bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Post‐nationalism and the Quest for Constitutional Substitutes
Authors: Chalmers Damien
Published: March 2003

Post‐nationalism is suggestive of a number of transformations in the practice of both law and politics. In the case of politics, it implies an assertion of the salience of the organization of scale, time, and individual subjectivity in the practice of politics, yet a corresponding acknowledgement that traditional administrative structures have lost their hegemony over organization of these phenomena. In the case of law, it implies a legal pluralism caused in part by administrative differentiation, but also brought about an increase in the number and types of organization that have private ’law‐making’ capacities. These processes are particular disruptive for the modern constitution, which has traditionally been identified as a central instrument in the recognition, co‐ordination, interaction, and self‐legitimation of law and politics. This begs the question as to what processes are carrying out tasks that have traditionally been associated with the modern constitution. This essay argues that the fluidity and complexity of these processes entail that they must lie in the processes of interaction themselves. In particular, it argues that the central ‘constitutional substitute’ is the individual act of recognizing organizations as having political and legal attributes. For the process of recognition contains two structures which serve to organize and legitimize interaction. Any act of ‘constitutional’ recognition requires, first, a process of prior evaluation on the part of the observer that requires the organization to justify itself to the observer. The according of recognition, by contrast, entails that the observer respect the organization as having the autonomy to impose and represent itself politically. This respect allow the organization to order legal and political life.
Law, Struggle, and Political Transformation in Northern Ireland
Authors: McEvoy Kieran
Published: March 2003

This article analyses the role of law as an element of the Republican Movement's violent and political struggle during the Northern Ireland conflict. The trials and legal hearings of paramilitary defendants, the use of judicial reviews in the prisons, and the use of law in the political arena are chosen as three interconnected sites which highlight the complex interaction between law and other forms of struggle. The author argues that these three sites illustrate a number of themes in understanding the role of law in processes of struggle and political transformation. These include: law as a series of dialogical processes both inside and outside a political movement; law as an instrumental process of struggle designed to materially and symbolically ‘resist’; and the constitutive effects of legal struggle upon a social and political movement. The article concludes with a discussion as to whether or not Republicans' emphasis upon ‘rights and equality’ and an end to armed struggle represents a ‘sell out’ of traditional Republican objectives.
Transparency Mechanisms: Building Publicness into Public Services
Authors: Stirton Lindsay , Lodge Martin
Published: March 2003

Recent changes in patterns of public service provision, sometimes associated with the ‘regulatory state’, have been said to have eroded citizenship and diminished accountability. This paper responds to these challenges by outlining a toolbox of four transparency mechanisms – information, choice, representation, and voice – as alternative devices that can be built into the architecture of public service regimes, to increase responsiveness and answerability. Using insights drawn from cybernetics and transaction cost analysis, this paper looks at the consequences of different choices of combinations of mechanisms in allocating authority in line with competing administrative doctrines of fiduciary trusteeship and consumer sovereignty. Attention is drawn to differences in ‘cost profiles’ between different public services that can facilitate or inhibit consumer choice as a basis for understanding the suitability of different combinations of mechanisms to specific public services. A contingency model determining the suitability of particular mechanisms to particular services of different ‘cost‐profiles’ is presented. Given the variety of public services and among different public service architectures in the regulatory state, it is argued that this differentiated approach to transparency and accountability provides a more effective response to holding public services accountable than narrower traditional notions of political accountability.
Private Regulation of the Public Sector: A Neglected Facet of Contemporary Governance
Authors: Scott Colin
Published: March 2003

The centrality of regulation among the tools deployed by governments is well established in the social science literature. Regulation of public sector bodies by non‐state organizations is an important but neglected aspect of contemporary governance arrangements. Some private regulators derive both authority and power from a legal mandate for their activities. Statutory powers are exercised by private regulators where they are delegated or contracted out. Contractual powers take collective (for example, self‐regulatory) and individuated forms. But a further important group of private regulators, operating both nationally and internationally, lack a legal mandate and yet have the capacity to exercise considerable power in constraining governments and public agencies. In a number of cases private regulators operate more complete regulatory regimes (in the sense of controlling standard setting, monitoring, and enforcement elements) than is true of public regulators. While private regulators may enhance the scrutiny given to public bodies (and thus enhance regimes of control and accountability), their existence suggests a need to identify the conditions under which such private power is legitimately held and used. One such condition is the existence of appropriate mechanisms for controlling or checking power. Such controls may take the classic form of public oversight, but may equally be identified in the checks exercised by participation in communities or markets.
The Dynamics of Alliance Conditions in the Alliance Development Process
Authors: Das T. K. , Teng Bing‐Sheng
Published: March 2003

