An interactive model of attitude and risk/benefit formation regarding social issues

Decision analysis has become an increasingly useful tool for aiding decisionmakers in dealing with complex public and private sector decisions involving multiple objectives and uncertainty. An outgrowth of this discipline is Risk Assessment, which in part concerns how citizen attitudes, risks, and benefits regarding social issues evolve. It is hypothesized that such attitudes and beliefs are determined interactively. A general simultaneous equation model is developed consistent with this hypothesis. A hybrid estimation model and the technique of ridge regression combined with two stage least squares are developed to estimate the model's parameters and tested using data from a psychometric survey of citizen attitudes and beliefs regarding contemporary socially sensitive issues. The results verify the validity of the model and technique. The utility of this model for the policy making process as well as future theoretical and applied research are discussed.     

The discipline of international relations: still an American social science?

This article reviews the state of the discipline of international relations. It starts from statements made by the editors in their editorial published in the first issue of this journal. The editors noted that there seemed to have been less adherence to positivism in international relations than in other areas of political science and that there was both more opposition to positivism and more methodological and epistemological openness in international relations than in political science generally. The article outlines the current state of the field, focusing on the rationalist mainstream and then on the reflectivist alternatives, before looking at social constructivism, seeing it as the likely acceptable alternative to rationalism in the mainstream literature of the next decade. It then turns to examine whether international relations is still an American social science, before looking at the situation in the United Kingdom. It concludes that the editors' comments were indeed accurate, but that the fact that there is both more opposition to positivism in international relations and more openness in the UK academic community does not mean that the mainstream US literature is anything like as open or pluralist. The UK community is indeed more able to develop theory relevant to the globalised world at the new millennium, but the US academic community still dominates the discipline.     

New Labour: what's published is what counts

Books reviewed in this article:
Barrett-Brown, M. and Coates, K. (1996) The Blair Revelation: Deliverance for Whom?
Blackburn, R. and Plant, R. (eds) (1999) The Labour Government's Constitutional Reform Agenda.
Blair, T. (1996) New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country.
Brivati, B. and Bale, T. (eds) (1997) New Labour in Power: Precedents and Prospects.
Crewe, I., Gosschalk, B. and Bartle, J. (1998) Political Communications: Why Labour Won the General Election of 1997
Denver, D., Fisher, J., Cowley, P. and Pattie, C. (1998) British Elections and Parties Review, Volume 8: The 1997 General Election.
Driver, S. and Martell, L. (1998) New Labour: Politics after Thatcherism.
Ellison, N. (1994) Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics: Retreating Visions.
Gamble, A. and Wright, T. (1999) The New Social Democracy.
Geddes, A. and Tonge, J. (eds) (1997) Labour's Landslide: The British General Election 1997.
Giddens, A. (1998) The Third Way: the Renewal of Social Democracy.
Hay, C. (1999) The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring under False Pretences?
Hazell, R. (ed.) (1999) Constitutional Futures: A History of the Next Ten Years.
Jones, T. (1996) Remaking the Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair.
Shaw, E. (1996) The Labour Party Since 1945.
Taylor, G. (1997) Labour's Renewal? The Policy Review and Beyond.
Thompson, N. (1996) Political Economy and the Labour Party: The Economics of Democratic Socialism 1884–1995.
Worcester, R. and Mortimore, R. (1999) Explaining Labour's Landslide.     

Penal Boundaries: Banishment and the Expansion of Punishment

We use this article to argue for greater recognition of legally imposed spatial exclusion—banishment—as a (re)emerging and consequential social control practice. Although the new social control techniques that entail banishment are buttressed by a blend of civil, administrative, and criminal law, they are best understood as punitive in nature. This argument is supported by two empirical findings. First, interviews with the banished indicate that spatial exclusion often has significant negative consequences akin to those identified by Sykes (1958 ) in his seminal account of the pains of imprisonment. Second, court data show that the growing use of civil and administrative banishment has increased the number of criminal cases involving allegations of noncompliance. These findings suggest that analysts of punishment might usefully broaden their focus to include phenomena that combine civil, criminal, and legal authority, and are not defined as punishment by their advocates.     

HMG, AIOC and the Anglo-Iranian oil crisis: In defence of Anglo-Iranian

At the interface of big business and government, with whom does influence and responsibility lie? Rarely is the answer clear-cut, yet accounts of the Anglo-Iranian oil crisis of 1948-54 have often roundly blamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) for British mishandling of it. This article seeks to redress the balance. Whilst no apologia for AIOC policy, it contends that HMG should shoulder much more responsibility than hitherto allowed. From clandestine partnership through to sacrificial pawn, the government used the company as an instrument of foreign policy as it sought to marry the protection of AIOC interests in Iran with wider concerns for combating communism and promoting the Anglo-American 'special relationship'.     

Women’s perspectives on the value of a father’s initiative in shifting gendered practices within families

This paper explores the qualitative perspectives of women about a community embedded fathers’ initiative in Northern England. Projects to improve the well-being of men and their children are less common within the landscape of parent and child support, with mothers more often being the target recipients. Asking women about their perceptions of an initiative for fathers then offers original insights from women who are positioned as ‘related outsiders’, in that they were ‘outside’ the project but ‘inside’ the family and community. Findings suggest that women are able to see the positive impact of such a project, identifying that it offers a shared space for men and children, time for mothers without their children and can help with shifting roles and attitudes around childcare and emotional labour in the home. The initiative was also seen by the women as offering men more healthy means of coping, including men moving away from traditional hegemonic practices, which in turn shifted some women’s long held gendered beliefs about men as fathers. This research then offers a relational gendered backstory to a father’s initiative, demonstrating how such initiatives can potentially ‘undo’ gender and the positive implications this could have for families.