Where the Action Is: Macro and Micro Justice in Contract Law

In contemporary private law theory the relationship between ‘macro’ theories of distributive justice and the ‘micro’ site of interpersonal transactions remains under-explored. In this paper, I draw on the ‘macro’ theory of justice articulated by John Rawls and offer an account of ‘micro contractual justice’ that helps us understand how the micro domains of contracting introduce particular relational constraints on the infusion of distributive considerations into contract law, resulting in constrained conception of ‘relational Rawlsianism’ operating in contractual domains. My framework provides a bridge between the macro and micro, helping us understand how they are in various senses separate yet interlocking, and also provides a ‘third way’ between all or nothing positions on the place of distributive justice in contract.     

The Effects of Blaming Others for Legislative Inaction on Individual and Collective Evaluations

Legislators commonly blame others for gridlock. We posit that legislators may engage in this type of rhetoric to minimize the individual reputational risks associated with legislative inaction or to boost the relative standing of their party. In a series of six survey experiments, we find that blaming others for inaction undermines voters’ evaluations of individual legislators who engage in this rhetorical strategy. This effect is particularly pronounced among out-partisans and independents. However, blaming rhetoric can also enhance the standing of the blamer’s party relative to the opposing party across all groups (including out-partisans), in large part by undermining the reputations of these other actors. Ultimately, we show that when an individual legislator engages in blaming rhetoric, the immediate net electoral effects are null. This suggests that coordinated efforts by a party to blame opponents may improve the party’s relative standing, while imposing few costs on those engaged in blaming.     

Towards virtuous and ethical organisational performance in the context of corruption: A case study in the public sector

With the increasing number of ethical violations reported across the public sector, the emphasis on ethics and values in governance is on the rise. Corruption is widely accepted as a form of unethical behaviour that can have detrimental effects on organisations as well as society at large. Research calls for empirical studies focusing on the contextual factors surrounding corruption. Based on the Contextually Based Human Resource Theory and using the case study method, this paper examines the role of context through a systematic analysis of corruption in a public sector organisation. We integrate corruption and human resource literature to understand employee behaviour, employee relations, HRM strategies, and organisational outcomes in the context of organisational corruption.     

The unseen hands: Collaborative instrumental leadership in the British renegotiation case

The article contends that an important but overlooked explanation for the European Union's resilience in the past decade in the face of several existential crises has been the informal instrumental leadership roles played by EU institutional actors collaborating with each other. In this article, a theoretical framework is developed that can explain why EU governments, facing a crisis, would choose to informally delegate leadership tasks to a set of EU institutional actors. A three-part mechanism of collaborative instrumental leadership provided by institutions is devised that explains why governments informally delegate leadership tasks to EU institutions, and the effects of this informal delegation. The core of the article is a process-tracing case study that explores how collaborative instrumental leadership actually works. The case selected is the British renegotiation of their terms of membership in 2015–2016. While the case has become more-or-less forgotten because the shock ‘no’ vote in the June 2016 Brexit referendum made its terms moot, the deal included quite exceptional reform proposals in which the EU bent over backwards to accommodate the United Kingdom, perhaps even going beyond the bounds of the EU Treaties themselves in the issue of immigration. Given this, analysing how collaborative instrumental leadership supplied by institutions contributed to producing the ambitious deal can shed light on the processes whereby intractable problems in the EU have been solved in the past decade.     

《舞论》对印度戏剧的历史影响:以库迪亚旦剧为例

婆罗多的《舞论》是印度古代著名的梵语文艺理论著作。它不仅深刻地影响了后世梵语文学与艺术理论的建构,也对一些重要的印度古代传统艺术如婆罗多舞、卡塔卡利舞和库迪亚旦剧等产生了重要的影响。与中国的昆曲一道,库迪亚旦剧于2001年被联合国教科文组织(UNESCO)列入首批人类非物质文化遗产代表作名录。库迪亚旦剧也是深受《舞论》影响的南印度喀拉拉邦的地方传统戏剧,它在漫长的历史岁月中,为了适合本土观众的欣赏情趣,大量吸纳了当地文化要素,从而为自己的长期流传打下了坚实的基础。《舞论》对其剧场建造、戏剧表演类型、戏剧人物塑造、形体与语言表演、舞蹈和音乐等各个方面均产生了积极的理论影响。库迪亚旦剧的表演至少涉及《舞论》提及的10种戏剧中的4种。库迪亚旦剧遵循《舞论》所规定的面部神态表演论、眼神表演论、手势论和步伐表演论等。《舞论》强调戏剧表演与舞蹈表演、音乐表演的三位一体,这一点在库迪亚旦剧中也有体现。库迪亚旦剧运用源自《舞论》音阶论和调式论的21种拉格和10种节奏类型。由于喀拉拉邦处在南印度达罗毗茶文化区,《舞论》基本原理和表演规范对库迪亚旦剧的影响,是后者的一种选择性或变异性接受。例如,库迪亚旦剧的服饰、化装与舞台布景,遵循与《舞论》所载区别极大的一种模式。     

