Public meetings are often referred to as “rituals” to denote a largely symbolic activity with little concrete meaning. This essay explores how public meeting rituals may produce very real impacts on participants and pragmatic outcomes. Whereas tangible outputs of rituals are not always evident, ritual theory suggests that participants can derive latent meaning and significant comfort from their application. Although rituals serve to reify certain norms or control behaviors, they may also reaffirm civic values and encourage group cohesion. A deeper appreciation of public meeting rituals will enable participants and officials to respond more effectively to restructured or nontraditional formats as well as better deal with the challenges of maintaining participation when rituals lose their meaning.相似文献
In 2011, Japanese-Peruvian Keiko Fujimori (1975- ), daughter of the former president, Alberto Fujimori, almost won presidential elections in Peru. Ollanta Humala (1962- ), who identifies himself as indigenous and as a youth studied in “La Unión,” a Japanese-Peruvian school, defeated her. He had been an army officer; Keiko Fujimori, a congresswoman. She now hopes to win in 2016. This would make her Perú's first elected female president. What is the importance of a candidate's ethnicity or gender? Have such identity factors become meaningless or unimportant in Perú -- despite the historical reality of racism and gender inequality? To answer these quite general questions, this article focuses on history, multiculturalism, and law. Key points are enhanced through conversations with present and former state officials, authors, professors, students, and with the coordinator of the Japanese Immigration Museum at the Peruvian Japanese Cultural Center. Peru is a multiethnic nation-state and being a woman is not an obstacle to power.
Adaptations to coordination problems endogenous to political parties have established the cartel party as the emerging equilibrium type in modern Western democracies. However, these factors alone are insufficient to maintain such an equilibrium given the threat of defection. That threat is mitigated by three factors: historical changes in party form, systemic changes in the global economy and changed ideas about governments. Together, these changes produce both a cartel of parties and the cartel party organisational form, without requiring overt conspiracy. These speculations are mapped onto actual experiences of the UK, the US and Sweden. The theory of the cartel party is advanced by emphasis on the 'cost of production' of policies and the constriction of the policy-space over which parties compete. We also explain why a cartel of parties might be stable, notwithstanding the temptation to defection often attributed to cartels as multi-player prisoners' dilemmas. 相似文献
Xenotransplantation - the transfer of living tissue between species - has long been heralded as a potential solution to the severe organ shortage crisis experienced by the United Kingdom and other 'developed' nations. However, the significant risks which accompany this biotechnology led the United Kingdom to adopt a cautious approach to its regulation, with the establishment of a non-departmental public body - UKXIRA - to oversee the development of this technology on a national basis. In December 2006 UKXIRA was quietly disbanded and replaced with revised guidance, which entrusts the regulation of xenotransplantation largely to research ethics committees. In this article we seek to problematize this new regulatory framework, arguing that specialist expertise and national oversight are necessary components of an adequate regulatory framework for a biotechnology which poses new orders of risk, challenges the adequacy of traditional understandings of autonomy and consent, and raises significant animal welfare concerns. We argue for a more considered and holistic approach, based on adequate consultation, to regulating biotechnological developments in the United Kingdom. 相似文献
