The Edi Festival at Ile Ife

This account of a major ritual at Ife in Nigeria is of particularinterest at the present time, in view of the tension, undernew forms, between the Yoruba and the Ibo (Igbo). The originalarticle has been slightly shortened, in particular by omittingmost of the veracular versions of the songs whose translationsare given. Not all the diacritical marks are included.     

BEHAVIOR GENETICS AND ANOMIE/STRAIN THEORY

Criminology is in need of conceptual revival, and behavior genetics can provide the concepts and research design to accomplish this. Behavior genetics is a biologically-friendly environmental discipline that often tells us more about environmental effects on individual traits than about genetic effects. Anomie/strain theory is used to illustrate the usefulness of behavior genetics to criminological theories. Behavior genetics examines the individual differences that sort people into different modes of adaptation and that lead them to cope constructively or destructively with strain. Behavior genetics and other biosocial perspectives have the potential to help illuminate Agnew's (1997) extension of General Strain Theory (GST) into the developmental realm.     

REFORM OF INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS IN AUSTRALIA: THE POLITICS OF FEDERALISM AND THE NON-POLITICS OF MANAGERIALISM

A remarkable process of reform of intergovernmental arrangements was initiated in Australia in 1990 designed, according to its proponents, 'to improve our national efficiency and international competitiveness and to improve the delivery and quality of services governments provide'. Unlike previous 'new federalisms' in Australia (and elsewhere) the reform process on this occasion was neither totally unilateral, nor top-down in design and implementation. Rather, while reflecting the commonwealth (federal) government's frustrations at the limits imposed by the federal system on its political power and administrative capacity, the process intentionally was cooperative, incorporating all state and temtory government leaders, and including representatives of local government. In the context of a review of the origins, nature and objectives of the reform initiative, this article points both to the valuable innovations embodied in its processes, and to the risks of reduced political access and citizen participation created by its attempts to apply 'single-government' managerialist principles to the redesign of intergovernmental arrangements in federal systems. Political and bureaucratic objectives, combined with a lack of adequate appreciation of federal principles, led, in our view, to an attempt to supplant participatory politics with relatively less accessible and responsive managerial structures.     

THE SEXUAL STRATIFICATION HYPOTHESIS AND SEXUAL ASSAULT IN LIGHT OF THE CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF RACE

Recent research examining race-based sentencing has reported anomalous results. It has been argued by Heck (1981) and Peterson and Hagan (1984) that these anomalies would not be perceived as such given a greater sensitivity to the "changing conceptions of race" in American society. This study performs a limited test of the sexual stratification hypothesis which asserts that various degrees of opprobrium are attached to sexual assaults depending on the racial composition of the offender/victim dyad. This hypothesis is tested with an additive and a race-specific model. The additive model fails to reveal any significant differences in severity of penalties based on either offender or victim race. The race-specific model reveals that significantly harsher penalties were imposed on blacks who sexually assaulted whites than were imposed on blacks who sexually assaulted blacks. The additive model suppresses this differential sentencing severity because blacks who assaulted blacks received the most lenient penalties, thus moving the black grand mean to one which was not significantly different from the white grand mean. Thus, both differential leniency and harshness are possible for blacks depending on the race of the victim.     

QUALITY AND PUBLIC SERVICES

The issue of quality of service is becoming increasingly important in the public service as a result of new approaches that are being adopted to management, notably the development of contract-based management. The argument of this article is that the concept of quality is a particularly difficult one for the public services, because of problems of information asymmetries. The first sections of the article are concerned with the meaning of the concept of quality and the problems of managing quality in the service sector and the public service in particular. The central argument of the article is that there are important problems of information asymmetries between service providers and service consumers. Four different situations of differential information availability are distinguished. The article argues that the issue of quality in the public service is an inherently political one.