Negotiated compliance at the street level: Personalizing immunization in England,Israel and Sweden

Often portrayed as behaviour that is inconsistent with policy goals, public noncompliance poses a significant challenge for government. To explore what compliance efforts entail on the ground, this study focuses on childhood immunization as a paradigmatic case where a failure to ensure compliance poses a public health risk. The analysis draws on 48 semi‐structured interviews with frontline nurses and regional/national public health officials in England (N = 15), Sweden (N = 17) and Israel (N = 16), all of which have experienced periodic noncompliance spikes, but differ in direct delivery of vaccination provision. Compliance efforts emerged as a joint decision‐making process in which improvisatory practices of personalized appeals are deployed to accommodate parents’ concerns, termed here ‘street‐level negotiation’. Whereas compliance is suggestive of compelling citizens’ adherence to standardized rules, compliance negotiation draws attention to the limited resources street‐level workers have when encountering noncompliance and to policy‐clients’ influence on delivery arrangements when holding discretionary power over whether or not to comply.     

The quality of democracy: Mass‐elite linkages in the Czech republic

This article argues for the importance of more focused scholarly attention on the development of mass‐elite linkages ‐ and in particular those linkages that transcend the electoral connection ‐ for understanding democratic consolidation, drawing on the post‐communist experience of the Czech Republic as a case study. Starting with the government's loss of its majority in the 1996 Czech elections amidst favourable economic conditions, we argue that this electoral result goes beyond the response to policy priorities to point to larger deficits in the development of channels of access and communication in the policy‐making process. Such deficits, characteristic of the post‐communist experience regionally, are not merely legacies of the stunted civil societies of the communist period, but also reflect a post‐communist style of governance that may itself discourage regularized citizen and associational input. As the episodic electoral connection alone cannot bear the weight of democratic consolidation, the risk is a pattern of mass‐elite linkages that creates a punctuated politics of elections and street demonstrations.     

Thinking land law differently: Section 70(1)(g) and the giving of meanings

Elements of this article first appeared in a paper given at the Hart Conference on Property, 1993.     

The effects of delayed menarche in different contexts: Dance and nondance students

The premise that effects of maturational timing are mediated by social context is explored by comparing adolescent girls in dance and nondance schools. Because the dance student must maintain a relatively low body weight, being a late maturer (who is often leaner than an on-time maturer) is expected to be more advantageous to the dancer than to the student not required to meet a weight standard. Girls aged 14 to 18 were seen; 276 attended private schools and 69 attended national ballet company schools. AllSs were weighed and measured and asked questions about their secondary sexual development, weight-related concerns, eating concerns, adult sex-role expectancies, body image, emotional functioning, and family relationships. Menarcheal age was used to classify girls as early (before 11.5 years of age), on time (between 11.5 and 14 years), and late maturers (after 14 years). More dance than non-dance school students were late maturers (55% versus 29%). The dance students weighed less and were leaner, had higher eating scores, and had lower family relationship and impulse control scores than the comparison sample. Across groups, late maturing students weighed less, were leaner, and had lower diet and higher oral control scores than on-time maturers, with the differences more pronounced in the dance than nondance students. In addition, the on-time dancers had higher psychopathology, perfection, and bulimia scores and lower body image scores than the late maturing dancers. The findings are discussed in terms of a goodness of fit between the requirements of a social context and a person's physical and behavioral characteristics.This paper was prepared with the support of grants from the W. T. Grant Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Research Interests: Girls' psychological adaptation to pubertal change, biosocial aspects of female reproductive events, development in at-risk children and adolescents.     

Chinese migrant women and families in Britain

This article examines the mode of understanding and experiences of family relationships of Chinese migrant women in Britain. In contrast to much existing research work on the patterns and experiences of postwar settlement of unskilled Chinese male labourers in Britain, the focus here is on the life stories of 41 Chinese women with different migration trajectories and varying economic and cultural capital. Their oral testimonies reveal Chinese women's diverse expectations and experiences of migrant family relationships and their different strategies to achieve self-fulfillment both within and outside the confines of the migrant family. For some women, migration brings opportunities for a fulfilling and independent lifestyle. They are successful in negotiating their way around and sometimes out of their initial familial and social position. For others, they bear the disproportionate cost and labour of familial strategies of advancement and remain vulnerable to the most constraining aspects of diasporic existence.     

The Downstream Benefits of Experimentation

The debate about the cost-effectiveness of randomized fieldexperimentation ignores one of the most important potentialuses of experimental data. This article defines and illustrates"downstream" experimental analysis—that is, analysis ofthe indirect effects of experimental interventions. We arguethat downstream analysis may be as valuable as conventionalanalysis, perhaps even more so in the case of laboratory experimentation.