Improving emergency management: A total quality management approach

We address the problem of managing emergencies in complex environments and examine the concepts of total quality management (TQM) as a means of increasing organisational capacity to reduce and/or respond to threatening events. The TQM approach initiates and integrates improvement in three fundamental areas of organisational design and operation: technical, organisational, and cultural. We apply this approach to the interactive environment of hazardous materials management and present an “action plan” for introducing TQM into community planning for risk reduction and response, focusing on the technical, organisational, and cultural components of the process. We present evidence of increased performance in reducing hazardous materials risk from field reports of communities that have adopted TQM practices. Finally, we conclude that TQM serves as a generative means of revitalising, renewing, and enabling community engagement in hazardous materials management.     

National Subversion of Supranational Goals: ‘Pork-Barrel’ Politics and EU Regional Aid

The structural funds were designed to give the European Commission supranational control over where regional aid was spent. In this article, we argue that domestic ‘pork-barrel’ politics determine which regions are awarded regional aid in the new member states of Eastern Europe. Support for our argument comes from a dataset that includes 1,688 European Regional Development Fund grants to Latvia's 118 regions and 1,533 pre-accession Phare awards to Bulgaria's 264 municipalities. In both Bulgaria and Latvia, we find that regional aid projects went to wealthier not poorer localities, and to those that supported coalition parties in the previous election.     

Does faith limit immorality? The politics of religion and corruption

Critically considering scholarship relating religiosity to ethical behaviour, we contend that religion is systematically related to levels of corruption, and that the nature of this relationship is contingent on the presence of democratic institutions. In democracies, where political institutions are designed to inhibit corrupt conduct, the morality provided by religion is related to attenuated corruption. Conversely, in systems lacking democratic institutions, moral behaviour is not tantamount to staying away from corrupt ways. Accordingly, in non-democratic contexts, religion would not be associated with decreased corruption. Time-series cross-sectional analyses of aggregate data for 129 countries for 12 years, as well as individual level analyses of data from the World Values Surveys, strongly corroborate the predictions of our theory. The correlation of religion with reduced corruption is conditional on the extent to which political institutions are democratic.     

Can Small High Schools of Choice Improve Educational Prospects for Disadvantaged Students?

This paper provides rigorous evidence (for 12,130 participants in a series of naturally occurring randomized lotteries) that a large‐scale high school reform initiative (New York City's creation of 100+ small high schools of choice between 2002 and 2008) can markedly and consistently increase high school graduation rates (by 9.5 percentage points overall and for many different student subgroups) for a large population of educationally and economically disadvantaged students of color without increasing annual school operating costs. These findings are directly relevant to current debates by policymakers and practitioners about how to improve the educational prospects of disadvantaged students in the United States.     

Classifying partner femicide

The heterogeneity of domestic violent men has long been established. However, research has failed to examine this phenomenon among men committing the most severe form of domestic violence. This study aims to use a multidimensional approach to empirically construct a classification system of men who are incarcerated for the murder of their female partner based on the Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart (1994) typology. Ninety men who had been convicted and imprisoned for the murder of their female partner or spouse in England were identified from two prison samples. A content dictionary defining offense and offender characteristics associated with two dimensions of psychopathology and criminality was developed. These variables were extracted from institutional records via content analysis and analyzed for thematic structure using multidimensional scaling procedures. The resultant framework classified 80% (n = 72) of the sample into three subgroups of men characterized by (a) low criminality/low psychopathology (15%), (b) moderate-high criminality/ high psychopathology (36%), and (c) high criminality/low-moderate psychopathology (49%). The latter two groups are akin to Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart's (1994) generally violent/antisocial and dysphoric/borderline offender, respectively. The implications for intervention, developing consensus in research methodology across the field, and examining typologies of domestic violent men prospectively are discussed.     

Morphometric criteria for sexing juvenile human skeletons using the ilium

Previous attempts to sex juvenile skeletons have focused on the application of qualitative or semi-quantitative techniques. This study applies a variety of geometric morphometric methods, including eigenshape analysis, to this problem. Six metric criteria for the ilia were tested with the aim of investigating previous ideas concerning sexually diagnostic characters. This study uses 25 ilia from juveniles of known age and sex from Christ Church, Spitalfields, London. Ninety-six percent of juvenile ilia were correctly identified as male or female using the shape of the greater sciatic notch. Identification accuracy is shown to improve with age for several criteria. Males were identified to a higher accuracy than females. Application of geometric techniques improves the understanding of the relationship between age, sex, and shape and the clarity with which these relationships can be quantified. Archaeological and forensic relevance of the results are discussed with recommendations for future application.     

Policing Soviet Society: The Evolution of State Control

The Soviet militsiia (regular police) has evolved in the past 70 years from a feeble body seeking to ensure the survival of Soviet rule to a massive bureaucracy corrupted by nearly absolute power. As the Soviet militia has developed the focus of its activities, its ethos, professionalism, and its relationship to both the Party and KGB have changed in all periods, the militia has had political, economic, and social responsibilities, but the balance among the three has wed depending on the conditions of the state.
The militia, like the Soviet state, is currently in crisis. It remains an instrument of the party that is losing its legitimacy among the population. Perestroika's objective of making institutions subordinate to the law is a sharp deviation from existing practice. But even if the militsiia responds to these new expectations, because of the demands of a centrally planned socialist state the regular police will remain we intrusive into the lives of the citizenry than are police in Western democratic societies.