Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling: Social Capital Matters for Women’s Career Success?

This study examines the relationship between social networking as a potential upward mobility strategy for women and their career advancement. The federal data from the 2007 Career Advancement Survey (CAS) were analyzed using ordered logistic regressions and OLS multiple regressions. The results showed that having a supportive supervisor and/or mentor was positively related to the likelihood of being appointed to critical roles and being assigned important work, while having important contacts was positively associated with temporary promotions. In addition, engaging in professional and formal networks showed a marginally positive association with work assignment. Gender congruence in supervisory dyads was positively associated with role assignment. The findings regarding gender differences in relationships reported a stronger positive relationship between having a supportive supervisor and/or mentor and temporary promotions for women than for men. Women were more likely to be temporarily promoted than men when they have a supportive supervisor and/or mentor. Women who have a female supervisor were more likely to be temporarily promoted and to be assigned critical roles than men or women who have a male supervisor.     

Levi’s Auschwitz and Dante’s Hell

On reading Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir If This is a Man, one is immediately struck by its literary quality, and especially its generous use of Dante’s Inferno, both of which point to the more general problem of Holocaust witnessing. This paper focuses on Levi’s reasons for using Dante’s poem in particular to communicate his experience. Levi’s choice of Inferno is pointed, not only because of the obvious trope of existence in Hell, but also because Levi conceived of Auschwitz as an experiment designed to destroy the “human,” created in part, at least in the West, by Dante’s poem. What I will be suggesting is that Levi emphasizes the distinctions between his and Dante’s experiences by including in his conversation with Dante’s Inferno (paradoxically) his rejection of that conversation. There may or may not be something “human” which persists after Auschwitz, and the only way to ask this question, without preconceiving an answer, is to dramatize silence. The resultant ambiguity urges readers to, as Levi puts it, “participate in” the events described and/or dramatized.

Co-creation of Linking Social Capital in ‘Municipality 3.0’

There is great interest in co-creation of welfare production between municipalities and the civil society in the Nordic countries. Using linking social capital as a theoretical point of departure and examining a qualitative case study in Norway, I critically assess the concepts of co-creation and ‘Municipality 3.0’. It is suggested that even in countries with high trust in the authorities, building linking social capital in the shape of interorganizational networks is a complex process fraught with potential barriers related to trust, network building, municipal resources, and statutory laws and regulations. And while outcomes are promising, they are far from certain.     

Libya’s conflict

With the battle for Tripoli, Libya’s civil war has entered a key stage. Powerful outside states are fuelling the conflict, and recent events have raised the prospect of more direct military intervention. No diplomatic solution is foreseeable while the United Nations Security Council’s permanent members support different factions. Moreover, each side in the conflict currently believes it can achieve more through fighting than through the necessary compromises of a peace settlement.     

Israel’s election

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears most likely to form Israel’s next government following its election on 9 April, although it is unclear how stable such a government would be. Further elections within the next two years are quite possible. Whatever the outcome of the election, Israel’s next leader will be forced to address a range of serious and interrelated strategic challenges.     

Tunisia’s troubles

Often considered the sole potential success of the Arab Spring, Tunisia is now in a perilous position. If Tunisia’s troubles persist, the best likely scenario it faces is stagnation, accompanied by a gradual return towards more authoritarian government. Yet recent unrest across North Africa and the broader region suggests that more turbulent outcomes are also possible.     

Independent Candidates in China’s Local People’s Congress Elections

In the Chinese political system, according to the constitution, the people’s congresses at the primary level are the only institution which the voters can directly elect. However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightly controls the “direct elections” and takes every measure in the elections to prevent grassroots power from entering even the primary-level people’s congresses. In recent years, grassroots power has kept struggling for its legal rights in the “direct elections” held in a few localities. The conflicts between the grassroots power and the authoritarian party in the “direct elections” have become an interesting political phenomenon, a subject deserves close observation and research. This paper studies the background of the independent candidates, their motivations and behaviour in elections. The paper also examines the party’s control in the elections and thus exposes the true nature of China’s people’s congress “direct” elections. The paper argues that independent candidates can have little impacts on China’s political structure at the current stage because of the party’s tight control, but their political participation has the most democratic value, compared with the “reforms” instigated and carried out by the CCP.     

NATO’s continuing adaptation

Despite US President Donald Trump’s noted hectoring on European NATO defence spending, several European NATO countries have been modestly increasing their spending for some time owing to national threat perceptions. The real challenges are to ‘spend better’, in ways that genuinely enhance military capabilities and in particular increase reassurance and deterrence vis-a-vis Russia, and to improve internal cohesion.