Do Employers Prefer Workers Who Attend For‐Profit Colleges? Evidence from a Field Experiment

This paper reports results from a resume‐based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for‐profit colleges. For‐profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives, such as public community colleges, being much cheaper. We sent almost 9,000 fictitious resumes of young job applicants who recently completed their schooling to online job postings in six occupational categories and tracked employer callback rates. We find no evidence that employers prefer applicants with resumes listing a for‐profit college relative to those whose resumes list either a community college or no college at all.     

The influence of collective bargaining on large police agency salaries: 1990–2000

Collective bargaining between police management and unions is an important process that determines many aspects of police work, particularly the monetary benefits for line officers like salary and fringe benefits. Working with limited budgets, police administrators who engage in collective bargaining are obligated to negotiate with union representatives over wage benefits while attempting to maintain adequate financial resources toward other police operations. Though students of policing learn that police unions try very hard to increase economic reward for their members there is limited research on the effectiveness of their efforts. Since economic benefits are the primary focus of police unions, it is important; therefore, to evaluate the impact that collective bargaining has on salaries earned by police personnel. This study examines this issue by combining four waves of the Law Enforcement Management and Administration Statistics for the period 1990–2000. Pooled time series analyses reveal that large organizations that engaged in collective bargaining had higher minimum wages for officers during the period. As predicted, collective bargaining did not affect minimum chief’s salaries.     

Representing the state? School and teacher in post‐Sendero Peru⋆

The school and the teacher give rise to different images and sets of meaning. Locating schools is a technique of government and teachers are supposed to act as mediators between state and society. But teachers are also local intellectuals and have actively engaged in discourses of dissent and challenges to the state. This article explores the changing identity, situation and representation of provincial schoolteachers in post‐conflict Andean Peru. It draws on material from Tarma province to debate the extent to which the former racist “social order”, upheld by school and teacher, has been destabilised and superseded.     

‘The Biosciences Knowledge Value Chain and Comparative Incubation Models’

This research derives from an EU DG Enterprise (IPS Programme) project on bio-incubation, called Bio-Link. The Bio-Link project is innovative in three ways. First, it involves an international comparative analysis of biotechnology incubators of the kind that is rarely if ever done. Second, the incubator representatives are monitored and investigated by an academic partnership team. Third, there is a stated aspiration by the incubator companies to engage in co-incubation across borders. Co-incubation is, as far as we are aware, a new kind of boundary crossing innovation in which advanced start-up businesses are assisted to enter other national markets and/or benefit from specialised services or scientific, technological, or commercial knowledge absent in the home country but present in a partner country. Evidence from research on European, Israeli and North American bioincubators is included to compare, contrast and enable future judgements of incubator appropriateness to biotechnology.     

MAKING PUBLIC POLICY

MAKING PUBLIC POLICY
Mark Considine
Polity Press, 2005, 262 pp., £15.99 (pb) ISBN: 0745627544     

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation: The British Columbia Experience

In 2001, the province of British Columbia (BC) became the first Canadian jurisdiction to enact anti-SLAPP legislation. While this legislation proved to be short lived, the BC experience around the issue of SLAPPs is instructive for law reformers both in Canada and beyond. In this article, the authors describe the legal and political processes that set the stage for the passage of the 2001 law, and its subsequent repeal. They also provide a detailed analysis and critique of key aspects of the debate surrounding the design of the law, and consider its efficacy in identifying, dismissing and deterring SLAPP lawsuits. They conclude with some observations with respect to the current status of the SLAPP issue in BC.