Book Reviews

Small Firms and Local Economic Networks: The Death of the Local Economy?. James Curran and Robert Blackburn, 1994. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. 210 pp.; £29.95 hardback. ISBN: 1 85396 209 0

Tourism and Politics: Policy, Power and Place. Colin Michael Hall, 1994 (reprinted. March 1996). Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. 239 pp.; £14.99 paperback. ISBN: 0 471 9647 2

European Union Spatial Policy and Planning. R. WILLIAMS, 1996. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. 304 pp. £16.95 paperback. ISBN: 1 8539 6 305 4

Disability and the City: International Perspectives. Rob Imrie, 1996. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. 200 pp.; £15.95 paperback. ISBN: 185396 273 2 (paperback)     

Guest Editorial: Political geographies of children and young people

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the present Special Issue of Space & Polity tackling the political geographies of children and young people. Historically given scant attention by the sub-discipline, since children and young people appear to have little active influence on the workings of states, nations, geopolitics and the like, there are now small signs of how and why political geographers might look anew at the experiences and contribu tions of this population cohort. An empirical vignette, based on letters written by children and young people to Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great De pression, is deployed to develop this claim. Contrasts are then drawn between political geographies of children and young people that are ‘adult-centred’ and those that are ‘child-centred’, as related to claims about the distinctions and connections between ‘macro-politics’ and ‘micro-politics’. It is suggested that, notwithstanding the exciting insights to be derived from child-centred approaches, the situation should not be a matter of privileging these over adult-centred approaches. Indeed, it is argued that there are dangers in going down such a route and of thereby collapsing ‘the political’ into ‘the personal’, thus missing what is distinctively political about the geographies needing to be researched and written. Following a brief excursion into debates about the supposed political apathy of (post)modern children and young people, the paper then introduces the other contributions to the Special Issue.     

State,society and the African crisis

Rehabilitation after violent conflict is today relevant to many countries - especially but not only in SSA - and hopefully will become so for more. It is in generally too narrowly specified, too short term and too fragmented with no macro strategic or conceptual frame. Further it is usually based on quite inadequate knowledge of the history, priorities and dynamics of the afflicted country. Rehabilitation has-or should have-interacting economic (especially livelihood rebuilding), social (stress and perceived inequity reducing) and political (reconciliation and legitimacy restoration not least by rehabilitating basic service access including user friendly, personal security oriented civil police and magistrates courts system). In severely war impacted countries these are likely to be among the most economically efficient ways to regaining growth and restructured economic development as well as of rebuilding social and political reconcilliation and religitimisation.     

Disclosure strategies among sex offenders: A model for understanding the engagement process in groupwork

Abstract

A key component of the functional engagement of child sex offenders in a group-based programme is the disclosure of certain personal information. Such information is required to be of a type and presented in a way that facilitates open exchange in the group, promoting understanding of the presenter's offence pattern and conveying his sole responsibility for the offending. The model explained in this paper, based on an outcome from a grounded theory study, describes in detail four distinct orientations to such disclosure. Each is associated with a particular style of managing the disclosure encounter. Three of these disclosure management styles can be described as essentially “resistant” in nature, but only one is overtly oppositional. The two other “resistant” styles of disclosure management emerge as more covert and perhaps less readily identifiable expressions of reluctance. The implications of the model for work with this population and in more general settings are discussed.     

Public Investments in Education and Children’s Academic Achievements

While the benefits of additional schooling in the developing world are widely recognised, the best use of scarce resources to improve academic achievement remains unclear. We compare public investments in school infrastructure, school improvement grants, teacher qualifications, and attendance incentives on independently-gathered measures of academic skills as well as grade progression for 8–11 year olds in India. We match a rich household survey containing a skills-assessment module, the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), with detailed measures of each district’s education resources from the District Information Survey on Education (DISE). We also include border-pair fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that incentives for children to attend school were associated with arithmetic, reading and writing skills, and grade progression. Investment in teachers were associated with greater probability a child could write and do more advanced math. Small improvement grants to schools were associated with better reading skills and writing ability. Investments in school infrastructure were only associated with improved writing ability.