Antecedents and Consequences of Psychiatric Disorders in African-American Adolescents

This study included three waves of data, collected from approximately 890 African-American children and their families. Antecedents and consequences of psychiatric disorders among this population were examined. Children’s temperament, pubertal timing, and experience of stressful life events were tested as antecedents of psychiatric disorders. Several aspects of school functioning were then tested as consequences of psychiatric disorders. In addition, children with a single psychiatric disorder and those with comorbid disorders were statistically compared. Results showed that (1) children with at least one disorder, compared to those with no disorder, exhibited significantly more difficult temperament, experienced puberty earlier, and underwent greater numbers of stressful life events; (2) those with at least one disorder had significantly poorer school outcomes than those with no disorder; (3) children with comorbid disorders, compared with those who had only one disorder, displayed lower educational aspirations and poorer school commitment.

An Organizational Echelon Analysis of the Determinants of Red Tape in Public Organizations

This article adopts an organizational echelon approach to the study of red tape in public organizations and argues that the nature and extent of red tape will vary at different levels of the organizational hierarchy. These propositions are tested with a multiple‐informant survey using a lagged model. The empirical results across the three organizational echelons sampled indicate modest variations in the levels of perceived red tape and major variations in its determinants. Results from the more senior managers uphold prior research findings and hypotheses on the determinants of red tape. This is not surprising because earlier studies typically sampled senior executives. Yet the lower down the organizational hierarchy one travels, the more red tape officials perceive and the more multifaceted the findings on determinants become. The authors conclude that prior empirical work is likely to have underestimated the extent of red tape in public organizations, and oversimplified its determinants. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

A complicity continuum of state crime∗

State crime scholars and radical criminologists have struggled to draw distinctions between state-initiated and statefacilitated state crimes and state-corporate crimes. The first of these, a less contentious concept, denotes an explicit and distinct action by a state for the furtherance of its organizational goals which violates law or produces social injury. State-facilitated and state-corporate crimes have been defined as implicit actions or inactions by the state which facilitate social injury, harm, or violations of law. Here we seek to establish more clearly the parameters of the phenomenon of state crime by creating a multidimensional continuum of state crime complicity. A sample of cases found in the radical-state and state-corporate crime literature are placed on or between the two extremes of the continuum: commission-omission behavior and implicit-explicit policy.     

Post-development theory and the question of alternatives: a view from Africa

Post-development theorists have declared development obsolete and bankrupt and have called for ‘alternatives to development’. What do they mean by such calls and what should be the African response to such calls? In this paper I will attempt to address three important questions: first, what is meant by post-development theory's call for ‘alternatives to development’? Second, why consider post-development theory from an African perspective? Third, what contributions can a consideration of African difference and diversity make towards debate on ‘alternatives to development’? I conclude by arguing that increased consideration of the African experience would be valuable for all who are seeking alternative ways of dealing with the problems that development purports to address.     

Connecting social and environmental policy in Australia: Collateral gains or collateral damage?

Climate change research relating to “co‐benefits” suggests that the facilitation of social‐welfare outcomes through environmental policy offers a powerful means of incentivising climate change action. Concerns about social‐welfare, however, are often used to undermine climate change policies, typically through political claims that low‐to‐middle‐income households should not shoulder the costs of greater policy alignment between social and environmental objectives. Integrating the social into the environmental can therefore, on the one hand, lead to “co‐benefits” as each agenda promotes the other in political discourse, or alternatively to collateral damage if the policy objectives are framed as incompatible. This article explores both scenarios through two case studies of energy policy in Australia. The findings show that social‐welfare concerns can be a powerful discursive tool with the potential to facilitate political consensus, but also that this potential is not being fully realised, primarily because environmental concerns suffer when attempts are made to integrate the two areas discursively.