Memories,Drama and Dreamers: Proposals to Address the Representation of the Latin World in the Face of the Telenovela Crisis

The broadcast of the Latin American telenovela in the United States has been approached from many perspectives. One approach is the study of how the Latin reality is perceived through stories, themes and iconographic elements. This article analyses the different forms of representation of reality as promotors of the identification, production of mental images and memory to maintain the interest of the spectators. A series of initiatives have been proposed so that the stories are more in line with the tastes and expectations of a complex, multicultural and multigenerational audience.     

Public Management and Educational Performance: The Impact of Managerial Networking

Policies are implemented in complex networks of organizations and target populations. Effective action often requires managers to deal with an array of actors to procure resources, build support, coproduce results, and overcome obstacles to implementation. Few large-n studies have examined the crucial role that networks and network management can play in the execution of public policy. This study begins to fill this gap by analyzing performance over a five-year period in more than 500 U.S. school districts using a nonlinear, interactive, contingent model of management previously developed by the authors. The core idea is that management matters in policy implementation, but its impact is often nonlinear. One way that public managers can make a difference is by leveraging resources and buffering constraints in the program context. This investigation finds empirical support for key elements of the network-management portion of the model. Implications for public management are sketched.     

Trade Measures and Climate Compliance: Institutional Interplay Between WTO and the Marrakesh Accords

This article examines the potential of trade measures to induce more climate-friendly policies, focusing on the relationship between global trade rules and the Kyoto climate regime. At the core of this interplay is the normative consistency of trade-related rules in the two regimes and any hierarchical relationship between them. The stronger clout of the WTO and its compulsory dispute settlement system suggest that issues involving competing claims would be referred to WTO bodies. Such bodies have so far been restrictive regarding the exceptions in WTO agreements to the general ban on embargoes and discrimination. The normative compatibility of the two regimes will also depend on their participatory interplay, specifically how they differentiate groups of actors as to rights and obligations. Non-members of WTO receive the least protection, and their vulnerability to climate-related trade measures is largely determined by their interdependence with states that consider employment of such measures. Among WTO members, the findings of a dispute settlement body would presumably differ depending on the status of the target under the Kyoto Protocol. A non-complier with Kyoto commitments would be more shielded than a non-party, because by joining the Kyoto regime a non-complier has exposed itself to regime-internal and less trade intrusive measures that should be exhausted first. A third dimension of interplay is linkage, or efforts to influence the regime interplay. To date there has only been moderate cross-agency coordination, but considerable attention is paid within each regime, including in the Millennium Round of trade negotiations, to the desirability of avoiding conflict between them.     

eBay Law: The legal implications of the C2C electronic commerce model

This article addresses some of the legal implications of the popular consumer-to-consumer electronic commerce model, in particular the implications of the successful and popular auctions site eBay.     

Some Remarks on the Concept of Toleration

The paper contains a conceptual analysis of "act of toleration" and the property of "being tolerant". Being tolerant is understood as a dispositional property of persons manifested in what the author calls the "circumstances of toleration". The main circumstances distinguished are: a tendency to prohibit a certain behaviour and the competence to determine the deontic status of the behaviour in question. An act of toleration, then, consists in not prohibiting (or cancelling the prohibition of) that behaviour. It is argued that this requires the existence of two different normative systems, the "basic system", and the "justifying system". Acts of toleration must be based on reasons coming from the latter. This insight enables one to establish a difference between reasonable and unreasonable toleration, as well as between toleration and related concepts like indifference, acquiescence, etc. The analysis also introduces the distinction between "vertical" and "horizontal" toleration. Acceptance of this last category implies that toleration does not necessarily require hierarchical relationships between those who tolerate and those whose actions are tolerated.     

Contests Among Bureaucrats

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucratsparticipate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, butthey also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of thetotal budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbyingconstitutes a contest among the bureaucrats. This papercharacterizes the Nash equilibria in lobbying and shows inwhich way exogenously fixed bureaucratic incomes induce thesame or different lobbying behavior as incentive incomes.