Singapore scrutinized

Malays in Singapore: Culture, Economy, and Ideology, by Tania Lee. Oxford University Press, Singapore and Oxford, 1989. xvii+206pp. £19.50 hardback. ISBN 0–19–588914–2.

Singapore: The Legacy of Lee Kuan Yew, by R. S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy. Westview Press, Boulder and Oxford, 1990. xi + 217 pp. £22.00 hardback. ISBN0–8133–0407–5.

The Political Economy of Singapore's Industrialization: Nation State and International Capital, by Garry Rodan. Macmillan, Houndsmill and London, 1989. xvii+266 pp. £38.00 hardback. ISBN 0–333–47079–6.

State and Family in Singapore: Restructuring a Developing Society, by Janet W. Salaff. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1988. xv + 301 pp. £41.25 hardback. ISBN 0–8014–2140–3.

Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, edited by Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1989. xxv +1,134 pp. $59.50 paperback. ISBN981–3035–42–0.

No Man is an Island: A Study of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, by James Minchin. Allen and Unwin, Sydney, London and Boston, 1986. xv+375 pp. £16.95. ISBN0–86861–906‐X.

Policy Options for the Singapore Economy, by Lim Chong Yah and Associates. McGraw‐Hill, Singapore and New York, 1988. xv + 499 pp. £24.95. ISBN 0–07–099133–2.     

Assessing nutritional status and functional ability of older adults in developing countries

This paper reports on the findings of a five-year collaborative research programme between the Public Health Nutrition Unit (PHNU) of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and HelpAge International (HAI) that was conducted in India, Tanzania, and Malawi with the broad objective of providing simple and easy tools for assessing nutritional vulnerability among older people.1 Under-nutrition was found to be a serious problem among such people in developing countries, with a positive association between nutritional status and functional ability. These results were presented at a Symposium held at the LSHTM with a view to encouraging development agencies to pay greater attention to the conditions of older people.     

Encryption and evolving technologies: Tools of organized crime and terrorism

Encryption is essential in today’s information and network age. Encryption policy must facilitate and encourage the use of encryption so that businesses can protect their corporate assets from economic espionage by foreign governments and competitors, so that law enforcement agencies can counter the surveillance activities of organized crime, and so that all organizations and individuals can safeguard sensitive information from criminals and intruders. At the same time, because encryption can be exploited by criminals and terrorists, its completely unfettered proliferation may not be in our national interest. The Clinton administration and National Research Council reached a similar conclusion, although they recommended different approaches.     

Social License and Environmental Protection: Why Businesses Go Beyond Compliance

This article examines the concept of the corporate "social license," which governs the extent to which a corporation is constrained to meet societal expectations and avoid activities that societies (or influential elements within them) deem unacceptable, whether or not those expectations are embodied in law. It examines the social license empirically, as it relates to one social problem–environmental protection–and as it relates to one particular industry: pulp and paper manufacturing. It shows try the social license is important, the circumstances in which it may encourage companies to go "beyond compliance" with regulation, how its terms are monitored and enforced, and how it interacts with what we term the regulatory and economic licenses. Overall, this research demonstrates that corporate environmental behavior cannot be explained purely in terms of instrumental threats and moral obligations to comply with the law, and that the increasing incidence of "beyond compliance" corporate behavior can be better explained in terms of the interplay between social pressures and economic constraints.     

Explaining Corporate Environmental Performance: How Does Regulation Matter?

How and to what extent does regulation matter in shaping corporate behavior? How important is it compared to other incentives and mechanisms of social control, and how does it interact with those mechanisms? How might we explain variation in corporate responses to law and other external pressures? This article addresses these questions through an study of environmental performance in 14 pulp and paper manufacturing mills in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Georgia in the United States. Over the last three decades, we find tightening regulatory requirements and intensifying political pressures have brought about large improvements and considerable convergence in environmental performance by pulp manufacturers, most of which have gone “beyond compliance” in several ways. But regulation does not account for remaining differences in environmental performance across facilities. Rather, “social license” pressures (particularly from local communities and environmental activists) and corporate environmental management style prod some firms toward better performance compliance than others. At the same time, economic pressures impose limits on “beyond performance” investments. In producing large gains in environmental performance, however, regulation still matters greatly, but less as a system of hierarchically imposed, uniformly enforced rules than as a coordinative mechanism, routinely interacting with market pressures, local and national environmental activists, and the culture of corporate management in generating environmental improvement while narrowing the spread between corporate leaders and laggards.     

Peer Victimization,Antisocial Cognition,and Delinquency in Early Adolescent Schoolchildren: A Test of the Person–Situation Interface

ABSTRACT

Interactive and mediating effects have the ability to elucidate variable relationships. The goal of the current study was to explore how these two effects potentially clarify the victimization–offending relationship. Examining three waves of longitudinal data, it was predicted that Wave 1 victimization would enhance Wave 2 cognitive impulsivity, Wave 2 victimization would interact with Wave 2 cognitive impulsivity, and Wave 2 cognitive impulsivity and the victimization x cognitive impulsivity interaction would both fuel a rise in Wave 3 delinquency. All predicted relationships were observed when evaluated in a group of 960 early adolescents (457 boys, 503 girls) from the Illinois Study of Bullying and Sexual Violence (ISBSV). When cognitive insensitivity replaced cognitive impulsivity as the mediator, the mediating and moderating effects were no longer significant. These results suggest that victimization stimulates reckless thinking, which, when aided by subsequent victimization, encourages future delinquency.