Share and Share Alike? Hedge Funds,Human Rights,and Owning Enterprise in Britain

This article explores the meanings of ownership and shareholding in the context of the 2007 run on Northern Rock, its subsequent nationalization in 2008, and the resulting legal challenge brought by former shareholders. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources outside traditional legal and official doctrine, and from original empirical research, it focuses on the perspective and voices of local small individual shareholders in relation to shareholding, bank failure, and government responses to financial crisis. It tells the story of these individual shareholders against differing conceptions of share ownership rights and responsibilities, and from various angles, to show the many different subjectivities of corporate shareholding and ownership of enterprise of which orthodox legal and economic models take scant account. It concludes on a note of historic persistence in demand for proprietary shares in banking institutions, despite the differing levels of understanding and tolerance of equity risk among shareholders that our research reveals.     

Texas Christian University (TCU) Short Forms for Assessing Client Needs and Functioning in Addiction Treatment

The TCU Short Forms contain a revised and expanded set of assessments for planning and managing addiction treatment services. They are formatted as brief (1-page) forms to measure client needs and functioning, including drug use severity and history (TCUDS II), criminal thinking and cognitive orientation (CTSForm), motivation and readiness for treatment (MOTForm), psychological functioning (PSYForm), social relations and functioning (SOCForm), and therapeutic participation and engagement (ENGForm). These instruments facilitate optically-scanned data entry, computerized scoring, and rapid graphical feedback for clinical decisions. The present study (based on 5,022 inmates from eight residential prison treatment programs) examines evidence on scale reliabilities and measurement structures of these tools. Results confirmed their integrity and usefulness as indicators of individual and group-level therapeutic dynamics.     

Navigating the space between politics and administration: The informal practices of Ontario school board trustees

Through interviews with 25 school board trustees in Ontario, this article contributes to the growing literature that explores the politics-administration dichotomy at the local government level in Canada. While existing literature is oriented from the perspective of the local government administrator, we examine the relations between local government politicians and administrators from the orientation of the former to determine how they navigate the dichotomy, particularly in a context where it is arguably more contested. We identify six informal practices trustees adopt in representing constituents and confronting tensions inherent in their role, namely: navigating, influencing, listening, translating, informing, and uploading.     

Building a global southern coalition: the competing approaches of Brazil's Lula and Venezuela's Chávez

This paper will set out the two very different regional leadership strategies being pursued by Brazil and Venezuela, concluding that it is the Brazilian neo-structuralist vision that will have more success than the Venezuelan overseas development aid approach. The two different approaches to Latin American leadership point to a substantive difference in how the regional system should operate in geopolitical and geo-economic terms, with the Brazilians favouring a market-oriented system in opposition to Venezuela's statist option. Contestation for regional leadership as set out in the article emerges as an early indicator of a chilling of relations between Brazil and Venezuela and points to a future scenario where other regional states may be able to play off contending would-be leaders.     

Florida's open meetings law and its effect on the policy making process in dade county: The administrative perspective

Open meetings laws are designed to make the process of governmental decision making more accessible to the general public. The objective of this study is to explore the views of key governmental officials on the operation and effects of Florida's open meetings (sunshine) law. The interviews uncovered considerable dissatisfaction with many of its provisions. Florida's sunshine law is one of the most comprehensive in the country and can provide insight on the potential effects of other state or local sunshine laws. The analysis is based upon the administrative perspective of city managers, city clerks and city attorneys in Dade County, Florida. This convenience sample of Dade County administrators perceives that significant costs are imposed by the operation of the sunshine law. There is a clear consensus that the presence of the media alters the process of policy making, increases the amount and degree of political posturing, increases the time to reach consensus, and inhibits the candor and openness of the deliberations. The respondents report that the open meeting provisions are so burdensome that council and board members routinely violate its provisions in order to discuss sensitive issues in private.     

Oil,Coalitions, and Regime Durability: the Origins and Persistence of Popular Rentierism in Kuwait

While the canonical literature on oil wealth suggests that hydrocarbon windfalls encourage repressive despotism, Kuwait provides a case of an oil-rich autocracy governing instead through popular rentierism—that is, through a broad coalition of social forces, one that furnishes enduring loyalty from below while constraining abuses of state power from above. This paper provides a theoretically guided explanation for this exceptional outcome. I argue that the Kuwaiti regime’s coalitional bargains originated in the pre-oil era, when domestic opposition and geopolitical constrictions compelled it to forge new social alliances at the dawn of modern statehood. This inclusionary strategy mediated the subsequent effect of oil rents, which the regime used to institutionalize its mass base with costly material and symbolic side payments. Such popular incorporation bound large constituent classes to the regime’s survival, precluding the need for widespread repression. After 50 years, these coalitional bargains have also proven remarkably resilient, as social actors have continued to endorse the autocratic leadership despite economic crisis and wartime defeat.     

The Albanian Diaspora and security in the Balkans

The main theses of this article, completed on the eve of the NATO bombing campaign, remain relevant. With half of Europe's Muslim Albanians living outside Albania proper in Slavic and Greek Orthodox countries, the resultant risk of a broader Balkan conflict remains. Indeed, the sense of grievance of both Serbs and Albanians has been intensified by ethnic cleansing, bombing, dispossession, and polarization. Those like Kosovar shadow President Rugova, who were committed to multi‐ethnic compromise, have been pushed aside by the KLA. Increasingly, the long‐term solution in Kosovo appears to be one of independence from both Serbia and Albania with the rights of Serbs preserved by partition policed by NATO/UN forces.