Policies for Decent Labour Standards in Britain

Decent labour standards are a prerequisite for perceived justice and social cohesion. Insofar as they have been achieved in Britain in the past, it has been the result of collective bargaining between employers and trade unions. This has all but vanished in the private sector and, it is argued, there is no chance of its being revived. Upholding labour standards now lies in the provision of statutory individual employment rights. Experience with minimum wages provides some guidance on how these might be developed through social partnership arrangements. Once achieved, such rights amount to little without effective enforcement. Increasingly important for this is the use of the law and consumer campaigns to expose poor employment practices and complex supply chains so that offending employers can be held to account. If Britain is to avoid falling into a competitive ‘race to the bottom’ with Brexit, it must institute a robust means of implementing and enforcing decent labour standards.     

Do Parent-Adolescent Discrepancies Predict Deviant Peer Affiliation and Subsequent Substance Use?

Recent evidence suggests parent-adolescent discrepancies regarding adolescent disclosure can provide insight into parent-child relations and adolescent adjustment. However, pathways linking discrepancies to adjustment are not well known. We tested a model linking parent-adolescent discrepancies in disclosure to adolescent substance use through affiliation with deviant peers. Using three annual waves of data from a community-based study (N?=?357; 91% African American; 53% female; M_age?=?13.13 years, SD?=?1.62 years at baseline), findings revealed that adolescent-reported secrecy and deviant peer affiliation were positively associated with substance use one and two years later, respectively, but there was no evidence of mediation. The results highlight associations of adolescent secrecy and adjustment, and the role peers play in adolescent substance use behaviors.     

Legal Cynicism,Antisocial Attitudes,and Recidivism: Implications for a Procedurally Just Community Corrections

The current approach to supervising offenders in the community has produced disappointing results in terms of reduced recidivism. In response to this, a number of scholars have turned their attention to the role that community corrections officers (CCOs) may play in ensuring successful community supervision. Early evaluations of CCO training have shown promising results, yet missing from this knowledge is a consideration for the legal cynicism that may be held by offenders. It may be unreasonable to expect CCOs to change the antisocial attitudes of offenders when those negative attitudes are directed toward them. The purpose of the current work, therefore, is to integrate ideas about legal cynicism into the knowledge about effective supervision to promote a more procedurally just community corrections. Our broader purpose is to encourage a more realistic understanding of the challenges of the officer-offender relationship in order to improve the efficacy of existing models of effective community supervision practice.     

The Effects of Media Violence on Anxiety in Late Adolescence

Exposure to media violence is related to anxiety in youth, but the causality of the effect has not been established. This experimental study examined the effects of media violence on anxiety, blood pressure, and heart rate in late adolescents. We also examined whether these responses varied by previous exposure to media and real-life violence. College students (N = 209; M age = 18.74; 75 % female; 50 % Caucasian, 34 % African American, 9 % Asian, 3 % Hispanic, and 3 % other racial minorities) were randomized to view either violent or nonviolent high-action movie clips. Participants reported on their anxiety before and after watching the clips, as well as their previous exposure to violence. Measures of blood pressure and heart rate were taken at baseline and during movie viewing. Participants watching violent movie clips showed a greater anxiety increase than those watching nonviolent clips. Both groups experienced increased blood pressure and reduced heart rate during movie watching compared to baseline. Prior exposure to media violence was associated with diminished heart rate response. Additionally, students previously exposed to high levels of real-life violence showed lower blood pressure increases when watching violent clips compared to nonviolent clips. Thus, relatively brief exposure to violent movie clips increased anxiety among late adolescents. Prior exposure to media and real-life violence were associated with lower physiological reactivity to high-action and violent movies, respectively, possibly indicating desensitization. Future studies should investigate long-term anxiety and physiological consequences of regular exposure to media violence in adolescence.     

