Navigating the role of the principal investigator: a comparison of four cases

Principal investigators are the lead actors on projects at the forefront of nascent technologies, yet few studies have explored the personal actions and experiences of PIs as they navigate their roles. I investigated principal investigators and their approach to new boundary spanning and entrepreneurial roles. Following a multiple case study methodology with a combination of interviews and observation, four PIs in nanotechnology related fields are explored in three dimensions: career and institutional alignment, boundary spanning activities and the tensions created in the still largely uncharted waters of nanotechnology commercialization. I found that these PIs actively sought organizational alignment that allowed them “to make things happen” while keeping harmony between the university and enterprise. The PIs demonstrated boundary-spanning activities, in particular a propensity for welcoming strangers into their labs in the hopes of finding new knowledge and opportunities, and practicing “good grantsmanship” to convert these new relations into collaboration. I found that the PIs managed tensions related to academic progression and lack of institutional support. Through this study, I offer researchers an opportunity to hear the voice of PIs on these topics and seek to contribute to our understanding of PIs as critical actors in the pursuit of science.     

The existing tensions in the defining of human trafficking at a UK and international level: a critical overview

Human trafficking is an ancient trade that took several forms over the centuries, from full blown state-perpetrated slavery through to illegal exploitative employment of migrants in the sex and other labor industries. At the start of the twenty-first century, a new definition of human trafficking was produced by the United Nations, within which are contained terms such as “coercion,” “deception,” “abuse of power” and “consent.” While the definition itself has largely been agreed upon, deep divisions – about the interpretation of those terms within the definition – continue to polarize the views of antagonizing political and feminist lobbying groups. The agreement on the definition seems to have served little in ironing the differences and the debates continue to be fuelled. In this article, the author elaborates on the tensions that surround the interpretation of the definition and argues that the main group to have fallen victim to the relevant yet inept international and individual state regulations is the trafficked people, while the traffickers tend to largely escape punishment. Rectifying the situation can be extremely challenging and requires sustained and large scale multinational collaborative work. So far, only little is being done to address the problem and the expectation is that it will become significantly worse before it eventually gets better.     

Research collaboration in universities and academic entrepreneurship: the-state-of-the-art

There is abundant evidence that research collaboration has become the norm in every field of scientific and technical research. We provide a critical overview of the literature on research collaboration, focusing particularly on individual-level collaborations among university researchers, but we also give attention to university researchers’ collaborations with researchers in other sectors, including industry. We consider collaborations aimed chiefly at expanding the base of knowledge (knowledge-focused collaborations) as well as ones focused on production of economic value and wealth (property-focused collaborations), the latter including most academic entrepreneurship research collaborations. To help organize our review we develop a framework for analysis, one that considers attributes of collaborators, collaborative process and organization characteristics as the affect collaboration choices and outcomes. In addition, we develop and use a “Propositional Table for Research Collaboration Literature,” presented as an “Appendix” to this study. We conclude with some suggestions for possible improvement in research on collaboration including: (1) more attention to multiple levels of analysis and the interactions among them; (2) more careful measurement of impacts as opposed to outputs; (3) more studies on ‘malpractice’ in collaboration, including exploitation; (4) increased attention to collaborators’ motives and the social psychology of collaborative teams.     

Decision Making in a Hybrid Organization: A Case Study of a Southwestern Drug Court Treatment Program

This article presents a case study of decision making in a drug court located the southwestern United States. This study seeks to fill a gap in research on decision making by attending to the ways that drug court officials navigate the demands of a court that is dedicated to both therapy and criminal justice. This analysis differs from previous research by viewing the drug court as a “hybrid organization” and asking how the staff members interact in the decision‐making process. Additionally, this research provides an opportunity to investigate the concerns over collaborative decision making raised by critics. The data from this case study reveal that as a hybrid organization, the drug court staff often divides along institutional lines by allowing the counseling staff to manage treatment and the judge to manage punishment. When tensions arise, they are resolved by the structure of the court, which is hierarchical rather than collaborative.     