One of the key issues in understanding the developmental processes of strategic alliances is how the alliance conditions change over the different stages of alliance development. A related question concerns the nature of the co‐evolutionary dynamics of alliances in terms of their constituent partner firms. In this article we propose an integrated process model of alliances that is based on alliance conditions, allianc developmental stages, and an alliance system comprising co‐evolutionary elements. We suggest that alliance conditions, or the key characteristics of an alliance at any given moment, link the alliance environment (firm characteristics) and the alliance development process. We also explore how specific patterns of alliance conditions have differential impacts on the interactive elements of the alliance co‐evolutionary system.
Time‐based Experience and International Expansion: The Case of an Emerging Economy
Authors: Luo Yadong
Published: March 2003

Building on the organizational learning theory and international expansion process model, this paper examines the effect of time‐based experience on multidimensional performance including return on equity, sales growth, competitive position, and asset efficiency of foreign‐invested enterprises (FIEs) in an emerging economy (the People's Republic of China). The analysis, based on a recent survey of FIEs in China, demonstrates that time‐based experience has a significantly positive effect on overall and individual dimensions of performance of FIEs. The underlying link between time‐based experience and multidimensional performance is, however, moderated by the cultural distance between the host and home countries. Moreover, time‐based experience moderates the positive impact of resource contributions, market commitment, and strategic innovativeness on venture performance.
What Corporate Boards have to do with Strategy: A Cognitive Perspective
Authors: Rindova Violina P.
Published: March 2003

Traditional research on corporate governance has viewed the contribution of corporate directors to strategy making as limited by their lack of independence or firm‐specific knowledge. To the degree that directors contribute to strategy, most previous research has viewed their role primarily as dealing with the conflict resulting from divergent preferences of agents and principles. The cognitive perspective this paper proposes suggests that directors contribute to dealing with the complexity and uncertainty associated with strategic decisions. It argues that directors possess valuable problem‐solving expertise, which they can apply to a variety of contexts. Directors make their cognitive contributions to strategic decision making by performing along with a firm's managers a set of cognitive tasks: scanning, interpretation and choice.
Organizational Learning: Debates Past, Present And Future
Authors: Easterby‐Smith Mark , Crossan Mary , Nicolini Davide
Published: March 2003

In this paper we attempt to map the development of organizational learning as a field of academic study by examining the rise and fall of specific debates. This does not pretend to be a comprehensive review of the field since there is now far too much material available to allow full coverage in any single publication. Rather, we have identified some of the key debates, and these have been organized along the simplistic time‐line of past, present and future. Our purpose is two‐fold: first, to note how the nature and language of the key ideas in organizational learning have changed over time; and second, to locate the papers in this Special Issue within the context of the developing field. It is perhaps no accident that we see most of the papers as closely associated with new, and emerging, issues, but we also find it interesting to note that many of these current or emergent issues actually have roots within some of the earlier debates.
A Dialogic Analysis of Organizational Learning
Authors: Oswick Cliff , Anthony Peter , Keenoy Tom , Mangham Iain L. , Grant David
Published: March 2003

Dialogue is often seen as the process through which the gap between individual and organizational learning is bridged. Here we demonstrate how the enactment of a discursive epistemology – a process which involves the social construction of a dramatized narrative – can be used to generate insights into organizational learning. Using extracts taken from the transcripts of 90 hours of tape‐recorded dialogue, we illustrate how a small group of organizational stakeholders construct, deconstruct and re‐construct meaning in relation to a critical organizational event (i.e. a learning opportunity)through a generative dialogical process. As a result of this analysis the dominant conceptualization of the role of dialogue in organizational learning – exemplified in Peter Senge’s work – is challenged. Here Senge’s output‐driven, univocal account is rejected in favour of a polyphonic perspective which enables a deeper, richer and less constrained understanding of organizational learning to be developed.
Learning Through Joint Ventures: A Framework Of Knowledge Acquisition
Authors: Inkpen Andrew C.
Published: March 2003

Joint ventures (JVs) are becoming an increasingly important organizational form in international business. When JVs are formed, valuable learning opportunities may be created for the venture partners. The primary objective in this paper is to explore the conditions under which firms exploit JV learning opportunities through the acquisition of knowledge. A framework of knowledge acquisition by JV partner firms is proposed. Using JV partner organizations as the primary level of analysis, the paper identifies various factors that influence the acquisition of learning, its value to the learning organization, and the migration of knowledge from the JV to the parent. Two firm specific learning‐based concepts are developed: alliance knowledge accessibility and knowledge acquisition effectiveness.
Odd Couple: Making Sense of the Curious Concept of Knowledge Management
Authors: Alvesson Mats , Kärreman Dan
Published: March 2003

