Dispute Resolution in a Worker Cooperative: Formal Procedures and Procedural Justice

While most research on workplace grievance resolution focuses on hierarchical settings, this study examines grievance resolution in a worker cooperative, a workplace mutually owned and democratically managed. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews and observations, this research explores how workers' perceptions of procedural justice influence their anticipated grievance strategies. Despite working side by side in the same organization, both men and women had very different experiences regarding procedural justice and dispute resolution. For men, working at a cooperative meant informal dispute resolution strategies, while the women cited the cooperative identity as empowering them to use formal grievance procedures.     

Do conditional cash transfer programs shift votes? Evidence from the Honduran PRAF

How do national social programs influence local voting? This study utilizes the experimental set up of a conditional cash transfer program to show that small, targeted cash transfers can have large electoral effects. The Honduran PRAF program allocated an average of $18 per capita per year to poor households within municipalities that were randomly assigned to receive the program. Although the program was administered at the national level, the program increased an incumbent mayor's re-election probabilities by 39%, without significantly influencing voting behavior in presidential elections. Moreover, the evidence suggests that transferring cash to poor households were more effective at increasing political support than interventions providing public goods for poor villages.     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Resident Mothers and the Moral Dilemmas they Face During Custody Disputes

Recent scholarship has critiqued the tendency for separated mothers in custody disputes to be defined as hostile and alienating. Through the presentation of three case studies, drawn from an interview-based study with 21 women, we show how such pejorative constructions only arise when the conflicting gendered moral accountabilities of contemporary motherhood are overlooked. We found that mothers tend to believe that contact with non-resident fathers is generally in a child’s best interests. However, as a result of balancing complex moral obligations for the care of their children, they may raise questions about particular kinds of arrangements for contact with particular fathers. We argue, therefore, that family law practice will lead to better outcomes for children when professionals listen to the history of, and reasons for, mothers’ positions. To enable family law professionals to undertake this task, we offer an alternative interpretive framework for making sense of women’s stories. Should family law professionals make use of this framework, it is likely that they will understand that the positions mothers adopt are often the outcome of the difficult moral dilemmas they encounter in caring for their children, and that the reductive rubric of the ‘hostile mother’ needs to be treated with scepticism.     

Bank Charges and the Core Exemption: Office of Fair Trading v Abbey National Plc

Consideration is given to the treatment of the core exemption in Regulation 6(2) of the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 in Office of Fair Trading v Abbey National Bank. Certain aspects of the approach taken to the general limitation of the exemption to terms in plain intelligible language are looked at, before the scope of Regulation 6(2)(b) itself is addressed.