Talking about gender equality: Swedish women's discourses on the home front

Housework is a useful arena for a study of the manufacturing of everyday femininity and masculinity. This article focuses on discourses and practices concerning housework and its equal or unequal distribution between husband and wife. It analyses how gender equality ideologies are met with or assimilated into everyday speech and understandings among Swedish women. Interview accounts from two women of different ages and class positions are analysed in detail, using a discursive approach of analysis. Their ways of relating to available discourses on gender equality and femininity are contrasted, and related to the feminist project of fifty‐fifty sharing of housework and traditional discourses of separate spheres for women and men.     

Framing the Choice Between Cash and the Courthouse: Experiences With the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund

In this article I report the results of a quantitative and qualitative empirical study of how those who were injured or lost a family member in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks evaluated the tradeoff between a cash payment—available through the Victim Compensation Fund—and the pursuit of litigation. Responses make it clear that potential plaintiffs saw much more at stake than monetary compensation and that the choice to forego litigation required the sacrifice of important nonmonetary, civic values: obtaining and publicizing information about what happened, prompting public findings of accountability for those responsible, and participating in the process of ensuring that there would be responsive change to what was learned about how the attacks and deaths happened. The results shed light on the framing component of the transformation of disputes, and in particular on how potential litigants see the decision to sue, or not, as a decision as much or more about how they understand their relationship to their community and their responsibilities as a citizen as how they evaluate monetary considerations.     

Narrative Swerves: Grand Narratives and the Disciplines

Beer explores the legacies of Jean-François Lyotard's proclamation of the death of 'grand narratives', including the gendered dimension of their fall-out in a 'domestication' or everydayness despised because it is perceived to hold no possibilities for invention and newness. Beer does not, however, seek to reinvent 'domestication', but rather to explore the possibilities of the 'narrative swerve': a model of narrative as flexible rather than totalizing. Its possibilities emerge in the philosopher Richard Rorty's account of 'irony' (which he genders as a female trope) and, more powerfully, in the 'trickster' figure of folk-tale which takes on new resonances in postmodern feminisms and in contemporary literature. Rorty's ironist ultimately controls language and meaning through her characteristic device of quotation marks, containing words while disclaiming responsibility for them. A more enabling site for the trickster (conceived by Beer as an enabling feminist thought-tool and not as an identity for women to assume) and for the narrative swerve might, paradoxically, be found in scientific studies, which are, and despite their declared ideals of coherence and testability, fascinated with the relations of deviation and rule. Thus we find spaces-between and across the 'two cultures' as well as other cultural borderlines - for productive knowledge-testing and knowledge-making which are neither held fast by 'grand narratives' nor wholly abandoned in and to their dereliction.     

Designed to travel? Transition management encounters environmental and innovation policy histories in Finland

Transition management is a new concept for long-term policy design for the reflexive governance of socio-technical systems. It has recently attracted attention beyond its original context, the Netherlands. Yet, considering the local origins of transition management, it is also valid to question whether its assumptions concerning the governance of long-term transitions ‘travel well’. This article aims to explore early experiences of transferring the transition management model into the Finnish context on the basis of two case studies in different sectors. We suggest that the policy design changes when it is moved to another country and identify factors that influence the outcome of the transfer process.     

A Longitudinal Daily Diary Study of Family Assistance and Academic Achievement Among Adolescents from Mexican,Chinese, and European Backgrounds

A longitudinal daily diary method was employed to examine the implications of family assistance for the academic achievement of 563 adolescents (53% female) from Mexican (n = 217), Chinese (n =  206), and European (n = 140) backgrounds during the high school years (mean age 14.9 years in 9th grade to 17.8 years in 12th grade). Although changes in family assistance time within individual adolescents were not associated with simultaneous changes in their Grade Point Averages (GPAs), increases in the proportion of days spent helping the family were linked to declines in the GPAs of students from Mexican and Chinese backgrounds. The negative implications of spending more days helping the family among these two groups was not explained by family background factors or changes in study time or school problems. These results suggest that the chronicity rather than the amount of family assistance may be difficult for adolescents from Mexican and Chinese backgrounds.

Illegal Economic and Transit Migration in the Czech Republic: A Study of Individual Migrants' Behaviour

This article examines the essential features of international migration and the illegal working activities of migrants in the Czech Republic, with a closer insight into the processes of trafficking and smuggling. The research is based on semi-structured interviews with 63 illegal migrants, both from countries of the former Soviet Union (mainly Ukraine) and developing countries in 2005 and 2006. The main conclusion of the analysis is that, in many ways, the situation of illegal labour and transit migration in the Czech Republic is similar to that in countries with a longer experience as target countries for immigration.     

Between European and national role conceptions – the EU3 initiative regarding the Iranian Nuclear Programme

This paper addresses whether Germany, France and the UK (the EU3) – with the EU in the background – can shape their own approach to a common Europeanised position or even a European role conception regarding the Iranian Nuclear Programme. As the EU3 initiative appears situated between Europeanisation and national role conceptions, it seems that the EU3 members – after a coherent start – were finally inclined to readapt themselves to certain of their national role conceptions, resulting in a “mix” of national and European role patterns in the process leading up to 2016. Currently, this mix hints at still-prevailing hindrances involved in genuine European conflict management, although this outcome holds the promise of greater European coherence in the future.

Abbreviations: E3: Germany, France and UK (without formal support of the EU); EU: European Union; EU3: Germany, France, UK and the “High Representative for the Common Security and Foreign Policy of the European Union”; EU3?+?3: official designation of the contact group concerning the Iranian Nuclear Programme, consisting of the EU3, the USA, Russia and China; IAEA: International Atomic Energy Agency; P5?+?1: informal designation of the contact group concerning the Iranian Nuclear Programme, consisting of the EU3, the USA, Russia and China (Permanent Security Council Members [P5] plus Germany); UK: United Kingdom; UNs: United Nations; UNSR: Security Council of the United Nations     

Serving many masters: Public accountability in private policy implementation

In recent decades, the introduction of market principles has transformed public service delivery into a hybrid. However, little is known about how these changes are reflected in the attitudes of private implementing agents: The hybridization literature neglects individuals, and street‐level bureaucracy research has disregarded hybridization. This article extends Hupe and Hill's ( 2007 ) accountability regimes framework to introduce the market as an additional accountability regime alongside state, profession, and society. Using a configurational approach, the article explores how public and private food safety inspectors in Switzerland perceive the multiple norms for behavior stemming from their environment. Results suggest that the plural accountabilities of for‐profit street‐level bureaucrats can increase the dilemmas involved in their work. Under certain circumstances, for‐profit street‐level bureaucrats have particular difficulties reconciling rule pressure with market incentives and client demands. The extended accountability regimes framework fruitfully captures such dilemmas and helps identify suitable governance responses.     

Linking throughput and output legitimacy in Swiss forest policy implementation

Policy Sciences - Policy scholars typically assume that implementing actors should follow democratically decided rules in linear, predictable ways. However, this assumption does not factor...