Employee buy-outs and privatization: Issues and implications for LDCs and post-communist countries of UK experience

Privatization has become an international phenomenon. Most attention has been devoted to privatization by stock market flotation or by sales to third parties. Management and employee buy-outs present a third main possibility for transferring assets from the public to the private sector. This paper discusses the scope for privatization buy-outs in LDCs and ‘post-communist’ economies in the light of conceptual issues and UK experience. The positive aspects of privatization by management and employee buy-outs concern: ownership incentives; the introduction of control mechanisms by institutional investors and various types of financing instruments; indigenous ownership, decentralized privatization; greater incentives in firms where specific skills are involved; the ability to improve trading relationships between a privatized supplier (the buy-out) and its former parent, which remains in the public sector where the supplier is heavily dependent on its former parent; and the general contribution of buy-outs to a redrawing of a state firm's spread of activities to create a more viable entity. The potential problems with buy-outs concern such issues as: absence of entrepreneurial skills; the scope of their applicability; the potentially restrictive effects of debt and debt-like finance; the need to deal with investment requirements of firms; the lack of personal wealth; the use of inside information by managers to purchase a firm at a price which is to the detriment of the public interest; and the possibility of social and political problems if individuals are perceived to enhance their personal wealth significantly as an accident of where they work. There are means by which many of these potential problems can be dealt with and the paper addresses these.     

State Constitutions, Freedom of Expression, and Search and Seizure: Prospects for State Court Reincarnation

This article examines the decisions of ten state high courtsin the areas of access to private property for expressive purposesand exclusion of the fruits of illegal searches and seizures.The analysis centers on two questions. First, are some statesrelying on their own constitutions to resolve individual rightsissues while other continue to follow the United States SupremeCourts interpretation of the federal Constitution? Second, havethe states that do rely on their own constitutions to resolveindividual rights issues developed an independently based stateconstitutional jurisprudence, or have they simply attemptedto circumvent decisions of the Burger Court? The authors findlittle evidence that the state high courts examined here havebegun, as yet, to develop an independent approach to state constitutionalanalysis.     

Are prisoners Clients?

Public servants should identify their clients. As a statement of modern practice it seems unobjectionable. The emphasis of modern management has shifted from die inputs and processes to the outputs and recipients of government services. The language of the public sector has been infused with the rhetoric of the private, with discussion of customers and clients, rather than, as previously, recipients and patients. In many places the benefits are apparent, with officials less concerned with ensuring that every minute process is satisfied and more directed to the needs of those whom they service. My concern here is not to challenge the notion that a concentration on clients and customers is desirable; in places it clearly is. Rather I want to suggest that while a client focus may be applicable in some facets of public policy it is not universally so. There are instances where the attempt to classify everyone as clients may be counterproductive and strip the concept of useful meaning.     

Challenging Institutional Denial: Psychological Discourse,Therapeutic Culture and Public Inquiries

ABSTRACT

The damaging effects of abuse in childhood were repeatedly emphasised in public hearings and in media coverage of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Testimony from earlier Australian inquiries, which documented widespread experiences of child maltreatment, particularly in institutions, also underscored the ongoing and often intergenerational impact of abuse. Taking institutional child abuse inquiries as a case study, this article examines how psychological and therapeutic concepts have been mobilised politically. It argues that therapeutically oriented and psychologically informed cultural narratives of childhood trauma and its ongoing effects have provided a framework for making sense of long-term experiences of adversity and suffering and have enriched attention to “the question of justice” for survivors of historical institutional child abuse.     

Book Reviews

Guy Edwards and J. Timmons Roberts, A Fragmented Continent: Latin America and the Global Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Table, figure, notes, bibliography, index, 274 pp.; hardcover $55, paperback $30, ebook $21. Owen Logan, John‐Andrew McNeish, and Axel Borchgrevink, eds., Contested Powers: The Politics of Energy and Development in Latin America. London: Zed Books, 2015. Tables, figures, bibliographies, index, 366 pp.; hardcover $95, paperback $28.95, ebook. Barbara Fritz and Lena Lavinas, eds., A Moment of Equality for Latin America? Challenges for Redistribution. Burlington: Ashgate, 2015. Tables, figures, bibliography, index, 284 pp.: hardcover $95.96, ebook. Mala Htun, Inclusion Without Representation in Latin America: Gender Quotas and Ethnic Reservations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Tables, figures, acronyms, appendixes, bibliography, index, 226 pp.; paperback $29.99. Koonings, Kees, and Dirk Kruijt, eds., Violence and Resilience in Latin American Cities. London: Zed Books, 2015. Figures, tables, 208 pp.; paperback $29.95, ebook. Miguel Carter, ed., Challenging Social Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Agrarian Reform in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Photographs, maps, tables, figures, abbreviations, bibliography, index, 544 pp.; hardcover $109.95, paperback $31.95. J. Patrice McSherry, Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s–1973. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2015. Notes, index, 229 pp.; hardcover $97.50, paperback $44.95, ebook $44.95. Bruce M. Bagley and Jonathan D. Rosen, eds., Colombia's Political Economy at the Outset of the Twenty‐First Century: From Uribe to Santos and Beyond. New York: Lexington Books, 2015. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index, 354 pp.; hardcover $100, ebook $99.99. Amy Reynolds, Free Trade and Faithful Globalization: Saving the Market. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Tables, abbreviations, bibliography, index, 198 pp.; hardcover $93, ebook $72.     

Ecologies of blood in Johannesburg vampire fiction

This essay reads two contemporary Johannesburg vampire narratives, the film Eternity (2010) and the graphic novel Rebirth (2012), as part of a body of fiction that sees post-apartheid Johannesburg as a laboratory for new forms of life. While recent Johannesburg science fiction has imagined the emergence of new and more fluid forms of being in Johannesburg, the vampire narrative employs a far older and more restrictive type of monster. By virtue of its intimate relationship to blood – with its mythical overtones of racial and national essence – and its peculiarly blank and limited form of being, the vampire is a productive figure for imagining whiteness. In this essay, I examine how the Johannesburg vampire registers the mutations of whiteness in the post-apartheid context. Located in a contaminated and contaminating city of hidden capillaries and networks, vampiric blood runs across and perforates the traditional blood bonds of race, family, and nation. Indeed, dependent on a precarious and potentially diseased resource, the Johannesburg vampire is always on the cusp of dissolving the very whiteness it figures. I am interested in the way in which these vampire narratives alternately reinforce and interrogate what I call the politics of prolongation; that is, in the ways in which their horizontal and entangled “haemopoetics” attempt to displace the genealogical poetics of blood that have traditionally suffused the colonial enterprise and its literature.     

Racial Inequality,Ethnic Inequality,and the System Involvement of At-Risk Youth: Implications for the Racial Invariance and Latino Paradox Theses

Drawing from the inequality and crime, racial invariance, and Latino paradox literatures, the effects of inequality on youth reoffending are examined. Specifically, hierarchical logistic regression models are estimated to determine: (1) whether racial and ethnic inequality have similar contextual effects on the continued delinquent behavior of at-risk youth and (2) whether these effects are specific to black or Latino/a youth residing in Maricopa County, Arizona (N = 13,138). Findings suggest that racial inequality increases reoffending while ethnic inequality decreases reoffending. Additionally, Latino/a youth are less likely to reoffend in areas characterized by high income and racial inequality. Structural theories of crime should continue to account for the importance of culture and the resilient responses employed by Latinos/as living in criminogenic environments.