Interdiction and Indoctrination: The Counter‐Terrorism and Security Act 2015

Lying behind the recent Counter‐Terrorism and Security Act 2015 is the phenomenon of foreign terrorist fighters which has sparked international and national attention. The 2015 Act deals with many facets of counter terrorism legislation, but its two principal measures are singled out for analysis and critique in this paper. Thus, Part I of the Act seeks to interdict foreign terrorist fighters by preventing suspects from travelling and dealing decisively with those already in the UK who pose a risk. Part V of the Act implements the second, broader aspect, of legislative policy, reflecting the UN emphasis on ‘Countering Violent Extremism’, through the statutory elaboration and enforcement of the ‘Prevent’ element of the long‐established Countering International Terrorism strategy, which aims to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting violent extremism. These measures are explained in their policy contexts and set against criteria of effectiveness, personal freedom, and accountability.     

The hijacking of a new corporate form? Benefit corporations and corporate personhood

Benefit corporations are a new type of corporate entity developed to remedy antisocial corporate behaviour by enabling mission-driven investors, managers and entrepreneurs to prioritize social values and contest the idea that profits are the only and best measure of corporate performance. To resocialize the corporate entity, the benefit corporation movement built enabling discourses and evaluation practices into the dominant model of corporate governance, shareholder value ideology. These discourses and practices expand both the purpose of the corporate entity and shareholders’ power to enforce that purpose. However, this paper argues that the effort to ‘re-embed’ the corporate entity by making it subject to non-economic claims expands the scope of corporate personhood and that doing so within extant power relations of the firm opens the door to alternative projects that undermine the benefit corporation movement's goal of fostering corporate social responsibility.     

Looking into the Day-To-Day Process of Victim Safety Planning

Although safety planning is a widely recommended intervention for domestic violence and sexual assault victims, there has been limited research on the safety planning process, content, context or effectiveness. This study builds on prior research to increase the understanding of safety planning in every day practice through focus group discussions with domestic violence and sexual assault advocates from a variety of settings. Five focus groups with 37 participants from a variety of settings discussed typical safety planning strategies and addressing the complexity of safety in challenging situations. Six main themes emerged with regard to typical safety planning strategies. Additionally, discussions revealed there are no widely accepted protocols or evidence-based strategies regarding how to assess and handle common but risky situations. Lastly, results indicate that risks are multi-layered and impacted by resources available to victims as well as civil or criminal justice system procedures, policies and victim status. It is essential that evidence based best practices and protocols be developed for safety planning for a number of high risk situations along with ongoing training, supervision and support. Future research is needed to examine whether, and how, safety planning best practices and protocols should differ depending on agency setting or delivery mode (e.g., hotline, case management, counseling) and geographic context.     

Geopolitics and the Regulation of Economic Life

The nation‐state should be a central unit of analysis for research into international and transnational regulation. Considering the research implications of this, we focus on the emergence stage of the regulatory process. We discuss how knowledge is contested in discussions between states over regulatory problems. We argue that a range of factors, not just a narrowly conceived national interest, influence their incentive to cooperate. Research is needed into whether regulatory problems at this level pose new or additional issues for states. Other stages of the regulatory process need to be similarly examined, likewise the interaction between the stages themselves.     

Implementing Environmental Sustainability in Local Government: The Impacts of Framing,Agency Culture,and Structure in US Cities and Counties

This article focuses on the organizational factors of environmental sustainability implementation in local government. We investigate the interactions, as well as direct and indirect impacts, of the framing of environmental sustainability and organizational culture and structure on implementation outcomes. We use a survey of 217 city/county planners and managers in 146 randomly selected American mid-sized cities and counties. The survey was specifically designed to tease out organizational features and their impacts. We model these impacts using structural equation modeling. We find that horizontally and vertically integrated organizational structure supports two essential dimensions of organizational culture: innovation adoption and consensus building. These cultural traits positively impact the framing of environmental sustainability at the core of organizations’ logic, which in turn significantly supports implementation outcomes. These findings provide important insights into city/county managers seeking to promote sustainability, and provide a base for future studies of the organizational factors of implementation.     

An investigation into the spatial elemental distribution within a pane of glass by time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometry

Advances in the technology employed for the manufacture of glass have resulted in a final glass product with little variability in terms of its physical and optical properties. For example, the refractive index of Australian float glass tends to lie between 1.5189 and 1.5194. It has therefore become necessary to complement physical and optical methods for forensic glass comparison with instrumental elemental analyses. In a previous study, time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry has been shown to offer potential for the analysis of glass particles as small as a few tens of microns across. In this study, the three-dimensional homogeneity of a sheet of float glass is described, and consequences for forensic elemental analysis of glass particles of such size are explored. Variation in Si, Ca, Mg, and Na levels immediately under the nonfloat surface was observed, with the variance accompanied by a decrease in refractive index.     

Factors Associated with Separation and Ongoing Violence among Women with Civil Protective Orders

This study examined a large sample of women recruited out of court at the time they received a civil protective order to better understand relationship status after obtaining a protective order (PO) and factors associated with protective order violations. Results are consistent with prior research suggesting that the protective order may be the impetus in separating from the abusive partner for some women, while for other women it is part of the separation process. Results also indicated that five out of ten women who did not continue a relationship experienced a violation while seven out of ten women who did continue a relationship with the PO partner experienced a violation. The majority of women felt safer and reported they believed the protective order was effective 13 months post-PO, regardless of relationship status. Furthermore, stalking played a significant role in separation from an abusive relationship and in protective order violations regardless of relationship status. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Wakeup Call: Strategic Management,Network Alarms,and Performance

New empirical evidence suggests that service performance is shaped by the strategies adopted by public organizations and the networking behavior of public managers. Strategy captures two central behavioral aspects of public organizations: the way in which objectives and actions are selected (processes), and an organization’s approach to service delivery (content). Networking is similarly concerned with the behavior of public managers as they interact with others. These twin themes are linked in an integrated study that explores the relationship between strategy, networking, and service performance within a sample of English local governments. The results show that strategy processes based on rational planning offer long‐run positive effects on public services, as does a strategic proactive stance.     

Gubernatorial elections and attitudes toward the police: State elections as focusing events

Traditional views hold that citizens’ attitudes toward the police are driven by local concerns. We contend that public attitudes toward the police are also responsive to systematic and periodic state-level political factors. We show that state elections as a focusing event alter periodically the determinants of attitudes toward the police. Using an ordered logistic regression model and data from national public policy surveys from 1998 and 1999, we find that gubernatorial elections have a significant effect on the state/police relationship. State elections create conditions that separate the bureaucratic and partisan functions of the state government. In turn, the bureaucratic performance of the state government is less related to police approval, while partisan contestation for control of the governor office (control of the state) is significantly and positively related to police approval. During gubernatorial election years, attitudes toward the state government account for more of the variation in police attitudes.