School Shootings and Security Lock-downs: Myths,Positive School Climates,and Safer Campuses

School shooting tragedies and the juvenile justice system’s movement toward a retributive and punitive framework gravely impacted how primary and secondary school students, disproportionately urban districts, used security measures to lock down campuses and build “fortress-like” schools. This iteration of control on school campuses emerged in tandem with the most recent generation’s zero tolerance approach to student violence and problems; a policy widely regarded as ineffective in urban, suburban, and rural districts. As school shootings continue to impact state legislative action and public reactions to school management, this paper takes a critical approach to school security policies and reviews the evidence on the risk for school violence and how to move away from student control approaches that do not improve school safety. Instead, the incorporation of prosocial education and school engagement efforts finds that school and student safety is improved. These, and related approaches to student body management, decreases campus violence and may also minimize the risk of some school shootings - as rare as these tragic incidents are across the nation’s schools. The interplay of schools, students, and the juvenile and family courts is ongoing. Knowing how school districts can best approach their campus environments, safety, and learning is important for school social workers and court personnel because of how often these systems work, or do not work, together.     

INFORMED CHOICE AND EMERGENT SYSTEMS AT THE GROWTH EDGE OF COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE

Integrated interdisciplinary team practice evolves over time as collaborative lawyers encounter the limitations of their own skill‐set in helping clients to reach consensual resolution outside the courts. Team collaboration represents the evolutionary growth edge of the collaborative practice movement. Working in teams with financial neutrals and mental health professionals who act as coaches and child specialists, collaborative lawyers become engaged in an emergent learning system called into being to assist each couple through their divorce. All professionals working on a collaborative team case participate in the process from the beginning and share responsibility for helping the clients achieve the values‐based goals identified by them early in the process. This shared professional engagement in the divorce conflict resolution process gives rise to a need for agreed roadmaps and protocols, sophisticated planning and debriefing sessions, case conferencing, and careful attention to the quality of communications at the negotiating table. None of this can happen at a “best practices” level without mutual trust between and among the professionals and a culture of transparency and accountability. These characteristics emerge over time as a natural outgrowth of working in teams.     

Infusing Public Law into Privatized Welfare: Lawyers,Economists, and the Competing Logics of Administrative Reform

Along with the trend toward “New Public Management” (NPM) and replacing the legal culture of public bureaucracies with market logic through privatization, we are also witnessing instances of “publicization,” the application of public law norms and mechanisms to privatized services. The article explores the role of government lawyers and economists in the dynamics of these administrative reforms. Using a detailed case study of welfare‐to‐work reform in Israel, it shows that the reconstruction of decision making and accountability patterns under NPM was the result of competing efforts by these professional groups to appropriate the “privatized state” to accord with their own institutional logics and interests. While economists advanced a “market” logic, lawyers tried to reproduce the logic of “law” in the post‐bureaucratic setting. The study demonstrates how eventually public law norms were re‐infused into privatized welfare as a result of the increasing institutional power of the lawyers in the regulatory space, along with wider political and social support for the entrenched legalistic mechanisms of the administrative state. However, in addition to the “battle of norms” between lawyers and economists, there were also concessions that led to the redrawing of the boundaries of public law along more functional, rather than formal, lines.     

The Right to Be Racist in College: Racist Speech,White Institutional Space,and the First Amendment

Throughout the post–civil rights era, colleges and universities across the United States have periodically experienced explicitly racist incidents on their campuses. From the hurling of racial slurs at students of color, to the hanging of nooses on campus, to students donning Ku Klux Klan outfits or throwing “ghetto” parties that caricaturize communities of color, these incidents challenge the notion that modern racism has changed to a more subtle form, referred to as color‐blind racism. We place these incidents within a broader context of race and institutions, suggesting a connection between overt racist expressions and the more covert elements of neoliberal color‐blind racism. Through a critical discourse analysis of news stories about these incidents, the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the controlling legal cases involving racist expression on campuses, we suggest that explicitly racist incidents operate in tandem with neoliberal educational policies and color‐blind racism to mark and reinscribe colleges and universities as white institutional spaces.     

