Consumers Beware: Online Personalized Pricing in Action! How the Framing of a Mandated Discriminatory Pricing Disclosure Influences Intention to Purchase

Social Justice Research - Online businesses collect a wealth of data on customers, often without properly informing them. Increasingly, these data can be used for behavioral price discrimination....     

How Do Fictions Construe Our Laws for Us?

This paper on van Schooten’s book starts from the observation that citizens untrained in the law are yet able to live by the law, while not being part of the established interpretive community. They manage to live with fictions. Neither the discredited flow model of legal communication rejected by Van Schooten nor her own semiotic and institutional alternative theory manages to deal with this phenomenon in an adequate way. We can learn from Plato’s discussion with Crito in which the laws were imagined as speaking beings that there is a long philosophical tradition according to which laws are imagined to speak to us (while everybody knows otherwise). Working with this legal fiction in our own democratic societies requires an analysis of the way fictions construe our laws for us. Five of these fictions are then briefly mentioned: perfect or at least adequate legal knowledge; legislative intention; instrumental reason; the General Interest; and the rule of measures, not of men.     

Resilience and Criminal Justice: Unsafe at Low Altitude

Resilience is increasingly featuring in crime and justice policy discussions. It appears in the fusion of military, security and criminal justice. It offers an alignment by which individual actors are to be adaptive to the uncertain conditions of high risk societies. This article unpacks the application of resilience to criminal justice to reveal at least one negative implication: by placing the focus on self-directed change resilient subjects have limited transformative power. The concept of resilience involves discounting a longer view that challenges the dominant social institutions and orders of neoliberalism. In contrast, we propose the dignified subject and the re-assertion of the discounted institutional context at a level above the individual and community. This analysis supports renewing the transformative agenda of a critical criminology.     

Shaping factors of EU–East Asia relations

Six shaping factors will determine the short-to-medium term outlook for East Asia. Two of these are geo-political flashpoints, with implications beyond the region—North Korea and China–Taiwan cross-strait relations. For both of these at least some logic of a’ solution’ will need to be worked out. Intra-regional tensions between China, the fastest growing economy in the world, and Japan, the second largest economy in the world, will need accommodation and compromise. Fourthly, the relationship between the US and China remains ambivalent, veering between strategic partnership and strategic competition. Long term stability in the region will require that the US–China relationship becomes more predictable, which will only be possible if both players define their long-term interests innovatively and in different ways. Probably the most important shaping factor for the region is the domestic political economy of China. The nexus between Chinese economic growth and its domestic political stability needs to remain in tact—without economic growth no political stability, while stability is a precondition for continued growth. These five shaping factors together will determine the scope of multi-lateral problem-solving frameworks for the region. The Kuala Lumpur first East Asia Summit has shown the determination of leaders in the region to co-ordinate, share information and exchange views. However, the decision not to go beyond the current institutional set-up and to retain ASEAN’s centrality points to a continuation of the present ‘shallow’ integration for some time to come.     

Recalled peritraumatic reactions, self-reported PTSD, and the impact of malingering and fantasy proneness in victims of interpersonal violence who have applied for state compensation

The present study explores the associations between three types of peritraumatic reactions (dissociation, distress, and tonic immobility) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in a sample of 125 victims of interpersonal violence who had applied for compensation with the Dutch Victim Compensation Fund (DCVF). In addition, the confounding roles of malingering and fantasy proneness are examined. Results indicate that tonic immobility did not predict PTSD symptom levels when adjusting for other forms of peritraumatic reactions, whereas peritraumatic dissociation and distress did. However, after the effects of malingering and fantasy proneness had been controlled for, malingering is the only factor associated with increased PTSD symptomatology. Implications for policy practice as well as study strengths and limitations are discussed.