Sociolegal change in consumer fraud: From victim-offender interactions to global networks

Advances in technology have transformed fraud against consumers from face-to-face, victim-offender interactions to a crime that now transcends international boundaries. Although consumer protection issues have been of interest to investigative journalists and literary scholars for centuries, the topic has only recently been subject to serious criminological inquiry. Employing the American consumer protection movement as an historical framework, we examine the evolution of consumer fraud. Our review documents that progressive social and legal changes in consumer protection and corporate regulation, as well as developments in criminological research, correspond to prominent literary exposés of the time. In today's technological age, such a reactive response to consumer fraud is neither efficient nor effective. Contemporary criminologists need to simultaneously address the questions of ‘how’ fraud is perpetrated and ‘why’ it occurs. Toward this end, we identify methodological strategies and data sources to promote empirical and theoretical understanding of consumer fraud, and to ultimately contribute to multi-national crime control policy.     

The Social Construction of Illegality and Criminality

In this article illegal immigrants, a relatively new group of immigrants living at the margins of society, are discussed. The question of the significance of crime for groups that are officially excluded from the formal labour market and public provisions, is presented within the framework of the Unknown City research project, conducted in the four largest Dutch cities (interviews with illegal immigrants; an ethnographic study to determine the extent of support by various ethnic communities; and an examination of the ways in which the restrictive policies towards illegal immigrants were implemented by the police, the Aliens Departments, and by professionals within public or semi-public institutions in the fields of education, healthcare and housing). Both the relatively limited involvement in crime in general and the differences between groups can be explained by the embeddedness of illegal immigrants in the labour sphere and the support by ethnic communities. Attention is paid to the social and legal construction of the illegal immigrant through new legislation and to the observation that illegality is increasingly linked to crime. The majority of illegal immigrants are not criminally active. One exception is the category that is active in the lower levels of the hard drug trade. The authors' analysis suggests that the perception of the criminal illegal immigrant first and foremost reflects the division between wanted and unwanted immigrants, which is the result of the shift towards a restrictive policy.     

用椭圆曲线实现的Applet代理签名方案

在网络信息系统安全管理中,使用签名Applet访问客户端资源能更灵活地扩展网络应用。然而在现行的Applet签名方案中,由于Jar包使用常规的签名方法,使客户端仅允许指定安全服务器中的Applet签名程序访问本机资源,而其他服务器的Applet程序即使被证明是可信的也无法实现同样的功能。这样的设置尽管保证了客户端访问的安全性,却使得网络分布性资源使用的效率无法提高,限制了网络应用。针对于此,该文提出了用椭圆曲线实现的Applet代理签名新方案,并对该方案的安全性进行了分析。     

To be or not to be Charlie Hebdo: ritual patterns of opinion formation in the social networks

The social sciences have mostly focused on the formation of social opinions from a semantic point of view: given a certain semantic field, interviews, statistics, and other analytical instruments are commonly deployed in order to map the distribution of views, their evolution, their conflicts and their agreements. Socio-semiotics, social semiotics, and the other semiotic branches that bear on social inquiry have contributed to the effort by providing semiotic grids of categorization. These grids too, however, have been mostly related to semantic contents circulating through societies and their cultures. The present article pursues a different hypothesis. After briefly recalling the events of 7–9 January 2015 in the Parisian area, the article seeks to survey and map the syntax of progressive differentiation of opinions circulating in the social networks about such events. Some patterns are identified and semiotically described: (1) cleavage; (2) comparative relativizing; (3) blurring sarcasm; (4) anonymity; (5) unfocused responsibility; (6) conspiracy thought. A new semiotic square is created to visually display these patterns, their positions, their relations, and their evolution.     

Do the Joneses Help You Keep Up? A Natural Experiment in Exposure to Nonpoor Neighbors

This study capitalizes on a natural experiment in Montgomery County, Maryland, where low-income applicant families are randomly assigned to public housing that is either (a) clustered within seven public housing developments or (b) scattered into market-rate subdivisions via the county's inclusionary zoning policy. Through a survey of 453 public housing residents, we find that adults who lived in scattered public housing reported a lower proportion of low-socioeconomic status (SES) social ties generally and a lower proportion of low-SES neighbors specifically in their social networks. They also counted more high-SES individuals in their social networks, and this effect was related to the amount of time they lived in the neighborhood. Living in scattered public housing had no adverse effect on feelings of neighborhood belonging or satisfaction. The socioeconomic composition of respondents' social networks was associated with two health outcomes for respondents (smoking and depression) and modestly associated with respondents' household income.     

The challenge of accountability in complex regulatory networks: The case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

A puzzle that faces public administrators within regulatory governance networks is how to balance the need for democratic accountability while increasingly facing demands from elected officials to optimize oversight of industry by utilizing the expertise of the private sector in developing risk‐based standards for compliance. The shift from traditional command and control oversight to process oriented regulatory regimes has been most pronounced in highly complex industries, such as aviation and deepwater oil drilling, where the intricate and technical nature of operations necessitates risk‐based regulatory networks based largely on voluntary compliance with mutually agreed upon standards. The question addressed in this paper is how the shift to process oriented regimes affects the trade‐offs between democratic, market, and administrative accountability frames, and what factors determine the dominant accountability frame within the network. Using post‐incident document analysis, this paper provides a case study of regulatory oversight of the deepwater oil drilling industry prior to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, to explore how the shift to a more networked risk‐based regulatory regime affects the trade‐offs and dominant accountability frames within the network. The results of this study indicate that a reliance on market‐based accountability mechanisms, along with the lack of a fully implemented process‐oriented regulatory regime, led to the largest oil spill in US history.     

Expert network interaction in the European Medicines Agency

The need for supranational regulatory capacity and the drive for governmental control are two colliding forces in international governance. As a solution to this governance dilemma, European administrative networks need to simultaneously fulfill the demand for supranational institutions and maintain governmental control. The assessment of risks associated with medicines authorized on the European market is carried out by such a network of national regulators as part of the European Medicines Agency. To uncover how these double-hatted experts navigate the opportunity structures created by supranational and intergovernmental forces, this study employs social network analysis. Developing exponential random graph models, this study tests to what extent members can act as professional experts in service of the supranational administration and to what extent national features shape interaction. The results indicate that while PRAC members are socialized as professionals in service of supranational deliberation on pharmacovigilance, intergovernmental forces do structure their interactions.     

Asserting integrity in Mexico's civic sector

In societies where civic space is closing, integrity in the civic sector is critical for its sustainability. Where state regulatory frameworks are inadequate, or worse, manipulative, self-regulation can help defend the sector's integrity and strengthen the ability of civic associations to serve the public and contribute to democracy. This paper describes the strategic role in self-regulation of a particular type of third sector actor in Mexico, the coordinating body or civic network. A case study of the Mexican Center for Philanthropy (CEMEFI) and its Accreditation in Institutionalization and Transparency project illustrates the contribution of NGO networks in service to the sector, and their key role in diffusion of norms of transparency and accountability within the civic sector and beyond.