COLLABORATIVE CAPACITY AND STRATEGIES IN AREA‐BASED INITIATIVES

Despite considerable evaluator investment in examining partnership activity in UK public policy initiatives, little attention has been paid to the role of strategy in supporting the generation and harnessing of the resources necessary to collaborate effectively. This paper focuses on one of the first New Labour initiatives – Health Action Zones (HAZ) – and draws on national evaluation findings to delineate local strategies, assess their application in practice and reflect on their contribution to collaborative action. The paper argues that even within nationally constrained policy initiatives there is sufficient flexibility for local actors to select strategies to steer collaborative effort, but these strategies are informed by their operating context and are liable to change in response to experience and changes in context. In addition, the evaluation findings suggest that effective strategies are those which harness collaborative capacity across a range of dimensions. The paper concludes by identifying implications for theory, policy and evaluation.     

USER INVOLVEMENT IN COMMUNITY CARE: ORIGINS, PURPOSES AND APPLICATIONS

Whilst the drive towards public sector consumerism is intensifying, it is also evident that somewhat different 'brands' of consumerism are currently being marketed. This article develops a framework to assist in the disaggregation and understanding of the range of approaches to consumerism currently being pursued in the field of health and social care. Its principal elements concern the ideological origins of consumerism in this field; their purposes; and the forms through which consumer preference are expressed. This framework is applied to the Birmingham Community Care Special Action Project, a major developmental initiative which the authors have been studying. An important area for further investigation is the extent to which users and carers seek to exercise greater collective control over services as opposed to influencing the development of services more responsive to their individual needs.     

UNPACKING THE BLACK BOX OF PEER SIMILARITY IN DEVIANCE: UNDERSTANDING THE MECHANISMS LINKING PERSONAL BEHAVIOR,PEER BEHAVIOR,AND PERCEPTIONS

The strong correlation between measures of personal and peer deviance occurs with near “law‐like” regularity. Yet, as with other manifestations of peer similarity (often referred to as homophily), the mechanisms generating this relationship are widely debated. Specific to the deviance literature, most studies have failed to examine, simultaneously, the degree to which similarity is the consequence of multiple causes. The current study addresses this gap by using longitudinal network data for 1,151 individuals from the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) School Project. Structural equation modeling is used to address these issues by adapting Jussim and Osgood's ( 1989 ) model of deviant attitudes in dyadic pairs to the current data. Across two separate behavioral domains (substance use and property offending), the results provide strong support for the prediction that individuals project their own deviant tendencies inaccurately onto their peers. Conversely, the results provide little or no support for the predictions that respondents accurately perceive their peers’ deviance or that their perceptions of peer deviance influence their own behavior. Implications for understanding the role of peer behavior in the etiology of adolescent deviance are discussed.     

EXAMINING THE GENETIC UNDERPINNINGS TO MOFFITT'S DEVELOPMENTAL TAXONOMY: A BEHAVIORAL GENETIC ANALYSIS*

In recent years, criminological research has observed an increase in studies examining different offending trajectories. Much of this research has been guided by Moffitt's (1993) developmental taxonomy of life‐course persistent offenders, adolescence‐limited offenders, and abstainers. Moffitt (1993) argued that the etiologies of these different pathways could be traced to several biosocial factors, including perhaps genetic factors. To date, research has failed to address this possibility directly. The current study addressed this gap in the literature by examining the extent to which genetic factors explain variance in different offending patterns. Analysis of sibling pairs (N = 2,284; ages spanned between 11 and 27 years) drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) revealed that genetic factors contributed significantly to being classified in each of the different offending patterns. Specifically, genetic factors explained between 56 and 70 percent of the variance in being classified as a life‐course persistent offender across different coding strategies, 35 percent of the variance in being classified as an adolescence‐limited offender, and 56 percent of the variance in being classified as an abstainer. We discuss the importance of integrating genetics into future studies examining offending trajectories.     

THE SCUNTHORPE ENTERPRIZE ZONE: AN EXAMPLE OF MUDDLED INTERVENTIONISM

The article examines the case of the Scunthorpe Enterprize Zone (EZ) and the extent to which it is consistent with the Conservative Government's emphasis on the market mechanism. It also looks at the likely impact of this EZ on the local and sub-regional economy. The article concludes by observing that Scunthorpe District Council was quick to take advantage of its EZ status, which has already generated a significant number of jobs for the town, but at the possible cost of jobs in other parts of the sub region. Finally the Scunthorpe case would appear to support the view that the implementation of the policy has been in contradiction to the original objectives of central Government.