Is the Rule of Law an Essentially Contested Concept (in Florida)?

Law and Philosophy -     

Administrative reform and the politics of management training in the People's Republic of China

Abstract: Since 1978 China has attempted to modernize its administration and to train and recruit younger and more professional managers, both in the state administration and in economic enterprises. Despite important efforts in this direction, this has created tensions in the traditional methods of recruitment and training of personnel by the Chinese Communist party. Traditional ideological training institutes, such as party schools have attempted to appropriate management training to preserve their prestige and primacy in recruitment despite their lack of adequately trained instructors. As a result, management education has been diluted by strong admixtures of ideology. As well as providing professional training, cadre training institutes become an important means to promote political favourites, whereas educated professionals may lack sufficient political influence to exercise their skills. The current crackdown in China represents one phase in a conflict over the objectives of political reform which has been going on for some years. Sommaire: Depuis 1978, la Chine tente de moderniser son administration, de recruter et de former des cadres plus jeunes, plus professionnels, B la fois pour I'administration de I'Etat et des entreprises. Des efforts considérables ont été déployés en ce sens, mais il en est résulté des tensions quant aux méthodes traditionnelles de recrutement et de formation du personnel par le Parti com-muniste chinois. Les instituts traditionnels de formation idéologique, comme les écoles du Parti, cherchent B s'approprier cette formation des cadres pour sauvegarder leur prestige et conserver leur rôle prépondérant en matière de recrutement, bien qu'ils ne disposent pas de suffisamment d'enseignants dûment formés. Résultat: de fortes composantes idéologiques viennent atténuer la force educative des programmes. Non contents d'assurer la formation professionnelle, les instruits d'éducation servent à placer les favoris politiques, alors que de leur côté, les gens instruits et dotés d'une formation professionnelle ne jouissent pas toujours de I'influence politique nécessaire pour exercer et tirer parti de leurs compétences. La répression qui sévit actuellement en Chine constitue I'une des étapes d'un conflit qui dure depuis plusieurs années à propos des objectifs de la réforme politique.     

Post-Industrial Changes in Policy Style

The article discusses central characteristics of the way in which western democracies formulate their public policy. This is done by presenting a preliminary typology of policy styles. An attempt is made to classify some European countries according to their dominant policy style as well as according to changes in this respect during the post-industrial period. Overcrowding and unconventional participation are identified as two important factors behind this development. The essay, which is mainly based on British and Swedish data, concludes with a discussion of the question of whether societies are able to exercise any choice in determining their policy style.     

Organizational Justice and Job Satisfaction: A Test of Three Competing Models

Using nationally representative data, we test three theories about distributive and procedural justice and their relation to job satisfaction. Our results support the group-value model more than the personal outcomes model by showing that procedural justice is a more important predictor of job satisfaction than is distributive justice. Furthermore, although other research has supported the psychological contract model by showing that experiences with downsizing alter how procedural justice and distributive justice are related to organizational commitment, we find that downsizing does not alter their relationship with job satisfaction.     

Scaling‐up participation at USAID

Since the 1970s many non‐governmental development organisations have moved away from top‐down modes of operation toward participatory practices that hand over decision‐making power to the poor. The bilateral development agencies of the industrialised states have been slower to follow suit, but in the 1980s and 1990s a number of such agencies also initiated participatory‐oriented reforms. Development scholars have paid little attention to reforms of the larger organisations. In this article, we analyse the efforts of the United States Agency for International Development to embrace participation in the 1990s. Internal reformers managed to change some agency procedures but had only limited success in institutionalising participatory practices. Forces internal to the agency, including rigid rules and employee incentive structures, hampered reform efforts. Also, while some developments external to the agency facilitated participation, many others, including legislative interference and shifting national policy priorities, hindered change toward participation. The case reveals how complex webs of accountability relationships make participatory‐oriented transformation a cumbersome process in large development organisations. Change towards participation can succeed, but only if reformers acknowledge and consider existing institutional constraints. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Richard Weaver's Untraditional Case for Federalism

Although Richard M. Weaver's political writings do not offera systematic examination of federalism, they include a defenseof federalist arrangements. Because Weaver's federalism is centralto his conservatism, and because his argument for federalismdiffers from more common conservative defenses of federalismoffered in the twentieth century, his writings allow studentsof federalism to examine possible connections between federalismand conservative political thought.     

Antisocial constructs in predicting institutional violence among violent offenders and child molesters

This study investigated the ability of self-reported antisocial constructs to predict serious institutional infractions among a correctional sample of child molesters (n = 69) and violent offenders (n = 138). Each group had significant predictors, but the predictors differed between the two groups. Interpersonal problems accounted for significant incremental variance after age in the relationship with institutional violence for child molesters. With the violent offender group, alienation and impulse expression showed significant incremental variance after accounting for age. Alienation and impulse expression also added to age in the relationship with the function of failure over time for the most institutionally disruptive. Implications for institutional classification and clinical use in an offender population are discussed.     

The Reasonable Woman Standard: A Meta-Analytic Review of Gender Differences in Perceptions of Sexual Harassment

Courts and legislatures have begun to develop the reasonable woman standard (RWS) as a criterion for deciding sexual harassment trials. This standard rests on assumptions of a wide divergence between the perceptions of men and women when viewing social-sexual behavior that may be considered harassing. Narrative reviews of the literature on such perceptions have suggested that these assumptions are only minimally supported. To test these assumptions quantitatively, a meta-analytic review was conducted that assessed the size, stability, and moderators of gender differences in perceptions of sexual harassment. The effect of the actor's status relative to the target also was evaluated meta-analytically, as one alternative to the importance of gender effects. Results supported the claims of narrative reviews for a relatively small gender effect, and draw attention to the status effect. In discussing legal implications of the present findings, earlier claims are echoed suggesting caution in establishing the reasonable woman standard, and one alternative to the RWS, the reasonable victim standard, is discussed.