Bearing Witness: Methods for Researching Oppression and Resistance—A Textbook for Critical Research

This paper forecasts a “fictional” methods textbook for researchers interested in studying social oppression and resistance. The volume moves between historic and contemporary writings on methods, with particular interest in questions of objectivity and subjectivity, history and psychology, relations among units of analysis, expert and construct validity, and the ever-thorny ambition of generalizability. Crafted with inspiration from Kurt Lewin, Carolyn Payton, Ignacio Martín-Baró, and many contemporary critical writers, the book is designed to provoke conversations about social research, asking—For what? With whom? and If not now, when? The essay is written to incite a re-membering, and re-thinking, of critical methods for the social psychological study of oppression and resistance.     

Testing for food market integration revisited

This article considers the statistical performance of four commonly used econometric tests for market integration: the Law of One Price, the Ravallion Model, cointegration and Granger causality. A spatial price equilibrium (SPE) model, that is subject to both production shocks and general price inflation, and mimics many of the key characteristics of integrated food markets, is constructed. The model is used to generate food price time series of lengths that are typical of the short sample sizes available in most developing countries, for both instantaneously integrated and independent markets. A series of Monte Carlo experiments on these artificial food price time series are performed, which show that all four of the conventional tests for market integration are statistically flawed.     

When Does Transparency Generate Legitimacy? Experimenting on a Context‐Bound Relationship

We analyze the main rationale for public administrations and political institutions for supplying transparency, namely, that it generates legitimacy for these institutions. First, we discuss different theories of decision making from which plausible causal mechanisms that may drive a link between transparency and legitimacy may be derived. We find that the common notion of a straightforward positive correlation is naïve and that transparency reforms are rather unpredictable phenomena. Second, we test the effect of transparency on procedure acceptance using vignette experiments of representative decision making in schools. We find that transparency can indeed generate legitimacy. Interestingly, however, the form need not be “fishbowl transparency,” with full openness of the decision‐making process. Decision makers may improve their legitimacy simply by justifying carefully afterward the decisions taken behind closed doors. Only when behavior close to a deliberative democratic ideal was displayed did openness of the process generate more legitimacy than closed‐door decision making with postdecisional justifications.     

Nationalism and its discontents

The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate by Jürgen Habermas; edited and translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen; introduced by Richard Wolin. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989; Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, .1994, Pp.270. £39.50 (hardback); £13.50 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 067 92 and 1411 6     

Conceptual Issues in Inter-Agency Collaboration

Inter-agency collaboration – or partnership as it now commonly termed – is central to New Labour's agenda, but the general support for a partnership approach conceals disputes about definitions and approaches. This article begins by examining the shift to more complex and ambitious partnerships in health, social care and regeneration, which require new modes of governance. The three main modes – market, hierarchy and network – are briefly described and contrasted, and located within the recent history of public service development. It is argued that they are best seen as overlain and co-existing, resulting in a hybrid mode of governance which is characterised by tension and contradiction. The article goes on to discuss the issues this raises for real partnerships in trying to understand the collaborative imperative and the barriers to its effective achievement. Although the network mode has its attractions, there are complex issues of membership, management and culture which need to be addressed. It is concluded that hierarchy, markets and networks will co-exist better where each acknowledges its own limits and the strengths of others.