Multi-agency approaches in ‘criminogenic’ settings: the case of the Amsterdam Red Light District

This paper assesses the empirical evidence on multi-agency collaboration to reduce crime, uphold justice and improve safety in the so-called ‘Red Light District’ in the city center of Amsterdam, which has been a high crime area for decades. Three periods are analyzed: crime on the streets (1980s–1996); organized crime behind the front doors (1996–2007); and reconquering the Red Light District (2007–2011). The paper analyzes shifts in the definition and framing of central crime problems, causal assumptions, policy assumptions, and evidence on multi-agency collaboration and outcomes. Alongside positive outcomes, all three periods contain evidence on how difficult it is to forge and sustain alliances between government agencies; and to coordinate a shared focus on a single area and on a single topic. Furthermore, the final outcomes of these efforts are hard to measure with the exception of visible street crime. Finally, the paper contributes to the literature on Third Party Policing and multi-agency collaboration by looking beyond the police as the central actor and by widening the predominant instrumental focus to normative and political issues such as changing norms, priorities, and increasing and decreasing internal and external support for certain policy lines and actions.     

Solace for the Frustrations of Silent Citizenship: the Case of Epicureanism

Insofar as no democratic society can fully realize norms of free and equal citizenship, citizens in such regimes are likely to experience some degree of discontent with their political lives. This raises a second purpose for democratic theory beyond the usual focus on improving democratic institutions: the psychological issue of how ordinary citizens might find solace in the face of disappointment. Democratic theory is capable of providing solace because egalitarian commitments – equality, free speech, solidarity, and self-sufficiency – have a double potential: they not only ground efforts to democratize institutions, but when sublimated in apolitical form also have the capacity to generate a transcendence of the political form itself. In this essay, I pursue both ideas – the need for solace and egalitarianism's ability to provide it – through analysis of the way Epicureanism may have functioned for the ordinary, plebeian citizens in late Republican Rome.     

Embodiment and meaning: moving beyond linguistic imperialism in social semiotics

Social semiotic approaches to multimodality have tended to take language as the model for other modalities even when their professed aim is to move away from it. This kind of “linguistic imperialism” causes problems for theorising the relationship between the two basic semiotic planes of expression and interpretation in different modalities, and how the affordances of the expression plane relate to the meanings of the interpretation plane in each case, as well as in understanding the particular role of language in multimodal texts. The current paper brings together insights from semiotics, sociology of music and philosophy of language, as well as critiques of social semiotic approaches, in order to argue that the missing element in accounts of semiotic systems like language and music is the fundamental role played by embodiment in both these systems.     

You gotta move: advancing the debate on the record of dispersal

This paper summarizes the social science research on the record of housing dispersal programs since 1995. The research shows a consistently disappointing record of benefits to low-income households. Households moved out of high-poverty neighborhoods, voluntarily and involuntarily, show few or no beneficial effects in terms of economic self-sufficiency, health benefits, or social integration. The benefits of dispersal are confined to feelings of greater safety and satisfaction with neighborhood environmental conditions. We offer a framework for understanding the disappointing record of dispersal, highlighting its translation from social science diagnosis to policy, problems in the policy's implementation, its underlying theory of poverty, and the political context within which dispersal has been applied.     

Chinese foreign policy and American social science

Abstract

Karl Marx and Mao Tse-tung, C. Wright Mills, Barrington Moore, Jr. and Fei Hsiao-t'ung also described themselves as social scientists. Thus when Boardman contrasts radical scholarship with authentic social science he is merely using a debater's tactic, using a label to place his adversaries at a rhetorical disadvantage, trying to monopolize the term science for only his outlook on events.     

Patterns and issues in health care collective bargaining

Unionization of health care facilities has grown significantly over the last twenty years. More than 20 percent of American hospitals have one or more union contracts and an equal percentage of the industry's labor force is represented for collective bargaining purposes. Union membership is concentrated in the Northeast, Upper Midwest and Pacific Coast and is to be found particularly among large metropolitan hospitals. Although many different unions are actively organizing in the health care industry four labor organizations predominate: American Federation of State, County, Municipal Workers; Service Employees International Union; National Union of Hospital and Health Care Workers - District 1199; and the American Nurses Association.

