Women, anger, and aggression: an interpretative phenomenological analysis

This study reports a qualitative phenomenological investigation of anger and anger-related aggression in the context of the lives of individual women. Semistructured interviews with five women are analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. This inductive approach aims to capture the richness and complexity of the lived experience of emotional life. In particular, it draws attention to the context-dependent and relational dimension of angry feelings and aggressive behavior. Three analytic themes are presented here: the subjective experience of anger, which includes the perceptual confusion and bodily change felt by the women when angry, crying, and the presence of multiple emotions; the forms and contexts of aggression, paying particular attention to the range of aggressive strategies used; and anger as moral judgment, in particular perceptions of injustice and unfairness. The authors conclude by examining the analytic observations in light of phenomenological thinking.     

Bubbling up or cascading down? Public servants,political advisers and politicization

One of the strands in the growing scholarship on political advisers in parliamentary democracies proposes that advisers can reduce the risk of civil service politicization by furnishing partisan advice to ministers, freeing civil servants to focus on the provision of expert competence. This benign narrative generates a significant hypothesis, which is that the institutionalization of the partisan role diminishes the risk of civil service politicization. That hypothesis has yet to be fully tested. Several studies have assessed the impact of advisers' actions on civil service impartiality, but the consequences of bureaucrats' own agency for that dependent variable have received far less attention. Drawing on data from a survey of New Zealand public servants, this article challenges the assumption in the political advisers literature that civil service politicization is primarily driven by exogenous factors and calls for a more nuanced theoretical approach to endogenous aspects of politicization.     

THE POLITICS OF MARKETING THE LABOUR PARTY

THE POLITICS OF MARKETING THE LABOUR PARTY
Dominic Wring
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 262 pp., £16.99 (pb) ISBN: 0333689534     

The Treaty of Amsterdam: Challenges of Flexibility and Legitimacy

The paper reviews key aspects of the new constitutional framework for the European Union, once the Treaty of Amsterdam has been ratified, in the light of the core challenges of managing flexible integration in an enlarged Union and securing adequate legitimacy for the integration project. Reviewing briefly the general debates on flexibility, and its relationship to different constitutional and political futures for the Union which are suggested by those involved in the debates, the paper examines the principal provisions governing what is termed 'closer cooperation' within the new Union treaties. The emphasis is placed on the framework provisions of the TEU, and those in the First Pillar. It is noticeable that the Treaty takes a 'non-ideological' approach to flexibility, eschewing direct support for those who interpret flexibility as meaning more or less integration in the future. It provides a framework for future cooperation which is likely to be too restrictive to be workable, except in very limited circumstances. However, particular instances of flexibility are provided in the Treaty, in the form of the opt-outs from the new free movement title and the communitarisation of Schengen for the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark, and some might even describe these as 'pick-and-choose'. The paper concludes by reviewing the flexibility debate against the background of the ongoing legitimacy challenge for the Union, arguing that, as currently conceived, flexibility is more to do with balancing political interests than with securing or enhancing legitimacy.