Sentence disparity in the federal courts and the adoption of sentencing guidelines

Pressure in the 1970's to reform the sentencing process can be attributed to a change in perceived public sentiment regarding the utility of treatment and to the belief that sentencing disparity was a severe problem in the sentencing process. Primary reform occurred in the federal judicial system with the development and implementation of rigorous sentencing guidelines. An evaluation of sentencing patterns for one federal judicial district indicates that sentencing disparity was not severe. Most federal offenders are relatively mild and consistently receive relatively mild sentences.     

Written in Their Own Voice: First-Year and Older Students' Perceptions on Their University's Identity

Undergraduate students (218 women, 57 men) attending a Roman Catholic, suburban university with a Franciscan charism tradition completed open-ended items assessing their perception on the mission, vision, and values of their university. However, only 41 lower division, first-year students (33 women, 8 men) and 29 upper division students (22 women, 7 men) actually wrote about different aspects of their school's identity. Qualitative themes emerged in regard to students' assessment of their school identity, such as university mission activities are perceived important, and overall support for different institutional values within the university community.     

Business as usual

The tech stock crash of 2000 discredited the new economy as business model. This article introduces a journal special issue which takes up the challenge of putting new economy developments into this post-crash perspective and establishing long-run continuities, without discounting the importance of what happened. This article opens the debate by highlighting two themes in the articles that are collected together in the special issue: first, it discusses what was and is the new economy in the USA; second, it examines the relevance and resonance of the new economy in Europe.     

Shareholder value and Financialization: consultancy promises,management moves

In the pages of the daily financial press, 'shareholder value' is a loose rhetoric. For business consultants who sell financial metrics and implementation, shareholder value is also a product and a promise that purposive management action will be rewarded. This paper begins by considering the consultant's promise and the more guarded academic responses. It then presents empirics on micro performance and the meso limits to shareholder value and argues that most corporate managements cannot easily deliver what consultants promise and the capital markets demand. The paper ends by taking a broader view of value-based management as part of a process of financialization. If the results are contradictory and disappointing, a persistent gap between expectations and outcomes can nevertheless drive management behaviours, which change the world.     

Inside chinese bureaucracy: Civil service reform in the ministry of light industry

Since 1987, mainland Chinese ministries have been experimenting with a western style civil service system. The provisional guidelines published in that year called for the creation of a professional administrative class to be hired by open recruitment at the central and provisional levels of leading state ministries. The article is a micro-analysis of civil service reform in the Ministry of Light Industry and evaluates the first two years of reform in this ministry, which is responsible for supervising roughly twenty percent of China's production of durable consumer goods. The reform process has been gradual and incremental. The reforms were stimulated by the need to modernize China's state-run ministries in order to make them economically competitive with the mainland's growing private market sector. However, the article concludes that the reforms are too limited to make a substantial contribution to this goal.     

Terrorism and local police

The conflict in Nagorno‐Karabakh, an autonomous region contested by both Azerbaijan and Armenia, began in February 1988 following a series of strikes and demonstrations held by Armenians living there. However, the article shows clearly that the eruption of this conflict was a result of a long and gradual process that goes back to the first quarter of the 20th century.

By utilizing primary sources in various languages, this article exposes, describes, and analyzes the historical background of the events that led to the development of this extended and so far unresolved conflict. In doing so, it aims to examine the nature of this conflict and questions whether or not it is possible that the conflict is at the same time both territorial and national‐religious.

The article maintains that this conflict could have far‐reaching consequences for the future of the region and could ultimately alter constellations of power in Central Asia, in the Middle East, and even globally.     

Explaining lustration in Central Europe: a ‘post-communist politics’ approach

Lustration, the vetting of public officials in Central Europe for links to the communist-era security services, has been pursued most systematically in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Prior attempts to explain the pursuit or avoidance of lustration focused on the differing experiences of communist rule or transition to democracy. A closer examination finds that although the three countries in question had very different histories, there were identical demands for lustration in the early 1990s. These demands were translated into legislation at different times and varied considerably in the range of offices affected and the sanctions imposed. This article offers an explanation of this variation by focusing on the dynamics of post-communist political competition. We find that the passage of a lustration bill depended on the ability of its most ardent advocates to persuade a heterogeneous plurality of legislators that the safeguarding of democracy required it.     

What’s Law Got to Do With It? Economics,Nation-Building,and Human Rights in India and Beyond

The review essay examines three recently published books: Eleanor Newbigin’s The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship and Community, Narendra Subramanian’s Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India, and Yüksel Sezgin’s Human Rights Under State-Enforced Religious Family Laws in Israel, Egypt and India.     

Two Ecological Models of Academic Achievement Among Diverse Students With and Without Disabilities in Transition

School experiences can have positive effects on student academic achievement, yet less is known about intermediary processes that contribute to these positive effects. We examined pathways between school experiences and academic achievement among 117 low-income urban students of color, many with disabilities, who transitioned to other schools following a school closure. Using structural equation modeling, we tested two ecological models that examined the relationships among self-reported school experiences, school support, academic self-efficacy, and school-reported academic achievement. The model in which the relationship between school experiences and academic achievement is mediated by both school support and academic self-efficacy, and that takes previous academic achievement into account, was an excellent fit with the data. The roles of contextual and individual factors as they relate to academic achievement, and the implications of these findings, are discussed.     

Interpersonal Aspects of Justice in Relationships Between Consumers and Service Providers: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis

There is a controversy in the justice literature as to whether interpersonal aspects of justice are best represented as one construct (interactional justice) or two (interpersonal justice and informational justice). Using confirmatory factor analysis, we tested competing models of these constructs on a sample of healthcare consumers (n = 1919) with respect to their justice judgments of primary care physicians. We found that the single factor model (interactional justice) represented a better fit to the data. Our results do not necessarily contradict those of prior studies that have found a better fit for a bi-dimensional model in organizational settings, however. Instead, we are suggesting a contingency approach: the results may be due in part to the halo effect, which may manifest itself where consumers are unfamiliar with the service provider and with the complexities of that person’s role.