Joining it up? Health and Wellbeing Boards in English Local Governance: Evidence from Clinical Commissioning Groups and Shadow Health and Wellbeing Boards

Statutory responsibility for health care and social care has long been separated between National Health Service (NHS) bodies and local government authorities. Repeated policy attempts to promote service integration through collaboration between such authorities have achieved little. The latest of such policy interventions are the Health and Wellbeing Boards (HWBs) established by the 2012 Health and Social Care Act (HSCA) alongside a range of other organisational innovations, including Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). These organisations await full legal and operational status but have begun to develop structures and processes. HWBs are intended to lead the integrated assessment of local needs to inform both NHS health and local authority social care commissioners. We undertook detailed qualitative case studies in eight CCGs during 2011–2012 and here report observational and interview data related to CCGs’ perspectives and observations of early HWB developments. We found that developing HWBs vary greatly in their structure and approach, but we also identified a number of significant issues that are familiar from earlier research into health and social care integration. These include heavy dependence on voluntary agreements to align the strategic plans of the many different new statutory bodies; a significant role for mundane organisational processes in determining the extent of effective co-operation; and problems arising from factors such as size and the arrangements of local boundaries.     

Human Resource Practices in State Government: Findings from a National Survey

What are states doing with respect to human resource practices to improve government operations? Using data collected by the Government Performance Project, this article identifies emerging trends and innovations in state personnel systems. Specifically, it provides a national comparison in the areas of personnel authority, workforce planning, selection, classification, and performance management. Results show that many states are delegating authority for personnel functions to agencies and managers, shifting their human resource missions to being more proactive and collaborative with agencies, and adopting performance management systems that integrate organizational and individual goals. In short, many states are investing considerable resources to modernize their human resource management systems.     

Untimely Economies of Survival

This article takes the recent turn against hope in breast cancer activism as a point of entry into a broader examination of speculative economies of science that creatively imagine, materialize, and manage futures in the present. It argues that untimeliness – anticipatory, simultaneous, porous, and prognostic in its articulation – captures these alternate arrangements of life and action as they are mobilized in cancer research that hails healthy women as experimental subjects to participate in clinical studies.     

Compensating Irish Female Revolutionaries, 1916–1923

The newly released Irish Military Service Pensions Collection offers the most comprehensive opportunity to examine the role of women in the Irish revolution (1916–23) or in any comparable nationalist revolution. It is also an extremely useful source of evidence for an emerging historiographical trend of tracing the post-revolutionary lives of female veterans by examining the award of service pensions to them by that state. This article will examine the role played by gender in the award of such pensions, the economic and financial significance of them in a state that had underdeveloped welfare provision and the importance of them as a symbolic recognition of women's roles in helping to achieve Irish independence. It also compares the post-conflict experience of Irish female revolutionary veterans with women who were involved in comparable international military conflicts.     

Schol-age child care and equal opportunities

The work involved in looking after children may be paid or unpaid, at home or in institutions outside the home. The main emphasis of this article is on mothers as unpaid care workers for their own school-age children. It describes the nature of child care in general terms, but looks especially at school children and their specific dependencies. In particular it focuses on one public intervention towards children and the ways in which this affects their mothers: namely, the state requirement that children between certain ages should be educated, together with the provision of schools to meet this requirement. This provides a starting point for a discussion of ways and means of extending care provision for school-age children and releasing mothers from their marginalised position in the labour force.     

Moral theories of torts: Their scope and limits: Part II

One approach to legal theory is to provide some sort of rational reconstruction of all or of a large body of the common law. For philosophers of law this has usually meant trying to rationalize a body of law under one or another principle of justice. This paper explores the efforts of the leading tort theorists to provide a moral basis - in the sense of rational reconstruction based on alleged moral principles - for the law of torts. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part I consider and reject the view that tort law is best understood as falling either within the ambit of the principle of retributive justice, a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility, or an ideal of fairness inherent in the idea that one should impose on others only those risks others impose on one. The second part of the paper distinguishes among various conceptions of corrective or compensatory justice and considers arguments — including previous ones by the author himself — to the effect that tort law is best understood as rooted in principles of corrective justice. This paper argues that although the principles of justice may render defensible many (but by no means all) of the claims to repair and to liability recognized in torts, it cannot explain why we have adopted a tort system as the approach to vindicating those claims. Some other principle — probably not one of justice — is needed to explain why it is that the victim's claim to repair is satisfied by having his losses shifted to his injurer — rather than through some other means of doing so. The paper concludes that the law of torts cannot be understood — in the sense of being given a rational reconstruction — under any one principle of morality.     

Agricultural Biotechnology and Regime Formation: A Constructivist Assessment of the Prospects

Controversies surrounding the appropriate use and diffusion of agricultural biotechnologies are giving rise to questions about governance at the international level. This article investigates the likelihood that a single, international regime or multiple regimes governing this technology will form by way of negotiation. We show that four normative–institutional arrangements, organized around distinct general principles, have a potential governance role: world food security and safety, liberalized trade, protection of intellectual property, and conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. We argue that an adequate amount of compatibility between the principles and norms of these arrangements is required to support the type of communicative action or truth–seeking needed to develop the intersubjective understanding for a regime. Using a framework for assessing normative compatibility, we find not one, but two nascent understandings rooted in the trade and biodiversity areas competing to form the foundation for governance. Further analysis of levels of institutional density between the two developing regimes reveals they are presently too low to support a negotiated resolution of normative conflict. Finally, we demonstrate that recent framing attempts at the international level to decrease areas of tension and incompatibility in principles/norms between the regimes have neglected to create the crucial normative background conditions needed to avert a scenario of increased political conflict in the near future.