Organising home‐based workers in the global economy: an action‐research approach

This article describes an action‐research project which has the multiple objectives of mapping the range of home‐based work in different countries, investigating the ways in which such work is embodied in local or international production chains, and developing a methodology which will facilitate the establishment of sustainable organisations of home‐based workers. The article focuses mainly on Latin America and Eastern Europe, though the project is also active in India and has begun to explore the possibilities of working in China.     

Public Involvement in NHS Inquiries

Opportunities for engaging the public have changed over the fifty years since the inquiry into the Ely Hospital, Cardiff. NHS inquiries, and inquiries more widely, tend to be called where events have led to public concern and loss of public confidence. Involvement of the public could therefore be assumed to form a part of restoring that public confidence. This paper explores the mechanisms for public involvement in NHS inquiries over the past fifty years, assessing the roles played by the public. It uses the framework outlined by Geoffrey Howe to examine how members of the public have been involved in four NHS inquiries. Findings suggest that the roles and mechanisms have varied, but that understanding the extent of public involvement is a dimension to assessing each of the potential functions of an NHS inquiry.     

“龙象并肩”:中印非传统安全合作

非传统安全合作是国际关系领域的新焦点。近年来,越来越多的国际关系学者开始关注日益凸显的非传统安全问题,包括恐怖主义、金融危机、跨国有组织犯罪、传染性疾病、气候变化、移民难民、复合性自然灾害、自然资源枯竭或跨界资源冲突等。非传统安全挑战严重威胁着区域安全,东亚和南亚地区也不例外。审视中国和印度这两个地缘相连的竞争大国之间的关系以及中印双边非传统安全合作,从传统安全角度看,长期以来存在的领土争议是阻碍中印关系发展的核心问题,而从非传统安全角度看,中印之间的合作交流却超过以往。中印之间存在的传统安全问题和非传统安全问题之间的关联,经济安全、能源安全、民族分裂主义与恐怖主义、水资源安全、流行性疾病、海洋安全、生态安全等领域是双方能够实现合作的非传统安全优先领域,而"和合主义"理念范式与"多元共赢"合作模式为中印之间的非传统安全合作提供了重要的理论指导,从而展示出中印共同携手发展的可能与前景。     

Difference revisited: Women,men, and religious discourse

The study of language as a ‘site of struggle’ has generated a burgeoning body of feminist research. Over the past decade the two concepts central to the feminist debate on language— language and woman—have come under scrutiny from a variety of theoretical fronts. Recognising the inherent instability of both these categories, this paper adopts a poststruc‐turalist approach to the discussion on gender and language in an examination of one area of gender contestation—religious proclamation. An analysis of the discursive construction of four preaching events shows the ‘gendering’ of the whole communicative process to be more complex and ambiguous than previous studies on gender and preaching have suggested.     

The robustness of the optimal weighted majority rule to probability distortion

This study identifies the optimal collective decision rule in a dichotomous symmetric setting, allowing for probabilities distortion as originally assumed by Tversky and Kahneman (Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 5(4):297–323, 1992). We show that previous results that identified the weighted majority rule as the optimal one, and did not consider subjective probabilities, are robust to such distortion in the sense that neither the rule nor the weights are changed.     

Passion,paternalism, and politics: DIY development and independent volunteers in Honduras

Independent development volunteers (IDVs) and their DIY development projects, although largely neglected in the literature, are part of an emerging movement of non-traditional agents within development. However, they are also participants in a deeply paradoxical industry; both a reflection of passion and commitment, and a paternalist and neo-colonial practice that reflects the messy realities of geo-political and cultural power and privilege. This article explores these debates, drawing on research with IDVs in Honduras. The intersection of passion, paternalism, and politics highlights the complex environments in which IDVs work, and the need to make them visible in discussions of development.