Working at the intersection—a story from Australia

Conceived by nurses in the hospital of a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, and inspired by Norwegian People's Aid, the international aid agency of the Australian trade unions was designed to give a genuine material base to solidarity with national liberation struggles. Bridging the difficult division in Australian labour politics between the Catholic right and the social democratic and pro‐Moscow lefts, Australian People for Health, Education and Development Abroad (now Union Aid Abroad APHEDA) was able to channel funds from unions and the Australian government to agriculture, health, and vocational training projects in many countries in the South. Unlike most counterpart organisations in Europe and the USA, its earlier partners were rarely trade unions. Only recently has APHEDA directly supported trade union training in Cambodia, East Timor, and Indonesia, under pressure from Australian unions, who see workers' rights in neighbouring countries as crucial to their own fate. Yet unions in advanced capitalist countries don't spontaneously understand the humanitarian and development needs of countries, such as Papua New Guinea, where waged workers are a small minority of the population. Unionisation is only one part of the solution. The April 2000 Durban congress of the ICFTU called for trade unions to ‘organise the unorganised’, such as informal‐sector workers, and to build alliances with NGOs and civil society around shared values. As a trade union NGO, APHEDA is located in the middle of a challenging intersection. Mandated to educate Australian workers on globalisation issues, APHEDA finds itself often more partisan than other international development NGOs in Australia, sometimes more circumspect. With attacks on union rights and the increasing share of the Australian aid budget delivered through private companies, APHEDA faces decisions about its independence, alliances, direction, and sustainability.     

Using similarity judgments to conduct a mugshot album search

Mugshot searches fail because the witness must be shown too many photos. Current methods to reduce the number rely too heavily on verbal reports of individual features. This research reports three tests of a new system that augments the presently used tools by having the witness choose photos that are subjectively similar to the target. Each photo thus chosen increases the ranking of every photo in the album that is similar to it, as determined by a similarity network in which the album photos are embedded. Because the ranking of the target itself is usually thus increased, it is soon displayed. The tests used familiar targets, an incidental one, and unfamiliar videoed ones. From 76% to 84% of the “witnesses” reached the target, having viewed 2.4 to 8.5 times fewer photos than they would have had they simply leafed through photos as is traditionally done.     

Japanese Network Capital: The Impact of Social Networks on Japanese Political Participation

Recent scholarship shows that social capital has a large influence on political behavior. Social capital’s definition includes trust, norms of reciprocity, and social networks. Most studies, however, ignore the networking component. Here, we test the influence of social networks on political participation using new Japanese survey data. We separately test the effects of involvement in formally organized voluntary associations and informal social networks. We also examine whether hierarchical networks have a different impact on participation than equal relationships. To determine if networks with bridging or bonding social capital affect participation differently, we also measure the openness to outsiders of these networks. Negative binomial regression models indicate a strong positive relationship between formal and informal social networking—including network hierarchy and some forms of openness—and political participation.     

Changing the Tobacco Use Management System: Blending Systems Thinking with Actor–Network Theory

Managing “wicked” issues like the tobacco epidemic is addressed using a combination of Open Systems Thinking (OST) and Actor–Network Theory (ANT). OST was used to construct a model of the tobacco problem as a management system acting in a broader environment. This highlighted several problems with the current system but provided no mechanism for reform. ANT, the “sociology of translation,” was used for understanding how change occurs. Unlike systems thinking, ANT focuses the contest for change on heterogeneous networks of human and nonhuman actors that must be constructed through a process of defining and defending models of change, building alliances, gaining public acceptance, and finally achieving institutional acceptance of the reform (or of some compromise). We then show how this dual approach can shed light on a current challenge in controlling tobacco, the issue of product regulation, and the broader issue of harm reduction versus harm elimination.     

ON THE SHANGHAI COMMUNIQUéAND THE SINO-U.S.RAPPORT

In 1954,representatives of France,Britain,the Soviet Union,the United States and China gathered in Geneva,Switzerland,for a conference on the political and military situation in the Korean Peninsula and in French Indochina.When U.S.Secretary of State John Foster Dulles encountered Chinese Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai.     

Norm Diffusion and Reputation: The Rise of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative

Transparency in the extractives sector is widely seen as an important tool for improving accountability and deterring corruption. Yet for those very reasons, it is a puzzle that so many governments in corruption‐prone countries have voluntarily signed up to greater scrutiny in this area by joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). We argue that EITI serves as a reputational intermediary, whereby reformers can signal good intentions and international actors can reward achievement. International and domestic actors thus utilize EITI to diffuse the norm of resource transparency and to advance reformist aims in a highly problematic policy area.