Getting Schooled: Legal Mobilization as an Educative Process

This article explores the role of formal education and specific legal knowledge in the process of legal mobilization. Using survey data and in‐depth case narratives of workplace disputes in China, we highlight three major findings. First, and uncontroversially, higher levels of formal education are associated with greater propensity to use legal institutions and to find them more effective. Second, informally acquired labor law knowledge can substitute for formal education in bringing people to the legal system and improving their legal experiences. The Chinese state's propagation of legal knowledge has had positive effects on citizens' legal mobilization. Finally, while education and legal knowledge are factors that push people toward the legal system, actual dispute experience leads people away from it, especially among disputants without effective legal representation. The article concludes that the Chinese state's encouragement of individualized legal mobilization produces contradictory outcomes—encouraging citizens to use formal legal institutions, imbuing them with new knowledge and rights awareness, but also breeding disdain for the law in practice.     

Eco‐Cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History

Eco‐Cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History. Edited by James Beattie, Edward Melillo and Emily O'Gorman (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. xvi + 323. 20 Illustrations. £65.00 (cloth).     

Uneasy freedom: Women's experiences of contraception

This article discusses the effect of available contraceptive methods upon women's lives. It quotes extensively from letters received from women who answered a press appeal for information. The main argument is that contraception is by no means the trouble free panacea it is often assumed to be. For many women, contraception can bring considerable mental and physical side- effects—pain, anxiety, discomfort. Women also have to deal with the patriarchal attitudes of the medical profession and—often unsympathetic—partners. The women's accounts show how experience of contraception can be a radicalising experience—feeding the beginnings of a feminist awareness.The article was written before the latest evidence of a connection between the pill and breast cancer was made known.     

Not searching,but finding: how innovation shapes perceptions about universities and public research organisations

Previous research about firms’ perceptions on the usefulness of public research has not distinguished between technological innovators and non-innovators. With the exception of openness of search, we find that factors shaping such perceptions differ in both types of firms. Non-innovators need market power and the presence of an R&D department to profit from public knowledge. Innovators need less sheltered environments and lesser R&D effort, though the availability of resources and absorptive capacity is necessary. Using a sample of 1,031 Spanish manufacturing firms, we conclude that practical experience in technological innovation enhances firms’ perceptions on the usefulness of public research, not directly but by enabling certain internal changes, i.e. it produces encounters between corporate choices and public research.     

Police Officers Do Not Need More Training; But Different Training. Policing Domestic Violence and Abuse Involving Children: A Rapid Review

Journal of Family Violence - Although the police have been identified as a key service provider when responding to domestic violence and abuse (DVA), very few studies have investigated their...