How social movement organizations explicitly and implicitly promote deviant behavior: The case of the militia movement

The literature on social movements and deviance has failed to recognize that social movement organizations also promote deviance in society. This oversight stems from a tendency in the dominant paradigm of social movement theory to normalize the activities of these movements by equating their activities with political behavior. Focusing on the modern militia movement, we discuss the explicit and implicit paths through which movements promote deviance and/or criminal behavior. Noting that the movement has both a “defensive” and an “offensive” wing, we find that they promote deviance both through their ideology, which legitimizes deviance, and through their organizational structures, which are unable to control either the actions of those who are part of the movement or the flow of movement-generated information.     

Institutionalization of Criminology: A Prerequisite to Comparative Criminology

The increased prevalence and enrichment of comparative analysis would invigorate criminology generally as a scientific field because comparative criminology is a movement toward a “true science of criminology.” But, at least at its present stage, comparative criminology awaits the institutionalization of criminology at a level sufficient for the essential availability of criminologists capable of and competent for meeting the peculiar demands of transnational research.

“Comparative, coordinated and interdisciplinary research should be carried out to determine the relative effects of programs in different countries” and through cooperation between researchers from different countries…to develop a highly promising new field of comparative criminology”, in order to determine “uniformities and differences in causal influences, in predictive factors, and in results of preventive and treatment programs” and to develop “a true science of criminology.”     

Survivor-Centered Research: Towards an Intersectional Gender-Based Violence Movement

Much has been written on the imperative of intersectionality within the fight for women’s equality and in efforts to end gender-based violence. However, data continues to show that women and LGBTQ people of color experience heightened and more severe instances of both state and interpersonal violence. What lessons can domestic violence and sexual assault advocates and researchers learn from intersectional theory and frameworks to help reduce instances of violence, reduce barriers in accessing resources and create safety nets for communities? This paper seeks to explore the roots of historical violence against communities of color, the current trends in anti-violence research and service provision and strategies for engaging in intersectional community based research.     

Research collaboration in the European community: Lessons for the US

Research collaboration between government, universities, and industry, as well as among member nations, has been a prominent strategy in the European Community's science and technology policy through the 1980s and into the 1990s. In the perspective of the Single European Act and 1992 Plan, this paper outlines the lessons from European research collaboration for the United States. The structure of the European Community's cooperative R&D programs are reviewed and support for the development of advanced materials is highlighted. In the context of the benefits from the European Community's programs, five policy implications can be discerned for the US: establishment of forums for industry and government to dialogue about research priorities, institution of programs to promote strategic industrial R&D through cost-sharing, encouragement of small and medium-size firms to cooperate in R&D in high-technology sectors, monitoring of European research and development programs, and development of reciprocity policies for foreign-company membership in national collaborative R&D programs. Mary T. Tyszkiewicz is senior research associate in the Technology and Information Policy Program at Syracuse University. She has an MS in inorganic chemistry from Iowa State University and MSc. in Science, Technology, and Industrialization from the Science Policy Research Unit at University of Sussex in Brighton, England.     

FROM RETRIBUTION TO "DESERT"The Evolution of Criminal Punishment

Does current disenchantment with rehabilitation and the movement toward determinate sentencing signal a return to “retribution”? To the contrary, a close analysis of the program and philosophy of determinate sentencing reveals a fundamental break with the retributive tradition of punishment according to generic categories of conduct. In an evolutionary development that can be traced through the classical and positivist reform movements. punishment has gradually shifted from a focus upon vengeonce and expiation toward individualized consideration of factors relevant to fairness. The thrust of the new movement toward regularizing the assessment of factors in aggravation or mitigation, with particular emphasis on harm and culpability, must be viewed in an evolutionary perspective.     

