A Weberian approach to citizenship in a divided community

In the British Isles, traditional accounts surrounding the concept of citizenship usually develop along liberal or neo-liberal pathways. That is to say the study of citizenship in these Isles derives from the work of the late T.H. Marshall. While the importance of his work deserves its time-honoured acknowledgement in the literature, various writers such as Giddens, Heater, and Turner have taken issue with his argument that citizenship rights were handed down or that they ‘re-evolved’ over the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, their main differences with Marshall are not along theoretical lines but rather the applicability, or otherwise, of his model to other societies. Roger Brubaker points out that the nation state is the final arbiter of who is, or is not, a citizen which in the modern world is an act of social closure. This paper will discuss the efficacy of a sociological approach, based on social closure theory, as a means of understanding the struggle that has accompanied the granting of citizenship rights. Northern Ireland will be used as a case study to assess the effectiveness of social closure theory as a sociological explanation for the expansion of citizenship rights in a divided community.     

Erring on the side of kindness in social welfare policy

Social welfare administrators inevitably err, and in one of two ways: either they err on the side of harshness (denying benefits to people who deserve them), or on the side of generosity (granting benefits to those who do not deserve them). The same things making errors inevitable also make inevitable a tradeoff between these two kinds of error, so at least for a large class of cases reductions in one kind of error can be accomplished only by increasing the other. Here I develop a criterion for striking the right balance. This criterion implies (contrary to all ordinary political and administrative impulses) that when times are tough and demands on welfare budgets heavy, administrators should not clamp down on applicants but should instead bias their decisions in favor of erring on the side of generosity.This paper was written during my tenure as Research Fellow in the Social Justice Project, RSSS, Australian National University. I am grateful to my colleagues there (particularly Valerie Braithwaite, Dorothy Broom, Diane Gibson and Julian LeGrand) for their advice and encouragement, and to various anonymous referees for suggesting subsequent refinements.     

对振兴东北老工业基地人力资源问题的思考

21世纪是一个以知识、信息和科技为主导的经济时代,更是一个以人力资源发展为战略核心的经济时代。要实现党中央提出的振兴东北老工业基地的经济发展战略,政府除在资金上加大投入、政策上倾斜外,还要重视人力资源的投入、人才的运用、人力资源管理制度的改革、用人机制的创新等问题。     

构建和谐社会的社区文化

建设和谐的社区文化是构建社会主义和谐社会的重要内容。本文试从和谐社区文化的内涵、方式、社区文化与社区居民、社区文化与和谐社会建设等方面进行探讨。     

A community of practice: explaining change and continuity in ASEAN's diplomatic environment

Despite change in the aims, institutions and informal diplomacy of ASEAN since 1997, the formal diplomatic code of conduct remains locked in a traditionalist mode first outlined in the 1970s. Existing approaches from mainstream International Relations theorising are unable to adequately explain this continuity and change. The recent ‘practice turn’ in theorising offers distinct explanatory advantage, which this article illustrates by arguing that the formation of an ‘ASEAN rationality’ between 1967 and 1997 fundamentally curtailed the ability of regional diplomats to revise ASEAN post 1997, resulting in the coexistence of new and old norms in ASEAN's organisation design.     

The mutuality of risk and community: the adjudication of community notification statutes

Although it has drawn significant attention in the legal literature, the adjudication of community notification statutes (often referred to as 'Megan's Law' in the United States) demonstrates a centrality of both risk and community that deserves attention from a governance perspective. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which concepts of risk and community are mutually constitutive, and how the adjudication of community notification statutes relies on particular visions of 'community' to engage particular ways of conceiving of 'risk', much of which relies on a rejection of expertise and a focus on 'common sense'. This focus on 'common sense', opens up new problematics of government: courts adjudicating community notification cases are working to define the particular mechanics of a state-civil society partnership, and thereby operationalize the preventive state without rendering the state redundant or obsolete, and without opening the state to new forms of legal and political accountability. While providing a case study in the move to advanced liberal governance in the area of criminal law, this adjudication also reveals the contingent nature of risk, and the ways in which judicial invocation of 'risk' and its management can constitute liberal subjects who continue to rely on the state, while no longer expecting the state to be accountable for crime or its control.