The idea of knowledge management draws currently much attention, both among practitioners and scholars. Advocates of the term argue that knowledge management points to a new set of phenomena and practices for managers to learn and master. In particular knowledge management focuses on the creation and distribution of knowledge in organizations through technological novelties such as the internet, intranets, and e‐mail, although there are also streams concentrating on social relations and interactions. This paper examines several possible conceptualizations of the idea of knowledge management. It is argued that knowledge is an ambiguous, unspecific and dynamic phenomenon, intrinsically related to meaning, understanding and process, and therefore difficult to manage. There is thus a contradiction between knowledge and management. Drawing from a literature review and a case study, it is suggested that knowledge management is as likely, if not more so, to operate as a practice of managing people or information than as a practice attuned towards facilitating knowledge creation.
Developing Stakeholder Theory
Authors: Friedman Andrew L. , Miles Samantha
Published: March 2003

Previous literature has led to a lack of appreciation of: the range of organization/stakeholder relations that can occur; the extent to which such relations change over time; as well as how and why such changes occur. In particular, extremely negative and highly conflicting relations between organizations and stakeholders have been ignored. Due to this lack of appreciation it is argued that current attempts at integrating the separate strands of stakeholder theory to achieve a convergent stakeholder theory are premature. A model is presented which combines stakeholder theory with a realist theory of social change and differentiation. This model is intended to highlight why it is important to distinguish different stakeholders. The model also enables an analysis of the organization/stakeholder relationship, which is not exclusively from the organization perspective and which is capable of illuminating why and how organization/stakeholder relations change over time. The history of Greenpeace is used as an example.
Dress and Identity: A Turkish Case Study
Authors: Humphreys Michael , Brown Andrew D.
Published: March 2003

This paper examines how dress can be implicated in contests regarding individual and organizational identities. Identities are understood as being constituted within discursive regimes, and to be subjectively available to people in the form of self–narratives. The pluralism and polyphony that characterize organizations means that collective self–narratives are likely to be fractured, contested and multi–layered. It is in this context that attire is an important object symbol that conveys information about the individual and collective self. Here we focus on aspects of dress, especially the Islamic headscarf, and its role in the dynamics of collective identity maintenance and challenge in one all–female Turkish university department. Our ethnographic approach yielded multiple, related and sometimes overlapping story lines centred on dress. These we have chosen to represent as a single though multi–voiced faculty narrative in order to facilitate analysis of what was a particularly rich symbolic milieu. The principal research contribution of this paper is as a discussion of participants’ clothing in the constitution of individual and organizational narrative identities, and its importance for understanding the dynamics of identity conflicts.
Mad King George: The Impace of Personal and Political Stress on Mental and Physical Health
Authors: Simonton Dean Keith
Published: March 2003

Both historians and psychiatrists have tried to explain the recurrent attacks of mental and physical illness experienced by King George III of Great Britain. Although the porphyria hypothesis is widely accepted, this diagnosis assumes that the king’s breakdowns were not precipitated by extreme stress. This assumption was tested using single‐case historiometric methods. Biographical data were compiled to form two extensive chronologies of the monarch’s life, one for stressful events and the other for pathological symptoms. From this information 22 independent judges reliably assessed fluctuations in stress (total, personal, and political) and health (total, physical, and mental) across 624 consecutive months between 1760 and 1811. The cross‐correlations were then calculated for the raw, first‐differenced, and prewhitened time series. A consistent tendency appeared for the king’s health to deteriorate after increases in stress, most frequently with a 9‐month delay. The current study demonstrates the utility of applying quantitative techniques to a psychobiographical debate hitherto examined solely by qualitative approaches.
Generalization, Adverse Events, and Development of Depressive Symptoms
Authors: Carver Charles S.
Published: March 2003

Many diathesis‐stress models have been proposed in which cognitive processes of various types are presumed to represent vulnerabilities to development of depressive symptoms. This study tested three potential vulnerabilities as prospective predictors of such symptoms: the holding of especially high standards, the tendency to be self‐critical after failure, and the tendency to generalize from a single failure to the broader sense of self‐worth. At the start of a semester, college students completed a measure of these cognitive tendencies and a measure of depressive symptoms. Six weeks later they completed the same measure of depressive symptoms and a brief measure of intervening life events. Hierarchical regression analysis yielded evidence that Generalization interacted with adverse events to predict subsequent depressive symptoms. Self‐Criticism also tended to predict later symptoms, but only if the symptoms were present initially. High Standards had no adverse effect.
Does Spirituality Represent the Sixth Factor of Personality? Spiritual Transcendence and the Five‐Factor Model
Authors: Piedmont Ralph L.
Published: March 2003

