Confucius Institutes and the Rise of China

Since 2004 China has set up over 700 Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms around the world to promote its language and culture and thereby to shape its image. Despite this impressive number Confucius Institutes are surprisingly understudied, especially in terms of their actual structure, operation mode and activities. This paper uses German Confucius Institutes as a case study to bridge this gap. It first discusses the concepts of public and cultural diplomacy and culture institutes as a conceptual tool to analyze Confucius Institutes. It then turns to the case study to provide empirical data to better understand this instrument of China’s image shaping efforts. It argues that Confucius Institutes are connected to the rise of China and a unique member of the family of national culture institutes.     

Prisoners' Adjustment, Correctional Officers, and Context: The Foreground and Background of Punishment in Late Modernity

Past research indicates that front-line criminal justice workers are the critical players in determining whether innovations in penal policy are realized. Recent attempts to understand the diversity in the application of the penal harm movement have, however, sidestepped the primary audience of these policies, the population of convicted offenders. This article uses data from two prisons to examine the effects of correctional officers on women prisoners' adjustment to prison life. Using regression models and interview data, we find that correctional officer behavior has a profound impact on women's ability to adjust to prison, and this effect is largely independent of the prisoners' characteristics and the institutions in which they are housed. On a theoretical level, the findings speak to recent calls to examine the background and foreground of penal culture. On a practical level, they highlight the need to understand the environments from which women are emerging, not just the communities into which they are released.     

Question order bias revisited: A split‐ballot experiment on satisfaction with public services among experienced and professional users

Public decision‐makers increasingly rely on satisfaction surveys to inform budget and policy decisions. Yet, our knowledge of whether, and under what conditions, this input from public service users provides valid performance information remains incomplete. Using a preregistered split‐ballot experiment among government grant recipients in Denmark, this article shows that the ordering of survey questions can bias satisfaction measures even for highly experienced and professional respondents. We find that asking about overall satisfaction before any specific service ratings lowers overall user satisfaction, compared to the reverse order, while the correlations between specific ratings and overall satisfaction are relatively stable. Also, the question order effect outweighs that of a large‐scale embezzlement scandal, which unexpectedly hit the investigated government agency during the data collection. Our results support rising concerns that subjective performance indicators are susceptible to bias. We discuss how practitioners should approach satisfaction surveys to account for the risk of question order bias.     

A Brief History of Doing Time: The California Institution for Women in the 1960s and the 1990s

Recent scholarship on penality describes profound changes in the ideology, discourses, and policies shaping criminal punishment in the late-twentieth-century United States. To assess the implications of these changes for those subject to criminal punishment, we examine the experiences of women in prison at two key points in the recent history of penality. We compare how imprisonment was practiced and responded to at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse, and in the mid-1990s, near the height of the "get tough" era. We find that the ways in which women related and responded to other prisoners, to staff, and to the prison regime, while in some ways specific to one or the other penal era, did not fundamentally change. Thus, penal regimes ostensibly informed by profoundly different rationalities nevertheless structured the daily lives of prisoners through a very similar set of deprivations, restrictions, and assumptions.     

Schattschneider in Brussels: How Policy Conflict Reshaped the Biotechnology Agenda in the European Union

This article asks why the European Commission lost control over the policy process in one of the most contested areas of policy-making in the European Union in recent years. The article finds that after years of vigorous political controversy over the framing of the issues at stake, the EU finally shifted into a Schattschneiderian mode of politics. The policy conflict expanded dramatically and a previously unrelated set of actors and interests united along new lines of policy debate. The analysis underscores how the political mode of EU decision-making can shift during the process of policy-making. In particular, it stresses how policy conflicts affect the mobilisation and demobilisation of political contestants and the realignment of political actors in the European Union.     

Fatal thrombosis of the basilar artery due to a minor head injury

A case is reported where a 20-year-old alcohol-intoxicated man was admitted to the hospital after a minor head injury. Initially there was no neurologic disturbances or complaints but after a few hours he became comatose, and he died 4 days later without regaining consciousness. The autopsy revealed no lesions of the upper cervical spine or the vertebral arteries, but the basilar artery was occluded in its entire length. No traumatic lesions could be seen by naked eye examination of the artery, and there was no accompanying subarachnoid haemorrhage. A thorough microscopic examination, however, using step-sectioning technique revealed a significant incomplete arterial rupture with an occluding luminal thrombosis superimposed, consisting predominantly of aggregated platelets. Only the very thin adventitia separated the vascular lumen from the subarachnoid space preventing the more well known fatal complication to a minor head injury: A subarachnoid haemorrhage. To the best of our knowledge, fatal thrombosis of the basilar artery due to a minor head injury has not previously been reported. The pathogenetic mechanism seems to be identical to that underlying fatal subarachnoid haemorrhage following a similar trauma apart from the resulting arterial rupture being incomplete instead of complete.