Working on the Ground. A Collective Biography of Feminine Subjectivities: Mapping the Traces of Power and Knowledge

In this paper we map the traces of power and knowledge as we read them at play in our own memories and as we make sense of them from a Foucauldian perspective. Our question here is twofold: how might we use Foucault to read our embodied memories of power and knowledge; and how might we use the analysis of those stories to enable us better to see the implications of Foucault's writing for the analysis of subjects' enmeshment in power/knowledge relations? We use as the ground of our analysis our own embodied memories of achieving ourselves as appropriate(d) subjects (as girls and women, in relation to men--fathers, lovers, and husbands). Our trajectory in this paper is double. First, it has been towards uncovering the ways in which girls and women might be said to be powerful, even when they are complicit in their own subjection. Second, it has been to show that when Foucault defines all acts of power to involve the possibility of resistance and freedom, and he takes the opposite, a state of domination, to arise from 'economic, political, or military means', he has not fully acknowledged the extent to which the repeated, minute accretions of everyday practices can generate sedimentations of lines of force that may also be understood as a state of domination.     

Postmodern Jurisprudence: Contesting Genres

It has become a common place of contemporary legal theory, particularly postmodernist legal theory, to reject modernist jurisprudence’s assumption of law’s disciplinary autonomy. Within this enthusiasm for interdisciplinary approaches to law, what is less common is detailed analysis of precisely how interdisciplinarity is figured, rhetorically and epistemologically, in the discourse of contemporary legal theory. It is with a view to detailed analysis of this kind that this paper emerges. Its aim is to explore in detail how interdisciplinarity might be figured, and with what consequences, in the jurisprudence of postmodernity. The particular site of this exploration will be Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington with Shaun McVeigh’s Postmodern Jurisprudence: the Law of Text in the Texts of law. Published in 1991, this text remains widely influential – it has become a contemporary classic in its genre. It is not the intention of this paper, however, to represent this text as exemplary. Rather, this paper intends to read this text in its particularity, to focus on its particular vision of postmodern jurisprudence. Specifically, this paper argues that Postmodern Jurisprudence figures interdisciplinarity in terms of genre; and that this understanding of interdisciplinarity is problematised by the unacknowledged contradictions between the different conceptions of genre – one associated with Jacques Derrida and the other associated with Jean-François Lyotard – which the text invokes. This paper argues that the project of postmodern jurisprudence – as title and as label – appears rather differently if it is imagined, on the one hand (following Derrida) according to the logic of the passe-partout and, on the other hand (following Lyotard), according to the logic of the differend. The paper concludes that this internal tension should at least give us pause for thought when approaching the complex phenomenon of interdisciplinarity in postmodern legal scholarship more generally.     

Barriers Inhibiting Industry from Partnering with Universities: Evidence from the Advanced Technology Program

This paper describes a small, unique set of project data that was assembled as part of a larger study on universities as research partners. Herein, we summarize, to the extent possible, our interpretation of what the project data reveal about barriers, intellectual property (IP) concerns in particular, inhibiting industry from partnering with universities.     

The Impact of Petition Signing on Voter Turnout

Generally speaking, campaign-related contact motivates voters. One form of such contact not much explored in the voter mobilization literature is the petitioning for ballot initiatives that occurs with considerable frequency in about half the states and even more localities. Using newly-available data that allow us to match individual petition signers with their subsequent election behavior, we explore the role of having had a hand in a ballot measure’s qualifying stage in propelling individual voters to the polls. Specifically, we perform multivariate analysis on a random sample of 1,000 registered Arkansas voters, 1,100 registered Florida voters, and all 71,119 registered voters in Gainesville, Florida to measure the influence of petition-signing in spurring voter turnout. We find marginal effects in the statewide samples, but substantial and significant turnout effects in the Gainesville municipal election—an off-cycle, low-profile election. Furthermore, the effect of petition-signing—across all of our samples—is strongest among irregular, as compared to habitual, voters. These findings are in keeping with recent campaign mobilization experimental research and comport with previous findings on the “educative effects” of ballot measures on voter turnout.     

Policy analysis in the presence of distorting taxes

This article first describes the new literature in environmental economics on the so‐called “double‐dividend” and then explores its implications for a broad range of economic issues. This literature reveals that in a second‐best, general‐equilibrium setting, environmental measures raise costs and prices and thereby reduce the real wage. This rise in the cost of living reduces slightly the quantity of labor supplied in an already highly distorted labor market, giving rise to losses in social welfare that can be large relative to the basic gains from a cleaner environment. These losses can be offset to some extent by using revenues (if any) from the environmental programs to reduce existing taxes on labor. This same line of analysis applies to many programs and institutions in the economy that raise the cost of living: tariffs and quotas on imports, agricultural price‐support programs, monopoly pricing, programs of occupational licensure that limit entry, and many others. Thus, traditional, partial‐equilibrium benefit‐cost analysis appears, in many instances, to have unwittingly omitted from the calculations a potentially quite significant class of social costs. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy and Management.