One of the obstacles to union growth for many years was the absence of Federal legal regulation of labor relations. In 1974 Congress amended the so-called Taft Hartley Act to cover private nonprofit hospitals, the largest component of the industry. Since 1974 the application of Federal labor law has resolved old problems that arose from the lack of a basis to handle recognition disputes but at the same time created new issues. Among these issues are such legal questions as the legitimacy of the ANA to act as a labor organization, the proper bargaining classification for registered nurses, and the proper role in labor relations for hired consultants.

The growth of unions in health care raised concern that collective bargaining would impose onerous new burdens on an industry already hard pressed financially. Research indicates, however, that the impact on hospital costs have not been great -- perhaps on the order of an increase of 10 percent over what would be the case in the absence of unions. The greatest effects seem to be in the area of fringe benefits, working conditions, and the provision for grievance machinery.

Special problems have arisen in conjunction with the unionization of registered nurses. This particular category of health care workers occupies a strategic position in the hospital's work force. After a slow start nurse bargaining activity has come rapidly particularly as nonnursing unions such as 1199, SEIU, and the American Federation of Teachers have forced the ANA to respond to their efforts to make inroads among nurses.

Union growth in the industry seems to have stabilized for the time being without the prospect for much change in the remaining years of the decade. Incidence of conflict has been relatively low compared to other industries and this also shows little likelihood of change. While some visible signs of conflict over representation rights still remain collective bargaining is moving rapidly into an era of mutual accommodation.     

Chester barnard's concept of responsibility

This article discusses what Chester Barnard meant by responsibility, what he presupposed in his definition, and how it differed from his more general idea of morality. For Barnard, the delegation of responsibility was more important than the issue of authority, and, as he says, must precede it. The article attempts to explain why Barnard thought this, and what exactly he meant by it. In Barnard's mind the concept of authority was quite secondary to the importance of responsibility.     

A Human Security Peace-Building Agenda

International peace building in post-conflict societies has helped to bring armed conflicts to an end and reduced the recurrence of war. According to some scholars, peace building has therefore contributed to the apparent downward trend of major intra-state conflict in recent years. However, the liberal institutionalist values which underpin international peace building—emphasising democracy, free market economics and the liberal state—have raised a range of criticisms and challenges from scholars as well as local stakeholders in the societies in which peace-building programmes are deployed. In particular, the prevailing approaches to peace-building give insufficient attention to basic and everyday human needs, and promote externally conceived models of state institutions which are not always appropriate. This article explores the problems of contemporary peace building and argues that an alternative vision which draws upon the concept of human security and gives greater emphasis to welfare, livelihoods and local engagement can make peace building more legitimate and sustainable.     

Action in adversity: Responses to unemployment in Britain and Germany

A ‘satisficing’ model of response to adversity is used to compare the reaction of Britain and Germany to the common stimulus of large and visible increases in structural unemployment since the mid‐1970s. Initially, both countries responded similarly, spending lots more money on existing programmes. However, as dissatisfaction persisted, responses differed: British governments sought to achieve satisfaction by a trial‐and‐error search, introducing (and repealing) many programmes. By contrast, Germany tried virtually no new measures. The conclusion considers why the two governments should respond differently. It rejects explanations of economic differences or party differences. Institutional differences linked to legal requirements and budgets ‐ reducing flexibility in Germany and facilitating it in Britain ‐provide a better explanation, indicating that state structure is an important independent influence on the capacity of a government to respond to signals of dissatisfaction.     

Health care and democratization in Indonesia

Analyses of Indonesian democracy often emphasize elite capture of democratic institutions, continuity in oligarchic power relations, and exclusion of popular interests. Defying such analyses, over the last decade, Indonesia has experienced a proliferation of social welfare programmes, some with a redistributive element. This article analyses the expansion of social welfare protection by focusing on health care. At the national level, Indonesia has introduced programmes providing free health care to the poor and approved a plan for universal social insurance. At the subnational level, in the context of far-reaching decentralization reforms, politicians have competed with each other to introduce generous local health care schemes. Taking its cue from analyses of social welfare expansion in other East Asian states, the article finds the origins of policy shift in the incentives that democracy creates for elites to design policies that appeal to broad social constituencies, and in the widening scope for engagement in policymaking that democracy allows. The article ends with a cautionary note, pointing to ways in which oligarchic power relations and the corruption they spawn still undermine health care quality, despite expansion of coverage.