How Empire Shaped Us

How Empire Shaped Us. Edited by Antoinette Burton and Dane Kennedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. xi+216. £65.00 (cloth).     

Early Intervention with Compensated Lower Back-Injured Workers at Risk for Work Disability: Fixed versus Flexible Approach

Low back pain (LBP), a leading cause of disability, has been linked with profound economic, personal, and social costs (Hills 2006; World Health Organization 2003). This significant effect propels research in identifying modifiable risk factors that protract LBP; these factors can be targeted in early intervention (EI) (Pransky, Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine, 49(3):249–251, 2007; Schultz et al., Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 17:327–352, 2007, Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 18(2), 140–151, 2008; White et al. 2013). This randomized controlled study evaluated the effectiveness of two approaches, fixed versus flexible, in delivering proactive, interdisciplinary EI with 63 workers within a workers' compensation interdisciplinary case management setting (i.e., WorkSafeBC, Canada). Off-work 4 to 10 weeks post-back injury, the workers were also at risk of protracted work disability (N?=?24 at high risk; N?=?39 at moderate risk). Fixed, protocol-driven, interdisciplinary, multimodal, clinical, occupational, and case management-based EI was compared with a flexible, individual need-driven EI with the same modalities as the fixed approach. Results showed a significant narrowing of the outcome gap between the two interventions. High-risk injured workers tended to benefit more from a fixed, protocol-driven approach, as shown in the pilot study (Schultz et al. Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 18(2), 140–151, 2008). The results indicated that moderate-risk workers benefitted from a more flexible, need-based, individual, and low-intensity approach as compared with a fixed approach. The flexible approach for moderate-risk workers was also less costly and consumed fewer rehabilitation and health care resources. Recommendations for future research and practice included larger sample sizes, controllability of research interventions, risk for disability-EI matching, and conditions under which a flexible delivery of multimodal EI is more efficacious than a fixed approach, and vice versa.     

Recent Historical Writing on Darwinism: A Review Article

Books reviewed in this article:
Frederick Burkhardt, (ed.), Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection 1825–1859
Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945
Stephen J. Gould, Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin     

The women’s liberation movement,activism and therapy at the grassroots, 1968–1985

The women’s liberation movement was the impetus for the founding of new institutions of psychological and mental health care for women in the late 1970s and 1980s. This article draws upon the archive of one such site, based in Islington, North London, to explore the ways that members of the movement interacted with local politics and were attentive to racial and economic oppression. It demonstrates that consciousness-raising groups and feminist magazines made women’s distress visible and that this visibility led to the development of feminist critiques of mainstream psychiatric care. The critiques of mainstream provision laid the ground for grassroots interventions into women’s mental healthcare in the community.     

From Protection to Competition — The Politics of Trade Practices Reform in Australia

From Protection to Competition — The Politics of Trade Practices Reform in Australia. By Kerrie Round and Martin Shanahan (Sydney: The Federation Press, 2015), AU$125.00 (hb).     

‘No‐party’ politics and local democracy in Africa: Rawlings’ Ghana in the 1990s and the ‘Ugandan model’

Ghana's decentralised form of administration run by elected District Assemblies was created in 1989 by Jerry Rawlings’ military government. As in Uganda under Museveni's National Resistance Council regime, it was inspired by populist theories of participatory, community‐led democracy which idealised the consensual character of ‘traditional’ village life and rejected the relevance of political parties. The Assemblies remain by law ‘no‐party’ institutions, notwithstanding Ghana's transition to multi‐party constitutional democracy in 1992. Their performance since 1989 is examined in the light of the question: to what extent can the Ugandan ‘no‐party’ model continue within a context of party competition, given that it assumes the all‐inclusive and non‐conflictual character of community politics? The conclusion is that the contradictions between the no‐party consensual model, de facto ruling party domination and the reality of local conflict have created significant difficulties for the Assembly system. Participation has declined and conflict‐resolution been made more difficult, whilst the legitimacy and transparency of resource decisions have been undermined.     

Legitimacy, Authority and the Transfer of Power in Ghana

The problems of authority and legitimacy experienced by post-colonial states are often explained in terms of a 'colonial legacy'. The validity of this hypothesis is examined, in the case of Ghana, by analysing changes in the kinds of legitimacy claimed by the state from the colonial period through decolonization to independence. It is concluded that, whilst the most enduring legacy of colonialism was the attempt to found legitimacy in particularistic, indigenous systems of law, the decolonization process failed to transfer any one of the new, competing claims to legitimacy which emerged. Nationalism, of its very nature, was precluded from claiming authority on the basis of expertise in being European, and was also led to deny the validity of indigenous cultures. Representative democracy too was contradictory in so far as its results often challenged the nationalists' conception of a non-ethnic national identity. Ultimately neither democracy nor 'being African' was a sufficient basis for the legitimacy of the new state.