Action oriented strategic planning: The concepts of infrastructure and functional domains

The problem is how to translate limited and uncertain knowledge about the future environment into operational strategic policy decisions. Because the strategic policy decisions must be made with a long time perspective in mind (10 to 10 years), planners tend to formulate strategies which are overly broad. A solution to the broad and uncertain approach is to employ a system that relys upon the use of the infrastructure. When the infrastructure is divided into permanent and complete societal functions, then specific opportunities can be presented to the organization. Examples of functional domains that may be relevant to strategic long-range planning are: industrial capabilities, pieces of legislation, regulation and training. Our knowledge about evolving world trends is usually available in functional terminology (i.e., the evolving “information society”, the “leisure society”, the “energy crisis”, and the “food crisis”, etc.) Knowledge about the future behavior of the Functional Domains may enable organizations such as governments and/or corporations, to create the required infrastructure for capitalizing on possible opportunities.     

Managing fragmentation in global environmental governance: the REDD+ Partnership as bridge organization

This article analyzes the increasing institutional and organizational complexity and fragmentation surrounding the international financing mechanism REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries and related forest activities), now being negotiated within the UNFCCC. We focus, in particular, on critically assessing the prospects of managing such fragmentation. We do so by analyzing whether and how (what we conceptualize here as) a “bridge organization”—the voluntary, multi-stakeholder REDD+ Partnership bringing together state and non-state actors from global to local scales—has aided in managing fragmentation in this realm, through exercising four enabling functions (enhancing transparency, participation, knowledge sharing, and coordination). Our analysis shows that the REDD+ Partnership has partially succeeded in furthering such procedural aims, but that this has not resulted in a “scaling up of REDD+ action and finance,” its overarching substantive aim. In contrast to dominant views of a bridge organization’s modus operandi, we conclude, based on our analysis, that its value lies not in overcoming persisting geopolitical conflicts around climate mitigation and providing a “depoliticized” context within which to manage fragmentation. Instead, its success lies in permitting dialogue and exchange even in the face of persisting political conflicts over its raison d’être and functions. In making these arguments, the article extends recent debates on the prospects to manage fragmentation in global environmental governance and provides a critical assessment of the role therein for bridge organizations.     

自侦案件“以事立案”模式论析

检察机关在自侦案件中应当摒弃“以人立案”的做法,并采取“以事立案”的模式,才能符合职务犯罪发案的客观规律,避免初查和侦查工作在衔接关系上的错位,并对自侦工作产生积极的促进效果和作用。要实现从“以人立案”到“以事立案”模式的转变,需要正确处理好立案与破案、立案与撤案和撤案与错案的关系。     

Inside a Cultural Agency: Team Ethnography and Knowledge Exchange

This article undertakes an auto-critical analysis of the research team's ethnographic study of Cultural Enterprise Office (CEO), a Scottish creative business support agency. We discuss the team's composition and how this relates to other analyses of ethnographic teamwork. Our research is situated in the wider policy context of the “creative-economic” turn in the UK's research funding. This has been accompanied by increased emphasis on “knowledge exchange” and “impact” in the drive for greater accountability in higher education. The team's evolution in the course of undertaking research is illustrated by reference to four “pivotal moments,” which illustrate how we “performed” knowledge exchange.     

Before there Is a Table: Small Wins to Build a Movement against Sexual and Relationship Violence in a University Context

Addressing sexual and relationship violence (SRV) on campuses requires coordinated engagement from all members of the campus-community; however, many campuses do not yet have the infrastructure or institutional commitment to build an all-campus action plan. In such cases, campuses lack the metaphorical table around which collaboration happens. This paper presents tensions and lessons learned so far from a faculty-staff-student partnership to build a movement toward university-wide collaborative practice. Through iterative, collaborative reflection on our context, practice, and intermediate outcomes, we identified recommendations for improving praxis in campus-based, intersectional anti-SRV organizing. Our analysis explores how our individual positionalities both open up and limit our potential to move this work forward. We share our guiding values and frameworks, including intersectional feminist attention to power and oppression; centering survivors and students; strategic collaboration within systems; and integrating self-care and other supportive practices for building a sustainable movement. Our emergent strategy, illustrated through ten lessons/tensions and four case examples, focuses on finding close collaborators with shared SRV analysis; making the best use of resources and spaces we control; identifying meaningful “small wins;” and pursuing opportunities to connect to others through positive collaborations. Efforts to intentionally raise awareness and grow strategic institutional connections build momentum toward institutionally-supported campus-wide evaluation and reimagining of prevention and survivor-support efforts. While feminist collaborative social change is challenging, we celebrate and learn from our “two steps forward” to sustain us through the inevitable steps back. We write to stir a conversation where we help each other interpret and learn across our varied contexts.     

