Detectives Stories and City Life

Detective stories take place mainly in two settings, constantly changing, many faceted big cities filled with strangers, and stable, fairly homogeneous, innocent small towns whose members know one another. The differences in each clarify the qualities of the other. In solving the mystery of the small town, the detective provides moral instruction and restores the town’s innocence. In solving the mystery in the big city the detective reveals the city as part of the mystery and provides the reader with temporary orientation to the city. Mysteries have grown with the growth of the cities and now appear in every country of the world. Harold J. Bershady is an emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, edited with Renée Fox and Victor Lidz, is After Parson: A Theory of Action for the 21st Century, published by Russell Sage Press, 2005.     

Civil Service Reform as National Security: The Homeland Security Act of 2002

The events of 9/11 have influenced policy making in public administration. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the Department of Homeland Security, contained language that empowered the secretary of homeland security and the director of the Office of Personnel Management to establish a personnel management system outside the normal provisions of the federal civil service. Why did civil service reform succeed as part of this legislation when previous attempts at large‐scale reform had failed? A case analysis of the enactment of civil service reform in the Homeland Security Act points to theories of policy emergence and certain models of presidential and congressional policy making. In this case, civil service reform became associated with national security instead of management reform. An assessment of the rhetorical arguments used to frame this policy image offers a powerful explanation for the adoption of the personnel management reforms in the Homeland Security Act. This case has implications for understanding how policy makers might approach future management reform agendas.     

Explaining Japan's Tortured Course to Surveillance Satellites

On December 25, 1998 the Japanese government reinterpreted a long‐standing policy prohibiting the use of outer space for military purposes by announcing its intention to develop a network of domestically produced and deployed “information‐gathering” satellites to be utilized primarily by the Japan Defense Agency (JDA) and other national security institutions. This decision is important in its own right—for one, Japan is a major player in the space technology arena—but also because of the precedent it sets for other areas of technology and military policy in Japan today. As many observers have noted, Japan appears to be undergoing a broad reexamination both of its view of the appropriate level of interaction between government bureaucracy and industry and of its military security strategy in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. The case of surveillance satellites links these two areas together, offering broader lessons for the course of Japanese policy in numerous areas in the future.     

An Examination of Three Models of the Relationships between Parental Attachments and Adolescents’ Social Functioning and Depressive Symptoms

Three models of attachment relationships—the hierarchy model, the integrative model and the independent model—were compared in order to elucidate which best described the relationship between attachments to fathers versus mothers and its developmental consequences among 1,289 eighth grade students in Taiwan. These consequences included adolescents’ social support from family and friends, social expectations in peer interaction, self-worth, and depressive symptoms. The models can be summarized as follows: the hierarchy model assumes that paternal attachment is influenced by the level of maternal attachment; the integrative model assumes that the combined effects of secure attachments to mother and to father best predict the child’s development; and the independent model suggests that maternal and paternal attachments have differential influences on the child’s developmental outcomes. Our results indicate that the independent model best describes adolescents’ attachment relationships with parents and their subsequent developmental consequences. Moreover, gender differences were found in adolescent’s report of attachment to mother and father in relation with the outcome variables. Yih-Lan Liu is an associate professor at National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, R.O.C. She received her Ph.D degree 1996 from University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A. Her major research interests include parent-child interaction, attachment relationships, ego development and adolescent development and psychosocial adjustment.     

Feminism and the Flat Law Theory

This article examines two modalities of law, depicted spatially as the vertical and the horizontal. The intellectual background for seeing law in vertical and horizontal dimensions is to be found in much socio-legal scholarship. These approaches have challenged the modernist, legal positivist and essentially vertical view of law as a system of imperatives emanating from a hierarchically superior source such as a sovereign. In keeping with the socio-legal critical tradition, but approaching it from the perspective of legal philosophy, my aim is to address three matters. First, why is vertical law problematic for feminists? Second, what are the theoretical characteristics of law in its horizontal register? Third, how is an appreciation of this ‘flat’ law useful for feminist legal theory and practice? In particular, I consider the ways in which feminist legal theory operating in the horizontal dimension can transgress, without transcending, the vertically determined perimeters of the nation state.