Quality of Work Life in the Postnationalization of Human Resources: Empirical Examination of Workforce Emiratization in the United Arab Emirates

In response to the challenge of human resource imbalance in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the government enacted a nationalization policy (Emiratization) which compelled organizations to hire national job seekers. The present study aimed at assessing the quality of working life (QWL) of 450 national employees in the public and private sectors. Univariate and multivariate analyses revealed that employees indicated an above average level of perceived QWL. Four factors were important to adding quality to the work life, namely managerial approach, prestige, pay and benefits, and professional development opportunities. These results and their implications were discussed in detail.     

Party system nationalization,presidential coalitions,and government spending

This paper argues that there is a strong relationship between geographical patterns of political parties' electoral performance and the composition of central government expenditures. When party system nationalization is high, the composition of spending will focus more on non-targetable expenditures, while targetable expenditures increase as the party system distribution of votes across different districts becomes less homogenous. However, the effect of party nationalization on spending type is conditioned by the size of the presidential coalition; targeted transfers will increase if the coalition size decreases, even if party nationalization is high. I find support for these hypotheses with an empirical analysis of district-level electoral and government expenditure data for several countries in Latin America between 1990 and 2006.     

The idiosyncratic dynamics of party system nationalization in Russia

This article uses data from the 1993–2011 national legislative elections in Russia in order to systematically measure and explain the dynamics of party system nationalization. The analysis registers a salient discrepancy between the extremely low levels of territorial homogeneity of the vote in the single-member plurality section of Russia's electoral system (1993–2003), on the one hand, and very high levels of party nationalization in party-list contests, on the other. This discrepancy, facilitated by such factors as the legacies of regime transition, federalism, and presidentialism, was reinforced by the integration of gubernatorial political machines into the nationwide political order, which ultimately resulted in unprecedentedly high levels of party nationalization in the 2007–2011 elections. The findings challenge a conventional theory that equates the formation of national electorates to the progressive process of party system consolidation, suggesting that under certain conditions, related but not reducible to the authoritarian perversion of the structure of electoral incentives, there is no such linear relationship.     

Green Light for PPP on German Motorways?

While public–private partnerships (PPPs) have surged worldwide since the 1990s, they have been met with growing skepticism during the last years. A recent revision of Germany’s constitutional rules on motorway construction and observations on the use of PPPs published by both the German and the European Courts of Auditors illustrate this new caution. These two examples fit into a general trend towards a revival of the public sector, which can be summarized under the cross-level umbrella term “publicization.” It would, however, be remiss to replace the uncritical euphoria that once surrounded privatization with a similarly undifferentiated euphoria regarding publicization. Rather, it is crucial to identify the most appropriate solution for the fulfilment of each public task from the “toolbox” of publicization on the one hand and privatization on the other hand in order to ensure the most effective completion of public functions.     

马克思主义中国化历史进程中的民族性

民族化是马克思主义发展进程中的一个重要规律,马克思主义只有与各国的具体国情、历史文化、民族特性相结合。进行国别化、民族化、具体化,才能发挥真正的世界观和方法论作用,才能指引各国的革命和建设事业取得胜利。在马克思主义中国化的历史进程中。马克思主义与中华民族历史文化、优秀传统思想和民族特性相互交融。表现出了鲜明的中国风格、中国气派、中国特色。     

Distinguishing territorial structure from electoral adventurism: The distinct sources of static and dynamic nationalization

Estimates of static nationalization do not always reflect stark qualitative differences between parties. We use a research design oriented around a comparison of sharply different parties—the unstable Democratic Left in Ecuador and the stable Broad Front in Uruguay—to develop the distinctiveness of static and dynamic nationalization. Snapshot measures that only consider a single election suggest that both parties are poorly statically nationalized; but we show that the former case is highly statically nationalized, and that the observed territorial differences arise because it is poorly dynamically nationalized. We adopt the linear mixed modeling approach to reduce the bias in extant estimators. The approach is also informative about the sources of variance in a party's territorial support: relatively stable district attributes account for static nationalization, while features unique to the electoral cycle account for dynamic nationalization. Substantively, our study alters conclusions about parties operating in highly unstable electoral contexts.     

法治中几个老问题的新见解

面对活生生的现实,我们不得不反思如何使构建起来的法律框架融入中国实际生活之中,这项工作比起纯粹的西化移植的理性建构来,显然非常复杂和困难,为此,对现实中的以下几个提出了很久但并未很好解决的老问题进行了新的探讨很有必要：诸如法治的定位、法律的功能、西化还是本土化等     

试论马克思主义时代化的路径

马克思主义时代化是马克思主义开放性的内在要求。实现马克思主义时代化的路径在于,培养问题意识,回答时代课题;关注现实生活,吸收时代内容;努力解放思想,实现理论创新;体现中国特色、中国风格、中国气派,促进马克思主义时代化。     

Party nationalization in a multilevel context: Where's the variance?

We use estimates of variance in district-level electoral data as a way to identify multiple dimensions of the nationalization of party support, including “static nationalization” and “dynamic nationalization.” The multilevel model we use—also described as a random coefficient, mixed, growth curve, and hierarchical model—yields estimates of a party's mean national trajectory of electoral support (fixed effects), as well as estimates of variability around the mean trajectory parameters (random effects). Using a general model, we present a two-step approach to first identify electoral variability and then account for it. We develop the model, apply it to three political parties, demonstrate its behavior under controlled conditions using data we create, and demonstrate its application for explanatory purposes.     

Working in the slaughterhouse: Tanganyika Packers Ltd., from colonialism to collapse, 1947–2014

Between 1947 and 1975, Tanganyika Packers Ltd (TPL) was Tanzania’s only export-oriented slaughterhouse and beef-canning factory, a branch of UK-based Liebig’s Extract of Meat Corporation (Lemco), which originated in 1860s Uruguay. Until shortly before TPL was nationalized in 1974, it was a profitable parastatal, employing some 1200 workers, anchoring a working-class community, and providing an outlet for indigenous Tanzanian cattle from open rangelands. While nationalization aimed to capture the full value of TPL profits and expand exports into the European Economic Community, it instead severed TPL from the world market when Lemco withdrew its marketing license. Worker layoffs followed, and TPL became primarily a domestic supplier of military rations, creating precarious working conditions, until the factory was shuttered in 1993. Although technically TPL still exists, this article contends that, far from being a victim of a post-cold war neo-liberal transition, as is usually asserted, TPL’s fate is properly located in the period between 1967 and 1974, when state socialism in Tanzania created pressures on the parastatal and its workers to contribute to nation building, particularly by supplying fresh beef to the local butcher trade. This was coupled with a political ecology of disease and corruption, at a time of drought, villagization, and agro-pastoral resistance to market pressures, which prevented TPL from acquiring sufficient numbers of cattle in Africa’s third largest cattle country to take advantage of international beef scarcities in the early 1970s. Global pressures, especially disease controls and the OPEC oil embargo, frustrated TPL beef exports as the world economy moved from beef scarcity to a sudden glut by 1974.