Women's law: methods,problems, values

Conclusion The five areas of women's law that I have chosen to focus — money law, housewives' law, paid-work law, criminal law and birth law — represent different coordinating perspectives on women's legal position. These perspectives could certainly have been supplemented by others, for example, discrimination law. The feminist perspective can also be used in several traditional areas of legal science e.g., social insurance law, tax law, family law etc. I, however, have chosen a problematic other than the traditional one: first, to underline the importance of theory through the development ofconcepts anddiscussions of values in women's studies in general; and second, to indicate the especial fields in focus within the Institute of Women's Law at the University of Oslo. Through the perspective discussed in this article we think that we are on our way to describe, explain and understand women's legal status. The fundamental aim is to improve women's position both in law and society.     

Counter-Reform in the American Welfare State: Ideas,Institutions, and Progressive Taxation

The Nixon/Ford years were a pivotal period when severe fiscal problems emerged whose resolutions constrained the ambit of social policy afterward. A shared diagnosis of economic challenges produced divergent effects in the electoral fortunes of the major political parties and set the stage for an upward redistribution of wealth. Horizontal equity became synonymous with overall tax equity. This article examines how economic ideas acquire political traction.     

Navigating between Disaggregating Nation States and Entrenching Processes of Globalisation: reconceptualising the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia

This paper argues that the fluidity that permeates the contemporary international community is driven by especially political and economic globalisation, which has a huge impact on the relationship between the nation and the state. As the individual nation state is increasingly dependent on the international community for its economic survival this dependency on the global has as a consequence that it rolls back aspects of national sovereignty thus opening up the national hinterland for further international influences. These developments initiate a process of disaggregating state and nation, meaning that a gradual disarticulation of the relationship between state and nation produces new societal spaces, which are contested by non-statist interest groups and transnational more or less deterritorialised ethnic affiliated groups and networks. The argument forwarded in this article is that Southeast Asians of Chinese descent utilise these newly created spaces for setting up diasporic-like networks thus providing substance for transnational ethnoscapes or nations without states.     

Searching for “the usual suspects”: The role of discretion and target group constructions in the frontline of policy implementation

This study investigates the implementation of preventive policy targeting children. Based on longitudinal survey data we analyze how frontline workers assign meaning to core concepts of the policy and categorize the children and in this light how their exercise of discretion affects policy implementation. Many studies problematize the effects of limiting the discretion in the frontline. We identify a case where the policy is highly ambiguous, the definitions of target groups, core concepts, or central goals are vague, and the general steering of the frontline is not characterized by a lack of discretion but a lack of organizational boundaries to shape the discretion. This expands not only the policymaking role of the frontline but also becomes a barrier to developing a stronger preventive effort. The findings give nuanced insight into how organizational boundaries affect the discretion and target group construction in the frontline during frontline implementation of welfare policies.