Reviews

Daniel S. Fogel (ed.), Firm Behaviour in Emerging Market Economies: Cases from the Private and Public Sectors in Central and Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Avebury, 1996, ix + 193 pp., £35.00.

Oldrich D#akedek et al., The Break‐up of Czechoslovakia: an In‐depth Economic Analysis. Aldershot: Avebury, 1996, xi + 208 pp., £32.50.

OECD, OECD Economic Surveys: The Czech Republic. Paris: OECD, 1996, viii + 121 pp.

OECD, OECD Economic Surveys: The Slovak Republic. Paris: OECD, 1996, viii + 159 pp.

Jan Winiecki (ed.), Five Years after June: the Polish Transformation, 1989–1994. London: The Centre for Research into Communist Economies, 1996, vi + 138 pp., £9.95.

Boris Rumer (ed.), Central Asia in Transition: Dilemmas of Political and Economic Development. London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996, xx + 286 pp.

Rosemarie Forsythe, The Politics of Oil in The Caucasus and Central Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 67 pp., £13.99.

Wei Ding et al., Bosnia and Herzegovina: Toward Economic Recovery. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1996, xxxi + 68 pp., £8.95.

Dmitri Steinberg, The Soviet Economy 1970–1990. A Statistical Analysis. San Francisco: International Trade Press, 1990, x + 350 pp., $115.00.

Abram Chayes & Antonia Handler Chayes (eds), Preventing Conflict in the Post‐Communist World. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1996, vii + 605 pp.

Trevor Findlay (ed.), Challenges for the New Peacekeepers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, xii + 170 pp., £25.00 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Ike Jeanes, Forecast and Solution: Grappling with the Nuclear, a Trilogy for Everyone. Blacksburg, VA: Pocahontas Press, 1996, xiv + 770 pp., £25.00.

David R. Marples, Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe. London: Macmillan, 1996, xxi + 179 pp., £14.99.

Jeffrey D. McCausland, Conventional Arms Control and European Security: Conventional Arms Control Agreements and Their Role in the Emerging European Security Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 76 pp., £13.99.

Christopher Williams, Vladimir Chuprov & Vladimir Staroverov (eds), Russian Society in Transition. Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996, xi + 315 pp., £39.50.

James O. Finckenauer, Russian Youth. Law, Deviance and the Pursuit of Freedom. London: Transaction, 1995, xvii + 237 pp., $34.95.

Rosalind Marsh (ed. & trans.), Women in Russia and Ukraine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, xvii + 350 pp., £55.00 h/b, £19.95 p/b.

Jeff Chinn & Robert Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Soviet Successor States. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996, xii + 308 pp., £48.50 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

Ladislav Holy, The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation. National Identity and the Post‐communist Transformation of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, x + 226 pp., £50.00 h/b, £16.96 p/b.

Francine Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims. Denial of a Nation. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996, xv + 288 pp., £14.95.

Yuri Feofanov & Donald D. Barry, Politics and Justice in Russia: Major Trials of the Post‐Stalin Era. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996, xiii + 346 pp., $62.95 h/b, $21.95 p/b.

Kathryn Hendley, Trying to Make Law Matter. Legal Reform and Labour Law in the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996, viii + 265 pp., $39.50 h/b.

Mark Lupher, Power Restructuring in China and Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, xv+ 335 pp., £34.50 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

Gary D. Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda: the BBC and VOA in International Politics, 1956–64. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, x + 224 pp., £35.00.

Hugh Ragsdale, The Russian Tragedy: the Burden of History. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996, xix + 306 pp., $61.95 h/b, $21.95 p/b.

Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, xiv + 335 pp., $49.50.

Derek Watson, Molotov and Soviet Government. Sovnarkom, 1931–1941. Basingstoke: Macmillan/New York: St Martin's Press, 1996, xxiii + 274 pp., £45.00.

Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov & Oleg V. Khlevniuk (eds), Stalin's Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936. London: Yale, 1995, xviii + 276 pp., £16.95.

Sekrety Gitlera na stole u Stalina: razvedka i kontrrazvedka o podgotovke germanskoi agressii protiv SSSR, mart‐iyun’ 1941 g. Dokumenty iz Tsentral'nogo arkhiva FSB. Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995, 254 pp.     

Science and technology in the transition: A review article

David A. Dyker (ed.), The Technology of Transition: Science and Technology Policies for Transition Countries. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997, ix + 292 pp., £37.50.

Mark Steven Frankel & Jane Cave (eds), Evaluating Science and Scientists: An East‐West Dialogue on Research Evaluation in Post‐Communist Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997, x + 226 pp., £37.50 h/b, £15.99 p/b.

Paul J. J. Welfens & George Yarrow (eds), Telecommunications and Energy in Systemic Transformation: International Dynamics, Deregulation and Adjustment in Network Industries. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer‐Verlag, 1997, xi + 501 pp., DM178.00.     

In the eye of the beholder: Meaning and structure of informal status in women's and men's prisons*

Applying an abductive mixed‐methods approach, we investigate the informal status systems in three women's prison units (across two prisons) and one men's prison unit. Qualitative analyses suggest “old head” narratives—where age, time in prison, sociability, and prison wisdom confer unit status—are prevalent across all four contexts. Perceptions of maternal “caregivers” and manipulative “bullies,” however, are found only in the three women's units. The qualitative findings inform formal network analyses by differentiating “positive,” “neutral,” and “negative” status nominations, with “negative” ties primarily absent from the men's unit. Within the women's units, network analyses find that high‐status women are likely to receive both positive and negative peer nominations, such that evaluations depend on who is doing the evaluating. Comparing the women's and men's networks, the correlates of positive and neutral ties are generally the same and center on covariates of age, getting along with others, race, and religion. Overall, the study points to important similarities and differences in status across the gendered prison contexts, while demonstrating how a sequential mixed‐methods design can illuminate both the meaning and the structure of prison informal organization.     

