics that also affect the level of trust.     

The Scharff technique: training military intelligence officers to elicit information from small cells of sources

ABSTRACT

Studies have demonstrated the efficacy of the Scharff technique for gathering human intelligence, but little is known about how this efficacy might vary among different samples of practitioners. In this training study we examined a sample of military officers (n?=?37). Half was trained in the Scharff technique and compared against officers receiving no Scharff training. All officers received the same case file describing two sources holding information about a terrorist attack. University students (n?=?74) took the role of the semi-cooperative sources. Scharff-trained officers adhered to the training as they (1) aimed to establish the ‘knowing-it-all’ illusion, (2) posed claims as a means of eliciting information, and (3) asked fewer explicit questions. The ‘untrained’ officers asked many explicit questions, questioned the reliability of the provided information, pressured the source, and displayed disappointment with the source's contribution. Scharff-trained officers were perceived as less eager to gather information and left their sources with the impression of having provided comparatively less new information, but collected a similar amount of new information as their untrained colleagues. The present paper both replicates and advances previous work in the field, and marks the Scharff technique as a promising technique for gathering human intelligence.     

Governance of a public sector joint venture: the control challenges of dominated owners

Local governments increasingly choose to provide a wide range of services through cooperation with other local governments. Providing complex services through intergovernmental units creates collaboration risks and collective action dilemmas that need to be mitigated. Based on a longitudinal case study, an investigation is made into the dynamic processes in the governance of a public sector joint venture (JV) and the control challenges of dominated owners. The findings illustrate that the approach to mitigating collective action dilemmas is far less rational than that prescribed by the normative literature, resulting in control challenges at later stages in the relationship. Limitations in the assessment of collaboration risks are explained by drawing on resource dependence theory (RDT) arguments. Dynamic processes in the JV relationship create the need to adjust the governance system. However, adaptability is constrained by power asymmetry and control complexity.     

Debating Food Security Policy in Two Different Ideational Settings: A Comparison of Australia and Norway

Food security has emerged as a relatively new policy issue in agricultural policy making in developed countries. This policy problem is addressed within an institutional landscape in which agricultural ideas and institutions are well‐established. In this article, food security policy making in Australia and Norway is compared. In Australia, agricultural normalism (agricultural markets and production are considered to be similar to those of other economic sectors) has been dominant since the mid‐1980s, while Norwegian agricultural policy making has been dominated by agricultural exceptionalism (agriculture is considered a unique economic sector with special market and production conditions). It is demonstrated in the article how these two opposing institutionalised ideational foundations have influenced the nature of the food security debate in the two countries. In Australia, the debate emphasises the positive role of the market and trade in providing global food security. In Norway, the debate highlights the need to regulate market forces and restrict trade in order to allow countries to develop their own agricultural sectors.     

Adolescents’ Engagement in Ethnic Harassment: Prejudiced Beliefs in Social Networks and Classroom Ethnic Diversity

Research on ethnic victimization to date has done little to identify the reasons why adolescents victimize their peers due to their ethnic background. To address this limitation, we examined: (1) the extent to which prejudiced attitudes within adolescents’ close and larger social networks determine their engagement in ethnic harassment, and (2) the extent to which classroom ethnic diversity plays a role in any such link. Our sample included 902 Swedish adolescents (M _age ?=?14.40, SD?=?.95; 50.3% girls). We found that Swedish adolescents who held negative attitudes toward immigrants or who were surrounded by prejudiced peers were more likely to be involved in ethnic harassment, particularly in classrooms with high ethnic diversity. Adolescents in classrooms with a high anti-immigrant climate were more likely to harass their immigrant peers. These findings suggest that prejudiced beliefs in youth social networks put young people at risk of engaging in ethnic harassment, particularly in ethnically diverse classrooms.     

Non-Suicidal Self-Injury and Depressive Symptoms During Middle Adolescence: A Longitudinal Analysis

Previous research has shown a consistent positive association between non-suicidal self-injury and depressive symptoms. However, the direction of the effects has not been examined. To understand whether non-suicidal self-injury predicts depressive symptoms or vice versa, we examined the relations between non-suicidal self-injury and depressive symptoms across three waves of self-report data collected 1 year apart from 506 Swedish adolescents (47 % girls; M age = 13.21; SD = .57) who were attending 7th grade at the onset of the study. The results suggest that depressive symptoms predict increases in non-suicidal self-injury 1 year later between the first and second waves of the study. Between the second and third waves of the study depressive symptoms and non-suicidal self-injury were significantly correlated indicating co-occurrence with no direction of effect rather than depressive symptoms predicting non-suicidal self-injury or vice versa. Group comparisons revealed no differences for boys and girls. The findings help clarify the relationships between non-suicidal self-injury and depressive symptoms during middle adolescence.