Education and Career Satisfaction: Examining the Specifics of the Relationship Among Criminal Justice Graduates

Several studies have considered the source of job satisfaction across different types of criminal justice professionals. This article identifies factors related to job satisfaction among graduates from a criminal justice program. The authors use a sample of 236 criminal justice graduates to explore the role of education in reports of career satisfaction. Findings indicate that graduates who felt they received adequate training in the social sciences were more likely to report satisfaction with their careers. Perceptions of preparation for careers/graduate study also were related to job satisfaction. Perceptions of course availability and independent studies/research opportunities also played a role. Implications are provided.     

A Non-Essentialist Version of Legal Pluralism

The concept of legal pluralism has been touted by many socio-legal scholars as a key concept in the analysis of law. Yet, after almost twenty years of such claims, there has been little progress in the development of the concept. This article will argue that the underlying cause of this lack progress lies in the fact that promoters of the concept have relied upon function-based, essentialist concepts of law. It will describe the problems generated by such concepts and, following this general analysis, will review the versions of legal pluralism articulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Gunther Teubner. The critique of their versions of legal pluralism will lead into the posing of a non-essentialist alternative which avoids the conceptual problems of prevailing versions of legal pluralism, and provides a better tool for purposes of research and analysis of the relationship between law and society.     

The Politics of Governance in Higher Education: the Case of Quality Assurance

The politics of governance in higher education is dominated by a discourse of quality assurance which assumes the external regulation of academic activity to be the natural state of affairs. This article analyses the ideological origins of that discourse and its resonance with more general trends in the public management of welfare, the nature of the opposition from traditional university values, the stages in the translation of ideological advantage into specific forms of regulation, and the consequent shifts in the balance of power between the major players in higher education. Underlying this analysis is a framework which views the governance of higher education as an arena in which there is a continuing struggle for the control of high status knowledge through the functions of standard setting, evaluation and intervention.     

Navigating tensions in co‐production: A missing link in leadership for public value

New forms of public leadership are needed to design and implement co‐production of public value. We draw on narrative analysis to explore the barriers to developing the capacity for co‐production of public value in disadvantaged and vulnerable Indigenous communities and find that existing norms not only crowd out efforts at reform, but can work against them. In particular, we find that upward accountability and a focus on expert knowledge are the most problematic for co‐production of public value. We focus on how more traditional practices of public administration mediated the achievements of public leaders in their co‐production efforts when Australian governments introduced strategies for partnership with Indigenous communities for services design and delivery. The analysis suggests that creating a broader enabling environment of supportive logics would allow public leaders to engage more productively with inherent tensions between old and new ways of working.     

Good to share? The pecuniary implications of moving to shared service production for local government services

Shared services are often lauded as an efficacious means of reducing municipal expenditure and thereby improving waning financial sustainability. However, most of the extant theoretical and empirical work only considers costs and benefits at the level of the specific service in question and, hence, fails to capture many of the wider benefits and costs that might accrue to local governments. In this article we first build a schema to illustrate the benefits and costs of moving from separate to collaborative production at the level of individual local authorities. We then test two hypotheses drawn from the schema against a five‐year panel of expenditure data. We find evidence of increased expenditure in the order of 8 per cent that prima facie runs counter to the objectives of many municipal managers engaged with shared services. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for cooperative ventures between local authorities.     

The Liverpool Dock Strike, 1995–98: a resurgence of solidarity in the age of globalisation

As the 20th anniversary of the 1995–1998 Liverpool Dockers’ Strike approaches, this case of industrial action should not be dismissed as a reminder of yet another nail in the coffin of organised labour. Rather, this event needs to be viewed more optimistically in hindsight as a symbol that working-class consciousness and systems of solidarity had not vanished entirely from Britain after the crushing collapse of domestic manufacturing and the fall of the miners in 1985. Indeed, the Liverpool dockers invented a fresh campaign of industrial action at this time, led more from the ‘bottom-up’ than most other labour protests in the past. Fuelled by a cognisant awareness of both community and workplace experience within the context of popular historical memory, this industrial action played significant roles in reconfiguring and adapting solidarity in this new era of rentier, global capitalism. It is appropriate we recall working-class militancy in a city whose own historical narrative is often described as ‘exceptional’ when one reflects upon Liverpool’s long entrenched culture of opposition.     

In-between liberal authoritarianism and electoral authoritarianism: Hong Kong’s democratization under Chinese sovereignty, 1997–2016

On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the handover, Hong Kong’s transition towards a full democracy remains unsettled. Drawing upon the contemporary theories of hybrid regimes, this article argues that manipulations adopted by electoral authoritarian governments have become increasingly common in Hong Kong today. As Hong Kong’s elections, opposition activities, and media have been increasingly put under electoral authoritarian-style manipulations, the city-state is now situated in the “political grey zone” in-between liberal authoritarianism and electoral authoritarianism and its transition into a full democracy remains nowhere in sight. The case study of Hong Kong will help enrich the existing comparative literature on hybrid regimes by developing a new “in-between category” and offering an interesting case of democratization of sub-national polity.     

“Ethnic polarization and the limits of democratic practice”

While several scholars have speculated that ethnic bipolarity, as a particular type of diversity, is related to the weakness of democracy in multiethnic states there exist few studies that test this relationship. This article suggests that ethnic bipolarity, measured as the size difference of the largest politically relevant ethnic communities and as ethno-political polarization, is related to whether a state exhibits tendencies to limit democratic participation. In cases where the size difference between groups is small or polarization is high there exist incentives to limit full democratic contestation. In the face of international and domestic pressures to politically liberalize, numerically dominant yet demographically insecure groups will seek to democratize only enough to satisfy the minimum needs of transparency while preserving their incumbent position. Using a panel of 121 countries between 1991 and 2014, the results of this analysis suggest that ethnic bipolarity and polarization are a strong predictor of whether a state institutionalizes procedures associated with competitive authoritarian regimes.     

Raíces Del Sur: Cultivating Ecofeminist Visions in Urban New Jersey

ABSTRACT

Significant research has been devoted to analyzing community gardens, including their benefits and problems. This article contributes to debates about community gardens by using concepts from feminist geography and food justice research to reflect upon the challenges and possibilities of community gardening in small, peripheral cities with large immigrant populations. We argue that these concepts provide a useful framework to enact ecofeminist visions through community gardens, especially in places dominated by immigrant populations that are particularly marginalized in the present political era. Our case study garden, Raíces Del Sur, was located in the City of Passaic, a low-income, post-industrial urban center surrounded by suburbs in Passaic County, New Jersey. As activists involved in the making of the Raíces Del Sur community garden to different degrees, and as researchers committed to an ecofeminist vision, we draw attention to the need for greater ecofeminist engagement with community gardening initiatives in cities throughout New Jersey.