Citizen Participation in City Governance: Experiences From Vietnam

The radical political and economic reforms sweeping through former socialist countries during the last several decades have facilitated economic growth and urbanization. During this period of market reform and urbanization, citizen participation is greatly needed yet easily lost to other priorities. We employ stakeholder theory to examine whether citizen participation differs between large and small cities and between the poor and non‐poor people in Vietnam. Using data from a sample of citizens in five centrally managed cities, we found that citizens in large cities and citizens that belong to “unofficially poor” groups participate less. For policy makers, this implies that citizen participation should be of central importance in the management of current cities' expansions. In addition, the categorization of “poor households” needs to be closely monitored to minimize the risk of de facto poor households being excluded from the group. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Routine activity and labor market segmentation An empirical test of a revised approach

This article contends that routine activity theory has virtually ignored the motivated offender construct in terms of its measurement. We extend previous research testing routine activity theory by more accurately modeling the effects of labor market segmentation and other structural sources of offender motivation on variation in crime rates. A revised routine activity model is tested using data for the 100 largest cities in the US in 1980. The findings suggest that as secondary labor markets grow, urban crime can be expected to rise.     

How High-Yield Farming Saves Nature

High-yield farming—more agricultural output per acre of farmland—has been a boon to mankind and to nature. If today’s agricultural efficiency was the same as in the 1950s, the world would need three times the cropland to produce today’s food supply. That would mean that 15-16 million mi² of forest would have been destroyed—all the global forest area available today. Rising population and increased affluence will require a tripling of agricultural efficiency in the next 50 years if we are to protect wildlife at the same time. More investment in agricultural research and education will be required, but this is what produced the previous green revolution.

The Counterrevolutionary Campus: Herbert Marcuse and the Suppression of Student Protest Movements

Abstract

With the recent surge of college protests against various forms of economic, political, social, and racial injustice, there have been persistent and pernicious reactions from other students, administrators and public figures that function to undermine the emancipatory impulses animating these demonstrations. The reactions are often justified under the banners of tolerance, chastising students to listen instead of protest. This article, focusing on Marcuse’s concepts of repressive toleration and counterrevolution, evaluates the reactionary responses to these events, as well as the critical potential of this fledgling student sensibility, a burgeoning refusal represented by protest events at American universities. We maintain that many of the calls for tolerance are actually demands for silence and belong to a wider counterrevolutionary phase of late capitalism observed by Marcuse. Bedrock liberties are dialectically inverted whereby speech and toleration are repressively deployed against demands for justice. This article concludes by arguing that it is crucial to the success of this resurgent sensibility for justice—and progress toward a radical socialist movement that coincides with the emancipatory vision of Herbert Marcuse—that the counterrevolutionary character of the responses are demystified.     

Outsourcing Public Health Laboratory Services: A Blueprint for Determining Whether to Privatize and How

In a continuing effort to reform and reinvent the way public organizations do business, the outsourcing of services has become a popular tool, particularly as resource constraints limit options available to governments. All too often, the decision is made, for reasons of ideology or resource constraints, to outsource services without giving careful consideration to the impact of privatization on the core missions of an agency, or whether privatization, in fact, offers real cost savings. Purchasing tools designed for traditional commodity purchases are often grossly unsuited for making decisions on specialized technical services.
This article suggests a process for the evaluation of an option to outsource laboratory services. It suggests that, prior to contracting or privatizing services, the concerned agency should evaluate:
the impact on the agency's core mission
the availability, stability, and reliability of private sector service providers
the relative costs of internal and external (public or private sector) service providers
the potential impact on regulatory enforcement
the ability to monitor the performance of external providers
potential conflicts of interest
Based on this model, the ongoing internal evaluation of services offers public agencies management tools to obtain the best value for the taxpayer dollar, not only in terms of the raw cost per test, but also in managing the quality of the services.