Anxieties without borders: The United States,Europe and their southern neighbours

In recent years, there has been a lively debate on “the end of the West” with the rise of authoritarian capitalist powers and the challenge they pose to the values and institutions of the West. The debate has to be qualified in two important respects. First, China and Russia have – albeit for different reasons – major stakes in the preservation of the current world order, thus making it unlikely that they will be able or willing to launch a sustained assault on it. Second, and perhaps more importantly, despite certain current similarities in their international outlook, China and Russia are in fact far from natural and permanent partners in the creation of a new anti-liberal world order. Therefore, instead of galvanising a strong resistance against the rise of China and, to a lesser extent, Russia, the future challenge for the West is to find ways to deal constructively with these countries so as to reinforce the liberal and multilateral elements of the present world order. This will necessarily require a moderate and constructive stance from China and Russia, one that can plausibly be expected in the natural course of events, provided they are given a chance to voice their legitimate concerns.     

The role of the sociologist in local planning

The role of the sociologist in development projects can be misunderstood by other members of an interdisciplinary team in ways that may have undesirable consequences for development research and can distort the resultant team recommendations. Technological professionals can define the sociologist's role in such a way that he is expected to produce answers to unreal and unanswerable questions and to refrain from attempting answers to important and answerable ones. These latter tend to be categorized as ‘evaluative’ or ‘political’ and excluded from the scope of the research project, with the result that major policy decisions are smuggled into the conclusions of the study in the guise of purely technical recommendations. The real goals of development can thus be largely ignored in the formulation of the report. Greater attention should be paid to the sociology and organization of development research itself if these dangers are to be avoided.     

The peasantry of northeast Scotland

Little attention has been paid to peasant agriculture in Britain. This paper is an attempt—of inordinate length—to give an account of the articulation of capitalist and peasant agriculture in northeast Scotland between 1840 and 1914. It uses a very wide range of sources including folk song and novels, as well as reminiscences and interviews, but seeks to ground these cultural productions—in which the study area is very rich indeed—in the material base from which they are derived.     

Using the Results from Rigorous Multisite Evaluations to Inform Local Policy Decisions

Evidence‐based policy at the local level requires predicting the impact of an intervention to inform whether it should be adopted. Increasingly, local policymakers have access to published research evaluating the effectiveness of policy interventions from national research clearinghouses that review and disseminate evidence from program evaluations. Through these evaluations, local policymakers have a wealth of evidence describing what works, but not necessarily where. Multisite evaluations may produce unbiased estimates of the average impact of an intervention in the study sample and still produce inaccurate predictions of the impact for localities outside the sample for two reasons: (1) the impact of the intervention may vary across localities, and (2) the evaluation estimate is subject to sampling error. Unfortunately, there is relatively little evidence on how much the impacts of policy interventions vary from one locality to another and almost no evidence on the implications of this variation for the accuracy with which the local impact of adopting an intervention can be predicted using findings from an evaluation in other localities. In this paper, we present a set of methods for quantifying the accuracy of the local predictions that can be obtained using the results of multisite randomized trials and for assessing the likelihood that prediction errors will lead to errors in local policy decisions. We demonstrate these methods using three evaluations of educational interventions, providing the first empirical evidence of the ability to use multisite evaluations to predict impacts in individual localities—i.e., the ability of “evidence‐based policy” to improve local policy.     

Understanding “corruption” in regulatory agencies: The case of food inspection in Saudi Arabia

Corruption is a relatively neglected topic in studies of regulatory agencies. The label is applied to a wide range of deviations from behavioral standards ultimately derived from Weber's account of the ideals of Prussian bureaucracy. This paper draws on a study of the work of Saudi Food Inspectors to argue that it is unhelpful to reduce a complex phenomenon to simple allegations of malpractice that can be managed by disciplinary sanctions. Our data show that irregular behavior by street‐level agents may be deeply embedded in the expectations that members of a society have of one another. It is less a matter of personal gain than of maintaining one's recognition as a fellow citizen. Such behavior is not easily changed through sanctions directed at individual inspectors. Our study does not exclude the possibility that irregular behavior can be motivated by personal gain, and properly managed by criminal or similar penalties. However, it does propose that research should be more sensitive to the contexts within which irregular behavior occurs rather than treating “corruption” as a uniform and homogenous phenomenon.