Engaging environmental turbulence: drivers of organizational flexibility in the armed forces

Since the transformation was set in motion to change Western armed forces from large-scale mechanized defensive organizations into smaller agile expeditionary crisis response forces, the call for organizational flexibility has rocketed. Yet, actual research into the key organizational drivers of flexibility has hardly been done. To bridge this gap, the present study has analyzed to what extent modular organizing and organizational sensing have contributed to flexible military crisis response performance. The study uses the Netherlands’ armed forces as a representative example of a contemporary Western crisis response organization and empirically draws upon its recent operational experiences. It has uncovered that within most mission contexts, modular organizing acts as a facilitator for the organizational sensing process. Yet, within highly turbulent crisis response missions, organizational sensing becomes the predominant driver, stimulating ad hoc solutions that challenge existing structures, available technology, and standard procedures.     

Performing Arts Review: Statement of Scope and Purposes

Recent research on arts and cultural audiences has attempted to go beyond the traditional social science surveys that assess attitudes or attendance to capture an understanding of how audiences actually experience the arts and what benefits or impacts those experiences provide. The study reported here contributes to this growing body of research by presenting in-depth case studies of four individuals and their chosen cultural experiences at various times through their lives. The authors used Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology to guide the informants through highly structured but open-ended interviews designed to prompt self-reflection and elaboration of what each experience meant to them. Informants were selected from a larger database because of the richness of their interviews and the insight these interviews offer to the understanding of people's engagements with culture. By considering multiple cultural experiences for each informant, it was possible to gain a clearer sense of the context in which these experiences took place and how informants were impacted personally. In addition, the case studies showed how informants' respective struggles with personal and identity issues moved with them across their cultural experiences.     

PERFORMING ARTS MANAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION

The aim of this article is to analyze the impact of EU cultural policies on a EUropean (capitalized "EU" meaning only EU member states) cultural identity. Although EUropean integration began as an economic project, the EU has developed more and more statelike features over time and has brought the question of democratization to the fore. Such questions, in turn, led to questions of what constitutes the EUropean demos and how to conceive of its collective identity. The EUropean identity has developed in addition and as a complement to the national identities of the member states. The article argues for EU cultural policies that foster plural, multiple, and dynamic identities instead of a unified EUropean identity. The EUropean cultural policies should not be based on assumed common roots expressed in the cultural heritage of Europe, but rather should focus on contemporary and critical cultural and artistic expressions.     

The Classification of Inkjet Inks Using AccuTOF™ DART™ (Direct Analysis in Real Time) Mass Spectrometry—A Preliminary Study

A novel approach for the analysis of inkjet inks is being reported. A time‐of‐flight mass spectrometer, coupled with a Direct Analysis in Real Time (DART?) ion source (AccuTOF? DART?), was used to determine if inkjet inks from various manufacturers and models of printers could be reliably differentiated, characterized, and identified. A total of 217 ink standards were analyzed. As inkjet printing often involves the use of multiple colors (e.g., cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to form an image or text, two different approaches to creating a library of standards and sampling methods were evaluated for implementation in a standard operating procedure. This research will show that a microscopic examination of the region of interest is requisite to identify what colors were utilized during the printing process, prior to comparing with known standards. Finally, blind testing was administered with 10 unknown samples to assess the validity and accuracy of the methodology.     

Thirteenth-Century Custodia

Thirteenth century custodia were arrangements – agencies or bailments – that served the same purposes as were later served by uses or trusts. This article presents evidence of the range of such arrangements and of how the common law protected the parties to those arrangements.     

A national population based examination of the association between age-versatility trajectories and recidivism rates

Purpose

To compare theoretical explanations of the age-versatility curve including the hypotheses of: self-control theory stating that versatility is followed by specialization; taxonomic theory stating that adolescent-limited offenders are specialists and life-course offenders are versatile and orthogenetic theory stating that specialization and versatility are present in a large number of offender groups.

Methods

These explanations were tested with Israeli national population-based data on all first and subsequent juvenile offenders (n = 17,176) with 248,114 registered police contacts from 1996 to 2008.

Results

Semi-parametric group-based modeling identified two trajectory-groups that characterized the age-versatility curve of police contacts before first conviction. The trajectory-groups were labeled as versatility (n = 2,447; 14.2%), and specialization (n = 14,729; 85.8%). After controlling for 19 documented demographic, familial, and criminogenic risk factors, Cox regression showed that juvenile offenders in the versatility group were at increased risk of recidivism compared to offenders in the specialization group.

Conclusions

These results partially adhere with taxonomic theory than the remaining theories and indicate that assuming a trajectory of elevated pre-conviction versatility increases the risk of recidivism.     

‘Illegitimate’ loans: lenders,not borrowers,are responsible

Debt relief has focused on the borrower—debt is cancelled if a country is too poor to repay and now has acceptable policies. Iraq shifted the focus to the lender—debt should be cancelled because creditors should never have lent money to the repressive regime. This paper uses domestic and international law to establish the concept of ‘illegitimate debt’, which should not be repaid independent of the status of the borrower. The concept of ‘moral hazard’ is used to argue that non-payment of illegitimate debt is necessary to discipline lenders and to prevent future lending to oppressive dictators.