Lessons of endogenous leadership in Nigeria: innovating to reduce waste and raise incomes in the cassava processing and goat-keeping systems

Agricultural innovations are increasingly emerging from African research scientists. This paper looks at an innovation developed by animal scientists at the University of Agriculture Abeokuta in Nigeria. They identified a method for drying cassava peels, which creates an income source for rural women, reduces environmental waste, and raises the income of goat herders by transforming the cassava waste into animal feed. Initially funded by a World Bank grant, this paper addresses the challenges of securing donor funding for local innovations and presents an argument for a new model of development that supports locally driven solutions to current development issues.     

Insularity and Law: Diversity and Changeability of Islands’ Statuses—The Example of French Outermost Regions in French and EU Law Systems

This article deals with the interactions between national and European legal corpuses about insular territories. French outermost regions (ORs) were first called “départements d’outre-mer” (overseas departments) at the dawn of the French Fourth Republic; they are distinct from other overseas entities. This denomination is used again in the initial EEC treaty in which French overseas departments and overseas countries and territories (OCTs) are distinct. Together with Spanish and Portuguese outermost regions, French overseas departments manage to change EU law in favour of ORs even if the legal differentiation has limits. Moreover, some recent amendments to the French Constitution allow for status variations and even mutations, which can also be found nowadays in EU law.

     

Markets,Hierarchies, and Networks: An Agent‐Based Organizational Ecology

Markets, hierarchies, and networks are widely understood to be the three primary forms of social organization. In this article, we study the choice between these forms in a general, agent‐based model (ABM) of cooperation. The organizational ecology is the product, an emergent property, of the set of choices made by agents contingent on their individual attributes and beliefs about the population of agents. This is one of the first attempts to theorize explicitly the choice between different organizational forms, especially networks and hierarchies, and certainly the first to do so in an ABM. The insights of the model are applied to current research on transnational networks, social capital, and the sources of hierarchy and especially autocracy.     

What makes a real man? Gender norms and Western Australia v. AH [2010] WASCA 172

In Western Australia v AH [2010] WASCA 172 the Western Australian Court of Appeal denied two female-to-male applicants for gender reassignment certificates the right to be legally recognised as men. In so doing, an opportunity was lost for Australia to be one of the first jurisdictions in the world to legally provide a reassignment of gender without requiring permanent sterilising surgery. This column examines not only the legal issues considered in the case but the broader ethical and human rights issues associated with denying female-to-male gender reassignment applicants who have not undergone a permanent sterilisation or genitalia alteration procedure, the right to be identified as males.     

Public opinion on crime causation: An exploratory study of Philadelphia area residents

Purpose

This study examined the views on crime causation from a sample of randomly selected Philadelphia area residents.

Methods

Through the use of a phone survey, residents (N = 359) were asked thirty seven questions related to their level of support for several criminological theories, including classical theory, biological theory, psychological theory, social disorganization theory, strain/general strain theory, subcultural theory, social learning theory, social control/general theory, labeling theory, critical theory, and environmental criminology theory. The analyses assessed whether the views of respondents differed by race, gender, and political ideology. Both across-race and within-race analyses were also conducted to determine the nuances of the support for specific criminological perspectives.

Results

The results pointed to numerous significant gender differences and across-race differences in public opinion on crime causation but few within-race differences. The results also confirmed previous research that supported the notion that one's political ideology is tied to the level of support for certain criminological theories.

Conclusion

Overall, the results point to the merits of including the views of lay persons when there are discussions pertaining to crime causation.     

Employment Discrimination Law and Industrial Psychology: Social Science as Social Authority and the Co‐Production of Law and Science

This article combines Monahan and Walker's classification of social facts, social authority, and social frameworks with political‐institutionalism's view of law and science as competing institutional logics to explain how, and with what consequences, employment discrimination law and industrial‐organizational (I‐O) psychology became co‐produced. When social science is incorporated into enforcement of legislative law as social authority—rationale for judicial rule making—law's institutional logic of relying on precedent and reasoning by analogy ensures that social science will have ongoing influence on law's development. By helping set research agendas and providing new professional opportunities, institutionalized legal doctrine shapes social science knowledge. But because of differences in institutional logic, wherein legal cumulation is backward looking whereas scientific cumulation is forward looking, co‐production of law and science may produce institutional mismatch between legal doctrine and scientific knowledge.     

The phenomenology and course of depressive syndromes in pre-trial detention

This study focuses on the prevalence, the phenomenology and the course of depressive syndromes in pre-trial confinement. In the course of the first examination, socio-biographic data and information pertaining to subjects' psychiatric and forensic record and their current situation in imprisonment were collected from a random sample of 105 male prisoners in a Berlin pre-trial detention center, with the help of a semi-structured interview. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) and the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD), each a self-rating questionnaire, taken together with a clinician rating were successively performed to assess the level of depression. A further examination was conducted approximately three weeks later. The subjects in the follow-up group (n=67) were questioned in a semi-structured follow-up interview regarding their confinement conditions and were requested again to fill in the BDI-II and HAMD questionnaires. The statistical analysis compares the results from administration of the two instruments at two points in time. Individual's symptoms of depression as well as potentially aggravating or protective factors relating to the development of depressive symptoms are taken note of separately. The results of the study reveal the prevalence of mild depressive syndromes in a pre-trial prison population and a tendency to improve within the period of pre-trial confinement.     

How electoral systems affect MPs’ positions

The question how different electoral systems affect the representation of voters in parliaments has been a thorny issue for a considerable time. While some research suggests that first-past-the-posts systems should lead to a closer correspondence between the preferences of the electoral district’s median voter and of its representative, other work concludes that in proportional representation (PR) systems, especially with open lists, candidates have an incentive to cultivate a strong personal vote.     

Can child care assistance in welfare and employment programs support the employment of low‐income families?

Policymakers have long recognized child care as a key ingredient in low‐income parents' employability. We examine the effects of expansions in child care policies that were bundled with a mix of employment‐related policies and implemented as part of several random assignment studies on families' child care access and cost. Almost all of these welfare and employment programs increased employment and led to concomitant increases in the use of child care, especially paid child care. Only the programs that also expanded access or affordability of child care consistently increased the use of child care subsidies and reduced out‐of‐pocket costs to parents, allowing parents to purchase center‐based care. With one exception, such programs had small effects on employment‐related child care problems, suggesting that broader and more generous targeting of child care assistance may be important for achieving the goal of enhancing the stability of employment among low‐income families. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

A Holistic Theoretical Model for Examining Welfare Reform: Quality of Life

Policy makers, public administrators, the media, and others are celebrating the "success" of the latest version of welfare reform, codified into law by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Most often, success is defined in terms of declining case loads or some other economic measure—a practice that does not provide a true sense of the impact of policy changes such as welfare reform. Assessing the human impact of policy change requires more than evaluating economic outcomes; it requires knowing the resources of beneficiaries of social services and their conditions of life from various perspectives. Thus, we must strive for greater understanding about the sociocultural aspects of people's lives that create the whole person—aspects such as health, family and friendship networks, housing situations, public and private support service and program use, conditions of work, and so forth. This is how we come to understand one's quality of life. The present research creates a conceptual model of quality of life and illustrates the model using data from a follow–up study of former welfare recipients in a county in northern Virginia. Evaluation activities that are premised on a quality–of–life model will help policy actors understand the impact of policies and how public institutions can be managed strategically within their very complex contexts, especially in an era of welfare reform.