This study reports on the development of the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, a measure designed to capture aspects of the individual that are independent of the qualities contained in the Five‐Factor Model of Personality (FFM). Using two separate samples of undergraduate students including both self‐report (Ns = 379 and 356) and observer data (N = 279), it was shown that Spiritual Transcendence: (a) was independent of measures of the FFM; (b) evidenced good cross‐observer convergence; and (c) predicted a wide range of psychologically salient outcomes, even after controlling for the predictive effects of personality. Given the long theoretical pedigree of Transcendence in the psychological literature, it was argued that Spiritual Transcendence represents a broad‐based motivational domain of comparable breadth to those constructs contained in the FFM and ought to be considered a potential sixth major dimension of personality.
Personality Disorders as Extreme Variants of Common Personality Dimensions: Can the Five Factor Model Adequately Represent Psychopathy?
Authors: Miller Joshua D. , Lyman Donald R. , Widiger Thomas A. , Leukefeld Carl
Published: March 2003

The present study examined Widiger and Lynam’s (1998) hypothesis that psychopathy can be represented using the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality. Participants in the study consisted of 481 21–22 year old men and women who are part of an ongoing longitudinal study. Psychopathy was assessed by the degree of similarity between an individual’s NEO‐PI‐R and an expert‐generated FFM psychopathy prototype. The expert‐based prototype supported the account of Widiger and Lynam (1998), as did the correlations between the NEO‐PI‐R Psychopathy Resemblance Index (PRI) and the individual personality dimensions. The PRI was also related in predicted ways to measures of antisocial behavior, drug use, and psychopathology. The results support the contention that psychopathy can be understood as an extreme variant of common dimensions of personality, and underscore the utility of a dimensional model of personality disorders.
Individualism‐Collectivism and Personality
Authors: Triandis Harry C.
Published: March 2003

This paper provides a review of the main findings concerning the relationship between the cultural syndromes of individualism and collectivism and personality. People in collectivist cultures, compared to people in individualist cultures, are likely to define themselves as aspects of groups, to give priority to in‐group goals, to focus on context more than the content in making attributions and in communicating, to pay less attention to internal than to external processes as determinants of social behavior, to define most relationships with ingroup members as communal, to make more situational attributions, and tend to be self‐effacing.
Indigenization and Beyond: Methodological Relationalism in the Study of Personality Across Cultural Traditions
Authors: Ho David Y. F. , Peng Si‐qing , Cheng Lai Alice , Chan Shui‐fun F.
Published: March 2003

A brief intellectual history of the indigenization movement in Asia leads to the thesis that the generation of psychological knowledge is culture dependent. Indigenous psychologies go further and insist on viewing a target group from the natives’ own standpoint. Psychological decentering underlies conceptions of human existence rooted in Asian intellectual traditions, in particular, relatedness between persons predominates in Confucianism. These conceptions demand new approaches to knowledge generation that signify a paradigmatic shift from methodological individualism to methodological relationalism. An implication is that relationships precede situations in the study of personality and social behavior. We define personality as the sum total of common attributes manifest in, and abstracted from, a person’s behavior directly or indirectly observed across interpersonal relationships and situations over time. We rely on the notion that there are identifiable levels of cognition to develop a metatheoretical framework for reconstructing selfhood. Confronting the subject‐object dichotomy opens the door to investigations of transcendent consciousness; confronting the self‐other demarcation underlying Western theories leads to the construction of self‐in‐relations.
Spatial Information: Classification and Applications in Building Design
Authors: Nguyen Tang‐Hung , Oloufa Amr A.
Published: March 2003

Physical properties of building components are usually represented in building data models by their three‐dimensional geometry and topology—also called spatial information. While geometric data of building components can be manipulated and managed by a computer‐aided design (CAD) interface, their spatial relations (or topological information) are conventionally represented in a manual fashion into data models. The manual data representation, however, is inherently a complex and challenging task due to the wide variety of spatial relationships. Thus, topological information should be classified and modeled in such a way that the required spatial data for a particular design task can be automatically retrieved. This paper attempts to identify and classify various topological information commonly used in building design and construction into more specific categories (e.g., adjacency, connection, containment, separation, and intersection) to support automatic deduction of the spatial information in a computer‐based building design system. The paper also discusses typical applications of the topological relations to different design activities. Finally, the development of deduction algorithms and the proposed building design system are briefly described.
Has Wittgenstein Been Misunderstood by Wittgensteinian Philosophers of Religion?
Authors: Amesbury Richard
Published: March 2003

