THE PERCEIVED SIZE OF SMALL BUSINESS BANKING MARKETS

Definition of markets is fundamental to any analysis of competitionand is the first step in enforcement of antitrust statutes.In the banking industry, geographic market definitions havebeen the subject of considerable discussion in recent years.This paper utilizes a survey conducted by the National Federationof Independent Business Research Foundation in 2001. The surveyasked a variety of questions relating to American small businesses'experience with financial institutions, including a questionasking how many banks were in the market area where the smallfirm did most of its business. Using the zip code of the surveyrespondent, this answer was compared with the number of banksin the same county, in the same metropolitan area, or in thelocal banking market as defined by the Federal Reserve. Theresults show that both urban and rural markets as perceivedby small businesses are considerably smaller than markets asdefined by either the US Department of Justice or the FederalReserve.     

领导干部考核中“德”之解读

中国改革开放以来一个重要的发展推动力是干部考核体制的建立与实施。考核体系里的核心指标"德"、"能"、"勤"、"绩"、"廉"中,"德"的考核往往由于缺乏硬性的衡量方法备受争议,也经常流于形式。本文通过对古今中外关于"德"的思想的讨论和回顾,说明了"德"的考量在古往今来的管理活动中的重要性及其丰富的内涵。作者结合中国现阶段的发展需要提出,"德"的核心要求应该是干部对中国发展的信心、对党领导人民从传统走向现代的伟大事业的理解、忠诚和奉献的理想主义的精神,对善恶的评价和判断能力,强烈的爱护和保护人民的公正心和正义感。在现有考核办法中,对于干部公正素质的要求和考核有必要得到进一步加强。     

传统人事管理的价值缺失与重建——论传统人事管理向现代人事管理的转变

人事管理是一种追求价值实现的活动。传统人事管理的生成背景及其基本模式导致其存在明显的价值缺失。本文立足于管理的本体追问,从管理的内在性出发,分析了传统人事管理在思维、理念、工作中心与基本原则等方面存在的基本问题,进而提出实现传统人事管理向现代人事管理转变这一命题。     

Testing proximity versus directional voting using experiments

A long-running debate about how voters use issues to evaluate candidates pits the proximity theory of voting against directional theory. Using surveys, both sides of the debate have found support for their preferred theory, but disagreement remains because of differing ways of analyzing the data. Lewis and King (2000) point out that these researchers make assumptions that bias results in favor of their theory. To avoid these difficulties, our approach creates fictitious candidates with controlled positions, presents these candidates to randomly-assigned subjects, and examines the relationship between subjects’ evaluations of these candidates and their ideological beliefs as a neutral test of proximity and directional theory. Our results provide reasonably strong support for proximity theory but little for directional theory.     

Political Bases for the Dissolution of a Public Corporation: A Nigérian Case

All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse how the concept of institutions has been used in scholarship on land tenure in Sudan. We then suggest, using a case study, that increased attention to the different ways in which actors validate or challenge institutions helps to examine the precariousness of institutional orders in the Sudans. This can move Sudan Studies beyond some of the limitations of previous scholarship, such as a tendency towards interpretations that reiterate institutions as timeless, discrete and immutable units such as “traditional” or “modern”.     

Reinventing Pluralism: Consensus,Hegemony, and the Politics of Affirmation

As inequalities in the United States have intensified in recent decades, Washington, DC’s advocacy system has thrived. Why has this proliferation of interest groups failed to deliver more substantive equality? The dominant response to this question typically cites the advocacy realm’s “upper-class accent,” portraying interest group representation as imbalanced and unresponsive to a broad range of voices. Yet this prevailing account—which I term “post- pluralist”—does not sufficiently explore the inegalitarian ways that neoliberalism shapes contemporary political advocacy. To this end, this article builds upon post-pluralist and post-Marxist insights to outline the advocacy system’s “politics of affirmation.” Using recent antigay legislation to explore this concept, I argue that today’s political advocacy circumscribes, rather than enlivens, prevailing standards of democratic participation by mobilizing hegemonic, neoliberal expressions of democratic citizenship. The article concludes by outlining how groups might pursue a transformative politics in order to destabilize neoliberalism’s hegemony.