Building Social Capital in City Politics: Scope and Limitations at the Inter-organisational Level

This article explores the relations between voluntary organisations and the city administration in two British cities through an analysis of the impact of social capital. It provides a corrective to the dominant individual-level approach by offering an organisational-level analysis of social capital. The evidence suggests that inter-organisational social capital is not distributed equitably within cities. Voluntary organisations that regularly engage with a city administration can build networks of trust and information flows that outstrip those available to other voluntary organisations. Although it is easier to build social capital within a sector, such as the voluntary sector, building it in tight networks with voluntary organisations would appear to be an achievable goal for a city administration – but such networks do not guarantee an enhanced overall confidence in the local political system.     

Australia and the Emergence of the Modern Two-Party System

Although the Australian party system is accepted in some literature as a "classic" example of a two-party system, information about how this system came about does not feature prominently in international studies on political parties. It is here argued that Australia indeed blazed the trail for the two-party model by being the first to link parliamentary organisation directly to a mass electorate.     

Social divisions in caring

This article is concerned with the perspectives on caring developed by academic feminist researchers in Britain over the last decade. It notes how these perspectives defined caring in terms of the unpaid domestic and personal services provided through the social relations of marriage and kinship to those who found it hard to meet their own care needs. The article draws on Black feminist and disabled feminist perspectives, together with recent autocritical work by academic feminist researchers, to unpack this concept of care. It focuses on what the concept obscures about the social divisions that mediate women's experiences of care. It examines what is eclipsed and who is excluded from feminist perspectives on caring which are grounded in the experience of giving care on an unpaid basis within kinship networks based on marriage.     

Revitalizing public management training in the Americas

The decade of the 1980s signalled major changes within public administration and development-oriented activities. As a consequence of the internationalization of the agendas of practitioners and academics working in these areas, there is today a growing convergence among public policy, public management, public administration and political science. Given the complexity of the public sector cross-nationally, what has become necessary in public management education is the design of programmes that meet specific needs and priorities and which are responsive to very different national settings. This particular case study is centred around one endeavour to achieve more effective interfacing between theory and practice, in the teaching of public management and the design of development programmes in the United States (US). It is based on an assessment of a 10-year co-operative endeavour between the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration and the US Agency for International Development. The outcomes of this project provided not only leverage for important changes in the teaching programmes of schools concerned with international management education but also built a new relationship between government and a non-governmental organization through the contacting out of management development work.     

Molly McQuade,Ed. By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry

It is hard to imagine a more welcome book and odd that no one conceived of such a project sooner.     

Digital Restructuring: Gender,Class and Citizenship in the Information Society in Canada

‘Digital restructuring’ denotes a phenomenon integral to but also distinct within economic and political restructuring broadly conceived. The concept of restructuring can be modified with ‘digital’ to forefront the important technological dimension of global restructuring, as well as to indicate developments associated with the new ‘information economy’. Digital technology and digitization have been integral to the scope and speed of the global economic and political restructuring of recent decades. They have constituted the technological conditions for some of the more characteristic aspects of this process; from the flexiblization or outright shedding of labour, to the mobility of production and capital and the globalization of trade and financial markets. This paper seeks to debunk much of the corporate and state mythology of digital restructuring currently in circulation by drawing upon the analyses of digital technology and restructuring advanced by critical scholars and progressive social movements, and to highlight the dangers to progressive political movements and discourses posed by the very nature of these representations.