Malaysia Incorporated: Ethics on Trial

It is logical to begin by considering briefly the influence of Malaysia's post-1957 social, economic and political factors in the evolution and development of the close and intimate relationships between government and business that have become the hallmark of the Malaysian economic equation. In 1957 when Malaya 1 achieved independence from Britain, it inherited a form of government based on the Westminster model which, with a few local adaptations, remains very much in place. Of equal significance is the inheritance of an economy based on the traditional British colonial mercantile interests centred on the export of rubber and tin. The nation boasted the most efficient plantation economy in the world, so efficient, in fact, that Malayan foreign exchange earnings helped Britain enormously to repay much of its war debt to the USA. It was not for nothing that Malaya was known as Britain's Dollar Arsenal. Economic prosperity, by the standards of Asia, was not new to the country. It was, however, commodity-based and opportunities for corruption were nothing like those that presented themselves in the 1970s.     

The Malayan Security Service (1945–1948)

The Malayan Security Service (MSS) was the main intelligence agency of the British when they returned to Singapore in September 1945 following the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. It was responsible for obtaining and collating information on subversive organisations and personalities in Singapore/Malaya. As there was some dissatisfaction over its alleged failure to forewarn the British colonial authorities of the impending uprising of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), it was disbanded in August 1948 just after the start of the Malayan Emergency, and its functions were taken over by the Singapore and Malayan Police Special Branches.     

青少年犯罪心理原因剖析及预防——以心理健康教育为视角

青少年犯罪问题己越来越突出,成为摆在人们面前的一个不容忽视的严峻的社会问题,预防青少年犯罪已成为我们社会各部门、学校及家庭必须研究、认识和解决的课题。本文中主要对青少年犯罪的心理原因进行剖析,并从心理健康教育的角度提出对策。     

远离辉煌的繁荣:青少年犯罪研究30年

回顾我国青少年犯罪研究30年的历程可以发现,青少年犯罪研究不仅仅推动了青少年犯罪学与犯罪学的产生,还在推动国家和社会公众重视解决青少年犯罪问题、促成矫正主义青少年犯罪观的形成、促进青少年犯罪刑事政策的形成与完善,以及推动未成年人专门立法的诞生、少年司法制度的建立等方面均发挥了重要的作用.与此同时,30年来的青少年犯罪研究也存在着学科独立性的缺失、研究对象界定的悖论、实证研究方法的缺失、青少年犯罪研究专业槽的缺失、青少年犯罪研究各学科之间的隔阂与分裂等严重不足.     

低自我控制与家庭社会经济地位在青少年犯罪中的作用——我国青少年犯罪成因实证研究初探

本研究分别对以官方统计数据和自我报告法获得的数据进行初步回归分析发现,在影响青少年犯罪的多种因素中,"低自我控制(low self-control)"的解释力最为突出,证实了青春期特有的身心冲突极有可能是导致此人生阶段犯罪(或偏差行为)激增的主要因素。同时我们还发现了家庭社会经济地位在青少年犯罪中的特殊作用。     

Urban local government finance in Zimbabwe: The case of Harare City Council

Since Zimbabwe won its independence in 1980, the country's leaders have embarked on an ambitious programme of decentralization and local government reform. At the same time, urban conditions in the country have become increasingly difficult. This paper examines major aspects of urban local government finances in this environment of reform and growing fiscal pressures, with special reference to the experience of Harare City Council. It is argued that some relative successes have been recorded, although a number of undesirable elements of colonial practices and various fiscal problem persist.     

不良交往与青少年犯罪

社会交往是青少年社会化的基本方式和途径 ,其在青少年成长过程中发挥着重要作用 ,但这必须是正常交往。青少年由于其身心特点很容易发生不良交往 ,而不良交往往往是青少年走向犯罪的第一步。本文主要探讨了什么是不良交往 ,不良交往的特点、原因、危害及预防 ,从而预防、减少青少年犯罪。     

The Art of Not Being Quite So Governed: An Examination of the Work of the “Critical” Journal

