Employee buy-outs and privatization: Issues and implications for LDCs and post-communist countries of UK experience

Privatization has become an international phenomenon. Most attention has been devoted to privatization by stock market flotation or by sales to third parties. Management and employee buy-outs present a third main possibility for transferring assets from the public to the private sector. This paper discusses the scope for privatization buy-outs in LDCs and ‘post-communist’ economies in the light of conceptual issues and UK experience. The positive aspects of privatization by management and employee buy-outs concern: ownership incentives; the introduction of control mechanisms by institutional investors and various types of financing instruments; indigenous ownership, decentralized privatization; greater incentives in firms where specific skills are involved; the ability to improve trading relationships between a privatized supplier (the buy-out) and its former parent, which remains in the public sector where the supplier is heavily dependent on its former parent; and the general contribution of buy-outs to a redrawing of a state firm's spread of activities to create a more viable entity. The potential problems with buy-outs concern such issues as: absence of entrepreneurial skills; the scope of their applicability; the potentially restrictive effects of debt and debt-like finance; the need to deal with investment requirements of firms; the lack of personal wealth; the use of inside information by managers to purchase a firm at a price which is to the detriment of the public interest; and the possibility of social and political problems if individuals are perceived to enhance their personal wealth significantly as an accident of where they work. There are means by which many of these potential problems can be dealt with and the paper addresses these.     

Modelling public confidence of the police: how perceptions of the police differ between neighborhoods in a city

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a survey evaluating the views of 1322 residents of York, UK around their perceptions and attitudes towards crime, their local area, and the police with the aim of understanding the main factors affecting public confidence within the city. The study uses Structural Equation Modelling to develop several models which are evaluated to examine whether differences in public confidence in the police exist across disparate local communities with varying degrees of neighbourhood perceptions. The results indicate that even in a relatively small city such as York, the factors which most affect an individual’s views of the police can vary wildly depending on an individual’s perceptions regarding their local area. The results suggest that policing strategies aimed at improving public confidence must be altered depending on the views residents hold regarding their local communities.     

Drug offenders and criminal justice. Careers,compulsion, commitment and penalty

In the light of recent shifts in the availability of illicit drugs to, and use by, young people in the UK the article argues that current drug policy in the criminal justice system, which is fashioned around a model of problem or dependent use, is increasingly irrelevant as a diversionary (from punishment) mechanism. It is further suggested that many users of the key drug of the 1980s, heroin, have routinely eluded various realistic therapeutic/rehabilitative interventions because the model of problem or dependent use was refused by them, or, they were, in turn, refused by it. Despite the treatment ambitions of the British System of drug control, those seeking illicit pleasures and getting in trouble with the law have largely been subject to traditional judicial penalties. Finally, a re-incorporation of drug studies within general criminology and (youth) cultural studies is put forward.Paper presented to British Criminology Conference, Cardiff, July 1993     

Patterns of Policing and Policing Patten

In September 1999 the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland, chaired by Chris Patten, published its recommendations. This article examines the political context of policing reform, the contents of the report and the rejection of its core ideas in the Police (Northern Ireland) Bill published in May 2000. The central argument of the paper is that the Commission's radical model of policing – a network of regulating mechanisms in which policing becomes everyone's business – failed, because it gave insufficient attention, like much modern writing on policing, to the role of the state and the vested interests within policing. The overall outcome is that the Patten Commission has been effectively policed and Northern Ireland will be left with a traditional, largely undemocratic and unaccountable model of policing with most of the control resting with the Secretary of State and the Chief Constable.     

Identification of the Class Characteristics in the Handwriting of Polish People Writing in English

Abstract: An investigation was carried out to identify the class characteristics of Polish people writing in English and to specifically identify those characteristics that separate Polish handwriting from English handwriting. In the first stage, 40 Polish and 40 English handwriting samples were collected and systematically examined. In total, 31 features were identified that occurred in ≥25% of the Polish handwriting samples and therefore considered class characteristics. Of these, chi‐square analyses identified 21 class characteristics that occurred significantly more in Polish compared to English handwriting. Twenty‐one of the class characteristics in the Polish handwriting had similar constructions to the copybook pattern thus supporting the theory that class characteristics frequently stem from the taught writing system. In the second stage, an algorithm was developed using seventeen of the class characteristics that successfully discriminated between a further 13 Polish and 12 English handwriting samples.     

An overview of institutions for juvenile offenders in the Netherlands and their place within the Dutch system of justice

Abstract: This paper provides the reader with a concise overview of juvenile correctional institutions in The Netherlands. These institutions are operated by either state‐ or private‐sector entities as detention centers (providing temporary custody) or remedial centers (when extended treatment is needed). The Netherlands is in the midst of significant changes in its population makeup which have had a corresponding effect on the nature of juvenile institutionalization. Specialized treatment programs and facilities will be explored in this paper. An overview of Dutch juvenile law, police, courts, and delinquency forms the background against which the reader learns about juvenile institutionalization in The Netherlands.     

Refining the Influence of Language on National Attachment: Exploring Linguistic Threat Perceptions in Quebec

Fears related to a group's culture can negatively impact national attachment. This article brings new insight into minority groups’ national attachment by empirically exploring the influence of language threat perceptions on it. Quebec is used as a case because of its longstanding tensions with Canada. The results of the analyses not only demonstrate that perceiving French as threatened positively influences Quebecers’ support for independence and negatively impacts their feelings towards Canada, but the findings also permit the conclusion that it is an individual's linguistic perceptions that directly determine their national attachment rather than simply their linguistic group membership.     

Collaborative Institutions in an Ecology of Games

This article seeks to improve our understanding of policy institutions and cooperation by adapting Long's (1958) analysis of the ecology of games to the context of collaborative land use and transportation planning in California. The traditional institutional rational choice analysis argues that collaborative institutions reduce the transaction costs of cooperation among multiple policy actors. The ecology of games framework extends IRC by emphasizing the consequences of multiple institutions and identifies several reasons why collaborative institutions may actually reduce the amount of cooperation in existing policy venues. Analyses of survey data from policy actors in five California regions demonstrate that higher levels of cooperation in collaborative institutions are associated with lower levels of cooperation in other land‐use and transportation planning institutions.     

Double balloon enteroscopy in children:Diagnosis,treatment,and safety

AIM:To assess the feasibility and utility of double balloon enteroscopy(DBE)in the management of small bowel diseases in children. METHODS:Fourteen patients(10 males)with a median age of 12.9 years(range 8.1-16.7)underwent DBE; 5 for Peutz-Jeghers syndrome(PJ syndrome),2 for chronic abdominal pain,4 for obscure gastrointestinal (GI)bleeding,2 with angiomatous malformations(1 blue rubber bleb nevus syndrome)having persistent GI bleeding,and 1 with Cowden‘s syndrome with multiple polyps and previous intussusc...