REPRESENTING CUSTOMERS’INTERESTS: THE CASE OF THE PRIVATIZED WATER INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND AND WALES

Privatization has been one of the most important and controversial policy initiatives to emerge in the UK over the last decade. However, to date there has been little attempt to assess the impact of privatization on customers, despite the fact that much of the justification for the privatization of the public utilities was couched in terms of the benefits it would bring for customers. In the case of the water industry opportunities for competition are virtually non-existent, and the ten regional water authorities were privatized with their monopoly position intact. Consequently customers’interests have been represented and protected through new regulatory arrangements operated by the Office of Water Services. The purpose of this article is to offer some provisional assessment of the effectiveness of these new regulatory arrangements. In doing so, the article regards the model of private sector consumer sovereignty as inappropriate given the continued absence of competitive arrangements for the representation of customers’interests against some of the criteria currently being discussed in the development of more consumer-oriented approaches to the delivery of public services.     

The Changing Position of Legal Academics in the United Kingdom: Professionalization or Proletarianization?

This article analyses changes to United Kingdom (UK) university law schools during the period coinciding with Phil Thomas’ career as a law teacher – the latter part of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first – in part illustrating the analysis with other examples from Thomas’ career. We will focus specifically on the way in which what it means to be a legal academic has altered, with UK legal academics having been professionalized as a community during this era. Yet, seemingly paradoxically, it is also an era during which, many have suggested, academics in UK universities have become a proletariat.     

The Problem That Is Global Warming: Introduction

Global warming poses significant challenges to society at every level, evading easy definitions that would make the usual instrumental approaches to policymaking and regulation a relatively straightforward task. The embeddedness of the carbon economy in contemporary methods of industrialization and development means that climate protection is at once a problem of environment, the global economy, and human rights. It requires us to understand the strengths and limitations of a regulatory approach, to tease apart the intricacies of international law and governance to find ways to turn economic, legal, and cultural norms toward creating climate justice. Sector specific approaches to dealing with human rights and refugees, as well as international relations based on interstate relations, also have limitations. These include insufficient capacity to appreciate the differentiated responsibility of various actors in the creation of this ecological crisis as well as creating obstacles in finding appropriate ways to motivate those with the most ability to reduce our impact on the climate. Mutual reinforcement and “virtuous” arbitrage across fragmented regulatory regimes might create new synergies with potentially positive transformative effects for climate protection. To achieve this, the development and maintenance of legitimacy is central. The articles in this edition tackle these issues and, taken as a whole, provide a springboard for future scholarship.     

GENDER,GREEDY INSTITUTIONS,AND THE DEPARTMENTAL COURT

This article seeks to identify, map and understand the ways in which the everyday beliefs and practices of British central government departments embed social constructions of masculinity and femininity. It draws on observational fieldwork and repeat interviews conducted between 2002 and 2004 to analyse the everyday practices of departmental courts. We argue these courts have gendered practices and are ‘greedy institutions’. We unpack their practices of hierarchy, civility, rationality, gendered division of work, and long hours. We argue that these practices have significant gender consequence most notably women have few institutional options but to ‘manage like men’.     

Principals in Practice: The Importance of Mentorship in the Early Stages of Career Development

In this article we empirically assess the benefits of mentorship across a diverse range of extrinsic and intrinsic career rewards. Using an integrated model, we investigate the ways in which characteristics of the organization, as well as characteristics of both protégés and mentors affect the outcomes of mentoring relationships. Our study includes two samples: new law school graduates and a more seasoned cohort of established lawyers. Our results reveal the unique contributions of career and psychosocial mentor functions to early and established careers, as well as the substantial rewards of informal and multiple mentors to the career paths of professionals.     

The Well-Tempered Breast: Fostering Fluidity in Breastly Meaning and Function

This article looks at the phenomena of induced lactation and adult nursing. While maternity is understood to perform a certain kind of body modification, it is little known that lactation can also work independently of the pregnant body, or even of the female sex to modify the breast and its function. Induced lactation allows for a splitting away of breastfeeding from maternity, opening up possibilities for elaborating on the cultural meanings and uses of breastmilk as a substance, breastfeeding as a practice, and lactation as a process. Finally, by introducing lactation into sexual play, it offers the opportunity for a mutual confluence of bodily flows which may help to disassemble the binaries of sexual difference.

“… how are we to prevent the very unconscious (of the) ‘subject’ from being … diminished in its interpretation, by a systematics that re-marks a historical ‘inattention’ to fluids? In other words: what structuration of (the) language does not maintain a complicity of long standing between rationality and a mechanics of solids alone?

Luce Irigaray, “The Mechanics of Fluids” in This Sex Which is Not One ^{1 1}Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. New York: Cornell UP, 1985, p.107

“Breastfeeding is a partial expression of female sexuality and yet there is no awareness or understanding of it today, no culture attached to it and not even an inkling of its rank as a sexual potentiality … even the history of the female species formulated by women themselves, however fragmentary, maintains a seldom-interrupted silence over this special sexual experience.”

Barbara Sichtermann, “The Lost Eroticism of the Breasts” ^{2 2}In Femininity: The Politics of The Personal. Ed. H. Gyer-Ryan. Translated by J. Whitlam. Cambridge: Polity, 1986, pp. 55-68, p. 56.

“Would you like to try some?”

“Thank you.” She swallows her last bit of cake. “I would.”

So we go through the process again. This time when I have bared my breasts I lean over and put the nipple between her lips. After a few tugs from her mouth, surprisingly strong, I have to put my hand on the wall to brace myself. She seems to pull clear through me.

“You are flushed,” she says when she comes away.

“You are fleshed,” I reply.

Susann Cokal, Mirabilis ^{3 3}Sydney: Hodder Headline, pp.78–9

     

Working to Death: The Regulation of Working Hours in Health Care

Recent research highlights significant risks associated with health professionals working long hours—risks to their health and safety, to the safety and quality of care provided to patients, and to public safety. This article undertakes a review of the various instruments used to regulate working hours in health systems, using six countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and the European Union as primary comparators. The review demonstrates differences in the instruments used to regulate the issue in these countries and in the economic, social, and cultural factors that limit instrument choice and moderate instrument effectiveness.