The decline of a model? Challenge and response in the Italian industrial districts

The article presents an extensive critical review of recent debates on the restructuring of Italian industrial districts in the 1990s. It shows that, despite consensus on the empirical 'facts' of district restructuring, there remains extensive disagreement over appropriate public policies. This debate fundamentally turns on analysts' interpretations of how, or indeed whether, strong institutions and localized subcultures allow territorial networks of small firms to compete successfully with larger and more highly capitalized multinational corporations. But perhaps the most crucial and contentious issues are questions about the past adequacy of the districts' regulatory and service institutions in overcoming structural difficulties of the model, and, more importantly, about further innovations that may be required given recent changes in the external economic context.     

Detecting deception: Practice, practitioners, and theory

Conclusions Of the forty-six types of detectives studied, all but one used the same general procedures to detect deception. (The exception was the adversarial method used by trial lawyers working in the American judicial system.) All others used standard logical systems (both deductive and inductive) in combination with intuitive methods. The more successful detections seemed to be closely associated with intuitive methods, particularly so-called “indirect thinking”. Authors'Note: The “I” in this chapter refers to the principal author, Bart Whaley. Since it was first written in 1999, Whaley has increased the number of types of detectives studies to over 100, and the number of major works cited to over 500. The most important finding was to reinforce the recommendation that effective detection and deception is crucially dependent on large and accurate data bases based on systematically collected and analyzed case studies.     

Who Cares about the Weather?: Climate Change and U.S. National Security

Is climate change a national security threat to the United States? This question remains a subject of debate in academia and has received renewed emphasis in the policy community. Even taking a narrow definition of national security, climate change already constitutes a national security threat to the United States, both in terms of direct threats to the country as well as its broader extraterritorial interests. While some of these purported threats—abrupt climate change and sea-level rise—have been overstated by advocates, several concerns, mostly related to the effects of extreme weather events on the United States and its strategic interests overseas, are sufficient enough that they already constitute security threats. That climate change potentially poses a direct threat to the U.S. homeland and its overseas interests suggests the subject warrants serious attention.     

Political Branding: The Tea Party and Its Use of Participation Branding

The emergence of the Tea Party movement in 2009 witnessed the surfacing of a populist, anti-Obama libertarian mobilization within the United States. The Tea Party, a movement that brought together a number of disparate groups—some new, some established—utilized participation branding where the consumer attributed the movement its own identity and brand. Its consumer-facing approach, lack of one single leader, and lack of a detailed party platform, in combination with its impact on the 2010 election races in America, earmarks it as a contemporary and unconventional brand phenomenon worthy of investigation.     

Legitimating war by victimization: state-corporate crime and public opinion

This article argues that the ideological use of victimization helps legitimate the state-corporate crime of aggressive war. This contributes to the emerging criminology of war by offering a theoretical framework to better understand how state and corporate actors legitimate criminal military action. We argue that politicians and other elite figures promote a sense of national victimization that is amplified by the news media. We partially test our theory by measuring the association between the incidence of terror victimization ideas in the news and public support for the U.S. ??war on terror.?? We find some evidence of relationships between our Terrorism Victimization Index and both victimization worry and aggressive war support.     

Presidential Candidates and State Crime: Views of Some U.S. College Students

This is a preliminary investigation of hawkish public opinion, understood as criminogenic in that it provides political support for state crimes of aggressive militarism. Our critical criminology approach treats public support for, or acceptance of, state aggression as part of criminogenic political culture. Despite growing interest among critical criminologists in broader perspectives on state crime and the politics of culture, there has been no work on this topic. Our survey of 53 criminal justice students at a liberal arts college finds both hawkish (militarist) and dovish (peaceful) beliefs and preferences regarding U.S. policy and the two major 2008 presidential candidates, Obama and McCain. We investigate whether authoritarianism helps explain hawkish opinions, but find little evidence for that expectation. We find evidence of respondent underestimation of the hawkishness of U.S. politics. We also find extensive evidence of dovish policy preferences, such as approval of diplomacy, a major attraction to Obama.     

Power Relations in Employment Disputes

This article reconceptualizes the operation of power relations in employment disputes. We draw on Foucault's theory of neo‐liberal governance to inform our analysis of empirical data exploring how low‐income workers make decisions about whether to engage with the Employment Tribunal system. Particular focus is placed on the ways the state governs employment disputes to achieve ideologically driven objectives. We conclude: first, that power relations in employment disputes operate across a range of institutions and individuals, and that the state's role is powerful and ongoing; secondly, that power relations operate to shape not just the objective context that workers find themselves in when experiencing an employment dispute but also workers' subjective moral codes about appropriate courses of action to take; and thirdly, that despite the powerful influence of the state, workers continue to hold non‐economic values that guide their perception of the appropriate basis for relations between employers and workers.