The appropriate application of Wittgenstein's thought to problems in the philosophy of religion has long been debated. A body of emerging scholarship argues that the philosophers of religion who pioneered this application are guilty of having misunderstood and distorted Wittgenstein's thought. This paper seeks to counter these charges by arguing that they generally depend on either construals of Wittgenstein's thought that are themselves implausible or misreadings of the philosophers against whom they are levied. Special attention is given to accusations of fideism, quietism, expressivism, and positivism, as well as to the work of Phillips, Winch, and Rhees.
Internationalized Policy Environments and Policy Network Analysis
Authors: Coleman William D. , Perl Anthony
Published: March 2003

The importance of horizontal coordinating governance arrangements in the internationalized policy domains that occur more frequently in the present globalizing era justifies building further on middle-level theories that draw on the policy community/policy network concepts. This reconceptualization, however, requires an explicit integration of policy paradigms and political ideas into policy community theory and careful attention to the differential impact of varying governance patterns in internationalized policy domains. This article pursues these objectives beginning with a review of existing literature on policy communities and policy networks. Next, drawing on recent research on policy paradigms and political ideas, it suggests how policy community concepts might be adapted for the study of policy change. Four types of internationalized policy environments are then identified and their implications for policy communities and policy networks are assessed. The article concludes by introducing the concept of policy community mediators and discussing how they might shape the relationships among multiple policy communities.
Power and Regulation in Britain
Authors: Wolfe Joel D.
Published: March 2003

With the sell-off of the nationalized utilities, regulation became central to the way Britain is governed. The withdrawal of state ownership and provision, however, challenges agency models of state power, which suggest that state capacity increases only with increased resources. This paper suggests that distinguishing between direct and indirect power explains how diminishing state intervention can enhance state control. After reconceptualizing regulation in terms of these two media of power, the paper examines British utility regulations as the operations and effects of marketizing delegation. It shows how market processes operate as a medium of indirect control, permitting the core state to hold direct power in reserve and enhancing overall state power.
The Politics of Inclusive Agreements: Towards a Critical Discourse Theory of Democracy
Authors: O'Neill Shane
Published: March 2003

This article offers a critical assessment of Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory of democracy. It suggests that the main thrust of a discursive account of legitimacy is the attempt to show how the demands of maximal democratic inclusion might be reconciled with a politics of reasoned agreements. While this aim is endorsed, the thrust of the argument is that a critical theory of democracy requires that normative frameworks that bring certain substantive features of democratic life into focus should supplement Habermas's procedural approach. First, the account of maximal inclusion has to be developed in a way that clarifies the egalitarian demands of distributive justice. Secondly, the account of a politics of reasoned agreements has to be connected to a theoretical analysis of the bonds of solidarity that could underpin such a form of political engagement. These developments contribute to a critical theory that gives a more adequate account of the motivational basis of discursive democracy.
Conflicting Equalities? Cultural Group Rights and Sex Equality
Authors: Deveaux Monique
Published: March 2003

This article explores the tensions within multiculturalist theory between the aspiration to promote cultural recognition and the need to promote and protect women's concern with issues of sex and gender inequality. The article asseses the three main approaches to the reconciliation of sexual equality and group rights; according priority to the traditional values and practices of cultural groups; accepting collective and cultural rights but within a framework international human rights; and finally, the acceptance of group rights subject to respect for individual rights and freedoms. By focusing on the experience of aboriginal women activists in Canadian politics and their struggle to preserve constitutional sex equality, this article argues that only the third approach provides adequate safeguards for women in their public and private roles.
Aquinas's Two Doctrines of Natural Law
Authors: Burns Tony
Published: March 2003

This paper examines the role which the concept of natural law has to play in the political thought of Aquinas, as this is to be found in the Summa Theologiae. It focuses particularly on Aquinas's understanding of the relationship which exists between natural and positive law. It argues that Aquinas's views are inconsistent and that the Summa actually contains two quite different positions regarding this subject. One of these is inherited from the Stoic natural law tradition and the other from Aristotle. The former considers natural law to be a critical standard by means of which positive law can be evaluated by individuals, whereas the latter does not. On the contrary, it maintains that according to Aquinas the principles of natural law require interpretation, and that this interpretation is to be provided, not by the conscience of the individual moral agent, but by positive law. Focus on either one or the other of these two documents leads to quite different interpretations of Aquinas's political thought as a whole. One such interpretation sees Aquinas as being a distant forerunner of the liberal political tradition. The other associates Aquinas much more closely with the notion of authority and hence with conservatism in politics. The article concludes by commenting on the relevance of these different interpretations of Aquinas for the contemporary debate between liberals and communitarians.
Post-Revolutionary State Building in Ethiopia, Iran and Nicaragua: Lessons from Terror
Authors: O'Kane Rosemary H. T.
Published: March 2003