英语教育的劳动市场回报及英语教育政策调整 —— 基于 2016年问卷调查数据

中国的英语教育近年来受到越来越多的重视。无论是国家还是个人都投入了大量资源用于英语教育,如此巨额的投入所带来的劳动市场回报值得关注。英语教育的劳动市场回报可以分为人力资本投入回报和信号作用回报。研究发现,英语在实际工作中使用越多,工资收入越高,是为英语教育作为人力资本投入回报的证据。但在工作中很少用到英语的人,通过英语四六级考试对其工资也有显著影响,反映了英语教育具有信号作用的功能。调查显示,英语教育的信号作用是英语教育劳动市场回报的主要方面。因此,中国的英语教育有过度教育从而导致资源配置低效率之嫌,建议及时调整国家的英语教育政策。     

海洋命运共同体思想的内涵和实践路径

海洋命运共同体思想是人类命运共同体思想在海洋领域的细化,反映了国际海洋法的发展趋势和价值目标。它创造性的继承并发展了和而不同思想以及共同体思想,为全球海洋治理提供了新的价值指引。海洋命运共同体是共同体成员基于海洋共识和共同的海洋利益产生认同感和归属感,通过在海洋领域的共同合作形成的联合体,包括海洋政治、安全、经济、文化和生态命运共同体。中国在区域可以通过实施多边海洋行动,构建区域海洋命运共同体,实现区域合作关系的升级。海洋命运共同体是超越民族和国家的海洋观,中国在全球可以通过构建海上丝路命运共同体、提升国际制度性话语权和形成国际海洋法律新制度来践行海洋命运共同体思想。     

Small winners and big losers: strategic party behaviour in the 2017 Dutch general election

Abstract

This article analyses party strategies during the campaign for the Dutch general election of March 2017, making use of issue-yield theory. It investigates whether parties strategically emphasise high-yield issues, by juxtaposing the issue opportunities provided by voters with parties’ issue emphasis during the campaign. More specifically, it asks whether parties strategically emphasised issues that were expected to reward them electorally. Analysing voter preferences and party campaign data, it is found that parties and most of their constituencies show high ideological consistency, that parties emphasise mostly positional issues and thus choose a conflict-mobilising strategy, and that most parties emphasise high-yield issues rather than following the general political agenda. Four small parties that won significantly behaved strategically while the social democrats – who severely lost – hardly did. The findings imply that the issue-yield framework can help to explain the election result in the fragmented Dutch multi-party context.     

An Ideational Approach to Gendered Institutional Change: Revisiting the Institutionalization of a New Prostitution Regime in Sweden

Recent work in the field of feminist institutionalism has made important progress in furthering our understanding of gendered institutional change. I argue that gradual ideational changes play an essential role in processes of gendered institutional change, and that examining the interaction between ideas and gendered institutions is of great importance for gaining a better understanding of processes of this type. This article revisits an empirical study of gendered institutional change in Swedish prostitution policy in the effort to specify two idea-based mechanisms that are conducive to gendered change, namely, consensus concerning the problem and gendering of the problem.     

Coming out of the shadow? Studies of local governments in Central and Eastern Europe in European academic research

This article is an analysis of the changing role of research on local governments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) within mainstream European studies. It refers to dependency theory (Wallerstein, Prebish) as applied to scientific research. It classifies CEE as being in the semi-periphery of academic research. The empirical analysis consists of two parts: (1) qualitative review of the most important of the comparative studies of European local governments. It includes a discussion on the role of local governments and researchers from CEE in these studies; (2) quantitative based on an analysis of articles published in international journals and citations for those articles in Scopus. The analysis covers 14 countries (all new member states who joined the EU from 2004 onwards, plus the Balkan countries: Albania, Macedonia, and Serbia).