The Emperor's New Clothes: A moral tale for development experts?

While global problems of poverty, inequality, and social upheaval are on the increase, the language used by development agencies and development experts sounds increasingly radical and idealistic. New socio-political conditions have been borrowed from real contexts in the South, only to be re-imposed on Southern 'partners'. Notions like empowerment, participation, and governance are paradoxically enforced through top-down, external intervention. Hans Christian Andersen's parable of the Emperor's new clothes highlights the illusory nature of this re-packaging of development policies in the 1990s. One major difficulty is that micro- and meso-level socio-political conditionalities remain subordinated to macro-level economic liberalisation. They look participatory from a distance, but at close quarters these measures have effectively become new forms of management and control, which are just as costly [as the old methods] but do not result in great benefits to project participants. (Craig and Porter 1997:50, commenting on the current vogue for mainstreaming of participation in development projects) Beautiful images of the high goals of the official development discourse and deep internal turbulence were clearly interdependent [but] contradictions between the discourse of goals and means and what is actually being achieved may not be visible any more. (Quarles van Ufford 1995:4, 12-13, 14)     

Women's Studies: Between a Rock and a Hard Place or Just Another Cell in the Beehive?

The article traces the history of Women's Studies from its beginnings as the ‘intellectual arm of the women's movement’. It argues that the complex story of Women's Studies has been marked by both ambiguity and uncertainty as well as sustained political commitment in the face of both institutional opposition and feminist ambivalence about Women's Studies as a field of scholarship. The development of Women's Studies occurs through crucial shifts in the theoretical paradigms of feminism and the political preoccupations of the women's movement. These shifts have both deconstructed the founding premises of feminist theory and generated a greater depth to feminist thinking and research. These challenges to Women's Studies have paralleled a different set of problems arising from the increasingly market-oriented direction pursued throughout the tertiary education sector. In spite of these difficulties Women's Studies continues to survive and constitutes an important and contested site of contemporary feminist thought.     

Tax compliance: An investigation using individual taxpayer compliance measurement program (TCMP) data

In this paper, we analyze the tax compliance behavior of U.S. taxpayers by using a 1979 data set that combines information from a random sample of individual tax returns, each of which has been thoroughly audited, IRS administrative records, and sociodemographic data from the Census. We find evidence that both audits and tax code provisions affect compliance. However, the effects are significant for only low-and high-income groups. Interestingly, work on the underground economy also suggests that it is these two groups that are least compliant. Our results for audits suggest that the ripple or general deterrent effect of audits may be substantially larger than the direct revenue yield of audits for high-income taxpayers. Our results for allowable subtractions from income imply that the 1986 Tax Reform Act changes that lowered allowable subtractions may have procompliance effects.     

Breach of Confidence as a Privacy Remedy in the Human Rights Act Era

This article examines the impact of the Human Rights Act (HRA) on the current lack of a remedy for non-consensual publication of personal information by the media. It argues that the action for breach of confidence is now ripe for development into a privacy law in all but name and that the normative impetus for this enterprise can be found in the HRA which will require domestic courts to consider Convention jurisprudence. It will suggest that when Strasbourg decisions are examined in the context of more general Convention doctrines, they may be seen to suggest the need for an effective privacy remedy. Drawing upon approaches from other jurisdictions it seeks to demonstrate that principled solutions may be found to the thicket of legal problems associated with such development. It contends that the main objection to this enterprise, the perceived threat to media freedom, is largely misplaced, as analysis at the theoretical and doctrinal levels reveals that speech and privacy interests are in many respects mutually supportive and the areas of conflict small and readily susceptible to resolution.     

Informant Discrepancies in Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms in an At-Risk Sample: The Role of Parenting and School Engagement

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - A number of studies have used variable-centered approaches to examine informant discrepancies on children’s behavior problems; however, few such studies...     

Identifying psychological pathways to polyvictimization: evidence from a longitudinal cohort study of twins from the UK

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Examine the extent to which cognitive/psychological characteristics predict later polyvictimization. We employ a twin-based design that allows us to test the...