bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What Can Organizations Do?
Authors: Hebl Mikki , King Eden
Published: February 2024

Not surprisingly given their positions of power, members of top management are in the best position to create large-scale diversity-related changes within organizations. Emerging evidence about best practices to create inclusive organizations is detailed in this chapter. This process of change begins with a needs analysis and requires that top management teams fully participate and communicate the organization’s mission, goals, and values widely. A thoughtful and well-resourced approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that is integrated across every organization function should be based on a clear strategy. Organizations have the opportunity to begin to meet the realistic, economic, and moral imperatives of DEI through strategic choices and investments.
New Orders for the Ages
Authors: Starr Martin P.
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses a novel secret society, the Universal Brotherhood (UB), which took the forefront in the occult life of Charles Stansfeld Jones and Wilfred Talbot Smith. The focus in this treatment is on the sparse available contemporary evidence of the aims of the UB and on Stansfeld Jones’s tutelage of Smith in it. The concealed founder of the UB was Merwin-Marie Snell. A Thomist who advocated for universal religion of which he believed the Catholic Church was the perfect exemplar. The opacity of the UB instructions gave Smith little idea of its purpose; he abandons it, preferring to make one final attempt to organize the Ordo Templi Orientis in British Columbia. Cecil Frederick Russell starts his own secret order, the Choronzon Club, “a short cut to initiation,” which fails to attract Smith, who had relocated to Los Angeles.
Apotheosis
Authors: Starr Martin P.
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses that, while Wilfred Talbot Smith is in a forced “magical retirement,” Aleister Crowley composes a Machiavellian magical instruction or liber, “Apotheosis 132,” which enjoins Smith to go into a perpetual retreat in which his task is to determine which god he is incarnating. The inspiration for this instruction is said to come from a novel by Louis Bromfield on the exploration of “the twin mysteries of love and religion and the confusion that lies between.” Smith attempts to follow Crowley’s dictates in 1943 but abandons the plan and returns to Pasadena. Smith tries to go into retirement again in 1944 for a few months but exits the retreat feeling that he has ultimately failed. Crowley fully disfellowships Smith and threatens excommunication of any member of Ordo Templi Orientis who remains in contact with Smith.
Epilogue
Authors: Starr Martin P.
Published: February 2024

This chapter details how Helen Smith, as Wilfred Smith’s widow, maintained limited contact with a few of the surviving members of the Ordo Templi Orientis in the years following Smith’s death. Their numbers, never large, are further diminished by disengagement and death, including that of Germer, whose demise in 1962 marks the effective end of the contemporary Thelema movement in the United States initiated by Smith. The idea of the OTO was continued in the 1960s by the Solar Lodge of Los Angeles and its leader Jean Brayton.
Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural
Authors: Egeler Matthias
Published: February 2024

Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops this theorizing further by confronting it with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data. Focusing on the themes of “time and memory,” “repeating patterns,” “identity formation,” “morality,” “labor,” “playfulness and adventure,” “power and subversion,” “sound,” “emotions,” “coping with contingency,” “home and unhomeliness,” and “nature and environment,” the book engages with a broad range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary field of landscape theory and the study of religions. It brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been collected since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this rich heritage with the insights of landscape theory both in and beyond the study of religions allows important new contributions to theorizing landscape and religion, especially when it comes to considering the perspectives on landscape held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have stood in the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities, and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the urban perspectives of literature and the arts.
Multidistrict Litigation, Due Process, and the Dangers of Procedural Collectivism
Authors: Redish Martin H.
Published: February 2024

This is the first of two chapters devoted to the application of liberal adversary democratic due process to the world of complex civil litigation. The chapter focuses on the serious—but mysteriously overlooked—due process problems which inhere in perhaps the most used of the modern complex litigation devices: multidistrict litigation. Under this system, existing litigations brought against the same defendant on generally overlapping issues are combined in a single federal district court for all pretrial matters, including discovery and pretrial motions. While theoretically the individual cases are designed to be returned to their original federal districts, as a practical matter those suits not decided at the pretrial stage usually settle as a group. While the individual litigants are not required to accept the settlement, it is often difficult for them to judge the fairness of the settlement to them as individuals. A judicial panel chooses the lawyer or lawyers who will represent the group of litigants, who have been combined whether they wish to do so or not. The chapter explains the serious due process issues inherent is this “paternalistic” form of due process, in which government agents make choices for individual litigants as to how their interests are best represented.
Health Behavior
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines how health behavior intersected with the COVID-19 moment. Health behavior can include exercising, working from home, substance use, wearing a seat belt, and other choices that influence risk of disease and harm. This chapter discusses how these behaviors are influenced by the social context in which people live, with the actions of individuals shaped by the broader determinants of health.
The Story of COVID-19
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses which stories might emerge from the pandemic moment to define that historical period. The chapter suggests that the core stories will likely be the story of science, the story of institutional failures, and, perhaps most important, the story of how the moment reflected foundational shortcomings in social and economic structures.
The Limits of Our Tolerance
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the importance of public buy-in to the process of shaping health policy. The public will tolerate much in the name of protecting health, but its patience is not unlimited. This chapter addresses the importance of shaping policies that respect these limits, guided by data and clear communication with the public.
Who Goes First?
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter engages with the issue of who should be prioritized in the rollout of a new vaccine. This issue is deeply entangled with ethics, risk, and health equity. Choices about vaccine priorities tend to be made in the political arena. This chapter argues that the work of thinking through questions of priority must be done long before crises strike.
Achieving Health Equity, Efficiently
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines the occasional conflicts between equity and efficiency and how they intersected with the COVID-19 vaccination process. The chapter argues for the importance of communicating to the public why equity is necessary for public health decision-making by better explaining the challenge of health inequities.
Grief and Loss
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the grief of the COVID-19 moment and the challenge of processing what was collectively experienced. It includes a line from Albert Camus, “There is no love of life without despair of life,” and reflects on the challenge of living with this reality in a context of large-scale loss.
Hope Dies Last
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the role of hope during a time of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It suggests that hope was fundamental to people’s ability to navigate the pandemic and to envisioning a better future. This hope was rooted in a vision of the common good, reflected by a governmental response aimed at mitigating the crisis on behalf of all people.
The Centrality of Compassion
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses how compassion can serve as the basis for a healthier world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, compassion helped people see the suffering of others and take steps to address it. Looking forward from this turning point moment, compassion can help shape a future where preventable suffering is a thing of the past.
Trust and COVID-19
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores how the COVID-19 pandemic tested the collective trust, with many Americans expressing skepticism of once trusted health authorities and institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The chapter also discusses the ways in which trust was evident during the pandemic, such as in the collaboration of researchers who had to trust each other’s expertise.
Who Decides?
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter focuses on the question of who should choose what is right for societies with regard to health. Who should get to evaluate the trade-offs inherent in choices about health policy? The chapter suggests the voice of public health should play a role in this decision-making process, even as the final choices are up to the elected representatives of the people.
Introduction: Inductive Christian Social Ethics
Authors: Stauffer Aaron
Published: February 2024

