Compliance Regimes and Barriers to Behavioral Change

Existing research on compliance failures by individuals and businesses focuses primarily on information and incentive problems. This article develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing barriers to compliance, giving particular attention to resource and autonomy barriers, heterogeneity of the target population, multiple barriers to compliance, and problems that arise when a complex and ongoing set of actions is require to be “in compliance.” How governments react to compliance failures is heavily influenced by the social construction and political power of target populations. The propositions developed in the article are tested against the cases of the Swedish individual account pension system and welfare reform in the United States.     

Justice Here and Now: A Personal Reflection on the Restorative and Community Justice Paradigms

Cuba has long had one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America and in the Americas generally. Incidents of crime against women such as rape and domestic violence, for example, appear to be lower in Cuba than in the rest of Latin America and the United States. Community organizations in Cuba play a significant role in controlling criminal activity by generating and sustaining citizen participation, generating an understanding of the nature of community crime, and helping to form partnerships for community policing. Cuba has attempted to obtain citizen participation in order to resolve social problems, including crime, by instilling a sense of community among its citizens and providing them with the structure of mass organizations that mobilize people on local, regional, and national levels. Residents attribute Cuba’s relatively low crime rate to the sense of community created and maintained by such mass organizations. This article focuses on the role that mass organizations and especially Committees for the Defense of the Revolution play in the Cuban experience of community policing and justice.     

Dialect on trial: use of African American Vernacular English influences juror appraisals*

ABSTRACT

We investigated the effect of dialect and race on juror decision making. Mock jurors read a summary of an ambiguous criminal case, which included audio of a defense witness (Study 1) or defendant (Study 2). Both speaker dialect [General American English (GAE)/African American Vernacular English (AAVE)] and race (White/Black) were crossed; Study 2 also included three levels of case (Ambiguous/Pro-Prosecution/Pro-Defense) to evaluate any effects of evidentiary context. In both studies, jurors who listened to the AAVE recording found the AAVE-speaking witness to be less professional and less educated than their GAE-speaking counterparts. Interestingly, jurors in Study 2 who heard the defendant use GAE were more likely to find him guilty and found him less credible when the case favored the prosecution, hinting that ingroup biases such as the black sheep effect may also play a role in perceptions of dialect. Secondary analyses found that AAVE predicted more negative overall evaluations of the speaker, and these negative evaluations were associated with an increase in guilty verdicts. Together, these findings suggest that dialect plays an under-investigated role in the courtroom, and that bias against AAVE negatively impacts juror appraisals of its speakers and can potentially influence juror decision making.     

The New Enclosures: London,New York City,Philadelphia, and the Transformation of Public Space

ABSTRACT

In recent years, social movements have taken to the streets to protest various forms of economic and racial injustice. However, these attempts to exploit the political opportunities public spaces afford have been compromised by the increasingly private nature of “public” spaces. What has changed is the rise of privately owned public spaces (POPS), areas that appear to be public, but in fact are owned by corporations that prohibit a range of activities, including political protest. This article argues such restrictions of public space are not limited to POPS. Rather, they are just one expression of a far more pervasive phenomenon, novel variations on centuries-old practices by which common or public land has been enclosed. I suggest that four forms of enclosure -for profit, of behavior, of community, and of the public realm- degrade the status of public institutions and insulate private interests from counter-mobilization by groups pursuing egalitarian ends.     

The Role of Incubators in the Entrepreneurial Process

We outline a model that improves our understanding of the role of incubators in the entrepreneurial process. Specifically, we focus on the impact of the services offered, namely infrastructure, coaching and networks, on the graduation rates of the respective incubators tenants. The model is tested among three different types of incubators, for-profit, non-profit, university-based incubators. Based on our qualitative findings, we conclude that our initial model is ineffective, in the sense that it cannot fully explain the role of the incubators in facilitating entrepreneurship. Interviews with directors of incubator centers were also carried out simultaneously. Further analysis of the results along with interview responses from incubator directors, led us to propose a more comprehensive model to explain how incubators affect the entrepreneurial process.     

Self-injurious behaviors, PTSD arousal, and general health complaints within a treatment-seeking sample of sexually abused women

Eighty-nine adult female survivors of childhood sexual abuse, presenting for psychological treatment, were assessed for self-reported rates of self-injurious behaviors (SIB), health complaints, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms of physiological arousal. A composite measure of current SIB was significantly and positively associated with health complaints, PTSD arousal, and three measures of sexual abuse severity: age of onset for sexual abuse, injury experienced during the sexual abuse, and perceived life threat. Tests of mediation revealed that symptoms of PTSD arousal mediated the relationship between earlier age of onset for sexual abuse and SIB. PTSD arousal moderated the relationship between sexual-abuse-related injury and SIB. SIB was a unique predictor of health complaints, even after controlling for sexual abuse severity and PTSD arousal.     

Patients Are More than their Illnesses: The Use of Story in Medical Education

[W]hen a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza and these experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the type-writer or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. —T.S. Eliot