滥用劳务派遣之反思与规制

《劳动合同法》实施以来,劳务派遣用工量呈井喷之势。劳务派遣迅猛发展的主要表现为劳务派遣的滥用,劳动立法的缺漏、利益的驱动、企业的经济人本性、政府职能的缺位是滥用劳务派遣现象发生的主要原因。滥用劳务派遣极大损害了劳务派遣劳动者利益,破坏了劳务派遣市场秩序,是本次《劳动合同法修正案》处理的主要问题。通过劳务派遣行业准入制度的完善、劳务派遣适用范围的限制、同工同酬权的保障、劳动监察力量加强等多个层面的治理,将劳务派遣控制在合理的适用范围,引导劳务派遣规范化发展,落实劳动关系的和谐稳定。     

‘Flat and fabulous’: women’s breast reconstruction refusals post-mastectomy and the negotiation of normative femininity

The ‘pinkification’ of breast cancer culture in recent years conflates women’s empowerment with the celebration of hyperfemininity. Consistent with this trend, reconstructive surgery post-mastectomy is increasingly normalised: restoring the breasts is to restore ‘lost’ femininity. Contextualised within the pressures of this normalisation, our article explores how women who decide against breast reconstruction negotiate their non-normative ‘flat’ bodies. We examine women’s posts in a breast cancer forum about their refusals of breast reconstruction. Using thematic and feminist post-structuralist analyses, we suggest that although health and body acceptance discourses enable resistance to embodied femininity norms, pressures to conform permeate practices related to appearance. Clothes and prosthetic breasts enabled forum participants to pass as ‘healthy’, ‘whole’, and ‘recovered’. The study’s findings emphasise the limitations to agency and resistance that emanate from the ways constraining gender discourses infiltrate every aspect of a woman’s life. In line with a critical awareness approach to breast cancer education, we discuss the possibilities of resistance afforded by the safe spaces of online communities.     

Critical Misunderstandings: Ineffective International Governance and the UK Nuclear Industry

In 2017, significant media and political interest was sparked by the UK decision to leave Euratom, the European Atomic Energy Community. While such interest in nuclear matters has to be welcomed, the apparent lack of knowledge displayed in the regulatory governance of the UK nuclear industry is disquieting. This article therefore offers an overview of the publicly funded UK nuclear industry and its regulatory governance including its links with European and global nuclear agencies to inform the debate and to identify critical issues in need of resolution.     

“互联网 +”语境下工会服务职工的路径探析

探索"互联网+"语境下工会服务职工群众的路径有助于进一步明晰新业态、新关系下工会的工作机制和服务方式,增强组织凝聚力,实现工作创新突破,更好地开展服务。面对当前工会运用"互联网+"服务职工存在整体规划模糊、信息共享不足、数据价值发挥不够充分等问题,建立权威的、全国工会层面的工会移动互联网服务平台,可以实现信息互通、资源共享,促进社会合作,为职工提供更精准、更深层、更长远的服务。该平台应以移动互联网应用程序即App为主,侧重服务、互动、综合信息的分析与发布,其建设需要工会工作人员和技术人员共同深度参与、持续完善。     

The Formal Delegation of Regulatory Decisions in the Telecommunication Sector: An Explanation Using Classification Trees

Research on regulation has traditionally focused on studying the delegation of regulatory competencies from political principals to an independent regulatory agency. In this article, we argue that this delegation is nuanced by different factors that affect whether a specific regulatory decision is formally delegated. We examine and explain formal delegation patterns at the level of individual regulatory decisions in twelve countries located in Europe, Latin America, and South Asia. The data were gathered by coding the twelve countries' telecommunications legislation. The data analysis was undertaken using a classification tree model—a nonparametric model. We found that the maturity of the market has the greatest effect on the formal delegation of regulatory decisions, but this effect is also influenced by the other theoretical factors considered, particularly the level of political constraints and the type of regulation.     

