Expressive Crimes in Post‐Socialist States of Estonia,Latvia and Lithuania1

The objective of this study is to examine the social determinants of violent victimization, with the principal focus being directed at the significance of neighbourhood conditions. By combining data from victim surveys with information on the neighbourhoods in which the survey respondents live, we have been able to study both the individual and household characteristics, and also the factors specific to different neighbourhoods that are associated with violent victimization. What we are able to show is that the violence that occurs in the residential neighbourhood constitutes only a small fraction of the violent incidents to which people are exposed. Further, the violence that occurs within the neighbourhood takes place to a large extent within the victim's home. This suggests that exposure to violence is associated with neighbourhood conditions only to a limited extent. More detailed analyses of the violence that does occur within the neighbourhood show no effects of neighbourhood conditions when controls are included for individual and household characteristics. The conclusion, therefore, is that we are unable to find any clear neighbourhood effects in relation to violent victimization. The differences that we initially note between different types of neighbourhood in the proportions reporting exposure to violence are too a large degree the result of selection processes. These do not, however, in themselves increase the risk for violent victimization.     

Chronic Offenders or Socially Disadvantaged Youth? Institutionalized Males as Missing Cases in School‐based Delinquency Research

Previous criminological studies comparing institutional youth populations with community samples have for the most part focused on youths institutionalized primarily as a result of involvements in delinquency. The present study compares levels of social disadvantage and criminal involvement within a nationally representative sample of Swedish schoolboys with those of a national population of institutionalized males that includes both serious young offenders and youths institutionalized for other reasons. Whilst at the aggregate level, mean levels of offending are higher within the institutional sample, the institutional population includes youths from across the entire range of levels of offending. Levels of social disadvantage are substantially elevated among the institutionalized males by comparison with the school sample. The study notes that institutionalized samples, where these include both young offenders and youths institutionalized for other reasons, may provide a fruitful ground for life‐course research into the way involvements in crime interact with other indicators of social disadvantage to affect the likelihood of continued marginalization into adulthood.     

Social movements and political opposition in contemporary Thailand

Abstract

There is an underlying optimism in much of the literature that considers the emergence of social movements as being associated with deepening processes of democratization. The expansion of civil society is seen to expand political space. This paper takes a critical lens to this perspective, using recent political events in Thailand as a case study of the political strategies and alliances of social movements. We examine the debates that saw many social movements and their leaderships initially support elected Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai Party only to see this support drain away as these same movements called on their followers to bring down the government. More importantly, we examine how these movements came to ally with conservative forces associated with the palace and military. Based on the Thai case study, we suggest that these seemingly unlikely outcomes result from the very nature of social movements. Leadership by middle-class activists, the need for alliances, the development of networks, and a focus on single issues and identities leads social movements to make substantial political compromises. The consequences can be negative for democratic development.     

Networks and nonprofits: Opportunities and challenges in an era of federal devolution

Abstract

Community development corporations and other nonprofit organizations are increasingly responsible for producing and managing low‐income housing in urban America. This article examines the network of governmental, philanthropic, educational, and other institutions that channel financial, technical, and political support to nonprofit housing sponsors. We analyze the relationships among these institutions and propose an explanation for their success. We then consider challenges the network must confront if the reinvention of federal housing policy is to succeed.

Block grants and rental vouchers, the dominant emphases of federal policy, present opportunities and constraints for nonprofit housing groups and their institutional networks. While states and municipalities are likely to continue to use block grants for nonprofit housing, the viability of this housing will be severely tested as project‐based operating subsidies are replaced by tenant‐based vouchers. We recommend ways that the federal, state, and local governments should help the institutional support network respond to this challenge.     

The impacts of welfare reform on recipients of housing assistance

Abstract

This article uses data from randomized evaluations in Indiana and Delaware to address three questions: (1) Are welfare recipients who receive federal housing assistance less employable than recipients who do not? (2) How does the impact of welfare reform compare for families with and without housing assistance? (3) Does welfare reform increase or decrease the use of such assistance?

