The Gender Ethics and Politics of Affection: The ‘Feminine’Melodramatic Mode in Walter Salles' Central do Brasil (1998)

This article reads Walter Salles's Central do Brasil (1998) through a reappraisal of the film's relationship to melodrama in order to emphasise the significance of the association of affect with ethical judgment in thinking about the complex and contradictory gender politics of the film, thereby challenging the conventional tension between pathos and logos. Using a number of filmic and psychoanalytic theories, this article argues that Central do Brasil's melodramatic search for a ‘space of innocence’ in the Sertão could offer less a nostalgic return to anachronistic forms of living than a survival strategy for living in late modernity. Finally, this article argues that Central do Brasil, while lamenting the state's withdrawal from the public sphere, calls for an ethical imperative that is associated with a ‘feminine’ responsible and generous capacity to embrace the other as a necessary form of social and political action for the redefining of citizenship in Brazilian neoliberal society.     

Sanctions Will Only Bolster Iranian Regime

As the US prepares new sanctions to stop Iran form obtaining a nuclear weapon, the partisans of popular sovereignty in the “green movement” continue to battle with the partisans of divine sovereignty fortified by the Revolutionary Guards. What does the “green movement” want? Will the regime be successful in crushing it? Will sanctions only bolster the clerical/military alliance instead weaken it? The first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran and several top reformist scholars address these issues.     

The reciprocal dynamics of organizing and sense‐making in the implementation of major public‐sector reforms

Abstract: Drawing on a longitudinal study from the early years of implementation of health‐care networks in Quebec, this article describes how public‐sector managers deal with complex challenges when both organizational structures and organizational strategies are radically transformed simultaneously. The new organizations studied had to completely re‐shuffle roles and responsibilities of their management teams while making sense of their new mandate of developing a population‐focused approach to health problems – all the time maintaining day‐to‐day operations. The four health‐care networks studied proceeded somewhat differently to meet these reciprocal challenges. The study reveals the importance of balancing organizing initiatives (focused on structures) with “sense‐making” initiatives (focused on strategies), of developing capacities for sense‐making through the creation of key “sense‐maker/sense‐giver” positions whose occupants are able to ensure that conceptual activities engage people working at different levels, even as organizational structures are in flux, and of mobilizing external constraints and influences as opportunities and resources in sense‐making and organizing. Sommaire : Se fondant sur une étude longitudinale des premières années de la mise en œuvre des réseaux de soins de santé au Québec, cet article décrit la manière dont les gestionnaires du secteur public font face à des défis complexes, alors que les structures et les stratégies organisationnelles sont radicalement transformées simultanément. Les nouveaux organismes étudiés ont dû complètement remanier les rôles et les responsabilités de leurs équipes de gestion et comprendre leur nouveau mandat d'élaborer une approche axée sur la population pour ce qui est des problèmes de santé, tout en maintenant leurs activités au jour le jour. Les quatre réseaux de soins de santéétudiés ont travailléà relever ces défis réciproques d'une manière assez différente. L'étude révèle l'importance de trouver un équilibre entre les initiatives consistant à organiser (axées sur les structures) et les initiatives consistant à interpréter les faits (axées sur les stratégies) ; de perfectionner les capacités à interpréter les faits grâce à la création de postes clés d'«interpréteurs de faits», dont les titulaires veilleraient à ce que des activités conceptuelles fassent intervenir les gens travaillant à différents niveaux même lorsque les structures organisationnelles fluctuent continuellement; et enfin de tirer parti des contraintes et influences externes comme autant d'occasions et de ressources pour interpréter et organiser les faits.     

Survival analysis: A survey

This paper is a survey of statistical methods used to analyze the length of time until a specified event occurs. These models have often been used to analyze the survival times (i.e., time until death) of medical patients, and so the term survival analysis is natural. In criminology, the main application of these models has been to analyze the time until recidivism, but many other applications are possible. The paper summarizes the statistical literature on survival analysis, and describes its applications in criminology. The methods are illustrated by an application to the prediction of time until recidivism for a sample of North Carolina prison releasees.     

Federalism Revised: The Promise and Challenge of the No Child Left Behind Act

Federalism in education has undergone significant changes since the Winter Commission. During the early 1990s, federal policy makers faced the challenge of organizational fragmentation and policy incoherence in public education. In the last 15 years, the intergovernmental system has evolved from one that is predominantly compliance‐driven to one that is performance based, as suggested by the congressional adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. While the former is often characterized by images of “picket fence” federalism and administrative silos, the latter remains very much a work in progress, with the promise of raising academic proficiency. This paper first examines the paradigm shift and then considers emerging politics in intergovernmental relations. The author explores the ways in which state and local policy makers are altering the rules governing education service provision in response to performance‐based federal expectations.