Does Wal-Mart reduce social capital?

Social capital has attracted increasing attention in recent years. We use county-level and individual survey data to study how Wal-Mart affects social capital. Estimates using several proxies for social capital—such as club membership, religious activity, time with friends, and other measures—do not support the thesis that “Wal-Mart destroys communities” by reducing social capital. We measure exposure to Wal-Mart two ways: Wal-Marts per 10,000 residents and Wal-Marts per 10,000 residents aggregated over the years since 1979 to capture a more cumulative “Wal-Mart Effect.” We find that the coefficients on Wal-Mart’s presence are statistically insignificant in most specifications.     

Overcoming Constraints of State Sovereignty: global health governance in Asia

Abstract

In an increasingly globalised world effective international communicable diseases control requires states to embrace basic norms informing global health governance. However, recent international public health crises have shown that states continue to use national sovereignty to justify non-compliance with these norms. In this article we use three recent high-profile examples from Asia in which the tight hold of state sovereignty cut into the effective implementation of international communicable disease control efforts. Taken together, the three cases illustrate a wider trend in which states historically diminished in structural power or subject to imperialist intrusion contest the legitimacy of global governance initiatives if they are perceived to be another vehicle for the imposition of exogenous norms that do not reflect the values or goals of that state. In response to these challenges, three strategies are posited for how the actors involved in protecting public health might overcome the constraints of state sovereignty to more effectively address global public health threats created by the fluid movement of pathogens across borders.     

New Zealand: the dynamics behind a reinvented government

Within the last ten years, the New Zealand government has reformed its management and accounting systems to such a degree that it has attracted the attention of government officials from around the world. The new business-like methods adopted include realignments in managerial authority, accrual budgeting and accounting, asset revaluations, capital charging, and budgeting for outcomes. This paper provides a look at the dynamics behind these revisions with specific emphasis on changes in budgeting processes. Additionally, an explanation is provided as to why it would be very difficult to adopt these methods in the U. S.     

Illumination and Innovation: What Philanthropic Foundations Bring to Global Health Governance

This article argues that because much of the scholarship examining the influence of private foundations in global health governance is either neo-Gramscian or reflexively critical in orientation, undue attention has been paid to foundations' origins, affiliations and perceived biases towards bringing technological solutions to bear on problems with deep socio-political determinants, obscuring their chief functions as global governors while downplaying their agency. Such concerns are by no means new as private philanthropic influence in the governance of global health is not a new phenomenon. Drawing on examples from the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations' efforts to strengthen public health across the Global South, we argue that for over a century private foundations have been instrumental in the governance of collective action problems for two important reasons. Firstly, their stark illumination of state and market failures disproportionately affecting the world's marginalised and the potential of science-enabled innovation to address longstanding challenges has repeatedly generated the requisite political will to address, however imperfectly, global disparities. Secondly, foundations have ensured that functional governance mechanisms exist to provide public goods to the poor when changes to the structural fabric of the world order constrain the ability of other institutions mandated to perform this function.     

The Impact of the Work Environment on Prison Staff: The Issue of Consideration, Structure, Job Variety, and Training

Correctional staff are instrumental in ensuring the success of any correctional institution; therefore, investigating how the work environment impacts correctional workers is essential. To determine the effects of supervisory consideration, supervisory structure, job variety, and perceptions of training on correctional staff job stress, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment, data from a survey of staff at a Midwestern private correctional facility were examined. The Ordinary Least Squares regression results indicate that each of the work environment factors had a significant impact on one or more of the three outcomes. Specifically, supervisory consideration and perceptions of training decreased job stress. Supervisory consideration, job variety, and perceptions of training had positive effects on job satisfaction. Finally, supervisory consideration, supervisory structure, job variety, and perceptions of training had positive relationships with organizational commitment.     

The gender-apartheid analogy in the transnational feminist imaginary: Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation, 1972-2002

Abstract

This article considers the rhetorical implications of transnational exchange between feminist activists in the late twentieth century. It uses Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine (est. 1972) and the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) as a lens through which to understand the emergence of the gender-apartheid analogy in the 1990s. During the 1970s and 1980s, Ms. demonstrated knowledge of and commitment to the anti-apartheid movement. However, when the FMF and Ms. began using apartheid as an analogy for gender-based oppression in the Middle East after the fall of the apartheid regime, the limitations of transnational understanding became fundamentally apparent. This article traces the historical and rhetorical foundations for the use of race-based analogies in women’s rights activism. It then examines the journalistic and foreign policy perspectives espoused toward the South African apartheid regime and women’s rights abuses under fundamentalist Islamic regimes. At the turn of the twenty-first century, this article argues, the transnational feminist imaginary was shaped by a process of inspiration and appropriation which delimited solidarity and understanding across transnational networks of feminist activists.