“Humanitarian aid is never a crime”: humanitarianism and illegality in migrant advocacy

I analyze the case of humanitarian pro-migrant activists in southern Arizona between 2000 and 2010 to explore how contending groups wield law and legality claims in a dynamic policy environment. Humanitarian activists both evade and engage the law. They appeal to a higher law to elude charges that they are acting illegally, while seeking assurances that their actions are within the law. Law enforcement agents rely on the authority and technical neutrality of the law in redefining humanitarian aid as illegal, while expanding their own claims to carry out humanitarian work. This case study of advocacy on behalf of “illegal” migrants highlights how both activists and those who enforce the law redefine legality in strategic ways.     

Exploring the Sources of Authority Over the Word Meaning in Transgender Jurisprudence

This paper looks at transgender identities and the law in the context of marriage in common law jurisdictions. It particularly focuses on the nature and sources of authority over word meaning as well as the role of language and definition in classifying transgender individuals into a legal category. When it comes to the legal question of who may marry whom, and what the terms “man” and “woman” actually refer to, there is no statutory definition of the terms “man”, “woman”, “male” and “female”. This has put the onus on judges, especially those who needed to decide whether a transgender person can marry in his/her affirmed sex, to interpret these terms. Two lines of cases in transgender jurisprudence are examined so as to have a close study of how the courts construed these terms and classified transgender people into a category. The first concerns United Kingdom cases, namely Corbett v Corbett (1971), Bellinger v Bellinger (2003) and the Hong Kong case W v Registrar of Marriages (2010), (2011) & (2013). The second consists of Australian cases such as Secretary, Department of Social Security v State Rail Authority (1993) and Re Kevin (2002). This paper discusses these issues by analyzing and comparing different cases in transgender jurisprudence as well as examining how these issues play out in contemporary Hong Kong.     

The “thinning” blueline: a Bourdieuian appreciation of police subculture

The notion of a recalcitrant “police subculture” is pervasive in the literature on policing, often invoked to explain many of the ills linked to police misconduct and corruption. This article argues that the failure of reform efforts is the result of interventionist strategies which had sought to change police subculture “head-on” without a corresponding change in the structural conditions in which the policing role is so located, and that these efforts, theoretically, have been informed by a conceptualisation of police subculture as homogenous, monolithic, and static. Using the Bourdieuian concepts of the “habitus” and “field”, the view of a “recalcitrant” subculture will be challenged in this article. Using the Singaporean experience as a case in point, it will be shown how changes in the field of policing can bring about changes, intended or otherwise, in the occupational habitus of the police: refashioning the informal repository of knowledge guiding police work.     

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.     

CITES as Global Governance: Paths to Consensus and Defining Nature Through Uncertainty

Abstract

As concern over various environmental issues has risen at the international level, questions regarding what constitutes “nature” and how it should be portrayed and treated have gained a greater sense of urgency. This paper explores varying concepts and attributes of nature articulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (“CITES”). Much of the research on CITES comes from the fields of policy and ecology, exploring matters of biodiversity, sustainability, enforcement, functionality, and evaluation of CITES as a “success” or “failure” of policy, with little focus on issues of cultural context and ambiguities. In contrast, within the social sciences, the contemporary literature is broadly dedicated to critiquing the static, dualistic ideas of nature upon which environmental regulations are based. However, what is often missing from this discourse is how environmental policies often have an implicit understanding that these static conceptions of nature are not accurate – that within the environmental legislation process, there is “an awareness, for example, of the messy, improvised character of knowledges about nature”. This paper explores CITES’s understanding of nature, how it characterizes nature, and how these conceptions become implemented in legislative practice. It illustrates CITES as a manifestation of what Krueger calls a regulatory process of “coded and recoded text with material implications” (p. 880), wherein a relatively unchanging set of legislation can create “multiple, even contradictory, outcomes coexisting simultaneously in the same system” (p. 872).     

