A view from below: industrial re-structuring and women's employment at four Russian enterprises

The labor market in Russia has changed significantly during the last decade. This transformation has resulted in notable changes in employment and unemployment patterns, and in labor mobility, flexibility and insecurity. One critical question is whether these changes signal important differences in labor market outcomes by gender. The approach taken here is to focus on the Russian industrial enterprise. In our study, we find that women experience different internal labor market opportunities and external job prospects than men and those differences in experience are reflected in the actual hiring practices at our firms, with men substituting for women, and women finding it particularly difficult to negotiate the increasingly closed labor market in Russia. At the same time important differences persist among women, differences that do not exist for men.     

Measuring the invisibles: Gender mainstreaming and monitoring experience from a dairy development project in Tanzania

Development projects are under pressure to deliver positive gender changes. This paper provides a practical example of how one project in Tanzania attempted to meet this demand. It details how a conventional technical project developed its own understanding of what it is to be gender sensitive, and identified gender concerns that it might address. The main monitoring challenges became those of how to assess the significance of routinely recorded events such as increased cow allocations to women, and how to incorporate monitoring activities that might focus on researching less obvious, less visible, and more subtle processes of change into the project cycle. The paper advocates giving greater attention to meeting these challenges within projects.     

A comprehensive population survey on the distribution of STR frequencies in Belarus

This work develops a detailed STR database from 11 population samples and samples from paternity analyses from different districts of Belarus. The combined data on 2020 individuals form a total database for the country, with the exclusion power of 99.987% based on 11 STR loci. Possible differentiation in allele frequencies between population samples, small in terms of F-statistics and undetectable by standard statistical tests, is discussed.     

Benefiting from Public Sector Innovation: The Moderating Role of Customer and Learning Orientation

This article examines whether the payoff from engaging in innovation‐generating activities is contingent on an organization's level of customer and learning orientation. The authors suggest that innovative activity is associated with higher public service quality when the level of customer and learning orientation within the focal organization is high. They test this hypothesis by drawing on a novel panel data set covering all public nonspecialist hospital organizations in England. Using dynamic panel data estimation techniques, the authors find strong support for a direct relationship between innovative activity and public service quality and for a moderating role of both customer and learning orientation. These findings call for a contingency perspective on public sector innovation and highlight some of the boundary conditions that need to be in place if public service organizations are to benefit fully from their innovative activities.     

Can general strain theory be used to explain recidivism among registered sex offenders?

Purpose

The purpose of the current study was to assess sex offender recidivism in the context of General Strain Theory (GST).

Methods

Surveys were mailed to 3,506 sex offenders with (N = 939) in Nebraska, (N = 1,850) in Kansas and (N = 717) in Montana. Questions related to strain associated with registration and community notification, anger, depression, and criminal behavior were asked. OLS Regression was utilized to predict overall recidivism, as well as sex, violent, drug, and property recidivism.

Results

Findings suggest that GST is supported when analyzing recidivism.

Conclusions

In the context of these findings, policymakers would do well to reexamine the broad use of registration and community notification laws.     

Negotiating democracy with authoritarian regimes. EU democracy promotion in North Africa

ABSTRACT

In order to better understand the dynamics of international cooperation on democracy promotion with authoritarian regimes, this article looks into the processes and results of negotiations on democracy (promotion) between the European Union (EU) and two of its North African neighbours (Morocco, Tunisia) in the decade leading up to the Arab uprisings. Asking if, how, and to what effect the EU and its Mediterranean partners have negotiated issues related to democracy promotion, it analyses official documents issued on the occasion of their respective association council meetings in 2000-2010. It shows that partners have indeed addressed these issues since the early 2000s, however, without engaging in substantive exchanges. Most of the time, conflicts have been neither directly addressed nor resolved. Where there are traces of actual negotiations leading to an agreement, these are clearly based on a logic of bargaining rather than arguing. These findings challenge the picture of harmony and cooperation between the EU and Morocco. Furthermore, they point to the low quality of these exchanges which reinforces the dilemma of international democracy promotion in cooperation with authoritarian regimes.