Experiencing impartiality to invoke fairness in the n-PD: Some experimental results

Subjects play a 5-person Prisoner's Dilemma both from an impartial point of view and in a regular fashion to determine whether 1) Concerns for fairness increase cooperative behavior; 2) Play of a Prisoner's Dilemma from an impartial point of view results in significantly higher levels of cooperation than does normal play; 3) Concern for fairness has greater explanatory force in explaining cooperation in impartial plays of the Prisoner's Dilemma than in normal plays; and 4) Experience with impartial play of a Prisoner's Dilemma sensitizes subjects to normative imperatives and results in higher levels of cooperation in subsequent normal plays of Prisoner's Dilemmas. The first and second hypotheses are supported, the third is inverted, and the fourth is not supported. Concern for fairness is demonstrated to play a complex role in explaining cooperative behavior in regular plays of the game. An earlier version was presented at the Annual meetings of the Public Choice Society, 1993 Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans; 20 March 1993.     

Deception and Mutual Gains Bargaining: Are They Mutually Exclusive?

Conclusion We have made great strides in recent years teaching more people — in classrooms, corporate training sessions, and actual negotiations — about negotiations, including how to be more ethical and how to ensure that integrative joint gains are not left on the table. The fact that we even need to write an article like this is an indication of the advances that have been made.Yet exactly because of these advances, more care needs to be taken to ensure that the subtle distinction between what is ethical and what is integrative is maintained. Being ethical in negotiations is more complicated than producing greater joint utility, and the techniques that are helpful for producing greater joint utility should not be made more complicated by the addition of ethical concerns. Each issue — ethics and mutual gains bargaining — can stand on its own, and benefits by being considered on its own. By maintaining this distinction, we believe each will have greater clarity and greater impact, and our teaching and training will be both better received and more valuable to those we teach.     

Workplace Monitoring and the Right to Private Life at Work

In Barbulescu v Romania, the European Court of Human Rights clarified the application of the Article 8 right to private life in the workplace, and the extent of the state's positive obligations to protect the right against workplace monitoring. The decision establishes that there is an irreducible core to the right to private life at work that does not depend on an employee's reasonable expectations of privacy, and sets out clear principles for striking a fair balance between Article 8 and the employer's interests in the context of workplace monitoring. This article considers the nature of states’ positive obligation to protect human rights at work, the scope of the right to private life, and the impact of the decision on domestic law of unfair dismissal.     

Book notes

Jeffrey Mourssaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy: When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Val Plumwood: Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.

Karen J. Warren, ed.: Ecological Feminism. London: Routledge, 1994.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson: A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Wendy Harcourt, editor: Feminist Perspectives on Sustainable Development. New Jersey: Zed Books Limited and the Society for International Development, 1994.     

The Learning Orientation of Primary Health Care Teams in the English National Health Service: Is This a Myth That Should Be Perpetuated?

A qualitative study of primary health care teams in the UK provides insight into their co-ordination or learning-orientation and how this affects member commitment, conceptions of ‘core’ and periphery, group identification and willingness to integrate roles. Even if the ideal of a learning-oriented primary health care team is viewed as a myth, it can still perform useful functions despite an apparent withdrawal of its official authorization by the Cameron-led government. The perpetuation of this myth maintains a tension between reality and potentiality in the hopes that inspire its pursuit as an ideal of team formation.     

Economic development and democracy revisited: Why dependency theory is not yet dead

It is generally accepted that there is a relationship between economic development and democracy which can be demonstrated by quantitative empirical evidence. The difficulties of validating the empirical claims derive not so much from the measures of economic development as from the measures of democracy itself. Our inquiry deepens the investigation of the relationship by 'unpacking' the dependent variable into separate measures of eight core values of liberal democratic government for 40 countries over the period 1970-1998. Our model assumes that the quality of liberal democratic government is not one-dimensional but can be measured across this range of values, so creating 'performance profiles' and demonstrating the likely trade-offs across distinct democratic values. The results of the analysis confirm that economic development has positive effects on democratic performance, but these effects vary across diverse aspects of performance and also across regions.     

International sex offender registration laws: research and evaluation issues based on a review of current scientific literature

In many jurisdictions, anyone convicted of a sexual offense is required to register with police, often for life. Nine different countries have now implemented sex offender registries in an attempt to protect the public from the perceived threat posed by sexual offenders. Yet such laws have been criticized as being overly inclusive, tying up limited law enforcement resources to track many offenders who pose little risk of sexual reoffending. This paper considers the available research evidence relevant to the effectiveness of such laws for the deterrence of sexual offending and the investigation of sex crimes. It is concluded that significant gaps persist in our knowledge of whether existing laws effectively reduce sexual offending or reoffending and that large-scale, well-designed studies of the impact of sex offender registration on rates of offending, the collateral consequences to offenders and their families, and the costs of such laws are needed.