Decision Making at the Firm Level: The of a Criminal Legal Aid Case Management System

The Criminal Legal Aid System, in Scotland as in England, is under severe economic strain. A key element in the legal profession's response should be reliance on IT in improving the efficiency of criminal legal aid case management. This paper is a work-in-progress report on our involvement (under a Teaching Company Scheme Project) with a Glasgow criminal practice and their use of an existing case management and automation tool. Although the focus of the research is on improving the scope of the present system, our work has involved us in an exploration of decision-making processes at the level of the firm and the role of computerisation and automation at all levels in the firm. More specifically, our investigations focus on the interaction of the fee earners and paralegals in the use they make of information and how, applying management science techniques, they could improve on that use. This in turn led to a reconsideration of how the case management system uses information available to the differing levels of “decision makers” within the firm. This creates an interesting contrast with the “decision making” process at the level of adjudication.     

An apple a day does not always keep the doctor away...

The authors describe a case of suicide in the workplace. A 45-year-old man employed by a fruit and vegetable packing company was found dead in a room containing a modified atmosphere for the packaging of fruits and vegetables. The rescue team measured the carbon monoxide (CO) concentration of the ambient air with a digital CO tester and found a level higher than 600 particles per million. Analysis of an arterial blood sample taken with an airtight syringe revealed the absence of CO but high levels of carbon dioxide (CO(2)). Autopsy revealed no significant injury and police investigators found a handwritten note of intent, describing a recent personal crisis. The authors concluded that the cause of death was suicide by asphyxiation secondary to CO(2) intoxication and notably oxygen (O(2)) depletion. This manner of suicide is rare and most cases previously described in the literature were accidental intoxications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case of suicide by CO(2) intoxication and O(2) depletion in a room with a modified atmosphere.     

Employment Niches for Recent Refugees: Segmented Labour Market in Twenty-first Century Australia

A survey of three refugee groups (ex-Yugoslavs, black Africansand people from the Middle East) in Western Australia indicatesthat the recent humanitarian arrivals are concentrated in labourmarket niches such as cleaning services, care of the aged, meatprocessing, taxi driving, security and building. Apart fromthe building industry, these employment niches are situatedin the ‘secondary labour market’ comprising low-statusand low-paid jobs that locals avoid. This article identifiesseveral interrelated mechanisms through which the recent Australianrefugee intake has been relegated to undesirable jobs: non-recognitionof qualifications as a systemic barrier, discrimination on thebasis of race and cultural difference by employers, ‘ethnic-pathintegration’ and the lack of mainstream social networksthat could assist in the job search, and the recent ‘regionalsponsored migration scheme’ through which the governmenttries to address the shortage of low-skilled labour in depopulatingcountry areas. The data show massive loss of occupational statusamong our respondents and confirm the existence of the segmentedlabour market, where racially and culturally visible migrantsare allocated the bottom jobs regardless of their ‘humancapital’. Changes in the nature of the segmented labourmarket in the increasingly mobile global workforce are analysed.Some of these insights are drawn from two other research projectson Bosnian and Afghan refugees in Australia undertaken by theauthors.     

Generational change: regional security and Australian engagement with Asia

The rhetoric of US foreign policy since the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001, would suggest that there has been a fundamental shift in US foreign relations. This is often summarised as a shift from multilateralism to unilateralism and, in the context of the war on terrorism, concomitantly a shift from geo-economic to geopolitical priorities. The rhetoric of the fight against the ‘axis of evil’, however, may simply cloud underlying continuities in US relations with Asia. Nevertheless the process of coalition-building by the Bush administration in the ‘War on Terrorism’ has impacted on the distance Asian countries have been able to maintain in relation to the United States. The case studies presented in this special issue raise a number of important issues concerning perceptions and the practice of US hegemony and the complex links between leadership and ‘followership’ at the inter-state level. They also draw out the impacts engendered by US–Asia relations on the wider phenomenon of regionalisation in the Asia-Pacific region.