RHODES' CONTRIBUTION TO GOVERNANCE THEORY: PRAISE,CRITICISM AND THE FUTURE GOVERNANCE DEBATE

This article discusses Rod Rhodes' contribution to governance theory. Rod Rhodes' work on governance has been much quoted. He has contributed to setting a new governance agenda and to an ongoing governance debate. This debate has also had an impact on political practice. However, as this paper argues, Rhodes' definition of governance is problematic in that it is narrowly identified with networks, and it is not consistently applied. Rhodes' concept of governance remains too narrow for it to be able to include a comparative analysis of a variation of governance forms. In addition, the governance concept needs to be equipped with tools from political economy in order be able to incorporate important aspects of interests, power and conflict. The way forward for governance theory would seem to involve the inclusion of political economy analysis of context as it affects beliefs and dilemmas.     

What Does Credibility Look like? Tweets and Walls in U.S. Presidential Candidates’ Visual Storytelling

This study considers the social media visual messaging of four candidates in the 2012 U.S. Republican presidential primary campaign. The analysis is guided by symbolic convergence theory, its method of fantasy theme analysis, and visual rhetoric theory. Using a schema of visual attributes, this study analyzes a rhetorical strategy of candidates' campaigns: the pictorial “public diary” found on their official Facebook and Twitter pages. It reveals how the credibility character traits of trustworthiness and expertise appear in the candidates' visual narratives, what messages dominate, and how candidates differ in succeeding or failing to visually communicate credibility. This study has important implications for how political management can use images in crafting and assessing messaging strategies in a competitive environment.     

Changing the Rules: A Speech Act Analysis of the End of the Cold War

Constructivists often refer to the end of the Cold War to illustrate their contention that social rules are not immutable. Agents can change the rules by performing actions that undermine them. In this article, we describe the Cold War as a set of social rules sustained by superpower speech acts. We show that, by altering their behavior, the superpowers undermined the felicity of these rules. In so doing, they progressively dismantled the rules of the Cold War. Our model captures the competing arguments in the ongoing debate about whether the rationalist buildup argument or the constructivist new thinking argument better explains the end of the Cold War. Within the model, we identify the rules that, when made infelicitous by the superpowers, resolves tensions in the Cold War rule system in ways consistent with each argument. We conclude by showing how these competing arguments are reflected in contemporary debates concerning the nature of the global security rules emerging in the post-cold-war world.     

Rates of putrefaction of dental pulp in the Northwest coast environment

Cytological stability is of interest to criminal investigators in instances where remnants of soft tissue have been preserved, since such tissue can aid in the identification of human remains, helping to determine either the sex of the individual or his or her identity. This study based on seven experiments shows that, in Northwest coast outdoor environments in both summer (three experiments) and winter (three experiments), the stability of dental pulp nuclei ranges from 4 days to 2 weeks. The seventh experiment serves to describe the morphological sequence observed in nuclear putrefaction. The specimens included human and pig extracted teeth and unextracted pig teeth. Deposition of the specimens was made both on the surface and in the subsurface (30-cm depth), and the environmental variables were recorded.     

An assessment of native American economic development: Putting culture and sovereignty back in the models

Economic indicators in the United States document the poor economic straits in which Native Americans find themselves. Historically, scholars have explained delayed economic development using Linear Stage, Structural-Change, Dependency and Neoclassical Counter Revolution Models. All of these, however, are unable to fully explain the Native American case. We discuss the deficiencies of these models and point out the effects of constantly changing United States policies on Native American economic well-being. We present data from a survey of tribal government respondents about preferred business arrangements on the reservation to support greater attention to cultural identity in economic development studies. A model that incorporates cultural and sovereignty variables is presented. Diane Duffy, Ph.D., is assistant professor of political science at Iowa State University. She combines the study of political psychology and public policy by examining citizen perceptions of political issues. Currently she is examining Native American perceptions of “patriotism.” Jerry Stubben, Ph.D., is an Extension State Communities Specialist and adjunct associate professor in the Professional Studies Department at Iowa State University. He descends from the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska and served as Chair of the American Indian Studies Program at ISU from 1990–1995. Presently, he serves as co-investigator on a National Institute on Drug Abuse funded project to develop, implement, and evaluate a tribally based, family oriented substance abuse prevention program on the Mille Lacs reservation in Minnesota and Lac du Flambeau reservation in Wisconsin.     

The impact of gender roles on verdicts and sentences in cases of filicide

Although mothers and fathers are equally likely to kill their children, maternal filicide cases tend to draw more media coverage and community outrage. While traditional gender role expectations appear to contribute to the community response that follows a report of filicide – and influence media representations – little is known about the offenders’ treatment in the criminal justice system. Drawing on theorizing within gender studies, this article examines relationships between traditional gender role expectations and court case outcomes in cases of maternal and paternal filicide. Findings indicate that both verdicts and sentences in these cases vary by gender and that, for female offenders, the differential treatment is related to how well they appear to fit traditional gender roles.     

A note on ‘Labour value and socialist economic calculation’

Cockshott and Cottrell have reopened a debate which has been engaged with vigour in the past, but, as they rightly point out, needs to be reassessed in the light of current technology. They describe their ideas as being ‘work in progress’, and this note attempts to retain this spirit. While differing on technical matters, it emphasises the need for such a reassessment and discusses some further possibilities.

A number of different issues are addressed in their paper: these include the use of labour values as a tool in economic planning and the computational feasibility of such a process. Formal definitions are given using a computer orientated notation.¹ This note separates the issue of the impact of increasing computing power on the feasibility and desirability of computing a central plan from the issue of using Marxian labour values as a method of calculation.

Much of what Cockshott and Cottrell say is related to a wide body of literature in mainstream economics, but whose mathematical nature has given it a restricted circulation.² For instance the problem of decomposing the input-output matrix, and the problems of designing a system which clearly sets up the information which would pass from central planners to decentralised decision makers. Cockshott and Cottrell also deal at length with the specific point of using market price/labour value (cost) as an indicator in deciding which lines of production to expand or contract. This fits into a tradition which offers a number of possibilities for deciding which criteria to use.