Although public housing residents may be more disadvantaged than welfare recipients who do not get housing assistance, voucher users and Section 8 project‐based recipients were not. Welfare reform had similar impacts on the earnings and welfare benefits of families that received housing assistance and those that did not. Where impacts did differ, they were larger for families receiving assistance. Welfare reform also reduced the receipt of housing assistance. Families that receive assistance appear to have less financial strain than families that do not, suggesting that assistance may increase overall financial stability.     

Codetermination and the market for corporate control in the European Community

In the process of European integration the member states have agreed to transfer substantial jurisdiction in the areas of economic and monetary policy to the European Community. In industrial relations, however, they have refused to make similar concessions. Despite its numerous attempts the Commission of the EC has not as yet been able to secure the political consensus necessary for a European model of employees' participation and codetermination. In the context of the Single European Market the national systems of codetermination are destined to play a decreasing role. With the continuing development of the single market and its interlocking business structures across national borders, regulations on codetermination that extend only up to such borders and no further can be expected to lose in significane. This paper traces the history of codetermination in the European Community. It also analyses the reasons why the various directives and regulations drafted by the EC Commission since 1967 have been rejected by the Council of Ministers.     

Repressed futures: financial derivatives' theological unconscious

Financial derivatives are credited with bringing to the fore a number of sociological and metaphysical problems for modernity, from the instantiation of particular modalities of risk to the destabilization of referentiality in knowledge-claims about the world. This essay argues that derivatives can take on the particular power they hold in such accounts only through a repression of their mathematical technique. Opening up the black box of the mathematical technique through a history of statistics, it argues that the founding trauma animating derivatives' discursive power is the separation of religion from the technical procedures of mathematics and the stochastic models that give form to trading in derivatives. Derivatives' indexical power is a symptom of this trauma. That symptomatology reveals derivatives to be a moral, not just mathematical, problematic.     

Barriers to long-run growth in Russia

Russia's economic adjustment to the fall of communism has been notoriously troubled. The output recovery since 1998 is widely judged to be fragile. What is less often noted is that Russia is far from unique in its 'transition' troubles. In this paper the main hypotheses put forward to account for Russia's transition difficulties are reviewed in the context of economic change in all ex-communist countries. Accounts relying on (unexplained) mistakes in economic policy are inadequate. Two accounts may be sustainable in the light of evidence from other ex-communist countries: one based on inherited economic structure and one based on cultural factors. The latter hypothesis is shown to be susceptible to testing.     

A Critical Theory of Social Suffering

Abstract

This paper begins by defending the twofold relevance, political and theoretical, of the notion of social suffering. Social suffering is a notion politics cannot do without today, as it seems indispensable to describe all the aspects of contemporary injustice. As such, it has been taken up in a number of significant research programmes in different social sciences (sociology, anthropology, social psychology). The notion however poses significant conceptual problems as it challenges disciplinary boundaries traditionally set up to demarcate individual and social phenomena. I argue that philosophy has a role to play in the attempt to integrate the diverging perspectives stemming from the social sciences. I attempt to show that, as it engages with the social sciences to account for the conceptual and normative issues thrown open by the question of social suffering, philosophy in fact retrieves the very idea of critical theory, as a conjugated critique of social reality and of its knowledge. I conclude by showing how the question of social suffering then becomes a useful criterion to distinguish between the different existing approaches in critical theory.     

Comparing federal institutions: Power and representation in six federations

The study of comparative federalism is often hampered by the diverse range of federal institutional arrangements in practice, as well as the ambiguity surrounding the concept of federalism. This article identifies three main conceptual approaches to federalism – sociological, constitutional, and governmental – then proposes a revised governmental approach that takes account of the institutional effects of federalism, for application in comparative politics research. Minimally defined, all federations are products of institutional rules that create separate territorial spheres of authority. This article compares Canada, the United States, Australia, Austria, Germany and Switzerland along two key institutional dimensions that structure politics in the federal state: resource allocation, and the representation of constituent units in federal-level decision-making.