Distributive Justice Antecedents of Race and Gender Disparities in First-Year College Performance

Public education is a sphere of society in which distributive justice with respect to the allocation of opportunities to learn can have profound and lasting effects on students’ educational outcomes. We frame our study in the distributive justice literature, and define just outcomes specifically from a meritocratic and strict egalitarian perspectives in order to investigate how assignment to academic tracks and the availability of opportunities to learn during high school are associated with students’ academic achievement during college. We examine the role of “just” placement into high school academic tracks, “just” access to high-quality teachers, and “just” assignment of secondary schools’ resources in high school, in relation to college freshmen’s grade point averages (GPA). We utilize longitudinal data from a unique dataset with over 15,000 students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina public secondary schools and then attended North Carolina public universities. Our results suggest that “unjust” assignment of students to certain high schools, access to high-quality teachers, and assignment to learn in specific academic tracks result in long-lasting consequences that are reflected in freshman college GPA. Importantly, findings also show that the direction and magnitude of the relationship between distributional injustice at schools and college performance is moderated by students’ own gender and race. Race and gender interact with the high schools’ institutional contexts operationalized by tracking practices, teacher quality, and by school racial and socioeconomic composition. Results show that similar settings do not affect all students in the same ways.     

Feminist lawyering,violence against women,and the politics of law reform in India: An interview with Flavia Agnes

The history of the women’s movement’s relationship to law in India cannot be written without acknowledging the pioneering work of activist, advocate, and scholar Flavia Agnes. Her own life’s journey, engagement with the movement, involvement in women’s rights litigation, feminist jurisprudential scholarship, and outreach work through Majlis (the organisation she co-founded) offer key insights into the kind of movement-based legal pedagogy, awareness, and training that the women’s movement has fostered in India. Flavia’s activism and scholarship over the last three decades have opened up sophisticated critiques of rape law and family law reform in India that have become foundational to the field of what can be called Indian feminist jurisprudence. This interview offers insights into the autobiographical, the feminist, and the scholarly convergences in Flavia’s thinking and writing. She speaks with candour and conviction and introduces ways of thinking about feminist lawyering, violence against women, and the politics of law reform in India that are historically and theoretically grounded in an ethics of self-reflexivity and quotidian wisdom that the insulated nature of clinical legal education in India has much to learn from.

     

Learning legal reasoning while rejecting the oxymoronic status of feminist judicial rationalities: a view from the law classroom

One misconception accompanying the idea of a feminist judgment is that feminist judgment is inherently at odds with the putative neutrality of the “judge” as a “neutral” adjudicator. Many lawyers, scholars and law students tend to assume that when deliberating as a judge, feminism(s) simply has/have no rightful or rational place, relevance or bearing upon the process or the outcome and that such a “non-neutral” view will necessarily deviate from the standard canons of judicial reasoning by embodying an unacceptable bias. Introducing students to the “grammar” of reasoning in an undergraduate course dedicated to both general critical reasoning and legal reasoning, however, presented an ideal opportunity for students to encounter in greater intimacy the interpretive openness of law and the indeterminacies that argument alone can never ultimately resolve without recourse to deeper positional commitments. By stepping into the role of judge, having studied the techniques, inherent malleability and limitations of legal argument, students could explore for themselves the range of argumentatively defensible interpretations and outcomes possible in any given legal case. In the process, the students could appreciate not only the open textured nature of judgment and legal reasoning more richly, but also see the “rationality” of feminist judgment as a fully plausible alternative to non-feminist “rationality” and judgment.     

Why Have-Nots Win in the HIV Litigation Arena: Socio-Legal Dynamics of Extreme Cases*

This study focuses on “extreme” cases, those in which “have-nots,” usually people with HIV (PWAs), win HIV-related disputes in direct contests with “haves.” Using extensive data gathered in the United States, we searched for a socio-legal explanation of how PWAs have managed to win claims against insurance companies, government agencies, and other institutional plaintiffs. We also looked at judicial preoccupation with PWAs as carriers of contagion. We have observed that PWAs win against haves when: their needs-based claims attract third parties with strategic interests and independent resources; and when litigators cause decision makers to identify with PWAs and employ proven scientific arguments to defeat fear of their clients' contagion. For example, gay activist lawyers devised such an effective strategy by defining PWAs as persons with disabilities and by extending to them the antidiscrimination protections won earlier by disability rights' lawyers. While this approach brought relief in court for some and secured a less onerous identity for PWAs, its importance is diminishing with the shifting epidemiology of HIV in the United States.     

