Why Does Employment Legislation Not Damage Small Firms?

Business rhetoric and conventional theory expect that employment regulations will have negative effects on small firms. Prior research has shown that effects are quite rare, but has not explained why. Case studies of 18 firms from three sectors identified four explanations. (1) Perceptions of effects tend to be broad and general, rather than reflections of concrete experience. (2) 'The law' is not uniform, with older laws being largely taken for granted. (3) Effects depend on competitive conditions, which are more important influences on firms than are regulations; where conditions are benign, regulations can be absorbed, but in other circumstances employment regulations can exacerbate competitive pressures. (4) A degree of informality in small firms further eases responses. By the same token, however, hopes that regulation will stimulate modernization are rarely realized.     

A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT TESTING INMATE CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS*

Research Summary: In California, incarceration in the state prison system is in part organized by security level. The higher the security level, the more restrictive the setting. Upon arrival at a reception center, new inmates are scored within a classification system that is used to determine the appropriate level of security. In this paper, we report on the development and testing of a new inmate classification scoring system. Over 20,000 inmates took part in a randomized experiment in which half were assigned to their housing using the existing scoring system and half were assigned to their housing using the new scoring system. There were two key outcomes: (1) potential mismatches between the number of inmates assigned to different security levels and the available beds and (2) reports of inmate misconduct. Policy Implications: We conclude there to be some potential crowding problems, but that the new scoring system is much better than the old scoring system in sorting inmates by the likelihood of misconduct. We also conclude that some predictors popular in the past are no longer effective (e.g., marital status), while some new predictors are extremely powerful (e.g., gang activity), and that one can build in a number of mandatory housing placements (e.g., for sex offenders) and not degrade the overall effectiveness of the new classification system. Finally, the new classification system is shown to be more user‐friendly than the existing classification system and well received by the staff responsible for implementing it.     

DEPENDENCY COURT MEDIATION

This article discusses the roles and levels of participation of the various participants in juvenile and dependency court mediation, and also examines potential gains and losses associated with participation for family members and the social worker.     

‘TO BE,BUT NOT TO BE SEEN’: EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SERVANTS

International civil servants (ICS) are largely excluded from the analysis of International Organizations (IOs) because states are assumed to be the determining force in shaping their behaviour. Even principal‐agent and constructivist analyses often treat an IO’s staff as a unit and are concerned primarily with states’ capacities to control IOs. Examining the opportunities of ICS, rather than the choices of states, provides a better means of understanding the capacities of ICS to contribute to the operation of IOs, and especially when they participate in multilateral negotiations. We suggest that structure, competence, legitimacy and culture provide a framework for analysing ICS variable capacity. We use the Secretariat of the WTO, known as a ‘member‐driven organization’, to illustrate how ICS can play a critical role in achieving the IO’s objectives. A word on our title. It comes from Esse, non videri in the original, as quoted by a director at the WTO in an interview in April 2003.     

Federalism and Modernization: Canada and the United States

Since World War II, the federal systems in the United Statesand Canada have moved in opposite directions: the U.S. has becomeincreasingly centralized, while the provinces in Canada havegained power at the expense of Ottawa. These divergences canbe explained by such societal factors as economic structures,international commitments, and locations of minority populations;and by institutional factors, such as the number of constituentunits, methods by which provincial authorities are representedin federal legislatures, and especially by the contrast betweenCanada's Westminster-type institutions and the U.S. separationof powers. These differences are illustrated by intergovernmentalfiscal processes, energy policies, and federal-municipal relations.They cannot be accounted for by modernization theories, butrather by economic structures, demographic distributions, andespecially constitutional and institutional arrangements.