Social integration: Approaches and issues

The World Summit for Social Development, to be held in Copenhagen in March 1995, will consider three closely inter-related themes: decreasing poverty, reducing unemployment, and enhancing social integration. With the support of the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) has been mobilising its worldwide network of scholars, activists, and development practitioners to promote reflection on major social issues, channel new information and ideas into the Summit preparatory process, and build public support for a successful Summit. To illustrate some of this work, we reproduce below the Summary of a Briefing Paper written by Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara.     

Track II Diplomacy: From a Track I Perspective

Huge changes are taking place in international diplomacy which have created an opening and a certain appreciation for the contributions that can be made by private citizens to international peacemaking. This article provides a snapshot of diplomatic thinking about Track II/nonofficial diplomacy, from interviews with distinguished American diplomats. As thoughts of two-way collaboration develop, it becomes increasingly important to be clear about the limits and potentially unique contributions of Track II. Open respectful dialogue between Tracks I and II is also necessary to overcome past resentments and to develop mechanisms by which the skills and insights of Track II can be fed into Track I, with greater effectiveness and integrity.     

Legal reforms appropriate for cohabitants and LATs

Cohabitants and LATs (couples who “live apart together”) do not fit the traditional categories and rules of our family law system. This article describes what we know about both cohabitants and LATs in the U.S., compares the two institutions, and makes recommendations about legal reforms with respect to each. For cohabitants the reforms would assimilate cohabiting couples to marriage after the passage of time, based on the evidence of their economic interdependence and the probability that there are children in their households. As to LATs, the reforms proposed are limited to those that would support the caretaking functions LATs perform for each other, resulting in benefits to society as a whole.     

Property and markets in Elmer Kelton novels

Literature is not for clear answers. Literature is for complicated questions. There is vital empirical data in literary texts—not data about economic fact, though there is some of that as well, but data about how people felt and thought and wrote about economic and market issues. If we care about that, if that is as important as Deirdre McCloskey has argued, we have a responsibility to find that data, to write about it, to share it, and to teach it (Skwire in Cato Unbound, 2012. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/07/02/sarah-skwire/bonfire-cliches).     

Transfiguring the golem: technicism,human relations technology,and the human project

The original Minnowbrook perspective is described as part of a broader human relations technology movement in which the organization of human activity could be accomplished without the negative features of bureaucracy—routinization, rationalization, depersonalization, mechanization, computerization. But, the problem is really not bureaucracy, it is technicism—the technological imperative. The article contrasts masculine and feminine perspectives on organizations and the implications of this contrast for wars between nation-states, human and organizational communication, and human relations technology. In this technicism era, public administered institutions are the best bet to hold together the fabric of society.