Law enforcement and political change in post-civil war Nigeria

The impact of law enforcement on political change may be observed in three sets of attitudes by groups and individuals: national consciousness, that is the acceptance of the nation as a meaningful identity symbol; class consciousness, that is identification with a class against other classes; and legitimacy, that is the acceptance of the state as a rightful source of commands. A discussion of general theories of law enforcement and their impact on these attitudes, and of politics and the police in post-civil war Nigeria leads to the conclusion that the police, by the manner in which they enforce the laws, do have an effect on legitimacy orientations, though a weak one. Law enforcement agencies do not contribute significantly to the creation of social and political changes but reflect changes that arise and are fought out in other spheres of societal life.     

Book Reviews

Book Review in This Article:
T he B itter P ill : D octors , P atients , and F ailed E xpectations . By Martin R. Lipp, M.D.
S cience and C onscience . By Milton R. Wessel
R ights and R esponsibilities in M odern M edicine : T he S econd V olume in a S eries on E thics , H umanism , and M edicine . Ed. by Marc D. Basson     

Public reputation and organised crime: explicating the relationship between racket subcultures and informal social control

This paper examines the influence of traditional organised crime on informal social control in community areas that once had a presence of organised crime while controlling for neighbourhood attachment, satisfaction with the police, social and organisational ties, and tolerance of deviance. The data comes from the Community Survey of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. The comparative quantitative method was used to analyse the data. The findings indicate that neighbourhoods with an historic reputation for organised crime can report higher levels of informal social control when compared to current racket areas in the city of Chicago. These findings have important implications for the study of deviance. Not only do they suggest that criminals can play an important role in controlling street crime, the findings also suggest that this public reputation remains long after organised crime activities have ceased in the area.     

Britain’s Place in the Contemporary World

This article offers a personal view of Britain’s place in the contemporary world, analysed in terms of five interlocking rings: the traditional three, i.e. relations with the United States, with Europe and the Commonwealth, to which are added the concepts of process and soft power.     

Injustice Frames, Legality, and the Everyday Construction of Sexual Harassment

This paper examines the frames that women use to understand their experience with sexual harassment. While legal frames do provide crucial guidance to women evaluating the behavior of their colleagues and supervisors, working women deployed a number of other interpretive frames when deciding whether they had been harmed by such behavior. Some of those frames emerge from feminist messages about discrimination and male abuse of power in the workplace; some emerge from management ideology that emphasizes efficiency and productivity; and some emerge from the criticism of sexual harassment policies as an unnecessary limitation on women's sexual freedom. But feeling a sense of harm does not automatically translate into the use of the label sexual harassment . Rather, women also employed an objective standard that compared their experience to some threshold of harassing behaviors. Only when the behaviors met this standard of offensiveness and were perceived as harmful did women consider their experiences sexual harassment.     

Evaluation and education: the ideal learning community

In this article we develop philosophically Cronbach's (1982) suggestion that the evaluator is an educator. The motivation for this article arose from problems encountered by us on a major evaluation project and from dissatisfaction with the existent philosophical underpinnings of evaluation theory. We propose, and provide a justification for, a model of evaluation based upon the notion of the evaluator as educator, which is sufficiently broad philosophically not only to subsume scientistic and humanistic models, but also to transcend them. Within this broad philosophical model we develop a particular theory of evaluation, based essentially upon Wittgenstein, and in which the notion of a learning community is taken as central. Finally we consider some practical implications of this theory of evaluation.