Matching supply and demand in local public services,part 1 — Preliminaries; productivity and quality control

The local government 'modernisation agenda' has important implications for research in local government, a function which has been neglected in recent years. This article argues that modernisation, especially Best Value, requires authorities to develop as 'intelligent learning organisations' and to build the capacity for research to support processes of learning and improvement. Based on the findings of recent research, the article discusses lessons for local government in enhancing research capacity and utilisation, referring both to internal factors and to the potential for collaborative arrangements. It is concluded that central government might do more to assist the development of such capacity but ultimately authorities' approach to research must be developed to support achievement of their defined purpose, role and objectives.     

Speaking for Themselves: Hope for Children Caught in High Conflict Custody and Access Disputes Involving Domestic Violence

The Speaking for Themselves (SFT) project sought to enhance the physical, emotional, and psychological safety of children exposed to domestic violence and high conflict custody and access disputes. Children were provided with both a trauma therapist and a lawyer, in an attempt to ensure their well-being while providing decision-makers with reliable and authentic information about these children’s circumstances. This project was an attempt to balance the “best interests” approach applied in family law decision-making with the value placed on a child’s right to be heard, an approach espoused by children’s rights advocates. This article presents the SFT philosophy, model program, and evaluation results.     

Theorizing strategies: Households and markets in 15th-century Tuscany

This article uses empirical evidence from rural Tuscany in the 15th century to compare three frameworks for conceptualizing household strategies: Chayanov's analysis of the domestic economy, Bourdieu's treatment of social reproduction, and Weber's distinction between budgetary units and profit-making enterprises. Although Bourdieu's framework did not work well in this context because there was little evidence that peasants employed strategies to prevent the division of land, there was considerable evidence to support Chayanov and Weber. As Chayanov predicted, many households allocated labor according to a tradeoff between providing for family members and avoiding drudgery. The Weberian perspective also worked well because it explained why these smallholders often divided their holdings and used money in their household strategies.     

Fetal Age Estimation Using Orbital Measurements: 3D CT-Scan Study Including the Effects of Trisomy 21

Abstract:  This study evaluates a new method of fetal age estimation based on orbital measurement and including the potential trisomy 21 of the fetus. Six orbital and one facial CT-scan measurements were taken on 71 fetuses ranging from 14 to 41 weeks of gestational age. Forty-eight fetuses were "normal" and 23 fetuses presented the Down syndrome (trisomy 21). The anatomy/imagery correspondence was evaluated comparing our results to those obtained by direct bone measurements on the same fetuses and revealed no significant differences between the two kinds of measurements. Moreover, a multiple linear stepwise regression was realized to estimate fetal age and showed that the "trisomy 21 parameter" is not conserved in the final determination model. Therefore, we conclude that the good radio-anatomical correspondence offers an interesting alternative to direct bone measurement (necessitating dissections) and allows a reliable fetal age determination, whatever is the trisomy 21 condition of the fetus.     

Detecting Specialization in Offending: Comparing Analytic Approaches

Offending specialization continues to be a subject of empirical inquiry for scholars interested in criminal careers. Early research consistently spoke to the generality of offending profiles, but more recent work has revealed somewhat mixed findings. These results have emerged alongside newly developed and applied methods that detect and describe offending specialization. To what extent these methods shape divergent conclusions and/or provide overlapping insight remains unclear, however. Therefore, the degree to which more recent inquiries are actually studying the same operational definition of specialization is unknown. In order to consider this issue further, this study utilizes four frequently applied approaches with a single data set. The study indicates when and where findings converge and also describes any unique insights provided by each method. The work concludes with a discussion surrounding the utility of applying multiple strategies in assessing specialization in criminal offending.     

Hommage à Gérard Cornu

Sans résumé

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Sex, Maids, and Export Processing: Risks and Reasons for Gendered Global Production Networks

Increasing numbers of women have become sex workers, maids, or employees in export production networks—all largely female sectors—to earn incomes in the restructured global economy. Many must migrate domestically and internationally. Women encounter many risks and much insecurity in these sectors: low wages, no benefits, long hours, harassment, health hazards, and lack of rights or legal recourse. By examining work in these three sectors simultaneously, we find that, as a result of globalization, economic restructuring, and crises, 1) women have increasingly been forced into such income-earning activities and 2) many governments have been pushed into strategies that foster these occupations.     

Fact Checking and Information in the Age of Covid

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed and accelerated an information crisis as well as a health one. What we discover about Covid 19, how it spreads, to whom and why and how best to mitigate it—all depend on information. The essays in this special section, which this article introduces, explore the importance of information and the fundamental role of fact checkers in understanding how information flows, why mistakes are made, and how to counteract them. Fact checking as an idea and a practice emerged in the early twenty-first century, developed as a positive beacon to counteract a growing sense that information could no longer be trusted. Now, more than a decade after its creation, fact checking sits within a far more complex and chaotic media context, and its expertise and understanding has never been so important. We need to understand what fact checkers do because they are grappling with how to tether us to reality.     

Financial Regulation in the United States: Lessons from History

History is institutional memory writ large. One looks at economic history to see what problems recur, what causes them to recur, what solutions have worked best in the past, and which interventions have made the problems worse. The authors argue that a moderately complex interaction between the workings of the financial sector, the way in which the political system is organized, and the administration of regulation makes perfect regulation of the financial sector extremely unlikely. Many of these problems arise as a result of conflicting incentives for those participating in and regulating the financial field. The authors find that some proposed solutions have improved matters but have costs, and that some proposed solutions have actually worsened problems in the financial sector.

Peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1837