Framework for Analysis of Legal Mobilization: A Decision-Making Model

The American legal system, structured in an entrepreneurial mode, relies upon the individual actor to personally evaluate the burdens and benefits of invoking the law on his or her own behalf Without discounting the contribution to our understanding of legal mobilization which has been made by the access-to-justice movement, the author argues that focusing on the poor and the distribution of legal services has limited our understanding of the legal system.
The article presents an alternative analytic framework for examination of citizen use of the law. The model of legal mobilization presented focuses on demands rather than needs, on citizens rather than lawyers or judges, on decision making rather than access, and on invoking the law rather than compliance with it. Drawing on the literature and available empirical evidence, the author attempts to analytically clarify the complex process of legal mobilization by organizing relevant variables into a decision-making model that focuses on the individual actor and the factors weighed in deciding whether and how to proceed in mobilizing the law.     

双层互动决策模型:近十年来中国政策过程的一个解释框架

近十年来,在决策环境影响下,互动关系成为影响中国公共政策过程的关键变量。通过对中国新医改方案制定过程的案例研究发现,当下中国公共政策过程是官僚体系层面(政策前台)的制度环境、社会网络层面(政策后台)的博弈格局和两者界面的互动结构共同作用的过程。这种双层互动决策模式在新常态下仍然具有强大的生命力,应得到积极的推广和发展。发展双层互动决策模式,尤其关注充分发挥执政党意识形态的政策价值导向功能、创造各利益群体平等参与公共决策的博弈平台以及以程序公正保障政策公正等三个问题。     

A Framework for Integrating External Information into New Product Development: Lessons from the Medical Technology Industry

Only the best manufacturers will remain competitive in today's challenging environment. Any manager involved with developing new products knows the excitement, complexity, and risk of this unpredictable undertaking. Based upon findings from four world class manufacturers of medical imaging technology in Japan and the United States, this article presents a new organizing framework for integrating external information into the NPD process. The findings are particularly timely in an era when manufacturers are vulnerable to intense global competition. The article concludes with several implications for managers involved in the new product development process.     

Procedural Rationality and Regulatory Decision-Making: A Decision Framework Approach

This paper presents the methodology and some preliminary findings from an ongoing study of the procedural rationality of regulatory decisionmaking in the occupational health arena. The author employs the concept of procedural rationality in the sense used by Herbert Simon to refer to the logic of decision-making as it is shaped by institutional constraints. Of particular interest here is the impact of provisions for the involvement of affected interests in and public scrutiny of the regulatory process. The methodology presented involves a charting of the "decision frameworks" adopted by participants in the process at various stages. The methodology is illustrated through its application to the particular case of the development of a regulation governing occupational exposure to inorganic lead in the Canadian province of Ontario.     

The Evolving Structure of the Environmental Justice Movement in the United States: New Models for Democratic Decision-Making

Over the last two decades in the United States, mainstream environmental organizations have reduced, rather than increased, democratic participation by citizens in environmental problem-solving. The environmental justice movement, on the other hand, has served to enlarge the constituency of the environmental movement by incorporating poorer communities and oppressed people of color into environmental decision making process; build community capacity by developing campaigns and projects that address the common links between various social and environmental problems; and facilitate community empowerment by emphasizing grassroots organizing over advocacy. This paper outlines the different components in the environmental justice movement. It is our contention that if researchers and policymakers continue to conceive of the ecological crisis as a collection of unrelated problems, then it is possible that some combination of regulations, incentives, and technical innovations can keep pollution and resource destruction at tolerable levels for more affluent socioeconomic populations. However, poor working class communities and people of color which lack the political–economic resources to defend themselves will continue to suffer the worst abuses. However, if the interdependency of issues is emphasized as advocated by the environmental justice movement, then a transformative environmental politics can be invented.     

Psychological Injury and Law: An Integrative Model

This article briefly reviews the literature on three areas of psychological injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury, preparatory to presentation of an integrated biopsychosocial and forensic model of multifactorial causality. The model is the first in the field to (a) cover in one model the three types of psychological injury, (b) while including a full range of causality factors relevant to forensic psychology (such as pre-event, event-, post-event, and unrelated factors), and (c) while addressing the relevance of biopsychological and stress as a cohering factors in all conditions. (d) The model emphasizes the importance of individual differences, for example, in causality of symptom presentation. (e) The model acknowledges that in individual evaluations, psychologists need to consider threats to validity, response biases, and possible malingering, and verify whether pre-event factors fully explain post-event presentation.     

The Sustainability of University-Industry Research Collaboration: An Empirical Assessment

The concept of university-industry collaboration is an important social experiment in the nation's innovation system. This study examines the sustainability of this collaborative experience by focusing on the actual give-and-take outcomes between university faculty members and industrial firms. Based on two separate but similar surveys conducted in 1997, one for faculty members and another for industry technology managers, the study reports that participants in research collaboration appear to realize significant benefits, some expected and others unexpected. The most significant benefit realized by firms is an increased access to new university research and discoveries, and the most significant benefits by faculty members is complementing their own academic research by securing funds for graduate students and lab equipment, and by seeking insights into their own research. Reflecting on their collaborative experience, an overwhelming majority of these participants say that in the future they would expand or at least sustain the present level of collaboration.     

Legal Constraints on the Use of Race in Biomedical Research: Toward a Social Justice Framework

This article addresses three questions concerning the legal regulation of the use of race as a category in biomedical research: how does the law currently encourage the use of race in biomedical research?; how might the existing legal framework constrain its use?; and what should be the law's approach to race-based biomedical research? It proposes a social justice approach that aims to promote racial equality by discouraging the use of "race" as a biological category while encouraging its use as a socio-political category to understand and investigate ways to eliminate disparities in health status, access to health care, and medical treatment.     

Banishment and the Post-Industrial City: Lessons from Seattle

Seattle deploys several mechanisms by which individuals’ presence in particular spaces can constitute a crime. Through a range of means, police in Seattle are given wide authority to question and arrest those who appear as human manifestations of the “disorder” that is of concern to many. Importantly, these programs accentuate the power of criminal law by mobilizing other forms of law, most notably civil law and administrative law. This legally-hybrid structure works to accentuate the police’s power notably. Yet increased police power does not actually work to reduce “disorder” to any appreciable extent. For this reason, and others, we suggest that different approaches to addressing social marginality represent more promising avenues for cities like Seattle to explore.