This paper focuses on an earlier theorized critical stage of revolution, the Reign of Terror which is redefined with summary justice as its essence and employed in a comparative analysis of three modern revolutions, Ethiopia, Iran and Nicaragua. The analysis demonstrates the importance of national factors over international factors in explaining post-revolutionary state construction. A reign of terror is an extemporized state; it is not an inevitable stage of revolution. Comparison of Ethiopia and Iran, where terrors occurred, is contrasted with Nicaragua, where a reign of terror was avoided. This reveals the significance for post-revolutionary state construction of the timing and outcome of civil war, of domestic policy choices constrained by circumstances directly encountered and of state control over new, revolutionary, means of coercion.
Government, Interest Groups and Policy Change
Authors: Richardson Jeremy
Published: March 2003

Much of the British and European literature on the role of interest groups in the policy process focuses on their participation in policy networks of various types. Possibly reflecting the original development of the policy community and policy network ‘models' in the late 1970s, these approaches tend to emphasize stability and continuity – of both networks and policies. However, the 1980s and 1990s have witnessed much policy change and instability in most Western European states. In particular, some governments have adopted a more impositional policy style, and interest groups have learned to exploit the opportunities presented by a policy process which is increasingly characterized by multiple opportunity structures. This is especially the case following Europeanization of many policy sectors within the fifteen EU member states. The article focuses on the possible causes of policy change, including the importance of state power; changes in the behaviour of interest groups as they adjust to and exploit the opportunities presented by multi-arena policy-making; the impact of new policy fashions, reflecting knowledge and ideas which can act as a virus-like threat to existing policy communities.
Confessions: A Model of Officials' Perspectives on Accepting Gifts from Clients in Post-Communist Europe
Authors: Miller William L. , Grødeland Åse B. , Koshechkina Tatyana Y.
Published: March 2003

There is widespread criticism of the behaviour of junior officials in post-communist Europe where they are often accused of treating citizens unfairly and soliciting presents or bribes to solve citizens' problems. To get the perspective of officials themselves we interviewed 1307 junior officials and state employees in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. This paper focuses on their willingness to accept gifts from clients, their confessions to having done so, and the factors that lead some officials to accept gifts while others do not – factors such as occupational bargaining power and the (related) frequency of offers from clients, economic pressures, national and institutional cultures, fear of punishment, and moral perspectives on charging clients for favours. Economic pressures make officials more inclined to feel that they ‘could not afford to refuse’ gifts, but this motivation is only weakly related to actual behaviour. Occupational bargaining power and the frequency of offers from clients make them more likely to ‘welcome’ gifts or accept them ‘out of politeness' – and these less excusable motivations are more strongly related to actual gift-taking.
Realism and Reform in Rousseau's Constitutional Projects for Poland and Corsica
Authors: Putterman Ethan
Published: March 2003

Of all of the criticisms leveled against Rousseau's practical political writings few have been as pervasive as the charge of intentional utopianism. Over the years this charge has not gone entirely unanswered but, for the most part, the scholarly response has been to identify these works' realism solely in terms of Rousseau's desire to educate a corrupt Europe morally. In this essay, I reexamine the question of utopianism in Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne and Projet pour la Corse to argue that the most egregiously fanciful or eccentric recommendations in these works actually demonstrate evidence of the philosopher's practicality and seriousness about constitutional reform in Poland and Corsica. To appreciate this realism though, readers must turn to Rousseau's opaque remarks about opinion's relationship to the laws in the Lettre à d'Alembert and other writings.
The Observer: Good at Observing, Less Good at Influencing?
Authors: Cowley Philip
Published: March 2003

The 1997 British General Election appeared to show a clear-cut case of the media influencing electoral behaviour. In an attempt to facilitate anti-Conservative tactical voting The Observer published the results of 16 constituency-level opinion polls. The newspaper is frequently seen as influential in determining the outcome in certain seats, where several high-profile members of the then Conservative government were defeated. In fact The Observer appears to have had very little impact in the seats it covered. Higher levels of tactical voting occured in few of these constituencies than in comparable seats elsewhere, and changes in the share of the vote consistent with the paper influencing the outcome are even rarer. In just one of the 16 seats covered by the paper is there prima facie evidence of the claimed effect.
Can EU Social Policy save the Social Exclusion Unit and Vice Versa?
Authors: Geyer Robert
Published: March 2003

