LIVING WITH THE CONTRADICTIONS OF MODERNIZATION? EMOTIONAL MANAGEMENT IN THE TEACHING PROFESSION

The state education system in the UK has undergone significant transformation such that New Labour’s modernization policy embodies aspects of the marketized system, inspired by New Right thinking, with a concern for placing schools at the centre of the social inclusion agenda. In this paper, we explore the impact of the modernized agenda on teachers’ work and identify the tensions and contradictions which emanate from these policies. The research centred on interviews with teachers and headteachers in four school case studies and explores the changing nature of the profession by focusing on teachers’ emotional management. It is evident that at a time when a large proportion of what teachers do is subject to scrutiny and audit, the emotional and less definable elements of teaching have also increased but remain relatively unrecognized. The findings suggest that issues of emotional management bring into sharp relief the contradictions evident in the modernized agenda.     

High Conflict Divorce,Violence, and Abuse: Implications for Custody and Visitation Decisions

Today, judges are faced with the daunting task of determining the best interests of the child and making appropriate custody awards to that end. The best interests of children becomes a critical question when domestic violence is involved; yet, determining what constitutes domestic violence is often debated. Research is often divided on what constitutes domestic violence. One body of research focuses on conflict, another focuses on domestic violence. What the first group identifies as intense emotional distress and disagreement, the other identifies as abuse. Judges making custody determinations in such cases are faced with the difficult challenge of distinguishing between a divorce with “high conflict” and a domestic violence case with ongoing abuse. This article will summarize the legal, philosophical, and historical understandings of the “high conflict” family and its potential impact on children. It will also provide practical judicial guidelines for making the important distinction between high conflict and domestic violence and subsequently crafting appropriate and safe child custody awards.     

Economics, environmentalism and party alignments: A note on partisan change in advanced industrial democracies

'We are neither Left nor Right, we are out in front' was the mantra of the environmental movement in the 1970s and early 1980s. This research examines the relationship between the traditional left/right economic cleavage and the environmental cleavage in structuring party competition in advanced industrial democracies. It begins by discussing the theoretical rationale for the separation of environmentalism from the traditional economic cleavage, and utilises new expert data to describe the evolution of party positions between 1989 and 2002–2003. An initially strong relationship between party positions on both dimensions in 1989 has strengthened over time. The convergence occurs largely because of changes by Green parties and by the addition of new parties that define themselves on both dimensions. This points to the ability of democratic party systems to integrate a new political cleavage, and the process of integration. However, leftist parties still continue to diverge with respect to how they respond to the environmental cleavage.     

DEVELOPING AND UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL CHANGE IN HM CUSTOMS AND EXCISE: THERE IS MORE TO DANCING THAN KNOWING THE NEXT STEPS

Increasingly, what was formerly known as public administration is turning itself into management, while management itself is fast becoming synonymous with the management of change. These two directions meet in government calls to change the culture of the civil service, and are to be found most clearly in the Financial Management Initiative (1982), and its successor, the Next Steps (1988). While each stresses a different aspect, the core policy idea which runs through them is one of improving performance by delegating power and responsibility down the hierarchy closer to the point of delivery. In this way the bureaucratic giants which comprise the various central government departments are transformed into more adroit organizations, to the extent that it becomes appropriate to talk of giants learning to dance (Kanter 1989). This article, through a discussion of 'experiments in change' conducted in one of the largest central government giants, HM Customs and Excise, argues that teaching giants to learn to dance is easier said than done. The main focus of the article is on what giants may need to learn in order that they can become more attuned to change and it concludes with the proposition that change in central government cannot be understood or be properly managed without an appreciation of the changing context of change itself.     

Global Banks as Global Sustainability Regulators?: The Equator Principles

Banks might now seem odd candidates for the role of global sustainability regulator. Nonetheless, in limited areas of their operation, where global banks kept risk on their balance sheets and were financially exposed to many types of risk often otherwise treated as “externalities,” banks began to enact policies to encourage what they construe as “sustainable” banking. A small number of these banks have started to extend these principles of responsible action more broadly, across many of their business lines, as conditions of lending to their corporate clients. To this extent, it is possible to talk about (some) global banks as global sustainability regulators. The “law of unintended consequences” as used in the legal literature almost always refers to the unintended negative consequences of a regulation or policy. In this article, however, we discuss a potentially positive unintended consequence of the deregulatory and privatization trend of the 1980s and 1990s that was fueled by neoliberal political commitments: some private banks have taken a leadership role in regulating development. Specifically, these banks are enacting policies that attempt to mitigate the potentially negative social and environmental consequences of infrastructure development in politically unstable or environmentally fragile landscapes. The vehicle for doing this is a voluntary agreement called the Equator Principles (EPs). The article describes and analyzes the EPs and reports the initial results from an interview‐based study of the various EPs stakeholders, including bankers, government officials, lawyers, consultants, and critics from nongovernmental organizations. We address—from the perspective of these stakeholders—such questions as why the participating banks decided to join the EPs, what effects, if any, the EPs are having on development practice, and whether the EPs will ultimately prove to be more than a public relations exercise.