‘It's easier that you're a girl and that you're Asian’: interactions of ‘race’ and gender between researchers and participants

This article is concerned with the ways in which ‘race’ and gender interact between interviewers and participants within the research process and the implications of differences/similarities between researcher and participants for feminist research and analysis. The paper discusses issues of power and representation within a research project conducted by the white female author and two Asian female interviewers with 64 British Muslim young men and women. Based on analysis of discussion group data, it is argued that ‘race’ and gender interact between researchers and participants in highly complex and unpredictable ways to produce particular accounts, but comparative analysis of accounts produced with different interviewers can help reveal ‘hidden’ structures of power within the texts.     

Rethinking Security: Organizational Fragility in Extreme Events

Providing public security is a fundamental function of government. As the class and degree of threat vary, government agencies must adapt to changing conditions or risk failing their basic mission. The events of September 11, 2001, illustrated the limits of governmental performance in identifying and interrupting actions intended to harm innocent citizens. These events are examined against the resources, range, and limits of governmental capacity to adapt to the emerging threat of terrorism, and an alternative perspective on administrative performance as a complex adaptive system is proposed. This perspective redefines the search for public security as a dynamic process that balances mechanisms of control with processes of information search, exchange, and feedback among public, private, and nonprofit organizations and is supported by a well–designed information infrastructure. The article concludes that the search for public security is an interactive learning process that, while guided by public organizations, must involve responsible participation by private and nonprofit organizations as well as an informed citizenry.     

The Right to Privacy Is Political: Power, the Boundary Between Public and Private, and Sexual Harassment

This paper concerns the relationship between power and the ability to defend the night of privacy. The discourse of public and private spheres has shifted historically, engendering arbitrary and changing legal and cultural definitions of the boundary between public and private. Historic specifications of this boundary have become untenable as increasing numbers of women entered the paid labor force. Recent formulations define the boundary of privacy as an area within each individual's life. However, greater social power increases the ability to protect personal privacy because it offers the ability to define and protect the "private" from scrutiny.
After outlining the history of the shifting public/private boundary, this argument is applied to sexual harassment. Explicitly sexual types of harassment are related to the public/private boundary in two ways. First, they challenge the boundary itself, representing the occurrence of "private" conduct in the "public" sphere of work and education. Second, sexual harassment reveals the importance of social power in defining and defending one's privacy. Sexual harassment represents the extreme on a continuum of communication patterns between status unequals, and an invasion of the sexual privacy of the target.     

Retrospectives and Prospectives on Hurricane Katrina: Five Years and Counting

New Orleans’ recovery from the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 reflects a long, complex, contentious process that still is not complete. In this article, the authors explore the key factors that have supported and hindered recovery so far. Initial conditions within the city, the web of policy demands, as well as recent changes in law and procedures for the region are explored using a new model that may be applicable to other severe disasters. Any recovery, the authors conclude, must be anchored within a local context, but only with necessary administrative backing from the wider region and society. Recovery from disaster offers a rare opportunity to rebuild damaged communities into more resilient ones when energy and investment are immediately channeled into the stricken region and focused in a constructive redesign that acknowledges environmental risk. The recovery process then shifts to mitigation and reduction of risk. Hence, cities will be better prepared for the next extreme event, which will surely come.     

European security and early warning systems: from risks to threats in the European Union’s health security sector

This article critically examines a poorly understood aspect of the European security landscape: early warning systems (EWSs). EWSs are socio-technical systems designed to detect, analyse, and disseminate knowledge on potential security issues in a wide variety of sectors. We first present an empirical overview of more than 80 EWS in the European Union. We then draw on debates in Critical Security Studies to help us make sense of the role of such systems, tapping into conceptual debates on the construction of security issues as either “threat” or “risk” related. Finally, we study one EWS – the Early Warning and Response System for infectious diseases – to understand how it works and how it reconciles risk – versus threat-based security logics. Contrary to assumptions of a clear distinction between risk- and threat-based logics of security, we show that EWSs may serve as a “transmission belt” for the movement of issues from risk into threats.     

Low-Hanging Fruit: Leadership,Perceived Prosocial Impact,and Employee Motivation

Transformational leadership affects public service motivation, but little is known about the context dependency of this association. If citizen contact and, therefore, relative perceived impacts on others and society differ, the association between transformational leadership and motivation is also expected to differ. Analyzing public employees and their leaders from four organizational contexts, we find that employees have relatively higher perceived impact on others and are more user-oriented in contexts with high citizen contact. The association between transformational leadership and employee motivation also depends on employees’ perceived impact, implying that some fruit hangs lower than other when leaders try to increase employee motivation.     

Does contact with the justice system deter or promote future delinquency? Results from a longitudinal study of British adolescent twins

What impact does formal punishment have on antisocial conduct—does it deter or promote it? The findings from a long line of research on the labeling tradition indicate formal punishments have the opposite-of-intended consequence of promoting future misbehavior. In another body of work, the results show support for deterrence-based hypotheses that punishment deters future misbehavior. So, which is it? We draw on a nationally representative sample of British adolescent twins from the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study to perform a robust test of the deterrence versus labeling question. We leverage a powerful research design in which twins can serve as the counterfactual for their co-twin, thereby ruling out many sources of confounding that have likely impacted prior studies. The pattern of findings provides support for labeling theory, showing that contact with the justice system—through spending a night in jail/prison, being issued an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO), or having an official record—promotes delinquency. We conclude by discussing the impact these findings may have on criminologists’ and practitioners’ perspective on the role of the juvenile justice system in society.     

Stature Estimation from Postmortem CT Femoral Maximum Length in Contemporary Danish Population

Stature estimation methods for Danish adult population have generally relied on Trotter and Gleser’s and Boldsen’s regression equations that are based on the skeletal remains of recent war dead American Whites, Terry Skeletal Collection, and Danish archaeological medieval skeletal materials, respectively. These equations are probably not suitable for stature estimation in contemporary Danish forensic cases. Furthermore, because postmortem computed tomography (PMCT) is now routinely performed at Danish forensic departments, equations based on PMCT, rather than measurements of defleshed bones, are needed. The aim of this study was to develop new equations for adult stature estimation based on PMCT femoral measurement. Maximum femoral length was measured on the PMCT images of 78 individuals (41 males and 37 females) aged 23–45 years. The measurement accuracy was tested on dry bones, and all the measurements were included in the inter- and intra-observer analyses. Both analyses results demonstrated the reliability of the method and data. Comparison between the living stature of the individuals and the estimates based on the equations by Trotter and Gleser and Boldsen demonstrated the unreliability of the previous equations to some extent. New regression equations were then developed and validated on a different sample of 18 Danish forensic cases. Comparisons of all the equations indicated that both the sets of previous equations underestimated the stature in the new validation dataset. The new equations developed in this study provide a reliable alternative for stature estimation in modern Danish forensic cases.