'Money,for the night is coming': Jean Rhys and Gendered Economies of Ageing

The published collection of Jean Rhys's correspondence opens with two undated photographs of Rhys on facing pages. The author's pose is nearly identical in the two images: her head rests on her hands and her large, dark eyes, rimmed with black liner, look directly out at the viewer. In both pictures, Rhys's hairstyle is exactly the same - though the colour and texture have changed - and the vivid pattern on her clothing is also similar. Both are portraits of a strikingly beautiful woman, and together they suggest a narrative embodying several concerns central to Rhys's early fiction: the exhibition of feminine beauty, the passing of time, and the social, biological and economic consequences of ageing for women. The strong continuities between the two photos, along with their striking differences, serve as a visual representation of the need for women to appear unchanging, to weave a narrative or create an image of the self that keeps the past and present contemporaneous in order to maintain value in the sexual marketplace. The inter-relations of gender, value, age and expenditure suggested by the two photographs are articulated in Jean Rhys's early novels, which depict the economy of investment and loss that women face as they age. In Rhys's texts - and particularly in her two first-person narratives - there is an attempt to recreate in prose the simultaneous experience of past and present, not simply as an example of modernist experimentation with narrative continuity, but also as a specifically gendered response to the economic and social consequences of ageing for women.     

Behavioral Stability as an Emergent Process: Toward a Coherence Theory of Concentrated Personal Disadvantage

The best predictor of future misbehavior is a history of aberrant and wayward conduct. Even so, few theories attempt to account for time-stable maladaptive pathways. To this end, we advance a theory of stability, what we term Coherence Theory. Coherence Theory conceptualizes stability as an emergent property that occurs when antisocial dispositions, social consequences, and misconduct coalesce within an individual. In this sense, misconduct is viewed as only one component of a larger, overarching and multi-faceted emergent construct we label as “concentrated personal disadvantage.” When these three components coalesce within an individual, temporal stability in maladaptive pathways should be expected. Using nationally representative, longitudinal data from the National Survey of Children, we test specific hypotheses derived from our theory. This study makes use of the first and second waves of survey data (N wave 1 = 2,301; N wave 2 = 1,423). The sample overall was 51% male and 52% white. Our analyses provide tentative support for the proposed theory. Concentrated personal disadvantage was found to emerge when the identified constellation of variables coalesced in individuals, and was found to be relatively stable over a 5 year period for males and females. Coherence Theory challenges traditional theories on the stability of antisocial pathways, offers specific conditions under which high levels of stability are likely, and explains why disruption off of antisocial pathways is so difficult.     

One-Year Follow-Up of Suicidal Adolescents: Parental History of Mental Health Problems and Time to Post-Hospitalization Attempt

This longitudinal study of recently hospitalized suicidal youth examined parental mental health history in addition to several indices of adolescent functioning as risk factors for time-to-suicide attempt over a 1-year period. Participants were 352 adolescents (253 girls, 99 boys; ages 13–17 years) who participated in self-report and interview assessments within 1 week of hospitalization and 6 weeks, 3, 6, and 12 months post-hospitalization. Multivariable proportional hazards regression modeled time-to-suicide attempt. Results indicate that adolescents were almost twice as likely to make a suicide attempt if they had at least one biological parent with mental health problems. Risk was also increased for adolescents with baseline histories of multiple previous suicide attempts, more severe suicidal ideation and more severe functional impairment. Findings suggest the need to consider the family system when intervening with suicidal youth.     

The Highs and Lows of Teaching IR Theory: Using Popular Films for Theoretical Critique

This article introduces an approach to IR that uses popular films to teach students how to critically analyze IR theory. By pairing IR traditions (like Realism) and the slogans that go with them (like "international anarchy is the permissive cause of war") with popular films (like Lord of the Flies ), this approach poses questions not about the truth or falsity of IR theories but about how IR theories appear to be true. This technique works because it draws upon visual analytical skills that students already possess and transfers them to analyses of IR theory and international politics. Overall, it challenges the positioning of IR theory as beyond culture and politics rather than as part and parcel of it, transforms what we think of as doing critical IR theory, and repositions students from passive recipients of IR truths into critically active and engaged analysts of IR theory's commonsense views of the world.