Crisis Management Europe: An Integrated Regional Research and Training Program

This article describes the Crisis Management (CM) Europe program that seeks to produce scientific knowledge that can be used also in order to train practitioners to cope more effectively with national and regional crises. Initiated in 1997 with a focus on the Baltic Sea area, the program has recently been broadened to cover all of Europe. The program documents and analyzes specific cases of national and regional crises. It relies upon a contextually grounded process tracing strategy for case reconstruction and dissection derived from relevant literatures in political science, psychology, and organizational sociology. To facilitate comparison and cumulation of case findings, a systematic four-step research procedure has been developed. Ten analytical themes of potential interest to both scholars and practitioners are identified as targets for structured focused comparison. More than a hundred cases have been studied by researchers working in research teams based in many European countries. Training tools have been successfully deployed in training practitioners from more than a dozen countries. An ongoing dialogue between academics and practitioners from across the Continent promises to make a contribution toward bridging the gap between these two different communities.     

Information transfer between an academic research center and its member firms

Many American universities have recently established research centers that interact with industrial firms. Such centers have been supported by the federal government whose objective is to enhance technological innovation. For this study, interviews were conducted with liaison persons from the member firms to determine how the firms acquire and use information obtained from the center and why they maintain a relationship with the center. The findings confirm that the center is a useful source of information for the member firms. It clarifies the need for establishing strategies that facilitate the transfer of information without compromising either the center or its members.     

Learning through conflict: a realistic strategy for risk communication

Technological conflicts are commonly seen as rooted in problems of risk perception and risk communication. This view is seriously deficient in that it does not fully appreciate that despite their technical content, the conflicts are at bottom political. Conflict of interests and values is evident even in differences over scientific agendas, methods, and interpretations, and especially in the inevitable cacophony of messages describing scientific knowledge to non-experts. Efforts to produce clear, accurate, and unbiased messages about risks will not even solve communication problems, let alone reduce conflict, because unbiased is undefinable. Clear and accurate messages can always be devised to support a variety of policy positions, and they will be, whenever controversy persists. The article substantiates these points and outlines some realistic approaches to risk communication that enable nonexperts to learn through conflict what they cannot learn from carefully crafted risk messages.     

Against agency: a positional critique

Abstract

This paper uses the changing historical and theoretical frames within which management pay and investor claims are considered to provide a critique of the functionalist approach of agency and to develop an alternative, positional explanation of rewards. The first part of the paper draws on the contrast between the pre-1940 critique of the rentier and the post-1980 discursive construction of the shareholder to raise important contemporary questions about position and reward. The second part develops the idea of positional rewards to challenge agency assumptions by arguing that both giant firm managers and the less visible, though larger, group of intermediaries use their position to skim value. In contrast, the experience of position is more mixed for shareholders, who are generally passive value surfers. The final section of the paper argues that a renewed emphasis on position will enable a problem shift from value creation to value capture.     

Reconciling questions about dichotomizing variables in criminal justice research

Purpose

Despite accumulating evidence against the practice of artificial dichotomization, its continued use among criminal justice researchers indicates that there are still unresolved questions about its appropriateness. Farrington and Loeber (2000) provided a discussion of how these issues impact research on delinquency, and many researchers have cited their article as a justification for dichotomization within the field of criminal justice. In the current study, we examine the reasons why researchers have cited Farrington and Loeber as a mechanism for answering some unresolved questions about whether and when dichotomization may be justified.

Methods

We used a forward citation search in PsycInfo to locate all articles citing Farrington and Loeber (2000) in support of dichotomization.

Results

This search identified 126 articles which provided a total of 191 reasons supporting dichotomization. We explore these reasons, discussing whether they are consistent with evidence from simulation-based analyses and whether they are supported by existing statistical and methodological theory.

Conclusions

Despite the large number of reasons for dichotomization provided by authors, we found very few that had empirical or theoretical support.     

The Effect of Conjugal Visitation on Sexual Violence in Prison

Using yearly state-level data drawn from a variety of different sources and a pooled cross-sectional time-series research design, we examine whether conjugal visitation attenuates sexual violence in prison. The determination of whether sexual violence in prison is less apt to transpire in states that allow conjugal visitation is theoretically relevant. Feminist theory argues that conjugal visitation has little if any influence on the occurrence of rape and other sexual offenses in prison, notwithstanding the gender of the offender and victim, because such offenses are crimes of power that are employed by the offender as an instrument to dominate and humiliate the victim. On the other hand, sexual gratification theory postulates that conjugal visitation provides inmates with a means of sexual release. Therefore, conjugal visitation should reduce sexual offending in prison. Results support sexual gratification theory by showing that states permitting conjugal visitation have significantly fewer instances of reported rape and other sexual offenses in their prisons. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Terminal Crisis of the “Participatory Government” and the Election of Lee Myung Bak

This paper examines the election of Lee Myung Bak through the terminal crisis of the Roh Moo Hyun government that preceded it. I start with an analysis of the election of Lee Myung Bak and the electoral strategies of the liberal-progressive bloc in the December 2007 election and then move on to detail how these strategies shed light on tensions within Korean progressive politics since the transition to democracy in 1987. These tensions inform what I shall call the “terminal crisis” of Roh's “participatory government.” I argue that this crisis involves a problem of articulation within progressive politics between a politics of reunification and one grounded in egalitarian economic reform, including the lack of an alternative to the different forms of neo-liberalism embraced by both the Roh government and the conservative government of Lee Myung Bak. My hope is that thorough examination of these tensions that have informed the liberal-progressive bloc during the long decade since 1987 can spur reflection on the role of social movements in Korean democratisation and the dilemmas they face in crafting strategies for political and economic reform.