Grammar Schools,a Policy of Social Mobility and Selection—Why?

Initially, four plausible reasons for introducing selection in secondary education are examined, three of which are irrelevant to contemporary debates about expanding grammar‐school education. These are: first, to ration education in less advanced economies; second, to increase the supply of skilled labour within an expanded national elite; third, as part of a ‘segmented’ system of education. A fourth—increasing upward social mobility—is open to two objections: first, the May government's proposals are so limited as to have little likely impact on mobility and, second, upward mobility in the twentieth century was possible only because of structural change in the British labour market, and that will probably not continue in this century. Finally, it is argued that attempts to select the ‘best’ in any activity or skill are necessarily highly imperfect, and are far less accurate than testing who does and does not meet some minimum level of competence.     

Ecosocialisms,Past, Present and Future: From the Metabolic Rift to a Reconstructive,Dynamic and Hybrid Ecosocialism

John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues have recently argued that the project of ecosocialism should be understood in terms of a “prefigurative” and “first stage” of red-green thinkers whose insights have largely been transcended by their own work on the metabolic rift. Rift scholars have further argued that “second-stage” ecosocialists should push back against “idealist” deviations occurring amongst historical materialists concerned with the production of nature, socionatures and “hybridity,” as well as more or less all engagements with literatures on eco-technological transitions, industrial ecology and the like, which are implicated in supporting “green capitalism.” This paper critically evaluates these claims. In each case, it is argued, rift scholarship is narrowing the possibilities for interdisciplinary engagement and for thinking in dynamic and reconstructive terms about red-green futures. It is our sense that an ecosocialist vision of just transitions has to be conceptualized as a diverse, dynamic, iterative and always incomplete affair. Anthropocene ecosocialisms are inevitably going to involve co-producing, making and remaking hybrid social ecologies on an irreducibly restless, turbulent and warming planet. We argue that what follows from this is the necessity to both critique and recuperate the better insights of hybrid political ecology and ecological modernities.     

Location‐Efficient Mortgages: Is the Rationale Sound?

Location efficient mortgage (LEM) programs are an increasingly popular approach to combating urban sprawl. LEMs allow families who want to live in densely populated, transit‐rich communities to obtain a larger mortgage with a smaller down payment than traditional underwriting guidelines allow. LEMs are premised on the proposition that homeowners in such “location‐efficient” areas can safely be allowed to breach underwriting guidelines designed to prevent mortgage default because they have lower than average automobile‐related transportation expenses and more income available for mortgage payments. This paper employs records of more than 8000 FHA‐insured mortgages matched with data on various measures of location efficiency to test this proposition. The results suggest that it does not hold and that LEMs—like other low‐down‐payment mortgage programs—will raise mortgage default rates. This cost must be weighed against any potential anti‐sprawl benefits LEMs may have. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

An Experiment Testing the Relative Effectiveness of Encouraging Voter Participation by Inducing Feelings of Pride or Shame

Prior experimental research has demonstrated that voter turnout rises substantially when people receive mailings that indicate whether they voted in previous elections. This effect suggests that voters are sensitive to whether their compliance with the norm of voting is being monitored. The present study extends this line of research by investigating whether disclosure of past participation has a stronger effect on turnout when it calls attention to a past abstention or a past vote. A sample of 369,211 registered voters who voted in just one of two recent elections were randomly assigned to receive no mail, mail that encouraged them to vote, and mail that both encouraged them to vote and indicated their turnout in one previous election. The latter type of mailing randomly reported either the election in which they voted or the one in which they abstained. Results suggest that mailings disclosing past voting behavior had strong effects on voter turnout and that these effects were significantly enhanced when it disclosed an abstention in a recent election.     

Managerial Tacit Knowledge,Individual Performance,and the Moderating Role of Employee Personality

This study investigates the relationship between knowledge-sharing mechanisms, managerial tacit knowledge, and individual performance in the Malaysian public sector. Moderation effects of employee personality on these variables were also examined. Findings from 308 Malaysian public sector managers suggest that individual performance is influenced by levels of accumulated managerial tacit knowledge (LAMTK), which were moderated by employee personality traits. The findings also show that individual performance has an impact on the effectiveness of knowledge-sharing mechanisms.     

