DRUG USE AND "HUSTLING" A Study of Their Interrelationships

This paper focuses on the dynamic relationship between daily “hustling” and narcotic use. Through interviews with 30 narcotics users three common patterns of interrelationships are established In addition. a large number of confounding factors which influence the hustling-drug use relationships are described. The paper reveals the complexity of street life and the tenuousness of views which posit a one-to-one correspondence between hustling and narcotics use.     

THE EDGE OF STIGMA: AN EXPERIMENTAL AUDIT OF THE EFFECTS OF LOW‐LEVEL CRIMINAL RECORDS ON EMPLOYMENT

Ample experimental evidence shows that the stigma of a prison record reduces employment opportunities (Pager, 2007). Yet background checks today uncover a much broader range of impropriety, including arrests for minor crimes never resulting in formal charges. This article probes the lesser boundaries of stigma, asking whether and how employers consider low‐level arrests in hiring decisions. Matched pairs of young African American and White men were sent to apply for 300 entry‐level jobs, with one member of each pair reporting a disorderly conduct arrest that did not lead to conviction. We find a modest but nontrivial effect, with employer callback rates about 4 percentage points lower for the experimental group than for the matched control group. Interviews with the audited employers suggest three mechanisms to account for the lesser stigma of misdemeanor arrests relative to felony convictions: 1) greater employer discretion and authority in the former case; 2) calibration of the severity, nature, and timing of the offense; and 3) a deeply held presumption of innocence, which contrasts the uncertainty of arrest with the greater certainty represented by convictions. In addition, personal contact and workplace diversity play important roles in the hiring process.     

Barack and Slumdog Millionaire

President Barack Obama pledged in his first TV interview—with the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya—that America under his watch would "listen with respect and not dictate" to the world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has further announced that this country will no longer just throw around its military might but will pursue a "smart power" approach by tempering the use of hard weaponry with the "soft power" of persuasion and cultural attraction. Or, as Madame Secretary's husband Bill has put it, America will now lead through the power of example instead of the example of power.
The first exceedingly complex test of Obama's smart power strategy will be how to end George W. Bush's misguided "war on terror" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, keeping al-Qaida at bay without being swallowed by the quagmire of tribal politics. An array of experts from New Delhi to Paris offers their views in this section.     

We Are All Probing Each Other,All the Time

The recent scandal of the National Security Agency (NSA) “Hoovering” up the metadata on US and foreign citizens from Google, Facebook and Yahoo exposes in the full light of day the central paradox of the new digital age: The Internet enables us to know and learn more than ever before, but enables more to be known and learned about us by both snooping governments and monetizing information corporations alike. In this section, Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen discuss this paradox. We also reprint an interview from 2009 with Mike McConnell, a former chief of the National Security Agency and the driving force behind Booz, Allen, Hamilton's digital security operation. Edward Snowden, the systems administrator who blew the whistle, was employed by the NSA as a subcontractor from Booz, Allen, Hamilton.     

THE DYNAMICS OF IRONY IN ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE: COPING WITH A SCHOOL MERGER

The potential of an ironic perspective for understanding public service change is portrayed through a re‐analysis of data on a merger between two English primary sector schools, an extreme change involving organizational termination alongside phoenix‐like emergence. The ironic perspective focuses on synchronic dissonance and diachronic divergence in meaning underlying verbal and situational forms of irony respectively, endemic sources of organizational ambiguity, its exacerbation by change which creates conditions favouring irony, and the dynamics of their relationship. The case illustrates how ironic consequences flowed iteratively from diverse sources of ambiguity for those managing the merger, often recursively generating further irony. It is suggested that an ironic perspective can deepen theoretical understanding of the relative unmanageability of public service change, within structural parameters delimiting its scope. This perspective also offers a generic heuristic for organizational analysis with potential to inform efforts to cope with ambiguity and consequent irony in the change process.