“It’s All About Something We Call Wasta”: A Motivated Moralization Approach to Favoritism in the Jordanian Workplace

There has been a limited focus on the construal of justice judgments in contexts where norms are potentially conflicting, despite the relevance of norms in justice research. The present study aimed to close this gap by looking at the case of favoritism in Jordan where such conflicting norms are highly salient. A qualitative approach was chosen to facilitate ample exploration of the contextual complexities of the study’s setting. The main data basis were 22 problem-centered interviews conducted with managers and employees in Jordanian non-profit organizations. Data collection and analysis were guided by grounded theory methodology. The resulting theoretical framework of motivated moralization demonstrated that people flexibly construed favoritism as either unjust or justifiable to pursue a number of goals. Instead of relying on a single norm or standard, people strategically adopted the norms that were best suited to substantiate or legitimize a desired position. The norm conflict surrounding favoritism in Jordan facilitated this process by providing a selection of fitting norms for appropriation.     

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Governments,trade unions and the macroeconomy: An expository analysis of the political business cycle

We have briefly reviewed the state of the art of research on the political business cycle in the context of a simple textbook model of the macroeconomy. It has been demonstrated that the government-generated political business cycle vanishes as expectations turn rational. Even then, however, non-inflationary policies apparently are time inconsistent. Hence, democracies seem to be stuck with some sort of inflationary bias.Countries with fairly centralized wage bargaining and strong labor unions have to deal with a second political source of instability in the macroeconomy: if the labor union's program contains political items such as equal educational opportunities for working class children, extended co-determination, a more equal distribution of wealth, and the like, they will prefer to see those parties in power who show the best prospects of implementing those items. So the trade union's wage bargaining strategies take into account how bargaining results influence the state of the economy and, hence, the reelection prospects of the ruling government — and they will do so in different ways, depending on whether the union prefers the government to the opposition party or vice versa.     

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Simultaneous screening and detection of drugs in small blood samples and bloodstains

A gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) method is described for the screening and detection of morphine, codeine, cocaine, benzoylecgonine, methylecgonine, cocaethylene, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), 11-nor-9-carboxy-THC (THC-COOH), 11-hydroxy-THC (11-OH-THC), amphetamine, methamphetamine, 3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA), 3,4-methylenedioxymetamphetamine (MDMA) and N-methyl-1-(3,4-methylenedioxyphenyl)-2-butanamine (MBDB) in small blood samples and bloodstains using solid phase SPE columns and a pipetting robot (Gilson Aspec XL). The detection limits are in the order of 1.62-4.10 ng/50 microl spot (amphetamines), 0.15-0.82 ng/50 microl spot (cannabinoids), 1.67-4.70 ng/50 microl spot (cocaine and derivatives) and 4.53-4.91 ng/50 microl spot (opiates) and the correlation factors are between 0.9957 and 0.9999. The method has proven useful in forensic cases with only small sample volumes or bloodstains.     

The politics of unemployment: Rates of unemployment and labour market policy

This article analyses the claims advanced by Robert McKenzie about the distribution of power in British political parties. It considers McKenzie's mode of analysis (with particular reference to Labour), his definition of terms, selection of evidence and interpretation of it. The major argument is that McKenzie over‐generalised from the events of the 1950s and 1960s and that subsequent events have severely undermined his thesis.     

Potenzielle Auslieferungshindernisse aus der MRK

Eine unzul?ssige Beschwerde gegen den Beschluss des Oberlandesgerichts ist, wenn die Verletzung in verfassungsgesetzlich gew?hrleisteten Rechten nach Art 2, 3, 6 und 8 MRK geltend gemacht wird, der Sache nach als Antrag auf Erneuerung des Strafverfahrens (§ 363a StPO) zu werten. Dem Betroffenen steht nur ein Erneuerungsantrag in Betreff ein- und derselben Sache zu. § 89 Abs 2 StPO gilt nicht für das Erneuerungsverfahren. Art 3, 6 und 8 MRK k?nnen unter eng begrenzten Voraussetzungen in Zusammenhang mit einer Auslieferung eine Konventionsverletzung bewirken.     

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The Effect of Household Wealth on Fertiliser Use in the Presence of Uncertainty

Previous studies of wealth effect on fertiliser use have produced mixed results on the direction of the impact. Our article looks at this issue from a different perspective by considering the presence of doubts, such as about the true content or general effectiveness of fertiliser. We show theoretically that there could be different responses between the high-wealth and low-wealth farmers. We analyse also the wealth effect empirically using household panel data from the Hebei province of China. The results indicate that the direction of wealth effect does indeed change across the different levels of farmers’ wealth.