An Investigation of Moral Suasion and Vertical Equity Arguments on Intended Taxpayer Noncompliance

A statewide telephone survey was used to obtain data on self‐reports of hypothetical prize income. One‐third of the subjects were read a moral argument, one‐third were read information on the level of taxes paid by the "wealthy," and one‐third of the subjects were treated as the control group. Both the moral and the wealthy‐pay arguments increased compliance for some of the subjects. There was no apparent backlash effect from the moral argument as suggested by Tittle and Rowe (1973). The wealthy‐pay strategy was effective for taxpayers with tax balances due rather than for those receiving tax refunds. The study also provides evidence on how college education moderates the effects of tax balances due as well as evidence on how a moral argument can negate the noncompliance effects of tax balances due.     

Risk Factors for Family Abduction: Demographic and Family Interaction Characteristics

Previous research in the study of family abduction has been plagued by three problems in efforts to establish risk factors for the experience of these events: (1) failure to use appropriate comparison groups; (2) focus on only the most severe cases of abduction, without consideration of the full spectrum of these events; and (3) use of data drawn only from some “reported” source (i.e., police, court, or missing children agency reports). This paper addresses these three methodological difficulties, using data drawn from a national sample of families, and including both abducted and nonabducted children. We find that race, age of children, family size, and incidence of violence in the family all appear to bear on the risk of experiencing a family abduction event. Further, recency of divorce or separation appears to be associated with the risk for more serious or alarming cases of family abduction.     

Adult child-parent bonds and life course criminality

Parents and parenting practices are often implicated as predictors of early childhood offending in criminological research, but little is known about the role of parents in adulthood in promoting or inhibiting criminal behavior. As juveniles mature into adult roles, parents also continue to mature and interact with their children in numerous roles throughout the life course. Unlike peers and romantic partners, parents are not easily discarded. Adults who have built a good foundation with their parents, then, possess additional social capital that has the potential to better adult life course outcomes, including criminal behavior. Social bonds formed within romantic relationships and stable employment have been the dominant factors identified within criminological literature in promoting criminal desistance, but in today's society with high rates of divorce and an unstable low-skilled job market, parents of origin may be an important stabilizing force in the lives of adults, particularly those lacking other conventional bonds. Using three waves of data from the Ohio Lifecourse Study, a project that spans some twenty-one years, the findings showed that strong relationships with parents are a significant predictor of criminal desistance for adult children, mainly through the emotional benefits these relationships have for the adult children. Furthermore, the data revealed that the adult child-parent relationship is a stronger predictor of desistance among the subjects with poor romantic relationship bonds. Implications for the life course theory are discussed.     

Tenderness,for Lynda Hart

Pedro Almodóvar and Judith Butler's respective projects have long shared an interest in the performativity of gender. More recently, Butler has turned her attention to thinking of rupture as constitutive of identity. Talk to Her reveals a similar turn in the director's work. This essay argues that Talk to Her employs the figure of a comatose woman who awakens in order to investigate the condition of wakefulness as a newly achieved consciousness. In doing so, the director also investigates the parameters of his own authorial condition: alternately embodied and disembodied, he reveals it to be effectively dispossessed. This essay rotates around the opening five minutes of the film, which introduce, in parallel, the space of the theater and that of the hospital–one a space of silence and the other a space for ‘talk,’ a place where the impetus of narrative cures. I argue that these two spaces underscore our condition of existing as bodies. I furthermore consider the role that melodrama–a genre described by its inclination toward embodiment, muteness, and excess–plays in articulating these themes.     

Assessing Correlates of Onset, Escalation, Deescalation, and Desistance of Delinquent Behavior

This article evaluates the utility of social development model constructs toassess the correlates of onset, escalation, deescalation, and desistance ofdelinquent behavior, from age 12 to age 15, using a dynamic classificationapproach. Dynamic classification places individuals into categories basedon changes in levels of delinquent behavior over time. These analyses assessthe extent to which specific constructs are associated with changes in thedelinquency status of individuals. Constructs of the social developmentmodel (SDM), including opportunities for conventional involvement, skillsfor conventional involvement, rewards for conventional involvement,proactive family management, bonding to conventional society, opportunitiesfor antisocial involvement, antisocial interactions, perceived rewards forantisocial involvement, and norms against drug use, were significantlyassociated with change in delinquent behavior over time. Many of theconstructs were particularly salient in distinguishing between youths whoremained involved in delinquency and youths who deescalated or desisted fromdelinquent behavior during this period. Implications for preventiveinterventions and criminological theory are discussed.     

Die Bedeutung institutionalistischer Ansätze für das Verständnis von Organisations- und Managementprozessen in multinationalen Unternehmen

Es ist auffällig, dass sich die sozialwissenschaftlich orientierte Organisationsforschung nur sehr wenig und theoretisch recht einseitig mit Multinationalen Unternehmen (MNU) als Organisationen beschäftigt. Organisationstheoretische Erklärungsmodelle, die das Verhalten in und von Organisationen jenseits technischer und ökonomischer Unternehmensumwelten erklären, sind daher eher rar und erst seit kurzem in einschlägigen Forschungsarbeiten zu finden. Ziel dieses Beitrages ist, die jüngere und vorwiegend englischsprachige Diskussion über den Einfluss von Institutionen und unterschiedlichen lokalen Rationalitäten auf Organisations- und Managementprozesse in MNU aufzuarbeiten. Im Folgenden werden die Grundlagen, wesentlichen Ansätze, Kernaussagen und Konsequenzen des europäischen und amerikanischen Institutionalismus dargestellt. Insbesondere wird der Beitrag die Bedeutung, aber auch Grenzen dieser beiden Ansätze für die Analyse von Veränderungsprozessen in Multinationalen Unternehmen skizzieren und evaluieren. Im Vergleich zum noch dominanten ?evolutionären Paradigma“ in der internationalen Managementforschung wird hier das alternative Erklärungspotenzial von sozialwissenschaftlichen Institutionentheorien herausgestellt und anhand von vier verschiedenen Aspekten diskutiert: dem Einfluss des Heimatlandes, der Macht und der Autonomie von Tochtergesellschaften sowie der Entstehung transnationaler sozialer Räume.