Michel Foucault in his lecture “What is Critique?” argues that criticism offered a response to the state's developing art of governing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Instead of accepting the state's way of governing, critics presented alternative visions of not being quite so governed or of not being governed thusly. Similarly, in the latter half of the twentieth century, factions within academic disciplines also rejected their disciplines' mode of governing and created alternatives. In response to the desire to make political science more relevant and visible, the Caucus for a New Political Science formed as an alternative to the American Political Science Association. A similar trend occurred in other disciplines. Over the next few decades a number of academic journals were founded that included the word “critical” in their titles or explicitly stated a “critical” aim or approach. However, even dissenting academic groups, like the Caucus for a New Political Science, began to be reabsorbed within their disciplinary homes. With time, many of these groups succumbed to a degree of professionalization that perhaps inhibited their larger aspirations. As Foucault argues, the critical attitude does not reject governing altogether; it is not a call for anarchy. Rather, it demands an alternative to the current governance. The question becomes how to maintain the critical attitude while also building alternative institutions. Does institution building attenuate critique? And what then is critique? This article reflects on these questions by providing a brief study of “critical” disciplinary reorganizations, with greater attention to the Caucus for a New Political Science and its journal, New Political Science.     

Colonial governmentality and the ‘economy’

Using Foucault's notion of governmentality, this paper argues that colonial governmentality in India sought to effect a new relationship between resources, population, and discipline. Drawing theoretical insights from the 'critical accounting literature' to bear on the regulation of economic activity in colonial India, the paper shows how the discursive practices of colonial governance, in particular the modalities of measurement, accounting, and classification, enabled the constitution of the 'economy'. Such statistical data generated as part of colonial administration opened up the possibility of a nationalist accounting of the exploitation of India by the colonial power.     

Sudan's Security Agencies: Fragmentation,Visibility and Mimicry, 1908–89

This article contends that, in the period under study, government security agencies in both colonial and post-colonial Sudan have failed to dominate society. It attributes this failure to the limited resources and limited ambitions of the state, and the fact that its security organs were thus weakly institutionalized. The fact that these failures persisted after independence, in spite of the efforts of post-colonial governments to expand their intelligence agencies, demonstrated the divisions within the state and the extent to which it could be captured by competing political and social groups.     

Preventive servicing is good for business and affordable homeownership policy

Abstract

This article documents the growing importance of preventive servicing—business practices that emphasize early intervention in delinquency and default management practices that also help financially troubled borrowers avoid foreclosure. We suggest that the loan servicing side of the affordable housing delivery system may be underappreciated and undercapitalized.

We use a database of more than 28,000 affordable housing loans to test several preventive servicing‐related propositions and find that after we control for loan and borrower characteristics, the likelihood that a delinquent mortgagor within this universe will ultimately default varies significantly across servicers. This suggests that loan servicing is an important factor in determining whether low‐ and moderate‐income borrowers who fall behind in their mortgage payments will end up losing their homes through foreclosure. It also suggests a need for policy makers to incorporate preventive servicing into affordable homeownership programs.     

In the Name of Human Rights: Global Organizations and Participating Citizens

As a contribution to the growing literature on citizenship and advanced liberal governance, this paper focuses on how citizens—especially the poor—are brought into new policy platforms and new social relationships of responsibility, accountability, and participation. In making specific empirical reference to a range of global organizations and their poverty reduction initiatives, the analysis emphasizes the diverse ways in which individuals are governed as certain kinds of “free” persons through particular administrative practices. In this analysis, we underline how some organizations encourage citizens to participate in global practices, markets, and institutions, and train them to act in ways that are aligned with the principles and expectations imposed on them by advanced liberal governmental agendas. We argue that global organizations that are formally or informally linked to other organizations, agencies, and governments around the world, such as the United Nations and the World Bank, view citizens' participation in rights claiming and budgetary design practices as a crucial part of their responsibility to improve their well-being. We also analyse how specific global organizations promote citizens to become consumers of global financial services as a way of solving global poverty. In assessing programmes designed to encourage poor people to participate in global markets and institutions, we contend that these programmes are founded on governing practices that aim to make citizens, non-governmental organizations, and nation-states adhere to advanced liberal principles. We question whether these programmes improve the well-being of poor people. We suggest that future research needs to focus on how global organizations cultivate different discourses of freedom and liberty which serve to govern citizens as responsible consumers and participants.     

Good Governance Practices in Professional Associations for Public Employees: Evidence of a Public Service Ethos?

Professional associations and occupational societies play an important role in educating and credentialing public employees. Very little research has attempted to connect, empirically, a public service ethos to the professional memberships that public employees carry. Nowhere is that potential influence more likely to be seen than in the governing boards of these nonprofit associations, whose behavior is subject to strong normative and mimetic influences as a result of the public's expectations for good governance. This article uses a large generalizable sample of boards of directors, controlling for many organizational characteristics known to influence board behavior, to compare the governance practices of professional and trade associations serving public employees with those serving the private sector. The results suggest that governance practices are shaped by many forces but that public employees do indeed carry their public values into the associations they join, and these values, in turn, are positively related to board behavior.     

