Environmental crime and problem-solving courts

Environmental harms are by their nature complex and as such give rise to formal legal responses that range from simple regulatory intervention to multi-faceted court order. The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence of environmental courts and the development of judicial and tribunal expertise in this specific area. A wide range of sanctions are now available and being actively applied by such bodies. Moreover, in many instances, the philosophical approach adopted by these courts is that of problem-solving. The combination of specialist expertise and innovative methods of intervention are progressively revolutionising judicial practice in regards to contemporary environmental issues.     

The impact of national culture on organizational change: A danish case study

Contrary to the path-breaking work of Hofstede, it has been argued that management techniques can be exported between countries if fine-tuned to accommodate the host country's cultural values. This paper presents a case study of how a change program was developed to be compatible with the Danish value systems. Comparisons are made to what might have happened if the same change program had been conducted in two countries with quite different cultures: the U.S.A. and Republic of China (Taiwan).

Gert Hofstede⁽¹⁾ was one of the theoretical pioneers of international consulting. He collected data from 160,000 IBM employees representing 40 countries. Hofstede's analysis indicated that there are four values which can be used to categorize a country's culture:     

‘You're Just Treating Us as Informants!’ Roles,Responsibilities and Relationships in the Production of Children's Services Directories

Local authorities in England are required to make directories of services available to practitioners working with children and young people. This is against a background of continuing reforms intended to ensure that services are joined-up around the needs and choices of children, young people and their families. There are high expectations that more of these services will be delivered by organisations from theVoluntary and Community Sector (VCS), especially services for groups or communities that public sector agencies find hard to engage. This article reports and comments upon a regional study focusing on the production of children's service directories involving service providers and commissioners, as well as the producers of directories, in a series of facilitated workshop activities. The study highlights tensions between local authorities and service providers around how information about services is controlled, edited and accessed. We argue that current approaches to the provision ofdirectories are unlikely to have the transformational effects predicted by policy makers. This is partly because local authorities' traditional position (supported by the prevailing technologies) has meant that they have tended to monopolise the roles and responsibilities which in turn maintains their control of directory content. They do so in the face of increasing dissent from new and established providers. Moreover, current models of service directories fail to meet the emerging information needs of a range ofstakeholders including service providers, service commissioners and service users. Inconclusion we propose some questions to improve visibility and governance in the creation and maintenance of service directories.     

Flaws in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's rationale for supporting the development and approval of BiDil as a treatment for heart failure only in black patients

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) rationale for supporting the development and approval of BiDil (a combination of hydralazine hydrochloride and isosorbide dinitrate; H-I) for heart failure specifically in black patients was based on under-powered, post hoc subgroup analyses of two relatively old trials (V-HeFT I and II), which were further complicated by substantial covariate imbalances between racial groups. Indeed, the only statistically significant difference observed between black and white patients was found without any adjustment for potential confounders in samples that were unlikely to have been adequately randomized. Meanwhile, because the accepted baseline therapy for heart failure has substantially improved since these trials took place, their results cannot be combined with data from the more recent trial (A-HeFT) amongst black patients alone. There is therefore little scientific evidence to support the approval of BiDil only for use in black patients, and the FDA's rationale fails to consider the ethical consequences of recognizing racial categories as valid markers of innate biological difference, and permitting the development of group-specific therapies that are subject to commercial incentives rather than scientific evidence or therapeutic imperatives. This paper reviews the limitations in the scientific evidence used to support the approval of BiDil only for use in black patients; calls for further analysis of the V-HeFT I and II data which might clarify whether responses to H-I vary by race; and evaluates the consequences of commercial incentives to develop racialized medicines. We recommend that the FDA revise the procedures they use to examine applications for race-based therapies to ensure that these are based on robust scientific claims and do not undermine the aims of the 1992 Revitalization Act.