Towards an Explanatory Taxonomy of Adolescent Delinquents: Identifying Several Social-Psychological Profiles

Taxonomic structure is examined in two large samples of delinquent youth in a domain of socio-psychological and personality factors. This paper offers a partial empirical test of the overlapping theoretical taxonomies of Moffitt (Pshycol Rev 100:674–701, 1993), Lykken (The antisocial personalities, 1995) and Mealey (1995). The first sample consisted of juvenile offenders (n = 1,572) from three state systems. Multiple cluster analysis methods were applied (Wards method, standard K-means, bootstrapped K-means and a semi-supervised pattern recognition technique). Core or exemplar cases were identified by means of a voting procedure. Seven clusters recurrently emerged across replications. While clear analogues of Moffitt’s two main categories were found, several additional stable subtypes emerged that were clearly reminiscent of Lykken’s sociopathic, neurotic-internalizing and “normal” types. However, boundaries between types were fuzzy and unstable, and many unclassified cases existed. Internal validation was assessed by cross-method verification. External validation assessed type differentiation on several delinquent behaviors. Finally, generalizability was assessed by repeating the clustering on a large replication sample (n = 1,453) from another state. Six of the seven initial types re-emerged.     

How can the poor benefit from private investment in agricultural research? A case study from Bolivia

This article evaluates potential mechanisms for facilitating increased private-sector engagement in agricultural research for development and technology transfer (ARDTT), with particular emphasis on Bolivia. It reviews the mixed results of efforts, in developed and developing countries alike, to decentralise ARDTT and to encourage private-sector investment. Potential mechanisms for Bolivia are considered within three broad categories: taxation schemes; co-funding arrangements; and output-based approaches. The constraints to participation in ARDTT by the private sector that arise from concerns over high transaction costs, intellectual property rights, and the legal and regulatory environment are also assessed. The article concludes that compliance, or a hybrid of compliance and a competitive co-funding scheme, is most suited to Bolivia's needs. A flexible approach to intellectual property rights systems is required, although it remains a challenge to identify appropriate taxation regimes.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble: The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994.

Laura Westra and Peter S. Wenz, eds.: Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice. Lanham, Md.: Rowman &; Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995.

John Gray: Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment. London: Routledge, 1993

Darrow Schecter: Radical Theories: Paths Beyond Marxism and Social Democracy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994     

Dispossession and disalienation: The fulfillment of life in Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed

For Caleb

In The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin imagines a non‐authoritarian society that privileges freedom and centers the individual's realization of her creative potentials in social context as the means to achieve the highest functioning, least repressive society. The concept central to this imagination of freedom and the ‘good life’ as expressed in her anarchic vision is that of disalienation, in the Marxist sense. In theorizing an anarchic society, whether or not a particular aspect of social organization is disalienating becomes for LeGuin the key criterion for assessing and determining the human efficacy of, in particular: the organization of work; the relationship between self, society, and nature; and the distribution of both social responsibilities and resources. This paper explores how LeGuin measures the alienating effects of a range of socio‐economic institutions, practices, and bodies of knowledge—from how we organize work, to how we establish the state and its governing power, to how we think about time—highlighting her critique of the alienating structures of our culture and the way they curtail human creativity and disarm individuals from developing freely and fully, that is, in a way that would benefit society as a whole and promote individual happiness.     

DAMNED IF YOU DO AND DAMNED IF YOU DON'T

In contemporary Western societies women are often thought to have overcome inequality, become autonomous and resistant to social pressures, and in so doing gained the freedoms to make their own choices. However, this ‘post-feminist sensibility’ can arguably be seen as a double-bind as some types of ‘choices’ cannot always be recognised as freely chosen if they are taken as an indication of failing to resist social (appearance) pressures. We argue that one such example is the ‘choice’ to have cosmetic breast surgery, a practice that has received both criticism and celebration from different feminist angles. In this paper we analyse how women who have had breast augmentation are constructed by readers of an internet blog in which they are largely vilified and pathologised for not valuing their ‘natural’ (yet ‘deficient’) breasts. We demonstrate how the same discursive constructions that appear to value women's ‘natural’ bodies simultaneously (re)produce the conditions in which women may feel the need to have breast augmentation.