The Continuing Volatility of Devolution in Northern Ireland: The Shadow of Direct Rule

Since the establishment of devolution in 1999, Northern Ireland's power‐sharing governments have been fragile and prone to crisis. However, following a decade of relative stability and cooperation between Nationalists and Unionists at Stormont, hopes were high that the devolved arrangements had finally become embedded and more resistant to collapse. This optimism was dashed when Sinn Féin brought down the devolved institutions in January 2017. A snap election once again returned the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin as the largest parties and their inability to form a government resulted in yet another political stalemate. This article begins by outlining the pattern of political crises in Northern Ireland and assesses both the trigger factors and the responses. It then goes beyond the most obvious explanation for this continuing instability—that of the deep sectarian based divisions—and points to a number of other reasons for the volatility. These include issues such as the incomplete implementation of previous agreements, the impact of broader UK policies and the shadow of Direct Rule.     

The 2008 World Development Report and the political economy of Southeast Asian agriculture

This article seeks to determine what light the literature on the political economy of agriculture in Southeast Asia can shed on the analysis that underpins the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture for Development. It argues that work on Southeast Asia highlights gaps and problems in the Bank's account relating to the dynamics of boom crops, to the nature of social and political mobilisation around agriculture, and to the conceptualisation of agrarian transition.     

Making Decentralization Work: A Cross-national Examination of Local Governments and Natural Resource Governance in Latin America

There has been increased emphasis in the last three decades on the decentralization of natural resource governance decisions to local government in developing countries as a means of improving environmental quality, public service delivery, and the accountability of local officials. We examine the performance of decentralization of natural resource management services in a large sample of municipal governments in four Latin American countries. Our analysis includes a variety of factors discussed in the literature as important in influencing the responsiveness of government officials to local needs. We provide a nested institutional model in which local officials respond to incentives created by the structure of formal political institutions at both the local and national level. The results provide support for the importance of considering local and national institutional arrangements as these co-determine the political incentives within decentralized systems.

Talk is not cheap: Policy agendas,information processing,and the unusually proportional nature of European Central Bank communications policy responses

This article unveils the policy agenda of the European Central Bank (ECB) Governing Council as found in the speeches that Governing Council Members gave between 1999 and 2018. Using a dynamic topic‐modeling approached based on non‐negative matrix factorization, we demonstrate how the issues discussed by ECB Governing Council members have evolved over time, and how the general punctuation hypothesis (Jones, B. D. & Baumgartner, F. R. (2005). The politics of attention: How government prioritizes problems. University of Chicago Press) sheds light on what drives this process. We find that unlike policy outputs from many other policymaking systems, ECB communications evolve in a proportional manner. We attribute this finding to the information‐processing capacities of the bank. Our findings speak to the literatures on central bank communications, the evolution of policy agendas, and the application of topic models to speech texts.     

A Preliminary Forensic Entomological Study of Beetles (Coleoptera) in Interior Alaska,USA*

Forensic entomology uses knowledge of arthropod ecology to help solve crimes. There has been no published forensic entomological research in Alaska. We used one piglet carcass split in half to create two carcass plots in Fairbanks (~64.8°N, subarctic) that were sampled over a period of 59 days in 2019. Four pitfall traps were placed around each carcass, and four similarly arranged pitfall traps were placed 40 m distant as controls. Traps were emptied approximately weekly covering the first four stages of decomposition. We focused on adults of the larger-bodied (>9 mm) families and subfamilies of Coleoptera: Staphylinidae (subfamily Staphylininae), Carabidae, and Silphidae. A total of 621 specimens were collected and processed: 29 staphylinines, 210 carabids, and 382 silphids. A one-way ANOVA showed no significant difference between the mean numbers of staphylinines or carabids caught in carcass versus control traps. Silphids showed significantly greater mean number of beetles caught in carcass traps relative to control traps. Four species of Silphidae were documented, but contrary to similar studies, the vast majority of specimens belonged to two species of Nicrophorus (N. vespilloides Herbst and N. investigator Zetterstedt). Each of the three target taxa showed a peak in the number of specimens collected during the bloat stage of decomposition despite the carabid peak being driven by a phytophagous species.     

Bystander reaction to women fighting: developing a theory of intervention

This article explores accounts of bystanders to female-on-female public violence. Group interviews with participants in the night-time economy are carried out. Whereas men tend to respond to the discussion topic of female-on-female violence with laughter, this laughter reveals ambivalence and discomfort as much as amusement. Men seem to negotiate the tension between the expectation that they should intervene in emergencies and a catalogue of costs that attend intervention. Female bystanders appear to have a different set of concerns. They talk about feelings of shame at the interpersonal and the group level. Women cite the public spectacle, and the opportunity for men to demean or sexualize women, as reasons for intervention. The article concludes with some recommendations about the importance of exploring female violence in its own terms, beginning with a series of identified moral and social dilemmas incurred within possible third-party intervention.