From Marx to Market: Lawyers,European Law,and the Contentious Transformation of the Port of Genoa

What happens when international courts are asked to tackle local political controversies and their judgments subsequently spark contentious resistance? In the European Union (EU), scholars have posited that the politicization of the often‐liberalizing rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) provokes Euroscepticism and noncompliance. In contrast, I argue that contentious politics may also produce permissive conditions for activist “Eurolawyers” to promote awareness of EU law and mobilize support for liberalization. To unpack this claim, I conduct an intensive case study of perhaps the most explosive controversy in Italy to generate litigation before the ECJ: The 1991 “Port of Genoa” case, where the public monopoly rights of a centuries‐old dockworkers' union were challenged. Leveraging interviews, court and newspaper records, public opinion data, and litigation statistics, I trace how—despite dockworkers' vigorous resistance—a pair of entrepreneurial lawyers liberalized Italy's largest port by combining strategic litigation with a public relations campaign to mobilize a compliance constituency. I conclude with insights the case study offers into the contemporary politics of transnational governance.     

“It's Just Black,White, or Hispanic”: An Observational Study of Racializing Moves in California's Segregated Prison Reception Centers

This article takes as its launching point a 2005 U. S. Supreme Court case, Johnson v. California (543 U.S. 499), which ruled that the California Department of Corrections' unwritten practice of racially segregating inmates in prison reception centers is to be reviewed under the highest level of constitutional review, strict scrutiny. Relying on observational data from two California prison reception centers, this research is grounded in an interactionist perspective and influenced by Smith's work on “institutional ethnography.” I examine how racialization occurs in carceral settings, arguing that officers and inmates collaborate to arrive at a “negotiated settlement” regarding housing decisions. They do so working together (but not always in agreement) to shape how an inmate is categorized in terms of ‘race’/ethnicity and gang/group affiliation, within a framework established by official Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation paperwork and related institutional understandings of housing needs. The findings demonstrate that administrators, officers, and inmates alike have influence over the process by which people are categorized and ‘race’ is produced, even as they derive their power from different sources and are both enabled and constrained by the relationship between them. I conclude that California prisons are, as Wacquant has put it, “the main machine for ‘race making’” (2005:128), and that the fuel for that machine—a series of patterned, negotiated settlements—happens in real time, “on the ground,” and with important consequences for inmates, officers, and administrators.     

General Deterrence and Corporate Environmental Behavior*

This research addresses the assumption that “general deterrence” is an important key to enhanced compliance with regulatory laws. Through a survey of 233 firms in several industries in the United States, we sought to answer the following questions: (1) When severe legal penalties are imposed against a violator of environmental laws, do other companies in the same industry actually learn about such “signal cases”? (2) Does knowing about “signal cases” change firms’ compliance‐related behavior? It was found that only 42 percent of respondents could identify the “signal case,” but 89 percent could identify some enforcement actions against other firms, and 63 percent of firms reported having taken some compliance‐related actions in response to learning about such cases. Overall, it is concluded that because most firms are in compliance already (for a variety of other reasons), this form of “explicit general deterrence” knowledge usually serves not to enhance the perceived threat of legal punishment, but as reassurance that compliance is not foolish and as a reminder to check on the reliability of existing compliance routines.     

地方政府创新中政策企业家知识创造的一个分析模型——以K市公益基金招投标改革为例

政策企业家在推动政府创新中,有无知识创造活动?若有,过程是怎样的?这是政府创新研究中的基本问题之一。论文以知识生产理论为视角,以K市公益基金招投标改革为例,对这一问题进行了研究。主要发现是:政策企业家将其新想法转化为创新方案的认知活动中,运用了其专门知识,创新方案设计活动是新想法、组织外部知识与内部知识的结合;知识创造本质是命题性知识与能力之知间相互作用而转换;知识创造方式包括原理化、操作化、合法化、边界化等;生产过程最后产出了因果知识、工具知识、流程知识、目标知识、预测知识、协调知识等。基于创造方式,论文将政策企业家的知识创造模型命名为ROLD。这一研究的意义在于:尝试从知识创造视角去揭示政府创新微观活动的“黑箱”。     

