Identity crisis: Global challenges of identity protection in a networked world

Modern identity is valuable, multi-functional and complex. Today we typically manage multiple versions of self, made visible in digital trails distributed widely across offline and online spaces. Yet, technology-mediated identity leads us into crisis. Enduring accessibility to greater and growing personal details online, alongside increases in both computing power and data linkage techniques, fuel fears of identity exploitation. Will it be stolen? Who controls it? Are others aggregating or analysing our identities to infer new data about us without our knowledge or consent? New challenges present themselves globally around these fears, as manifested by concerns over massive online data breaches and automated identification technologies, which also highlight the conundrum faced by governments about how to safeguard individuals' interests on the Web while striking a fair balance with wider public interests. This paper reflects upon some of these problems as part of the inter-disciplinary, transatlantic ‘SuperIdentity’ project investigating links between cyber and real-world identifiers. To meet the crisis, we explore the relationship between identity and digitisation from the perspective of policy and law. We conclude that traditional models of identity protection need supplementing with new ways of thinking, including pioneering ‘technical-legal’ initiatives that are sensitive to the different risks that threaten our digital identity integrity. Only by re-conceiving identity dynamically to appreciate the increasing capabilities for connectivity between different aspects of our identity across the cyber and the physical domains, will policy and law be able to keep up with and address the challenges that lie ahead in our progressively networked world.     

Situated Justice: A Contextual Analysis of Fairness and Inequality in Employment Discrimination Litigation

A substantial body of sociolegal scholarship suggests that the legitimacy of the law crucially depends on the public's perception that legal processes are fair. The bulk of this research relies on an underdeveloped account of the material and institutional contexts of litigants' perceptions of fairness. We introduce an analysis of situated justice to capture a contextualized conception of how litigants narrate fairness in their actual legal encounters. Our analysis draws on 100 in‐depth interviews with defendant's representatives, plaintiffs, and lawyers involved in employment discrimination lawsuits, selected as part of a multimethod study of 1,788 discrimination cases filed in U.S. district courts between 1988 and 2003. This article offers two key empirical findings, the first at the level of individual perceptions and the second at the level of legal institutions. First, we find that neither defendants' representatives nor plaintiffs believe discrimination law is fair. Rather than sharing a complaint, however, each side sees unfairness only in those aspects of the process that work to their disadvantage. Second, we demonstrate that the very notion of fairness can belie structural asymmetries that, overall, profoundly benefit employers in employment discrimination lawsuits. We conclude by discussing how a situated justice analysis calls for a rethinking of empirical research on fairness. Audio recordings of respondents quoted in this article are available online. ¹      

Regulation of legal services in the e-world: a need to short circuit hot spots in ethics and novel practices?

This paper examines the professional and regulatory implications for legal practices of a rapidly evolving legal services marketplace shaped by new technologies and e-spaces. The paper focuses on three burgeoning areas in the delivery of legal services: (i) legal outsourcing; (ii) virtual law firms; and (iii) use of social media networking. The authors examine how Australian legal practitioners are utilising these new practices and technologies and the ethical implications of their use. The paper argues that the current regulatory framework in Australia does not adequately address the challenges and concerns raised by an increasingly borderless and e-based legal services market and thus calls for Australian legal regulators to remedy this deficiency as a matter of priority.     

IMPACTS OF THE FARM FINANCIAL CRISIS OF THE 1980s ON RESOURCES AND POVERTY IN AGRICULTURALLY DEPENDENT COUNTIES IN THE UNITED STATES

The farm financial crisis of the 1980s has had a major effect on agriculturally dependent areas in the United States. The crisis has resulted in a large proportion of producers leaving agriculture, in a substantial decline in the number of rural businesses, and in the support for rural service bases. Although extensively analyzed, the crisis' impacts on resources and poverty have not been adequately evaluated.
This paper examines such impacts using parameters derived from USDA data and from extensive surveys of producers, business operators, and employees in rural communities. The results show effects on populations, services, and income that could lead to a substantial increase in the rates of poverty in these counties.
The paper concludes that the crisis, if left unaddressed, may result in a long-term loss of economic opportunities, accentuated rates of poverty, and reduced potential for economic development in agriculturally dependent areas in the United States.     

Implementing 'Best Value': Local Public Services in Transition

This paper examines the impacts of the 'Best Value' regime on the management of local public services in the UK. It argues that the regime marks an important shift in the framework of national regulation of local authorities and the services they provide but that the initiatives developed by the councils which have been piloting the new framework reflect a variety of approaches to local implementation. This suggests not the arrival of a new, hegemonic 'outcomes-focused paradigm' but a more gradual transition characterized by the co-existence and interaction of hierarchical, market based and collaborative frameworks for co-ordinating service delivery. The search for 'citizen-centred' services is likely to lead to a shift in the 'mix of governing structures' with an increasing number of services structured around 'cross-cutting issues', specific client groups or local communities. However, these more integrated approaches to local service delivery frequently require internal re-structuring as well as more effective collabor-ation with other local service providers and with local people. They may not therefore lead to immediate improvements in public services and will require local and central government to embrace new approaches to learning.     

WTO and China's Financial Services Sector

Financial services, particularly securities markets, insurance and commercial banking, have played a crucial role in China's post-1978 economic reforms. China has so far established a market structure and a legal framework, and has a growing understanding of how financial services operate in the modern world economy. We will review China's progress in financial services reforms over the last 22 years, describe the commitments China has made to gain WTO entrance, and then evaluate the potential benefits and costs to China's financial sector of WTO accession. We conclude that even with the substantial challenges presented by greatly increased post-WTO foreign competition, China will benefit from the WTO because of a number of factors including a growing pool of well-trained personnel, lessons learned from domestic and foreign development experiences, increasing Chinese economic strength, and continual advancement of China's financial infrastructure.     

Attentiveness to television news and opinion change in the fall 1992 presidential campaign

This paper examines the extent to which attention to television news impacted affective evaluations of presidential candidates during the last two months of the 1992 campaign. Our analyses show that attentiveness to campaign news significantly influenced evaluations in a manner consistent with the tone of news coverage for each candidate. We disaggregate the data by party and ideology, however, and discover this effect to be conditional, depending critically on the character and intensity of political predispositions. Throughout the paper we emphasize the interplay between political predispositions and the valence of network coverage, underscoring the contingent effect of media messages. We conclude with a brief discussion of our results and stress the importance of partisan reinforcement, which we found was a major consequence of news media reception during the fall 1992 campaign.