Administration in the year 2000: serving the client

One component of the increasing emphasis on management in the public sector is an emphasis on serving the “customer” of public sector agencies. Although it is difficult to argue that the clients of the public agencies should not be served courteously and efficiently, there are a number of questions about whether they should be thought of as customers in the same way as in the private sector. Some of those questions are empirical, related to difficulties in clearly identifying the customers of agencies. Other questions are normative, related to the proper definition of the role of the clients of public agencies and the definition of the public interest. These problems require serious rethinking of any simplistic adoption of a customer orientation in government.     

Contested Forests: An Analysis of the Highlander Response to Logging,Ratanakiri Province,Northeast Cambodia

This article examines in detail the influence of the global on state-local relationships in the particular context of Ratanakiri Province, Northeast Cambodia. It is argued that modern state power in Cambodia is based on Western concepts of nation-building, including territorialization, assimilation, economic development, and the commercial exploitation of resources and has led to the incorporation of the remote forested areas of the periphery into the net of the state. Since the 1993 election, the plunder of the northeast has been justified in the name of “development.” The author shows that the response of forest-dependent highlanders to this state intervention cannot be understood as either simple opposition or acquiescence. Rather it has been a contradictory and fragmentary response, emerging from the conflicting desires for autonomy over land and forests and for the benefits to be gained from “development” and inclusion within the hypothesized “nation-state.”     

Escaping the joint‐decision trap: Repetition and Sectoral politics in the European union

Decision making in the European Union has been argued to present a ‘joint‐decision trap’, in which the ability of national actors to block decisions unilaterally produces decision making by the lowest common denominator. While this outcome is apparent in some decision situations it is far from a general outcome. The division of decisions into functional specialities and the continuing nature of the policy debates limits the capacity of ‘high politics’ to hinder decision making. Further, there are ways in which a policy entrepreneur can structure decisions to eliminate this sub‐optimal outcome.     

The Criminal Justice Approach: Case Examples

The article presents a special form of a European comparative synopsis. For this case examples have been chosen ranging from administrative or minor (criminal) offences to increasingly serious offences and offenders. In this way it can be comparatively demonstrated how the criminal justice systems studied handle specific cases and whether they do so in a similar or different way.     

transcending the impact of the financial crisis in the United Kingdom: towards plan F—a feminist economic strategy

This paper sets out a framework for understanding the impacts of the financial crisis and its aftermath that is based on the idea of three interacting spheres: finance, production and reproduction. All of these spheres are gendered and globalised. The gendered impact of the current crisis is discussed in terms of the impact on unemployment, employment protection and security, public sector services, social security benefits, pensions, and the real value of wages and living standards. Drawing on the analysis of the UK Women’s Budget Group, the paper demonstrates that the biggest falls in disposable income as the result of austerity policies by the Conservative-led government since 2010 have been borne by the most vulnerable women—lone mothers, single women pensioners and single women without children. Working-age couples without children have been least affected. The paper then goes on to discuss what an alternative economic strategy, based on feminist political economy, might look like. It utilises the notion of the ‘reproductive bargain’, first developed to understand the transition in Cuba in the 1990s. It sets out a possible feminist economic strategy that insists on the incorporation of reproductive and care work into the analysis of alternative economic policies and links employment, wages and social security payments to public provisioning of trans-generational reproductive services. It suggests feasible strategies to finance the proposed Plan F—a feminist economic strategy.     

Development of microwave-assisted extraction procedure for organic impurity profiling of seized 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)

Abstract: Organic impurity profiling of seized 3,4‐methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) tablets aims to link tablets to common production sources. Conventionally, organic impurities are extracted from tablets using a liquid–liquid extraction (LLE) procedure prior to analysis by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC‐MS). In this research, the development of an alternative microwave‐assisted extraction/headspace solid‐phase microextraction (MAE/HS‐SPME) procedure is described. The optimal procedure used phosphate buffer (1 M, pH 8), with an HS‐SPME extraction temperature of 70°C for 40 min, using a divinylbenzene/Carboxen?/polydimethylsiloxane (DVB/CAR/PDMS) fiber. Impurities were extracted from seized MDMA exhibits using the MAE/HS‐SPME procedure, as well as HS‐SPME alone, and a conventional LLE procedure. The HS‐SPME procedure was deemed to be the most practical because of the affordability and need for less analyst involvement. Although the LLE was limited in the number of impurities extracted, the procedure is still useful for the extraction of less volatile impurities that are not extracted by HS‐SPME.