The role of mandates in third party intervention

Conclusion Mandate, as a noun, is the charge that authorizes and legitimizes an intervenor's actions. The intervenor may act at the bidding of the disputants or of third party stakeholders. Mandate provides a functional taxonomy of intervenors—from go-betweens to conciliators to mediators to arbitrators to dictators. Mandate affords a perspective for analyzing initiation, process, and evaluation of intervention. Useful heuristics have been proposed for categorizing the ways in which intervenors restricted to persuasion, such as mediators, can attempt to change beliefs. Future work might seek to determine conditions under which an intervenor's persuasive abilities may change beliefs about available alternatives, about the probability that the alternative will lead to certain outcomes, and about the value of the outcome. Sanda Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio 44115.George T. Duncan is Professor of Statistics at the School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Penn. 15213.The authors thank Mark Kamlet for many valuable discussions, Linda Argote for her thoughtful suggestions, and Christina Duncan for her criticial reading.     

Reviews

John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, xi + 360 pp., £24.95, $29.95.

W. Lutz, S. Scherbov & A. Volkov (eds), Demographic Trends and Patterns in the Soviet Union Before 1991. London: Routledge, 1994, xl + 496 pp., £85.00.

Deborah Adelman, The ‘Children of Perestroika’ Come Of Age. Young People Of Moscow Talk About Life in the New Russia. Armonk, NY & London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994, xxii +193 pp.

Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, viii + 319 pp.     

Social skills training with young adolescents

It is hypothesized that young adolescents with social skills difficulties can be helped by group social skills training if a school setting is used and school staff are involved in selection and treatment. An intervention using group social skills training was run in a secondary school as part of the curriculum. The results of 9 treated subjects on three measures were compared with those of an equal number of subjects who had no treatment. Scores were computed before treatment, after treatment, and at follow- up. On two of the measures significant improvement was found in the case of the treated subjects, while there was no improvement in the case of the untreated subjects.Received B.A. from Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1966 and M.A. in 1983. Completed postgraduate professional training as a psychologist at the Tavistock Centre in 1971. He has previously worked as an educational psychologist and currently works as principal clinical psychologist at Peterborough District Hospital, Peterborough, PE3 6DA, United Kingdom. He has published papers in a number of clinical areas. Currently his main research interest is in social skills.He was previously associated with the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in London. His research interest is in person-centered therapy and in testing assumptions derived from the theories of Carl Rogers. He has published extensively in this area and is currently developing research into the process of psychotherapy.     

GDP Revisions and Updating Statistical Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa: Reports from the Statistical Offices in Nigeria,Liberia and Zimbabwe

Abstract

The quality of economic statistics in Africa has been likened to a statistical tragedy. Currently many statistical systems in Africa are being updated. This report from the statistical offices in Nigeria, Liberia and Zimbabwe documents that base year, data and methods used to generate GDP estimates currently date from 1990, 1992 and 1994. There is a growing need for macroeconomic statistics, but a rebasing of GDP estimates is costly and time consuming. The work to update economic statistics in Nigeria and Zimbabwe is still ongoing, while efforts to generate an authoritative estimate of the Liberian economy have proved unsuccessful.     

Constructing and contesting City of London power: NGOs and the emergence of noisier financial politics

Existing literature on the City of London has tended to focus on its ‘structural power’, while neglecting political and narrative agency. This paper acts as a corrective by presenting evidence to show that since the financial crash of 2008 the political terrain the City operates on has become more contested, crowded and noisier. The contribution develops a middle course between a positive assessment of the role of civil society in relation to global finance, and a more pessimistic reading. We demonstrate how macro-narratives and public story-telling both construct and contest City and financial sector power. In a new pattern since the financial crash, NGOs have moved from campaigns of limited duration and narrow focus, to a more sustained presence on macro-structural issues. Adopting a supply–demand framework for assessing governance and regulatory change, we look at the emergence of TheCityUK as a new advocacy arm and the strategies of three of the more prominent and focused NGOs that have mobilized in the aftermath of the crash: the Tax Justice Network’s (TJN) use of the ‘finance curse’; Positive Money on private endogenous money creation; and Finance Watch counterweight strategies at the level of the European Union. We suggest these mobilizations highlight the need for a more concerted and orchestrated construction of a global institutional civil society infrastructure in finance (a global financial public sphere) to achieve greater access, resources, scrutiny and oversight for a range of specialist expert NGOs.     

Youth Substance Use and Body Composition: Does Risk in One Area Predict Risk in the Other?

Both substance use and obesity are prevalent among youth. As youth age, substance use rates increase and over the past three decades, obesity rates among youth have tripled. While these two factors have both short- and long-term health impacts, little research has explored how substance use and obesity among youth may be related. This study explores the bi-directional longitudinal relationships between substance use and body composition. Participants (N = 704; 50.7% female) were mostly white (86.4%) with a baseline mean age of 14.7 years. Objectively measured body composition was used to calculate body mass index z-scores (BMI z-score) and percent body fat. Cross-lagged structural equation models, accounting for clustering at the school level, were run to determine the longitudinal association between body composition and self-reported substance use (alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana), adjusting for socio-demographic characteristics, pubertal status, and weight satisfaction. Baseline alcohol use predicted decreased BMI z-score at follow-up and a similar association with percent body fat approached significance. Baseline cigarette use predicted increased percent body fat. No longitudinal associations were seen between baseline body composition and future substance use. Our results suggest that substance use contributes to subsequent body composition; however, body composition does not contribute to subsequent substance use. Continued research that explores these relationships longitudinally is greatly needed.     

Public administration in the cross-hairs of evidence-based policy and authentic engagement: School closures in Ontario

Education policy affects communities across Canada. Changes in demographics, enrolment patterns, and pressures on education budgets have put school closures on the political agenda in many provinces. Implementing these policies is increasingly contested and conflict-ridden. Public administrators are at the cross-hairs of implementing evidence-based policies, based on authentic stakeholder input and engagement. This article examines two cases of school closure policy implementation in Ontario to illustrate the tension between these two important dimensions of public administration and challenges that must be overcome in this and other policy areas where evidence and engagement are increasingly important.     

Workplace violence in Hong Kong, China: nature, impact, and preparedness

This article reports a survey of workplace violence in Hong Kong. A sizable number of the 1,198 organizations that were questioned reported that they had experienced such violence over the 2 years preceding the study, but the problem was not prevalent. In both the private and government sectors, nonphysical violence happened more frequently than physical violence, and there was a reported lack of preparedness of many organizations to deal with the violence. Compared with private organizations, government organizations experienced more coworker and customer violence, but more private than government organizations believed that workplace violence caused the loss of key employees and clients. Correlation analysis found that a subculture of workplace violence appears to emerge over time, such that the more customer violence is experienced, the more is coworker violence, and the more the nonphysical violence, the more the physical violence. These findings are discussed with reference to international findings.