Dress and Distinction in Nursing, 1860–1939: ‘A corporate (as well as corporeal) armour of probity and purity’ 1

This article considers the uniform and uniform rules which formed an important part of the ‘reformed nurse’ in the latter years of the nineteenth century and remained central to the concept of the nurse in the twentieth. It will be shown that the rules and regulations of nurses’ garb continued long after the rules for women’s dress in general had relaxed. These dress codes were used by the reformers of nursing to provide a ‘space’ between the ‘new or reformed nurse’ and her morally suspect predecessor, the Sairey Gamp figure in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. The nurses’ garb was created to provide a common identity for the profession at a time of rapid social change. But within this context it also represented its distinctiveness; uniform was a metaphor for the class divisions and symbolic fractures within the profession.     

Government Assistance Protects Low‐Income Families from Eviction

A lack of affordable housing is a pressing issue for many low‐income American families and can lead to eviction from their homes. Housing assistance programs to address this problem include public housing and other assistance, including vouchers, through which a government agency offsets the cost of private market housing. This paper assesses whether the receipt of either category of assistance reduces the probability that a family will be evicted from their home in the subsequent six years. Because no randomized trial has assessed these effects, we use observational data and formalize the conditions under which a causal interpretation is warranted. Families living in public housing experience less eviction conditional on pre‐treatment variables. We argue that this evidence points toward a causal conclusion that assistance, particularly public housing, protects families from eviction.     

An anatomy of dispossession: post-apartheid land rights and farm dweller relocation in the context of a private game reserve initiative,northern KwaZulu-Natal

This article is a detailed examination of the impact that the development of a private game reserve initiative in northern KwaZulu-Natal had on the lives of farm dwellers in the late 1990s. The reshaping of this landscape for ecotourism purposes – a decision taken by a group of private landowners – meant that the residents of the former cattle farms were relocated, a process which had serious consequences for them. The outcomes of relocation from the farms are explored through conversations with the relocated farm dwellers. In an attempt to convey the texture of the emotional geography of dispossession, we document both the tangible and the less tangible losses suffered from the farm dwellers' point of view, as well as their experience with the state bureaucracy. The legal and bureaucratic process leading up to the relocation is then retraced through court documents and other archival evidence. At one level, this case raises questions about the capacity of the post-apartheid South African land reform programme to secure the land rights of marginalised groups such as farm dwellers, despite legislation passed to protect them. At a deeper level, this article is about the conceptual inadequacies of the law. While the law finds it easy to render visible and to protect (saleable) private property, it struggles to fully recognise more complex land relationships. The people whose experience is described in this article felt disempowered, their lives effectively invisible. We problematise the continuing primacy of private property in post-apartheid South Africa and argue that the voices of those with other histories on the land should receive more serious attention.     

Who opposes government arts funding?

While the reasons for the controversy overpublic arts funding are well-understood,less clear is the set of variables thatassociates with strong opposition orsupport for arts subsidies. Using data fromthe General Social Survey, this paperbuilds a model to predict opposition basedon ideological, economic, and demographiccharacteristics. The most importantpredictors of opposition are found to bepolitical views, gender, income, privatedonations to the arts, and region ofresidence. The results in this papersuggest that the benefits of public artsfunding accrue primarily to those in thehighest income class, and that supportvaries somewhat according to the level ofgovernment providing the funding. ``The far right is waging a war for the soulof America by making art a partisan issue.And by trying to cut these arts programs,which bring culture, education, and joyinto the lives of ordinary Americans, theyare hurting the very people they claim torepresent.'' Barbra Streisand, in a speech delivered atHarvard University (1995) The National Endowment for the Arts hasbecome a play thing ... for an elitegroup. Newt Gingrich, in an interview on C-SPAN(Lamb, 1994)     

Public subsidies and charitable giving: Crowding out,crowding in,or both?

Abstract Whether government subsidies to nonprofit organizations leverage (crowd in) private donations, or rather crowd them out has been actively debated for some time. A third hypothesis, explored theoretically and tested empirically in this paper, is that the two phenomena are actually not inconsistent with one another: At low levels of subsidies, government support may stimulate private giving, whereas at high levels it could have just the opposite effect. The model presented is based on this idea, which yields implications relevant to nonprofit management and public policy, and tests it with data on symphony orchestras. The conclusion is that the maximization of private donations and total “unearned” revenues are not compatible goals. Further, nonprofits that suffer from short‐term liquidity problems or managerial shortsightedness may face a “subsidy trap,” in which they are forced to rely on suboptimal levels of subsidies in terms of maximizing the firm's revenues. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Bureaucratic Inefficiency: Failure to Capture the Efficiencies of Outsourcing

This paper analyzes the political economy ofoutsourcing by 16 federal bureaus during 1981-96. Inan era of restricted budgets and budget balancing, thepaper questions why federal bureaus did not exploitfully the efficiencies of outsourcing. It proves thatfederal bureaus can achieve technical and costefficiency through outsourcing when contracts can benearly fully specified. Federal bureaus outsource byobtaining inputs to their production processes throughcontracts with competitive market producing units. Econometric results substantiate the hypothesis that``institutions matter,'' and reveal that bureausachieve varying levels of technical efficiency throughdifferent levels of outsourcing.     

Mediterranean neo‐democracies and the opinion‐policy nexus

This article empirically evaluates the previously unresearched relationship between mass public opinion and public policy in the Mediterranean neo‐democracies. By studying almost 250 issues over the last decade, the nature of contemporary democracy in Spain, Portugal and Greece is revealed in relation to the overall consistency between majority preferences and government action. In addition, the opinion‐policy nexus is explored in regard to the potential impact of alternative institutional structures, landslide majorities, different categories of issues (e.g., redistributive, foreign policy), and the partisan composition of the government (i.e., socialist versus non‐socialist).     

Confronting Law Affectively: Encounters of a Patpong Sex Tourist

When considering spaces of sex-work such as Patpong in Bangkok, Thailand, the inclination is to be drawn into habitual debates concerning the legitimacy of sex-work and the clear objectification of sex-workers. While these concerns are valid and real, there are significant absences in terms of the theoretical mapping of the space, such as the affect of the presence of law, bodies, space and the sexual encounter itself. Law emerges as the most significant presence, since it both forms the transactional surface of Patpong and produces the confusion and revilement that results from the confluence of cold legal exchange with the tactile intimacy of the sexual encounter. This text explores the ethnographic space of Patpong in order to understand ways in which law’s transactional, effective surface is both embodied through subjectivication and spatially emplaced, yet also disrupted through the affective agency of the bodies and spaces it enfolds in order to produce this surface. This exploration will point to the limitations of law’s effective surface and suggest ways in which law might be located within a regime of affect, which returns the law to the body it subjectivises.