Relational Leadership,Storytelling, and Narratives: Practices of Local Government Chief Executives

This article examines the storytelling and narrative practices of an elite group of public administrators in the United Kingdom: local government chief executives. The authors do so through the lens of relationality, exploring the collective dimensions of leadership. The focus on leadership and stories embraces the narrative turn in public administration scholarship. It responds to calls for research examining the distinctive settings of everyday leadership action. The contribution to theory is a qualitative understanding of the relational ways in which stories and narratives are used in the practices of public administration leaders. The article analyzes four ways in which such leadership is accomplished: inviting an emotional connection and commitment to public service, making sense of organizational realities, provoking reflections on practices and assumptions, and managing relations with politicians. The authors offer an appreciation of how relational leadership influence can be generated by expressive narratives and storytelling rather than stemming from bureaucratic authority.     

Advocacy Coalitions in Ontario Land Use Policy Development

In 2005, the Ontario government passed the Places to Grow Act and the Greenbelt Act, both major changes in land use policy designed to preserve greenspaces and combat urban sprawl in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, Canada's largest conurbation. This article examines the actors, actor beliefs, and inter‐actor alliances in the southern Ontario land use policy subsystem from the perspective of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). Specifically, this paper undertakes an empirical examination of the ACF's Belief Homophily Hypothesis, which holds that inter‐actor alliances form on the basis of shared policy‐relevant beliefs, creating advocacy coalitions. The analysis finds strong evidence of three advocacy coalitions in the policy subsystem—an agricultural coalition, an environmentalist coalition, and a developers' coalition—as predicted by the hypothesis. However, it also finds equally strong evidence of a cross‐coalition coordination network of peak organizations, something not predicted by the Belief Homophily Hypothesis, and in need of explanation within the ACF.     

Objectivity,Interpretation, and Rights: A Critique of Dworkin

Law and Philosophy -     

Racial disproportionality in state prison admissions: Can regional variation be explained by differential arrest rates?

Recent studies have found that states in the Midwest incarcerate Blacks at a higher rate than those in the South. This article examines the extent to which this regional pattern of racial disproportionality in incarceration rates could be explained by controlling for race-specific arrest rates. The findings showed that the level of racial disproportionality in imprisonment decreased among all of the regions after controlling for race-specific arrest rates, but previously observed regional differences remained. These findings indicate that differences in the level of racial disproportionality in incarceration rates among regions were due to differential involvement in serious crimes by race resulting from a higher concentration of Blacks in urban areas relative to Whites in the Midwest.     

Peddling a semiotics of fear: a critical examination of scare tactics and commercial strategies in public health promotion

In this study, we critically examine the ways in which a nationwide health promotion campaign – the 2013 Diabetes UK/Tesco diabetes campaign, the largest of its kind in the UK – seeks to raise the general public's awareness of Type 2 diabetes. We subject a series of six campaign images (including their layout and accompanying text) to a multimodal discourse analysis, identifying the presence of a range of fear-inducing, stigmatising and commercial strategies, through which the campaign emphasises the dangers of diabetes and advocates personal responsibility for assessing both individual and others' risk of the disease. Specifically, we describe, in multi-semiotic detail, three discursive techniques deployed in the campaign to achieve these ends: (1) the depiction of grief and amplification of diabetes-related danger, (2) the promotion of diabetes risk and localisation of individuals' responsibility for their health and (3) the commercial branding and framing of the Diabetes UK/Tesco partnership – including the promotion of goods and services – as a means of diabetes prevention and management. Our findings raise concerns about the moral legitimacy of using fear-inducing and commercial strategies in order to (effectively) raise public awareness of and responses to Type 2 diabetes, strategies which do little to address the environmental factors which are associated with increasing rates of the disease.     

Psychopathic personality traits,intelligence, and economic success

A wealth of research has revealed that psychopathy and psychopathic personality traits are associated with criminal involvement. Comparatively less research, however, has examined whether psychopathic personality traits influence economic outcomes in adulthood. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by analyzing data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The results of the analyses indicate that psychopathic personality traits are negatively related to a number of economic outcomes, including household income and employment history measures. Individuals with high levels of psychopathic personality traits were found to have lower household incomes and to be fired more frequently than individuals with lower levels of psychopathic personality traits. Unexpectedly, psychopathic personality traits were also found to be negatively associated with household debt. There was also some evidence that the effect of psychopathic personality traits was moderated by intelligence in the prediction of household income. We discuss what these findings mean for the psychopathy and economics literatures.     

A Rapid and Efficient Method for Evaluation of Suspect Testimony: Palynological Scanning

A rapid method for evaluating suspect testimony is valuable at any stage in an inquiry and can result in a change of direction in an investigation. Rape cases, in particular, can present problems where a defendant renders DNA analysis redundant by claiming that the claimant consented to have sexual relations. Forensic palynology is valuable in confirming or eliminating locations as being crime scenes, thus checking the testimony of both parties. In contrast to some forensic disciplines, forensic palynology can provide critical information without time-consuming full analysis. Two cases are described where the palynological assemblages from comparator samples of pertinent places were compared with those obtained from clothing of claimants and defendants. The results of rapid microscopical scanning of relevant preparations led to early confessions, thus obviating the need for costly analyses and protracted court proceedings. A third case demonstrates the unbiased nature of this technique where a man, although innocent of any offense, lied about having visited the crime scene for fear of prosecution. This highlights the need for sensitive policing in claims of rape.