Doing Politics: Journey to the Centre of the (Academic) Universe: 20 Steps on Getting Published in Journals

As postgraduate students, researchers or junior lecturers, we all aspire to climb the highest peaks of academic life, to bask in our reflected glory and to have the (small disciplinary) world at our feet. Yet how do we assail those peaks? More often than not, they seem like sheer cliff faces or mountain ranges where the noviciate assemble at the bottom and gaze skywards in disbelief. When we look around at academics who have successfully scaled those heights, it is obvious that an effective publication record is essential, where refereed journal articles are particularly prized. Yet the numbers who gather to attempt their own ascent ask the question – is there any straightforward publication route the beginner can follow? Surely we cannot all be left to cut our own path without really knowing where, how, or even whether we should be travelling at all? This article argues that writing academic journal articles has been mystified. For many wanting to get started, it seems like the final destination is a secret place, somewhere that you might stumble across but one where the locals jealously guard the short-cuts. Here we aim to de-mystify journal article writing and provide 20 steps for the prospective writer. These 20 steps, however, provide more a series of useful directions than a definitive map of the terrain. As beginning academics themselves, the authors are, at best, merely amateur cartographers.     

The development and reform of court organization and administration

Over the past decade, court reform has become an integral part of the process of economic, political and administrative development. This article will examine the causes and consequences of court reform's new role. After reviewing the key national and international actors and examining the political and economic assumptions used to justify this initiative, the article will then argue that (1) the priority of judicial reform in the development agenda is linked not only to a theory of the role of courts and law in political and economic development, but also to the emergence of the field of judicial administration and court management, beginning in the United States and extending to a number of other countries; (2) the limitations built into the judicial administrative reforms implemented in OECD countries may be accentuated in the developing world; and (3) the very success of judicial administration as a field allows it to be used, in conflict with its fundamental tenets, to advance the political agendas of OECD countries as well as developing and transitional regimes. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Characteristic Features of Severe Child Physical Abuse—A Multi-informant Approach

Minor child physical abuse has decreased in Sweden since 1979, when a law banning corporal punishment of children was passed, but more serious forms have not decreased. The aim of this study was to examine risk and background factors in cases of severe child abuse reported to the police. Files from different agencies (e.g., Social services, Adult and Child psychiatry and Pediatric clinic) for 20 children and 34 caretakers were studied. An accumulation of risk factors was found. It is concluded that when the following four factors are present, there is a risk for severe child abuse: 1) a person with a tendency to use violence in conflict situations; 2) a strong level of stress on the perpetrator and the family; 3) an insufficient social network that does not manage to protect the child; 4) a child that does not manage to protect him or herself. Thus, multiple sources of information must be used when investigating child abuse.     

Postmodernism the Movie

Postmodern cinema, in its various expressions over the past three decades, represents a form of popular culture characteristic of the post-Fordist, globalized phase of capitalist development most visible in the United States. As a crucial dimension of media culture with its strong emphasis on new modes of technology, commodification, consumerism, and the society of the spectacle, filmmaking today celebrates increasingly diverse, experimental, and in some cases subversive types of aesthetic representation. It often questions established social hierarchies and discourses while at the same time depicting a society in the midst of turmoil, chaos, fragmentation, and violence - a social order that gives rise to and sustains a popular mood of anxiety, cynicism, and powerlessness. Postmodern cinema reflects and helps reproduce this milieu through its embrace of disjointed narratives, dystopic images, technological wizardry, and motifs dwelling upon mayhem, ambiguity, death of the classical hero, and breakdown of dominant values or social relations. While such film culture calls into question certain dimensions of the class and power structures, it simultaneously negates prospects for collective identity and subjectivity required for effective social change; its cultural radicalism is never translated into anything resembling political radicalism. On the contrary, postmodern cinema more than anything encourages a flight from politics - a cynical, detached, disempowering attitude toward the entire public sphere - typical of an increasingly depoliticized society.     

Social crisis and political decay: The contemporary American malaise

Abstract

By the 1990s American society had become more depoliticized than at any time in recent history, with the vast majority of the population increasingly alienated from the political system. This has occurred, ironically, at a time when deepening social problems—environmental degradation, homelessness, eroding public services, civic violence, threats to privacy—require extensive and creative political intervention. Further, it has taken place during a period of accelerated growth of higher education, informational resources, and communications. Most people seem to have lost hope for remedies to social problems within the existing public sphere. The political system has atrophied, with differences between the two major parties narrower than ever; citizenship is in drastic decline, as reflected in lower voter turnout, collapsing sense of political efficacy among ordinary citizens, and declining knowledge about the social and political world. This triumph of anti‐politics is not a matter of failed leaders, parties, or movements, nor of flawed structural arrangements, but mirrors a deeper historical process—one tied to increased corporate colonization and economic globalization—that shapes every facet of daily life and political culture. Depoliticization is the predictable mass response to a system that is designed to marginalize dissent, privatize social relations, and reduce the scope of democratic participation.