WHEN POLICY COMES TO TOWN: DISCOURSES AND DILEMMAS OF IMPLEMENTATION OF A STATEWIDE REENTRY POLICY IN KANSAS

In this case study, we document challenges to reform implementation posed by line staff, supervisors, and managers during a large‐scale realignment of the Kansas Department of Corrections (KDOC) in which they sought to replace a traditional approach of “risk containment” focused on surveillance and incarceration with a new model of “risk reduction” focused on service delivery and reintegration. We draw on interviews, observations, and archival research to document the staff's discursive challenges to the rollout of the new policy. More specifically, we describe how varying challenges to the reforms—“denial,” “dismissal,” and “defiance”—reflect actors’ positions within the organization, the local contexts in which they operate, and more general frames of interpretation of the long‐term orientation of the KDOC. We integrate these perspectives to contribute to the ongoing expansion of conventional models of penal change that highlight the role of actors and local social and institutional context as moderators of the gap between “law on the books” and “law in action.”     

In the eye of the beholder: Meaning and structure of informal status in women's and men's prisons*

Applying an abductive mixed‐methods approach, we investigate the informal status systems in three women's prison units (across two prisons) and one men's prison unit. Qualitative analyses suggest “old head” narratives—where age, time in prison, sociability, and prison wisdom confer unit status—are prevalent across all four contexts. Perceptions of maternal “caregivers” and manipulative “bullies,” however, are found only in the three women's units. The qualitative findings inform formal network analyses by differentiating “positive,” “neutral,” and “negative” status nominations, with “negative” ties primarily absent from the men's unit. Within the women's units, network analyses find that high‐status women are likely to receive both positive and negative peer nominations, such that evaluations depend on who is doing the evaluating. Comparing the women's and men's networks, the correlates of positive and neutral ties are generally the same and center on covariates of age, getting along with others, race, and religion. Overall, the study points to important similarities and differences in status across the gendered prison contexts, while demonstrating how a sequential mixed‐methods design can illuminate both the meaning and the structure of prison informal organization.     

解读高等学校的“法律法规授权的组织”资格——以田永诉北京科技大学案为范本展开的分析

“法律法规授权的组织”是非行政机关被推上行政诉讼被告席的惟一事由,也是法院受理田永诉北京科技大学案,为学生打开司法救济之门的前提。然而,法院在田永一案中并没有证成高等学校具有“法律法规授权的组织”资格。尽管单方面性、强制性等是行政权的属性,但并非所有具有这些属性的权力都是行政权。     

Coproducing the Endangered Polar Bear: Science,Climate Change,and Legal Mobilization

Applying insights from science and technology studies about the “coproduction” of science and sociopolitical order to research on legal mobilization yields important theoretical insights. Using the polar bear petition campaign by the Center for Biological Diversity as an illustrative case, this article shows how this protracted legal campaign around protection of the polar bear and its habitat opened up new legal opportunities for those advocating for the regulation of carbon emissions, mandated state-sponsored generation of climate science, legally constructed the polar bear as “endangered,” and helped to shape the priorities of the nongovernmental organization itself.     

Climate Change Litigation,Obsession and Expertise: Reflecting on the Scholarly Response to Massachusetts v. EPA

Climate change litigation is an obsessive preoccupation for many legal scholars. Three different “narratives” can be identified for why scholars find such litigation important to study: litigation is a response to institutional failure, legal reasoning holds authority, and litigation is a forum for the co‐production of facts and social orders. The nature and consequences of these narratives are considered in the context of the first U.S. Supreme Court “climate change” case—Massachusetts v. EPA (2007). This analysis has implications for both how scholars understand their expertise in this area, and how they should foster it.     

“法律”一词使用、翻译的话语实践——集中于19世纪初期在中国的西方传教士

基于法律的独特语境,“法律”概念的使用和翻译不可避免地是复杂的。在近现代随着各个民族国家交往的深入展开,这样复杂地使用和翻译的背后隐藏着许多“重要故事”。我们可以认为,法律的存在其本身就意味着纠纷的存在,纠纷不仅可能是个人的,而且可能是广义社会的或说民族国家的,后者在特定时期可能是更为重要的。在纠纷中,随着人们的利益、观念、立场或者态度的不同,这种不同同样又是不可避免的,“法律”概念的一般含义因而也会裹挟在利益、观念、立场或者态度中表达自己的“差异”。因此,应当揭示使用、翻译背后的话语实践。