Limits of regulatory responsiveness: Democratic credentials of responsive regulation

Responsiveness and accountability constitute the process of democratic representation, reinforcing each other. Responsiveness asks elected representatives to adopt policies ex ante preferred by citizens, while accountability consists of the people's ex post sanctioning of the representatives based on policy outcomes. However, the regulatory literature tends to interpret responsiveness narrowly between a regulator and regulatees: the regulator is responsive to regulatees’ compliance without considering broader public needs and preferences. Democratic regulatory responsiveness requires that the regulator should be responsive to the people, not just regulatees. We address this theoretical gap by pointing out the perils of regulatory capture and advancing John Braithwaite's idea of tripartism as a remedy. We draw out two conditions of democratic regulatory responsiveness from Philip Selznick – comprehensiveness and proactiveness. We then propose overlapping networked responsiveness based on indirect reciprocity among various stakeholders. This mechanism is the key to connecting regulatory responsiveness with accountability.     

Does online voting change the outcome? Evidence from a multi-mode public policy referendum

Do online and offline voters differ in terms of policy preferences? The growth of Internet voting in recent years has opened up new channels of participation. Whether or not political outcomes change as a consequence of new modes of voting is an open question. Here we analyze all the votes cast both offline (n = 5.7 million) and online (n = 1.3 million) and compare the actual vote choices in a public policy referendum, the world's largest participatory budgeting process, in Rio Grande do Sul in June 2014. In addition to examining aggregate outcomes, we also conducted two surveys to better understand the demographic profiles of who chooses to vote online and offline. We find that policy preferences of online and offline voters are no different, even though our data suggest important demographic differences between offline and online voters.     

‘Policies that Fail – Words that Succeed’: The Politics of Accessible Housing in Australia

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate over the efficacy of voluntary agreements versus regulation, and uses a study of the Livable Housing Design initiative to deliver voluntarily new‐built accessible housing in Australia. We first probe why regulation has become such a significant component of government policy making, and then ask why political campaigns focus on this issue as a strategy for reform. We refer to research by disability activists, which claims that the voluntary approach has failed and regulation is necessary. Amongst our conclusions are: (1) that the disjuncture between policy rhetoric and outcome can be attributed to the power of lobbyists, reliance on the private market to address inequality, and antipathy to regulatory enforcement; and (2) that there is a need for greater interrogation of the language deployed in policy texts to identify whether they are crafted to maintain the government's legitimacy or to deliver purposeful change.     

The social semiotic of homophone phrase substitution in Chinese netizen discourse

The paper addresses an ingenious way by which Chinese netizens manage to reach their intended audiences under the radar of censors surveying the Internet in China. One specifically Chinese social use of language in this respect is the option to express criticism by using inoffensive characters that share the same or similar pronunciation with politically sensitive phrasing. We identify this type of expression as homophone phrase substitution (HPS). The device has been part of Chinese since ancient times under the name political metaphor. We address the main constraints at work in HPS, especially the role of voice (prosodic contour) that guides the construction of two divergent kinds of aboutness. Leaving aside its critical function in contemporary society, by contrasting HPS with verbal irony, metaphor, and Australian rhyming slang, and by drawing on semiologie and semiotics, indirect speech acts and implicit deixis, we suggest that this linguistic option throws new light on the semantic/pragmatic distinction.     

The End of Sprawl? Not so Fast

This article takes a careful look at the recent state of sprawl among America’s 178 largest metropolitan areas through the lens of four sets of questions: (a) Measured at the metropolitan level, is sprawl really declining? Is it declining everywhere, or just in selected metropolitan areas? (b) If sprawl is indeed declining, are more compact growth forms on the rise? (c) If sprawl is indeed declining, is it the result of antisprawl land use and development policies? (d) Which metropolitan-level land market, demographic, and economic factors are most associated with changes in sprawl? It concludes that sprawl is indeed declining when measured by average population densities, but that the decline has been much less widespread if measured in terms of population growth in core-area neighborhoods, changing density gradient intercept and slope estimates, and increased employment clustering. In terms of policy, it finds no evidence that local regulatory regimes or growth management programs have had any effect on sprawl, but finds that the consistent administration of local regulatory programs in ways that incentivize infill development and send consistent signals to developers does contribute to reduced sprawl.