Administering a victim impact curriculum to inmates: a multi-site replication

While restorative justice has been the topic of much research, a specific type of program included in restorative justice, Impact of Crime (IOC) on Victims programs, has not been widely studied or assessed for effectiveness. This study examines IOC on Victims Curriculum Development Programs. Offenders from programs in California, Ohio, Tennessee, and Virginia were participants in this research. A four-state evaluation methodology was developed in order to assess the effectiveness of these programs in educating offenders about victims’ right and victim facts, as well as increasing their sensitivity to victims’ difficulties. The findings in this evaluation lend support to previous studies, indicating efficacy for IOC programs. Suggestions for future research are briefly discussed.     

Management not models: adaptability,responsiveness, and a few lessons from football

Despite a swathe of critiques of logframes and other blueprint approaches to development over the last 30 years, most aid infrastructure continues to concentrate on the design and subsequent implementation of closed models. This article does not propose an alternative to blueprints, but challenges the inflexibility of their implementation, which is inadequate given the complex nature of social change. It proposes a supplementary management and learning approach which enables implementers to be dynamic, adaptive, and responsive to problems and opportunities. Emphasising the role of donors, the paper presents a case study of one donor-led programme in Bangladesh doing just this.     

Lawyers' Perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Is the Court a “Political” Institution?

Do legal elites—lawyers admitted to federal appellate bars—perceive the Supreme Court as a “political” institution? Legal elites differentiate themselves from the mass public in the amount and sources of information about the Court. They also hold near‐universal perceptions of Court legitimacy, a result we use to derive competing theoretical expectations regarding the impact of ideological disagreement on various Court perceptions. Survey data show that many legal elites perceive the Court as political in its decision making, while a minority perceive the Court as activist and influenced by external political forces. Ideological disagreement with the Court's outputs significantly elevates political perceptions of decision making, while it exhibits a null and moderate impact on perceptions of activism and external political influence, respectively. To justify negative affect derived from ideological disagreement, elites highlight the political aspects of the Court's decision making rather than engage in “global delegitimization” of the institution itself.     

The changing of the guard: Top management characteristics, organizational strain, and antitrust offending

From within an organizational strain perspective, this paper examines the effects of managerial succession, CEO background, decentralized management, and product dominant strategies on the reported corporate antitrust offending levels of 43 basic manufacturing companies over a 22-year period. In the aggregate, findings suggest that past illegal involvement predicts future offending; companies headed by finance and administrative CEOs have higher offending levels than do firms headed by CEOs from other backgrounds; a turnover in top management generally decreases offending levels; the pursuit of product dominant strategies increases the number of anticompetitive acts; and offending levels are unrelated to whether new leaders are recruited from within or outside the firm, whether the CEO is also Chair of the Board of Directors, or whether management is centralized or decentralized. The effects of some variables on corporate offending interact with firm performance.