With the creation of the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), the new Labour government signalled its concern with the problems of social exclusion. Unveiled as an innovative unit with a dynamic cross-departmental and holistic approach, the SEU quickly failed to meet the hopes of its supporters. Poorly resourced, passively supported by the prime minister, and ignoring the extensive experience of EU antiexclusion policy, the SEU appears doomed to stagnate. However, if it was able to link to and learn from EU social policy, it could provide itself with a broader power base, more coherent policy approach, and strengthen ‘Social Europe’ as well.
Ulrike Marie Meinhof's Bambule and the Censorship of Terrorism in the Arts
Authors: Haynes Michael W.
Published: March 2003

Ulrike Marie Meinhof's televised play Bambule was not broadcast for fear that it would elicit sympathy for the terrorist organisation she founded. This is despite there being no justification of violence for political ends. The withholding of funding and sponsorship continued into the late 1980s for works that condemned violence, but which also refused to provide positive support for the anti-terrorist measures of the state. Although understandable when a society is confronted by a crisis such as terrorism, it may hinder both the understanding of the complexities of political violence and debate over the issues it raises.
Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Affective Judgments
Authors: Reber Rolf , Winkielman Piotr , Schwarz Norbert
Published: March 2003

According to a two-step account of the mere-exposure effect, repeated exposure leads to the subjective feeling of perceptual fluency, which in turn influences liking. If so, perceptual fluency manipulated by means other than repetition should influence liking. In three experiments, effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments were examined. In Experiment 1, higher perceptual fluency was achieved by presenting a matching rather than nonmatching prime before showing a target picture. Participants judged targets as prettier if preceded by a matching rather than nonmatching prime. In Experiment 2, perceptual fluency was manipulated by figure-ground contrast. Stimuli were judged as more pretty, and less ugly, the higher the contrast. In Experiment 3, perceptual fluency was manipulated by presentation duration. Stimuli shown for a longer duration were liked more, and disliked less. We conclude (a) that perceptual fluency increases liking and (b) that the experience of fluency is affectively positive, and hence attributed to positive but not to negative features, as reflected in a differential impact on positive and negative judgments.
A System for Relational Reasoning in Human Prefrontal Cortex
Authors: Waltz James A. , Knowlton Barbara J. , Holyoak Keith J. , Boone Kyle B. , Mishkin Fred S. , de Menezes Santos Marcia , Thomas Carmen R. , Miller Bruce L.
Published: March 2003

The integration of multiple relations between mental representations is critical for higher level cognition. For both deductive- and inductive-reasoning tasks, patients with prefrontal damage exhibited a selective and catastrophic deficit in the integration of relations, whereas patients with anterior temporal lobe damage, matched for overall IQ but with intact prefrontal cortex, exhibited normal relational integration. In contrast, prefrontal patients performed more accurately than temporal patients on tests of both episodic memory and semantic knowledge. These double dissociations suggest that integration of relations is a specific source of cognitive complexity for which intact prefrontal cortex is essential. The integration of relations may be the fundamental common factor linking the diverse abilities that depend on prefrontal function, such as planning, problem solving, and fluid intelligence.
Reflexive Joint Attention Depends on Lateralized Cortical Connections
Authors: Kingstone Alan , Friesen Chris Kelland , Gazzaniga Michael S.
Published: March 2003

Joint attention, the tendency to spontaneously direct attention to where someone else is looking, has been thought to occur because eye direction provides a reliable cue to the presence of important events in the environment. We have discovered, however, that adults will shift their attention to where a schematic face is looking—even when gaze direction does not predict any events in the environment. Research with 2 split-brain patients revealed that this reflexive joint attention is lateralized to a single hemisphere. Moreover, although this phenomenon could be inhibited by inversion of a face, eyes alone produced reflexive shifts of attention. Consistent with recent functional neuroimaging studies, these results suggest that lateralized cortical connections between (a) temporal lobe subsystems specialized for processing upright faces and gaze and (b) the parietal area specialized for orienting spatial attention underlie human reflexive shifts of attention in response to gaze direction.
Of Wealth and Death: Materialism, Mortality Salience, and Consumption Behavior
Authors: Kasser Tim , Sheldon Kennon M.
Published: March 2003

Theoretical work suggests that feelings of insecurity produce materialistic behavior, but most empirical evidence is correlational in nature. We therefore experimentally activated feelings of insecurity by having some subjects write short essays about death (mortality-salience condition). In Study 1, subjects in the mortality-salience condition, compared with subjects who wrote about a neutral topic, had higher financial expectations for themselves 15 years in the future, in terms of both their overall worth and the amount they would be spending on pleasurable items such as clothing and entertainment. Study 2 extended these findings by demonstrating that subjects exposed to death became more greedy and consumed more resources in a forest-management game. Results are discussed with regard to humanistic and terror-management theories of materialism.
Contrasts and Correlations in Effect-Size Estimation
Authors: Rosnow Ralph L. , Rosenthal Robert , Rubin Donald B.
Published: March 2003

