The second face of security: Britain's 'Smart' appeasement policy towards Japan and Germany

Most states have numerous paths to create security for themselves.Foreign policy-makers must recognize that their own securitypolicy will initiate a process that structures the nature ofthe domestic competition over domestic and foreign policy inother countries. I contend that one state's security alternativecan empower or weaken domestic actors and interest groups inopposing foreign powers. I term this process the ‘secondface of security’ since it entails a less direct and morenuanced method of creating security (in contrast to the ‘firstface of security’). I apply this model to explain theintent of Britain's ‘smart’ or targeted appeasementpolicy during the 1930s – to strengthen conservative business,government officials, and economic circles in banking, lightindustry and finished goods, and even heavy industry in orderto steer Tokyo and Berlin away from rearmament and extreme autarky.     

Sudden Cardiac Deaths in Adults with Congenital Heart Disease with Structural Abnormalities: A Retrospective Review of Cases in the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office

Sudden cardiac death is a significant cause of mortality in adults with congenital heart disease (CHD). The Cook County Medical Examiner's Office database was queried for cases of CHD as a cause of death in the period between July 2008 and April 2019. Twenty-two cases were identified, including 11 decedents with simple defects and 10 decedents with complex defects. All of the subjects were in apparent good health at the time of death. In the absence of other obvious causes of death, simple defects were considered cases of sudden cardiac death. Significant cardiac morphological changes were common in complex defects. While 16 cases had known, diagnosed/treated CHD, 5 cases had no diagnosis prior to autopsy. In these cases, the ability to recognize CHD (sometimes subtle) helped in determining the causes of death. Therefore, forensic pathologists must be able to properly recognize various forms of CHD and request consultations, when needed.     

Goats or wolves? Private sector managers in the public sector

Public administration reforms have propagated the use of private sector management skills in the public sector, and an increased openness to managers with a private sector background. This has created a debate between those who think private sector experience improves public institutions by bringing core managerial values such as results orientation, efficiency, or openness to innovation, and those who argue that private sector experience can damage core public sector values, such as impartiality and equity. Despite the abundant anecdotal evidence, broad empirical evidence on the effects of private sector experience on public managers' values remains limited. Using data from a survey among central government top managers in 18 European countries, we show that public managers with private sector experience have, as expected, more core managerial values. Yet, unlike the conventional view, core public values do not suffer.     

The effects of new public management on the quality of public services

Have New Public Management (NPM) reforms in public organizations improved the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery of public policies? NPM reforms, understood as a style of organizing public services towards the efficiency and efficacy of outputs, have been controversial. They have been accused of importing practices and norms from the private sector that could collide with core public values, such as impartiality or equity. Yet, with few exceptions, we lack systematic empirical tests of the actual effects that NPM reforms have had on the delivery of public services. In this introductory article, we summarize a special issue devoted to cover this gap. And, overall, we find that neither the catastrophic nor the balsamic effects of NPM reforms are confirmed, but the success (or failure) depends on the administrative, political and policy context those reforms take place.     

In space no one can see you waving your hands: making citizenship meaningful to Deaf worlds

This article suggests that there is an underlying social contract that defines relationships between deaf and hearing people and which ultimately influences state provisions as well as society's perception of Deaf people. It is outdated and does not have the consent of Deaf communities. It will be argued that any renegotiation of the social contract needs to take into consideration a number of ‘elements’ that would be the context for that negotiation. Deaf citizens are marginalised in society largely due to a citizenship that assumes an idealised individual as a speaking and hearing citizen, with a social policy constructed and made in the image of hearing culture, that is rooted in a philosophy of favouring by default the instruction of deaf children via oral means in overwhelming mainstream education. These state policies have resulted in an entrenched social exclusion of Deaf people. Citizenship is recognised as an inclusive and momentum concept and therefore this situation is not unchangeable. A renegotiation of the social contract may require a form of group rights which nevertheless recognises the transnational nature of Deaf communities. As part of that process it will be necessary for Deaf people to obtain control over how their communities are run and resources allocated. That would entail the withering away of hearing control in a social policy context within Deaf spheres of influence. The new social contract would aim not for a paternal citizenship, but an empowering and Deaf-led one.     

The Contribution of Community and Family Contexts to African American Young Adults’ Romantic Relationship Health: A Prospective Analysis

Accumulating evidence suggests that African American men and women experience unique challenges in developing and maintaining stable, satisfying romantic relationships. Extant studies have linked relationship quality among African American couples to contemporaneous risk factors such as economic hardship and racial discrimination. Little research, however, has examined the contextual and intrapersonal processes in late childhood and adolescence that influence romantic relationship health among African American adults. We investigated competence-promoting parenting practices and exposure to community-related stressors in late childhood, and negative relational schemas in adolescence, as predictors of young adult romantic relationship health. Participants were 318 African American young adults (59.4 % female) who had provided data at four time points from ages 10–22 years. Structural equation modeling indicated that exposure to community-related stressors and low levels of competence-promoting parenting contributed to negative relational schemas, which were proximal predictors of young adult relationship health. Relational schemas mediated the associations of competence-promoting parenting practices and exposure to community stressors in late childhood with romantic relationship health during young adulthood. Results suggest that enhancing caregiving practices, limiting youths’ exposure to community stressors, and modifying relational schemas are important processes to be targeted for interventions designed to enhance African American adults’ romantic relationships.     

Guys and Dolls

The doll has become a figure for the objectification of women, especially in the form of the sex doll, which is routinely taken to be the image of the woman reduced to a condition of pure passivity. But the doll is also, and perhaps even predominantly, a means of ‘guying’ the putative man (the word ‘guy’ entering English with the burning of Guy Fawkes in effigy) and presenting the simplest possible idea of male desire in comically petrified form. Effigies of women indirectly figure the assumed fixation of male desire throughout post-classical European culture. This guying is a repeated feature of stories of the animation of female dolls and statues, from Ovid onwards, which regularly put male protagonists to a kind of mock death, or death by mockery. The author considers the anonymous poem Adollizing: Or, A Lively Picture of Adoll-Worship (1748) alongside the most celebrated instance of doll fetishism in twentieth-century art history—the doll that Oskar Kokoschka had made of his wife Alma Mahler after she left him. The author concludes with a discussion of the contemporary sexual cult of ‘living dolls’, in which men act out the fantasy not of owning, but being a female doll. Here, perhaps, the doll is not only adored as a substitute for some other real object, but is envied as what it is—that is, as a thing, with a thing's power of declining to be subjected to subjecthood. This passion for passivity suggests that there is something that intervenes between the he and she, with swelling erotic force: the it.     

Harming the best: How schools affect the black‐white achievement gap

Sizeable achievement differences by race appear in early grades, but substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black‐white achievement gap and particularly about its evolution across different parts of the achievement distribution. Texas administrative data show that the overall growth in the achievement gap between third and eighth grades is larger for students with higher initial achievement and that specific teacher and peer characteristics explain a substantial share of the widening. The adverse effect of attending school with a high black enrollment share appears to be an important contributor to the larger growth in the achievement differential in the upper part of the test score distribution. This evidence reaffirms the major role played by peers and school quality, but also presents a policy dilemma. Teacher labor market complications, current housing patterns, legal limits to desegregation efforts, and uncertainty about the overall effects of specific desegregation programs indicate that effective policy responses will almost certainly involve a set of school improvements beyond simple changes in peer racial composition and the teacher experience distribution. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.