Institutional Constraints,Managerial Choices,and Conflicts in Public Sector Supply Chains

In this research, we compare the governance mechanisms that public sector managers and private sector managers leverage when responding to conflict in supply chain relationships. We find evidence that public sector managers are more likely than private sector managers to rely on written (formal) contract mechanisms, but that both public and private managers use relational (informal) governance mechanisms to similar extents. We also find that managers from both sectors perceive an improvement to the quality of the exchange relationship when a relational approach is emphasized in managing the conflict. Our research provides an important contribution to our understanding about the actions public managers take in dealing with supply chain conflicts and suggests potential policy alternatives to foster contracting efficiency and effectiveness.     

‘Swanning back in’? Foreign fighters and the long arm of the state

As foreign fighters have flocked to conflicts in Syria and elsewhere, their home governments have often claimed a right not only to criminalise their doing so, but also to deprive them of the right to return. This article challenges some problematic assumptions about the intersection among political allegiance, extraterritorial jurisdiction and the right of abode. It traces the origins of today’s conventional wisdom to a particular modern experience of state–society relations, including the rise of administrative ambitions that outrun the original bounds of the territorial state. In contrast, it argues for an ‘unbundling’ of state authority, prepolitical membership in society, and cross-border political action. This position would chasten overreaching views about states’ ownership of their citizens, while still leaving other ways to deal with jihadist violence.     

Attribute Affinity: U.S. Natives’ Attitudes Toward Immigrants

Political Behavior - We examine the extent to which relevant social identity traits shared between two individuals—what we term “attribute affinity”—can moderate out-group...     

Understanding the nature of change: how institutional perspectives can inform contemporary studies of development cooperation

This article argues that core lines of sociological institutionalist thought provide a set of valuable conceptual and theoretical vocabularies for exploring and explaining contemporary concerns of development cooperation. It identifies four broad categories of issues of central attention in the current study of development cooperation, and couples these with four avenues of sociological institutional research that may provide us with theoretical and conceptual frameworks for further empirically exploring and theoretically extrapolating these. Increasing attention to these theoretical concerns not only helps us progress the study of development cooperation, it may also allow us to inform contemporary institutional thinking.     

Capital mobility,perspectives and central bank independence: Exchange rate policy since 1945

Hegemonic stability theory has been the traditional explanation in International Political Economy for the trend from fixed to floating exchange rates which was brought about by the collapse of Bretton Woods. This approach is found to be problematic. A more powerful explanation is the postwar rise in capital mobility, which produces a trade-off between exchange rate stability and policy autonomy. Preferences for these two policies have been a function of perspectives on economic policy and the degree of central bank independence. Independent central banks prefer domestic policy autonomy to exchange rate management, as they have no socio-political incentives to produce competitive, stable exchange rates. Their interests are predominantly in achieving low domestic inflation. In addition, current perspectives hold that the best way of securing international exchange rate stability is to pursue stable macroeconomic policies at home, resulting in the predominance of floating exchange rate policies. This trend will continue into the near future despite opportunities for international cooperation presented by the rationalization of world monetary politics into a G3 following the introduction of the euro. This may have adverse effects on the global economy for three reasons. First, there is a long-term danger that triad regionalization will result in a revival of neo-mercantilist policies, in which the exchange rate could play a part. Second, a high proportion of world trade and finance will be denominated in dollars and euros, rendering the stability of the dollar/euro exchange rate a global public good. Third, dollar/euro exchange rate misalignments which harm either the U.S. or EMU will be harmful to the global economy because of the high percentage of world GDP accounted for by these two areas.     

Central bank independence and inflation revisited

We re-examine the relationship between central bank independence (CBI), proxied by the central bank governor’s turnover rate and an indicator based on central bank laws in place, and inflation using a random coefficient model with the Hildreth-Houck estimator for more than 100 countries in the period 1980 to 2005. We conclude that there exists no general significant negative relation between our indicators of central bank independence and inflation. Central bank independence has a significant effect only in a minority of the countries in our sample.     

Collaborative Institutions in an Ecology of Games

This article seeks to improve our understanding of policy institutions and cooperation by adapting Long's (1958) analysis of the ecology of games to the context of collaborative land use and transportation planning in California. The traditional institutional rational choice analysis argues that collaborative institutions reduce the transaction costs of cooperation among multiple policy actors. The ecology of games framework extends IRC by emphasizing the consequences of multiple institutions and identifies several reasons why collaborative institutions may actually reduce the amount of cooperation in existing policy venues. Analyses of survey data from policy actors in five California regions demonstrate that higher levels of cooperation in collaborative institutions are associated with lower levels of cooperation in other land‐use and transportation planning institutions.     

Post-mortem Iris Decomposition and its Dynamics in Morgue Conditions

With increasing interest in employing iris biometrics as a forensic tool for identification by investigation authorities, there is a need for a thorough examination and understanding of postmortem decomposition processes that take place within the human eyeball, especially the iris. This can prove useful for fast and accurate matching of antemortem with postmortem data acquired at crime scenes or mass casualties, as well as for ensuring correct dispatching of bodies from the incident scene to a mortuary or funeral homes. Following these needs of forensic community, this paper offers an analysis of the coarse effects of eyeball decay done from a perspective of automatic iris recognition. We analyze postmortem iris images acquired for a subject with a very long postmortem observation time horizon (34 days), in both visible light and near-infrared light (860 nm), as the latter wavelength is used in commercial iris recognition systems. Conclusions and suggestions are provided that may aid forensic examiners in successfully utilizing iris patterns in postmortem identification of deceased subjects. Initial guidelines regarding the imaging process, types of illumination, and resolution are also given, together with expectations with respect to the iris features decomposition rates. Visible iris features possible for human, expert-based matching persists even up to 407 h postmortem, and near-infrared illumination is suggested for better mitigation of corneal opacity while imaging cadaver eyes (Post-mortem iris decomposition and its dynamics in morgue conditions. ArXiv pre-print, 2019).     

Developmental Pathways from Parental Socioeconomic Status to Adolescent Substance Use: Alternative and Complementary Reinforcement

Although lower socioeconomic status has been linked to increased youth substance use, much less research has determined potential mechanisms explaining the association. The current longitudinal study tested whether alternative (i.e., pleasure gained from activities without any concurrent use of substances) and complementary (i.e., pleasure gained from activities in tandem with substance use) reinforcement mediate the link between lower socioeconomic status and youth substance use. Further, we tested whether alternative and complementary reinforcement and youth substance use gradually unfold over time and then intersect with one another in a cascading manner. Potential sex differences are also examined. Data were drawn from a longitudinal survey of substance use and mental health among high school students in Los Angeles. Data collection involved four semiannual assessment waves beginning in fall 2013 (N?=?3395; M baseline age?=?14.1; 47% Hispanic, 16.2% Asian, 16.1% multiethnic, 15.7% White, and 5% Black; 53.4% female). The results from a negative binomial path model suggested that lower parental socioeconomic status (i.e., lower parental education) was significantly related to an increased number of substances used by youth. The final path model revealed that the inverse association was statistically mediated by adolescents’ diminished engagement in pleasurable substance-free activities (i.e., alternative reinforcers) and elevated engagement in pleasurable activities paired with substance use (i.e., complementary reinforcers). The direct effect of lower parental education on adolescent substance use was not statistically significant after accounting for the hypothesized mediating mechanisms. No sex differences were detected. Increasing access to and engagement in pleasant activities of high quality that do not need a reinforcement enhancer, such as substances, may be useful in interrupting the link between lower parental socioeconomic status and youth substance use.