Drawing the Line: Sex Education and Homosexuality in South Australia, 1985

This paper examines a specific controversy over the control and content of sex education in South Australia in 1985 that was triggered by concerns about homosexuality. Drawing on Foucault's idea of the "deployment of sexuality", the paper examines the way in which the issue of homosexuality became the focal point for a concerted struggle over sex education in state schools. It is argued that the idea of homosexuality, or more accurately male homosexual sexuality, served as a boundary marker that both defined and revealed the content and scope of school-based sex education. It is shown that this controversy was an instance of the "deployment of sexuality" through which public opinion was concentrated and mobilised to ensure that prevailing heterosexual norms remained the defining parameters for sex education. Thus it is also demonstrated that sex education is deeply implicated in both the construction and maintenance of prevailing (gendered) sexual norms.     

Advanced therapies and the outer limits of DNA regulation: new horizons for patents or a scaffold too far?

This Regulation seeks to regulate existing and future advancedtherapy medicinal products intended for the market in MemberStates, being either prepared industrially or manufactured bya method involving an industrial process, and introduces additionalprovisions to those laid down in the pharmaceutical legislationDirective 2001/83.     

Goods diversion and repressed inflation: Notes on the political economy of price liberalization

Most analyses of parallel markets in centrally-planned systems focus on queue-rationing as the mechanism whereby state-sector goods become available for second economy resale. This article takes into account employee diversion of goods as a second channel through which merchandise can move to private markets. Diversion of goods tends to temper the adverse distributional consequences of price liberalization. As repressed inflation increases, more goods are diverted out of the state sector, and the likelihood that an individual will be made worse off by a transition of free prices is diminished.     

The INSPIRE Framework: How Public Administrators Can Increase Compliance with Written Requests Using Behavioral Techniques

Public administrators rely on written communications to send information to citizens and stakeholders, and they are among the heaviest users of the postal service. Behavioral science research has identified several techniques that public administrators can use to increase compliance with written requests and, in turn, increase effectiveness. Currently, however, many written communications from government bodies are not written in a manner that utilizes these techniques. It remains an ongoing challenge for public administrators to identify, understand, and use these techniques in the written communications sent by their organizations. This article presents a framework capturing seven prominent techniques in a simple mnemonic—INSPIRE—that is already being used by several government bodies in Australia. It also provides practical examples of how to use each technique and demonstrates that using these techniques could result in large aggregate improvements in effectiveness and socially desirable outcomes of public administrators' written communications.     

Identifying with the Nation: Spain's Left-Wing Citizens in an Age of Crisis

This study analyses the extent, sense, and strategies employed by sympathisers with Spanish state-wide left-wing parties to ‘reconstruct’ their affective ties with the Spanish nation after the ‘monopolisation of patriotism’ by Franco's regime. Such an undertaking is further complicated within the context of economic crisis and intensified peripheral nationalism found in Catalonia and the Basque Country. This article applies qualitative analysis to the discourse of left-wing participants from 11 focus groups held in March 2012 amidst the economic (and political) crisis. As expected, this context of crisis favoured the emergence of explicit discourse on the Spanish nation, providing an opportunity to gain a better understanding of its nature. Findings show that welfare nationalism and social patriotism define the kind of attachment developed by the interviewees towards Spain better than the concept of constitutional patriotism, or any kind of ethnic-cultural feeling of belonging.     

Marginalization,reproduction and assaults against teachers: Ideas on the contradictions of ideological social control

Summary We have analyzed school stratification and delinquent behavior by demonstrating that the connection between the two can be explained more completely by reference to the nature and functioning of American capitalism. By way of a thorough analysis of the reproduction forces at work today in American capitalism, as well as the way consciousness is formed through the satisfaction and fulfillment of species needs and powers, our investigation linked delinquent behavior (assaults against teachers) and school stratification with the social system of which they are embedded. Concentrating initially on the structural forces at work within the labor market, we were able to uncover the foundations which mold the social relations of production. We then turned our investigation to the school, revealing how the underlying function of secondary education today is the reproduction of the social relations of production. With a thorough understanding of these two interrelated phenomena, we were then able to explain why minority students attack secondary school teachers at a higher rate than other students. Specifically, it is because of thecontradiction between the creation of a personality possessing autonomous and independent behavior traits, with emphasis on violent behavior patterns as a means of solving interpersonal problems (marginalization), and the austere authoritarian and control mechanisms of the school (reproduction).I wish to thank Nancy Gilliland for helpful comments and criticism on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Appropriately Upset? Emotion Norms and Perceptions of Crime Victims

Victims who express less emotion in response to a crime are perceived as less deserving, less sympathetic, and they have less punishment assigned to the offender who committed the crime. This study considers the extent to which emotion norms underlie perceptions of victims who testify. Two studies investigate the circumstances in which emotional reactions to a crime are seen as "unusual" and whether a more general emotion norm underlies responses to victim testimony. We test a "victim-role" norm against a "proportionality" norm by crossing the severity of victim's emotional response (severe or mild) with the seriousness of a crime (serious or less serious). Results across two studies lend greater support to the notion that people expect victims to match the intensity of their emotional response to the seriousness of the event (i.e., a proportionality rule), although we also find instances in which expectations of the victim are not strong. Gender of the victim exhibited small and contingent effects. We discuss the relevance of emotion norms to legal settings.