Managerial Strategies for Spontaneous Privatization

Two Western economists examine the rapid changes in property and business forms of enterprises in the former Soviet Union using evidence from intensive interviews conducted through December 1991 and involving 80 industrial and commercial organizations. After reviewing the reforms that provided the legal basis for the process, they describe different managerial strategies employed in spontaneous privatization and examine the ensuing changes in contractual relations of firms with other entities such as ministries or banks. The authors also interpret spontaneous privatization on the basis of literature covering property rights and identify several groups that lose or derive benefits from the transformation. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P20, L2.     

GIVING CHINA DUE CREDIT

The Man Who Loved China By Simon Winchester 352 pages US $15.99 (paperback) Published in US by Harper Perennial THINK in oceans. It was a piece of childhood advice that the British scientist Joseph Needham     

Cultural Adaptation and Validation of the Movers Scale in a French-Canadian Population

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study that draws upon a collaborative research strategy and has two main objectives: 1) Translating and adapting into French the Measure of Victim Empowerment Related to Safety (MOVERS scale) (Goodman et al. Psychology of Violence, 5(4), 355-366, 2015a); 2) Validating the French version of the MOVERS scale in a population of French-Canadian women receiving shelter services. The French-Canadian MOVERS (FCM) was administered to 189 women receiving shelter services in the province of Québec (Canada). The factorial structure, reliability and validity of the FCM were tested. This paper highlights that the FCM replicates the three dimensions found in the original version (Goodman et al. Psychology of Violence, 5(4), 355-366, 2015a), displays significant correlations with measures of depression, anxiety and stress, self-esteem, perceived social support, satisfaction with life and self-efficacy, and has overall good reliability estimates. The FCM is a valid and reliable scale to assess safety-related empowerment among women receiving shelter services. Furthermore, the scale provides interesting opportunities to shelter workers, which will be discussed in the paper.

     

Second-chance Punitivism and the Contractual Governance of Crime and Incivility: New Labour, Old Hobbes

The growing application of mechanisms of contractual governance to behaviour that breaches social norms, rather than the criminal law, appears to represent an ethopolitical concern with delinquent self-reform through the activation of technologies of the self. In fact, there is little empirical evidence that the contractual governance of incivility leads to such self-reform. Beneath the ideology of contractual agreement to observe social norms lies what this paper calls a 'second-chance punitivism' which operates to crystallize behavioural elements of the Hobbesian social contract, after breach, into a more specific form. The responsibilizing and individualizing properties of this form of contractual governance set the moral-ideological platform for a retributive punitivism, when the rational agents it creates fail to live up to their image, and are taken to have wasted their 'second chance'.     

Dimensions and alignments in European Union politics: Cognitive constraints and partisan responses

Abstract. As the European Union (EU) has evolved, the study agenda has shifted from 'European integration' to 'EU politics'. Missing from this new agenda, however, is an understanding of the 'cognitive constraints' on actors and how actors respond, i.e. the shape of the EU 'political space' and the location of social groups and competition between actors within this space. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the shape of the EU political space (the interaction between an Integration–Independence and Left–Right dimension and the location of class and sectoral groups within this map), and tests this framework on the policy positions of the Socialist, Christian Democrat and Liberal party leaders between 1976 and 1994 (using the techniques of the ECPR Party Manifestos Group Project). The research finds that the two dimensions were salient across the whole period, explains why the party families converged on pro–European positions by the 1990s and discovers the emergence of a triangular 'core' of EU politics.