Pedagogy and deliberative democracy: insights from recent experiments in the United Kingdom

A growing body of research suggests the existence of a disconnection between citizens, politicians and representative politics in advanced industrial democracies. This has led to a literature on the emergence of post-democratic or post-representative politics that connects to a parallel seam of scholarship on the capacity of deliberative democratic innovations to ‘close the gap’. This latter body of work has delivered major insights in terms of democratic design in ways that traverse ‘politics as theory’ and ‘politics as practice’. And yet the main argument of this article is that this seam of scholarship has generally failed to explore the existence of numerous pedagogical relationships that exist within the very fibre of deliberative processes. As such, the core contribution of this article focuses around the explication of a ‘pedagogical pyramid’ that applies a micro-political lens to deliberative processes. This theoretical contribution is empirically assessed with reference to a recent project that sought to test different citizen assembly pilots around plans for English regional devolution. The proposition being tested is that a better understanding of relational pedagogy within innovations is vital, not just to increase levels of knowledge, but also to build the capacity, confidence and contribution of democratically active citizens.     

Die Wiederherstellung des Marktsubjekts

The UK is generally considered a laboratory for styles of governance influenced by New Public Management: outsourcing, internal markets, targets, auditing. The shifts in governance style, and the new instruments that have accompanied them, were once synonymous with “Thatcherism” but have since been adopted and refined by New Labour. Early critical social scientific analyses deployed the Gramscian notion of hegemony to analyse this shift. This was followed by Foucault inspired analyses of “governmentality”. The latter focused more explicitly on the micro-level of conduct. This article follows that lead, but seeks to address the central puzzles thrown up by this experiment through Max Weber’s conception of a “bureaucratic revolution” and Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the constitution of a “market subject” via a “double movement”: a simultaneous loosening and tightening of control. The Weber-Polanyi approach allows us, we argue, to make the link more explicit between micro-level changes in the “conduct of life” (Lebensführung) and the meso-level instruments designed to bring about such a re-orientation of conduct. The article makes the case with reference to empirical material from a number of public services, notably education and health. Overall, the decisive factor is not a weakening of the state, but a change in its capacities and instruments.     

Partisan self-interest and electoral reform: The new Italian electoral law of 2005

In December 2005, Italy's mixed-member electoral system was replaced with a system of bonus-adjusted proportional representation. The reform conformed with rational-choice models in that it was imposed by the ruling coalition, which sought to bolster its own power interests. But the case illustrates the impossibility of reducing such power-based motivation to a single goal, such as seat maximization. Power is shaped by many factors, and electoral systems influence many of these. This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the various power-oriented considerations that may operate in electoral reform. It then analyses the role these played in Italy. It argues, in particular, for the need to take account of coalition dynamics when studying such processes.     

Hans Jonas: A Study in Biology and Ethics

Hans Jonas was a philosopher who looked nihilism in the eye and courageously stood his ground. He did so by volunteering to serve against the Nazis in World War II, by discovering the links to nihilism in his thought of his teacher Martin Heidegger and by developing a novel philosophy of nature that took its lessons from both Aristotle and Darwin. Jonas’s philosophy of organic nature – his rehabilitation of the soul as a relevant notion for biology – provided prescient insights for the still developing fields of bioethics and environmental ethics.

The domestic origins of human rights trials: A case study of the Second Boer War

What explains decisions taken by states around the world to prosecute members of their own armed forces for human rights violations? The dominant trend in existing literature suggests that a “justice cascade” best explains the growing prevalence of human rights trials. However, while norm diffusion offers some explanatory power in the contemporary era, other mechanisms are necessary to explain many early human rights trials. Through an analysis of one of the first recorded instances of what we now term “human rights trials” — the court-martials of six British Empire officers for the murder of POWs, civilians, and a missionary in the Second Boer War — this article identifies other crucial mechanisms driving prosecutions that retain relevance in the contemporary era. I find that signaling to domestic audiences, both at “home” and in recently conquered territories, can be critical motivators in elite or government decisions to pursue human rights trials.