Semiotic technologies: a case study of discipline-based practices and pedagogy

This paper examines semiotic technologies, both in terms of the resources they harness and the practices developed around their use. It draws on data collected as part of an ethnographic investigation into the meaning-making practices deployed within civil engineering study. The data is used as a case study for examining semiotic technologies as socially situated resources for disciplinary practices. Using a multimodal social semiotic approach, we argue that technologies are not self-evident, and that their use constitutes specific social practices that require development in the classroom. In order to deploy technologies in pedagogically effective ways, we need to understand the semiotic resources they draw on (including embodied resources). Awareness that technologies are not neutral or value-free, but are socially situated and ideologically laden, may enable meta-level understanding of the discipline, thus creating the possibility for improved pedagogical practices.     

Loan delinquency in community lending organizations: Case studies of neighborworks organizations

Abstract

This article reports on qualitative data gathered through interviews conducted in 1996 with key leadership and staff from 13 community lending organizations. Loan servicing and collection procedures within the organizations were examined. Findings suggest that several organizational factors of nonprofit lenders are related to their loan delinquency rates: social networks, business culture, funding sources, composition of the board and loan committees, staff structure, loan intake, and collection tools.

The study also finds that the nonprofit sector's institutional environment and its partnership with the private sector in a mutually beneficial process influence the loan delinquency rate. More specifically, active participation of local bankers in NeighborWorks¹ loan committees, diverse funding sources (from both the public and private sectors), and a diffusion of business practices through dense social networks are related to NeighborWorks’ loan servicing and collection policy and procedures. These factors in turn influence NeighborWorks’ rehabilitation loan delinquency rates.     

What Motivates the Gatekeepers? Explaining Governing Party Preferences on Immigration

Most scholarship on immigration politics is made up of isolated case studies or cross‐disciplinary work that does not build on existing political science theory. This study attempts to remedy this shortcoming in three ways: (1) we derive theories from the growing body of immigration literature, to hypothesize about why political parties would be more or less open to immigration; (2) we link these theories to the broader political science literature on parties and institutions; and (3) we construct a data set on the determinants of immigration politics, covering 18 developed countries from 1987 to 1999. Our primary hypothesis is that political institutions shape immigration politics by facilitating or constraining majoritarian sentiment (which is generally opposed to liberalizing immigration). Our analysis finds that in political systems where majoritarianism is constrained by institutional “checks,” governing parties support immigration more strongly, even when controlling for a broad range of alternative explanations.     

Contesting Citizenship in Post-Handover Hong Kong

Journal of Chinese Political Science - The British colonial rule inscribed a passive citizenship in Hong Kong with its de-politicized and de-nationalized governing strategies. Central to this...     

Australian Public Policy, Federalism, and Intergovernmental Relations: The Federal Factor

Public policy is the overt activity of governing and what governmentshave as their primary purpose. This is so whether the politicalsystem is unitary or federal. There are many more elements thatcomplicate policymaking in a federal system. In particular,constitutional, financial, and political issues intrude becauseof the necessary interdependence of otherwise independent andautonomous national and subnational components. This articleaddresses this complexity of joint action through use of theideas about federalism, the structure of governing institutions,and the processes of policymaking. The extent to which an outcomedepends on the mixture of independence and interdependence isconceptualized as degrees of the federal factor. Linking thisconcept to particular policy arenas may provide a better understandingof federal systems than explanation from centralization or decentralizationor dependence or independence.     

Solomon Islands: blending traditional power and modern structures in the state

By mid‐2001, the Solomon Islands government was on the edge of bankruptcy after two years of unrest on Guadalcanal. Solomon Islanders' hopes that the national government can improve their living standards have been dashed, only 23 years after British colonial rule ended on these South‐West Pacific islands. The reasons for the state's limited capacity to facilitate development extend much further than the financial crisis, as a comparison between power relations typically institutionalized in Western liberal democratic states and those institutionalized in the Solomons state shows. The Solomons state is a syncretism of traditional political practices and modern structures. Many of these traditional practices are impeding development. Recent neo‐liberal reforms championed by the previous government, the Asian Development Bank and other aid agencies did little to address these practices and were terminated in the unrest in 2000. If the state is to improve the living standards of ordinary Solomon Islanders, changes in structure, such as the state governments being established following the Townsville Peace Agreement, are not the sole answer. There also need to be changes in the political practices of both officials and politicians at national and local level. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.