The Continuing Problem of the Universal to Questions of Justice: A Feminist Reading of Lars von Trier’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Dogville</Emphasis>

What are the terms of evaluation that seem relevant in deciding whether a film is feminist or anti-feminist? Which critical practices should be engaged in such an evaluation? In recent and contemporary critical feminist practices, feminist arguments are no longer based on a stable subject category of “woman” and there is no longer any particular methodology upon which feminist theorists rely. The category of “woman” has been revealed to be not an ahistorical, stable category but an effect of material and representational practices. Further, feminist methodologies have been concerned to contextualize the framing of the questions they ask, as well as their place in the methodologies they employ. In addition to the refusal of an essentialized female subject, feminists have called into question the idea that it is possible to produce a “feminist method” based on the standpoint of a female subjectivity, even where this subjectivity is admitted as a construct, arguing that this extrapolation to the general from a particular point of view produces political, and frequently racist, effects. In this essay, I consider Lars von Trier’s controversial film Dogville (2003) as a case study to explore the relation of practices of representation to questions of feminist justice. I argue that the film does a lot of good critical work in showing the ways in which certain practices of representation can be mobilized to produce a collectivity (or “sovereignty”) that is seen to emanate from “the people” and to thereby instantiate authority, while simultaneously disguising the material and political effects of its subjugation of “others.” However, in doing this work the film produces its own problematic construction of universality and particularity. Further, the film instrumentalises representations of sexual violence and subjection in order to prove its point, and as productive as these tactics are to illuminating questions of social justice, I argue that this representational practice produces effects that need to be read as anti-feminist.     

Winning by Co-Opeting in Strategic Government-University-Industry R&D Partnerships: The Power of Complex, Dynamic Knowledge Networks

There is increasing consensus among academic scholars, policy makers, and industry practitioners alike that the present and future secret of business survival and prosperity lies in strategic partnering and co-opeting successfully rather than outright competition. This is particularly so in knowledge-intensive, highly complex, and dynamic environments such as all high technology industries (semiconductors, aerospace, software, telecommunications, etc.), where collaborating to compete in knowledge generation and exchange has become so pervasive it is often hard to notice having become the standard modus operandi (from cross-licensing agreements to strategic complementarity in products and services). For example, witness the case of the Microsoft/Intel collaboration or “Wintel” alliance. We propose a dynamic, learning-driven framework which uses the game theoretic perspective, drawing principally from the notion of “co-opetition” (coined by Ray Noorda, former CEO of Novell, and developed by Brandenburger and Nalebuff [1996]), to examine how a knowledge generating and leveraging value-maximizing organization (not just a for-profit firm), should position itself in relation to the range of players with whom the organization interacts (in terms of market relationships, generating and pooling of strategic knowledge assets including intellectual property rights and human capital, and other dimensions) to maximize shareholder value in the long term. Select case studies focusing on government-university-industry strategic partnerships for research and technological development (GUISP RTDs), such as the NSF Engineering Research Centers, provide empirical validation of our concepts and especially on how to architect intelligent organizational interfaces across the spectrum of strategic R&D collaborations.     

Who is Afraid of Radical Pluralism? Legal Order and Political Stability in the Postnational Space*

Constitutional pluralism has become a principal model for understanding the legal and political structure of the European Union. Yet its variants are highly diverse, ranging from moderate “institutional” forms, closer to constitutionalist thinking, to “radical” ones which renounce a common framework to connect the different layers of law at play. Neil MacCormick, whose work was key for the rise of constitutional pluralism, shifted his approach from radical to institutional pluralism over time. This paper reconstructs the reasons for this shift—mainly concerns about political stability that also underlie many others' skepticism vis‐à‐vis radical pluralist ideas. It then seeks to show why such concerns are likely overdrawn. In the fluid, contested space of postnational politics, a common, overarching frame is problematic as it might inflame, rather than tame, tensions. Leaving fundamental issues open along radical pluralist lines may help to work around points of highly charged contestation and provide opportunities for resistance from less powerful actors.