Widening Participation and Higher Education

This article considers higher education 'widening participation' policy and practice, focusing upon attempts to widen access in relation to applicants from under-represented socio-economic groups and educational backgrounds. Some key United Kingdom approaches are described and discussed in the light of the concept of affirmative action. The article also examines the legal support for widening participation.     

The meat of the global food crisis

The global food crisis has been widely described in terms of the volatility of grain and oilseed markets and the associated worsening conditions of food security facing many poor people. Various explanations have been given for this volatility, including increasingly meat-centered diets and rising demand for animal feed, especially in China. This is a very partial reading, as the food crisis runs much deeper than recent market turbulence; when it is understood in terms of the biophysical contradictions of the industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex and how they are now accelerating, meat moves to the center of the story. Industrial livestock production is the driving force behind rising meat consumption on a world scale, and the process of cycling great volumes of industrial grains and oilseeds through soaring populations of concentrated animals serves to magnify the land and resource budgets, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture. These dynamics not only reflect disparities but are exacerbating them, foremost through climate change. Thus, this paper suggests that rising meat consumption and industrial livestock production should be understood together to comprise a powerful long-term vector of global inequality.     

Transforming Administrative Policy

Administrative policies and practices may evolve and change slowly and incrementally or they may be transformed intentionally. Intentional efforts to change administrative policy by transforming the structure, processes, or personnel of public sector organizations define an active administrative policy. Ideally, an active administrative policy takes as given that the organizational form to be used is open to choice, that administrative goals are clear, that a tight coupling exists between ends and means, that different organizational forms have different effects, and that there are criteria that may be used to assess those effects. This article focuses on the fulfilment of these preconditions in the three national contexts – Norway, Sweden and the United States of America – in order to determine the relevance of a transformative perspective for understanding the process of administrative change. We examine what impact constraints like polity features, historical-institutional traditions and external pressure, particularly through popular international administrative doctrines like New Public Management ideas and financial crises, have on the possibilities to enhance an active national administrative policy.     

Projecting crime rates: An age,period, and cohort model using ARIMA techniques

The object of this paper is to generate forecasts of U.S. index property and violent crimes. A three-step procedure is employed. First, the age-specific crime rates are decomposed into age, period, and cohort effects. Then the period and cohort effects are characterized using regression and transfer functions, respectively. Finally, these statistical models are used to generate forecasts of the period and cohort effects and hence forecasted values of the age-specific crime rates. The forecasts are compared with existing data and found to be quite accurate. Issues concerning the forecast efficiency of this approach compared to that of others are also discussed.