This article describes procedures for presenting standardized measures of effect size when contrasts are used to ask focused questions of data. The simplest contrasts consist of comparisons of two samples (e.g., based on the independent t statistic). Useful effect-size indices in this situation are members of the g family (e.g., Hedges's g and Cohen's d) and the Pearson r. We review expressions for calculating these measures and for transforming them back and forth, and describe how to adjust formulas for obtaining g or d from t, or r from g, when the sample sizes are unequal. The real-life implications of d or g calculated from t become problematic when there are more than two groups, but the correlational approach is adaptable and interpretable, although more complex than in the case of two groups. We describe a family of four conceptually related correlation indices: the alerting correlation, the contrast correlation, the effect-size correlation, and the BESD (binomial effect-size display) correlation. These last three correlations are identical in the simple setting of only two groups, but differ when there are more than two groups.
Granting Forgiveness or Harboring Grudges: Implications for Emotion, Physiology, and Health
Authors: Witvliet Charlotte van Oyen , Ludwig Thomas E. , Laan Kelly L. Vander
Published: March 2003

Interpersonal offenses frequently mar relationships. Theorists have argued that the responses victims adopt toward their offenders have ramifications not only for their cognition, but also for their emotion, physiology, and health. This study examined the immediate emotional and physiological effects that occurred when participants (35 females, 36 males) rehearsed hurtful memories and nursed grudges (i.e., were unforgiving) compared with when they cultivated empathic perspective taking and imagined granting forgiveness (i.e., were forgiving) toward real-life offenders. Unforgiving thoughts prompted more aversive emotion, and significantly higher corrugator (brow) electromyogram (EMG), skin conductance, heart rate, and blood pressure changes from baseline. The EMG, skin conductance, and heart rate effects persisted after imagery into the recovery periods. Forgiving thoughts prompted greater perceived control and comparatively lower physiological stress responses. The results dovetail with the psychophysiology literature and suggest possible mechanisms through which chronic unforgiving responses may erode health whereas forgiving responses may enhance it.
Visual Implicit Memory in the Left Hemisphere: Evidence From Patients With Callosotomies and Right Occipital Lobe Lesions
Authors: Yonelinas A.P. , Kroll N.E.A. , K. Baynes , Dobbins I.G. , Frederick C.M. , Knight R.T. , Gazzaniga M.S.
Published: March 2003

Identification of visually presented objects and words is facilitated by implicit memory for past visual experiences with those items. Several behavioral and neuroimaging studies suggest that this form of memory is dependent on perceptual processes localized in the right occipital lobe. We tested this claim by examining implicit memory in patients with extensive right occipital lobe lesions, using lexical-decision, mirror-reading, picture-fragment, and word-fragment-completion tests, and found that these patients exhibited normal levels of priming. We also examined implicit memory in patients with complete callosotomies, using standard and divided-visual-field word-fragment-completion procedures, and found that the isolated left hemisphere exhibited normal priming effects. The results indicate that the right occipital lobe does not play a necessary role in visual implicit memory, and that the isolated left hemisphere can support normal levels of visual priming in a variety of tasks.
Visual Memories from Nonvisual Experiences
Authors: Shelton Amy L. , McNamara Timothy P.
Published: March 2003

Many common activities rely on spatial knowledge acquired from nonvisual modalities. We investigated the nature of this knowledge by having people look at a collection of objects on a desktop and manually reconstruct their arrangement, without vision, as though the display had been rotated by 0°, 45°, 90°, 135°, or 180° relative to the view they could see. Performance on several measures of visual-spatial memory showed that participants had better visual memory for the view they had manually reconstructed than for the view they had studied visually for several minutes. These findings provide compelling new evidence that visual-spatial knowledge of very high fidelity can be acquired from nonvisual modalities, and reveal how visual and nonvisual spatial information may even be confused in the brain.
Knowing a Word Affects the Fundamental Perception of The Sounds Within it
Authors: Samuel Arthur G.
Published: March 2003

Understanding spoken language is an exceptional computational achievement of the human cognitive apparatus. Theories of how humans recognize spoken words fall into two categories: Some theories assume a fully bottom-up flow of information, in which successively more abstract representations are computed. Other theories, in contrast, assert that activation of a more abstract representation (e.g., a word) can affect the activation of smaller units (e.g., phonemes or syllables). The two experimental conditions reported here demonstrate the top-down influence of word representations on the activation of smaller perceptual units. The results show that perceptual processes are not strictly bottom-up: Computations at logically lower levels of processing are affected by computations at logically more abstract levels. These results constrain and inform theories of the architecture of human perceptual processing of speech.