Pragmatized Aesthetics: The Impact of Legitimacy Pressures in Symphony Orchestras

This article explores the balancing exercise between opposing value regimes in symphony orchestras. This complex environment in which art organizations move while producing art will be mapped out in a model called a “biotope.” In recent years, orchestras have been struck hard by declines in the cultural sector. As a result of opposing legitimacy pressures in today’s symphony orchestras, standardized canonical repertoire now serves as a pragmatized aesthetic compromise. This article suggests that although this compromise grants short-term legitimacy to the art organization, it simultaneously brings its biotope out of balance, reinforcing the legitimacy crisis it was meant to avert.     

Minors and informed consent: a comparative approach

The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine of the Council of Europe provides in article 6 for special protection of persons who are not able to give free and informed consent to an intervention in the health field, e.g. minors. According to the second paragraph of this article it is up to domestic law to decide whether and under which conditions a minor is capable of taking autonomous decisions in the health field. In the present article an overview is given of the legal regulations in place regarding the position of minors in a health care setting in the EU Member States that have ratified the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine namely Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain. As the overview will show, the legal position of minor patients in a health care setting varies from country to country. This in view of the system they have opted for as well as the age and circumstances under which minors are allowed to take health care decisions autonomously.     

Measurement and analysis of diastereomer ratios for forensic characterization of brodifacoum

The highly toxic anticoagulant rodenticide brodifacoum is an organic compound that has two diastereomeric forms. In this paper, we consider the hypothesis that the relative population of the diastereomers is a characteristic of forensic value for the association or source attribution of specimens of brodifacoum. In general, the stereoisomer distribution in an organic compound depends on the reagents, conditions, and methods used for synthesis and purification, and may vary over time due to differential stabilities of the stereoisomers. The stereoisomer distribution may thus serve as an identifier of the production methods and history of samples and provide a basis for comparing recovered specimens. We refer to this novel approach for signature detection as stereoisomer distribution analysis or SDA. If the stereoisomers are diastereomers, quantitative determination of the diastereomer ratio in a specimen can be performed by a number of techniques, notably gas or liquid chromatography or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. This paper describes an NMR spectroscopic analysis of ten commercial technical grade brodifacoum samples from distinct batches originating from three different sources. The results reveal detectable source-to-source and batch-to-batch variations in diastereomer ratios.     

When the study of delinquent groups stood still: In defense of a classical tradition

This essay focuses on reductionism, the study of delinquent groups, and citation analysis. It describes Frederick Thrasher’s epistemological break with reductionists like Sigmund Freud and William Healy. It shows how Freudian, neoFreudian, and social-control theorists attributed ‘the group factor’ in delinquency to pathological traits, early childhood disorders, frustrated desires for mobility, or social disabilities of group members. From 1950 to 1970, the mobilization of bias accompanying these regressive developments nullified a classical sociological view of delinquent groups by transforming a fruitful legacy of non-reductionist theory and research into ‘non events’. When criminologists employ citation indices to legitimate such degenerative developments, they rely on spurious subjective criteria for gauging scientific contributions to knowledge.     

Physiological Relaxation: Stress Reduction Through Fair Treatment

The effects of fair treatment on physiological stress reactions of participants in a moderately high or low mental pressure condition are studied. On the basis of Injustice Stress Theory IST; Vermunt, R., and Steensma, H. In: Cropanzano, R. (ed.), Justice in the Workplace (Vol. 2), Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 27–48,2001, predictions were made about procedural fairness as stress reducing factor. The results supported the expected effect of fair treatment, in that lower cardiovascular activity was measured after fair treatment but not after unfair treatment. Moreover, three-way interactions showed that participants with type-A behavior in the low mental pressure conditions had lower cardiovascular activity after fair treatment but not after unfair treatment, while participants with type-B behavior showed lower cardiovascular activity after fair treatment in the moderately high mental pressure condition. The discussion focuses on the difference between fair treatment and social support as well as on the several ways to reduce stress by being fair.     

Justice delayed? Internationalised criminal tribunals and peace-building in Lebanon,Bosnia and Cambodia

In countries emerging from violent conflict and/or mass atrocity, there is an urgent need to promote stability and often also widespread demand for accountability for abuses which have taken place. Debate has raged among scholars and practitioners about whether justice should be sacrificed or delayed for the sake of peace, or should be promoted even if it is in the short term destabilising. In many countries emerging from conflict processes of accountability, or transitional justice processes, operate almost simultaneously alongside processes of peace-building such as disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-combatants, reform of the security sector and rule of law promotion, in the immediate aftermath of conflict. These can include domestic processes of truth-telling, prosecution, reparation and amnesty, or internationally promoted processes such as international criminal tribunals. They can also include internationalised criminal tribunals, which have mixed national–international staff. While scholarship has increasingly focused on the engagement between transitional justice and peace-building processes in the relatively near term, far less has examined the role of processes of accountability that follow conflict termination by a significant period of time, justice delayed. Drawing on recent fieldwork, the authors examine three internationalised criminal tribunals developed some 15 years after the termination of conflict in countries that experienced three very different types of conflict, conflict resolution and peace-building or reconstruction in Bosnia, Lebanon and Cambodia. They find that despite claims made by advocates for such institutions, such tribunals may only have limited impact on longer term peace-building and that the effects of flawed peace-building activities affect the operating environment of the tribunals.