Seeing like an indigenous community: the World Bank's Agriculture for Development Report read from the perspective of postwar rural Guatemala

This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using ‘agriculture for development’ put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's framework, namely, its neglect of the non-economic forces that structure agrarian poverty, and its neglect of history.     

Early onset offending and later violent and gun outcomes in a contemporary youth cohort

Currently there is great concern regarding the high homicide rate and persistent weapon carrying among urban youth. Criminal career research has offered criminology an opportunity to understand offending as a process that has a beginning, middle, and end. Using that framework, the current study examined a contemporary cohort of arrestees and estimated the extent to which age of first arrest predicts future violent and gun offending. Net of demographic and offending variables, the results indicated that early onset was a significant predictor of serious violent offenses and weapon involvement. Theoretical and policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Criminalization of Aliens: Regulating Foreigners

Intergroup contact and conflict is inevitable in the context of global economic competition and geopolitical interests. Immigrant and migratory groups have particularly been subjected to unequal treatment by members of dominant host groups, generally as a means of promoting and protecting their own economic and political interests. Immigrants often serve as a dependent and secondary labor force, useful within fluctuating cycles of labor shortage, economic crises, and economic prosperity. Likewise, criminalization is one tool that perpetuates notions of “otherness,” which in turn maintains immigrant minorities as a secondary labor force; and justifies penal punishment of them. For instance, in the United States, Chicanos and Mexican immigrants have been exploited as secondary labor, and have also been more likely than many other groups to be swept up in the Criminal Justice System. Drawing on neo-Marxist perspectives and postcolonial notions of “otherness”, this paper examines the relationship between incarceration of foreigners and economic conditions, economic threat, population change, and otherness. As hypothesized, country level data suggests that factors such as a free market economy, population change, economic competition, and a concentration of immigrants in the population are related to the level of imprisonment of foreigners. Implications for further research are also discussed.     

Historical change and the administrative state: An analysis of the theoretical foundations of public administration

This article offers an explanation for the theoretical underdevelopment of Public Administration. It argues that Public Administration studies the relations among elements of the administrative state and between the administrative state and its environment dissociated from time. The ahistorical orientation of the discipline has drastically reduced its capacity for theory building.     

The Cuban family: principal sociodemographic features that have characterized its development and dynamics

"This study deals with the principal sociodemographic features which have characterized the development and dynamics of the Cuban family during the last decade. It also describes the way in which sociocultural changes taking place in Cuba have influenced the family. The article includes an analysis of average age at first marriage or union, types of marriage, changes in fertility rates (and how women contribute to these changes depending on their age), and the dissolution of the family unit." (SUMMARY IN ENG)     

Crime trends through two decades of social changes in Spain

Over the last two decades, the Spanish social fabric has undergone a variety of profound changes, which in turn may explain the rise in police-recorded crime and prison population figures. Although the rise in crime reported to the police has been higher for common offences—misdemeanors—, the mainstream media concentrates overwhelmingly in serious violent crimes—felonies—. Spain does not have an official agency responsible for conducting victimization surveys to measure crime trends as directly experienced by the citizens. Based on this methodology, our study shows that contrary to information gathered from police data, and despite social fabric changes, crime in Spain is decreasing. The present study also reveals the distorted public perception of this trend, which seems to respond to a repetitive coverage of serious crime by the mainstream media.