Christian social ethics is a distinct field of Christian ethical reflection that finds its roots in the inductive methodology pioneered by Francis Greenwood Peabody and Harry Ward. Christian social ethicists did their work out of the conviction that Christian principles had an important bearing on social structures and in directing those structures toward social justice. Nowadays, scholars across many fields are returning to the concept of social practices, without, however, taking into consideration the ethical value of the tradition of the radical social gospel on these questions. The introduction situates the argument of a white Christian social ethicist in this radical social gospel stream of thought in a book that draws from Black radical social gospelers in order to more keenly address drastic economic disparity and deadly white supremacy. It offers brief definitions of some key terms: radical social gospel, Christian democratic socialism, social ethics, racial capitalism, and social practices.
Our Ecological Predicament
Authors: Powers Madison
Published: February 2024

This chapter explains the importance of understanding the current ecological predicament as a cluster of five concurrent, mutually reinforcing crises. These crises are causally intertwined, resistant to resolution in isolation, often regionally variable in impact, but increasingly global in scale. Also, the unsustainable ecological effects of each include not only resource depletion and ecosystem destruction but planetary destabilization. Moreover, their convergent effects result from or are exacerbated by the structure of the global political economy, especially the institutions that influence market practices pertaining to the acquisition, use, and control of land, energy, and water resources. The chapter also explains the overall ambitions of the book, why it focuses on human rights in the face of threats to all living things, and why our predicament warrants assignment of normative priority to a specific bundle of human rights. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of subsequent chapters.
Some Realism about Precedent in the Wake of Dobbs
Authors: McConnell Michael W.
Published: February 2024

The Dobbs decision intensified an old debate about when the Supreme Court is justified in overruling a prior decision. Because of the weakness of the reasoning in Roe, the main argument against overruling was based on stare decisis. But many commentators have a distorted understanding of the way stare decisis works in practice. On both sides of the ideological spectrum, justices treat precedent as only presumptively binding, and are generally prepared to overrule decisions they consider seriously wrong, when they have the votes to do so. Comity and mutuality among the nine justices at any given time are the true constraints, not attempts to create “doctrines” or multipart tests to discipline the process. The institutional values of stare decisis would be better served by greater transparency about overruling than by the Court’s all too frequent practice of distinguishing old cases on flimsy or disingenuous grounds.
The Dobbs Gambit
Authors: Bridges Khiara M.
Published: February 2024

Despite the Dobbs Court’s repeated assertion that it is taking a “neutral” stance on the normative question of abortion, the majority’s language implicitly embraces a particular “theory of life” that powerfully aligns with those who believe that life begins at, or shortly after, conception. In reaching its holding, the Court implicitly adopts the nonneutral theory that a pregnant person can be permissibly subordinated to the fetus they gestate. The question of why the majority might adopt a false veneer of neutrality can be explained by the Court’s desire to maintain its legitimacy while simultaneously becoming an increasingly partisan instrument of Republican politics. Just as the Republican Party has recently been characterized by its mendacity, the Court in Dobbs paid lip service to neutrality to engage in gaslighting at the highest level.
The Failure of Dobbs
Authors: Roberts Dorothy
Published: February 2024

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization spotlights the entanglement of abortion bans, criminalization of pregnancy, and family separation, which Roe failed to address. After Dobbs, we can see more clearly a right-wing strategy of reproductive control that includes not only abortion laws that compel pregnant people to give birth, but also a broader criminalization of people who give birth to and raise children. Especially telling is how the Court’s attention to adoption ties together these forms of reproductive violence. Its rosy recommendation of adoption as a remedy for abortion paints a false picture of both reproductive servitude’s history and the child welfare system’s current operation. Black feminists have developed a reproductive justice framework that includes the human right not to have a child, to have a child, and to raise children in safe and supportive communities—a framework made more urgent than ever by Dobbs.
How Contraception and Abortion Got Divorced
Authors: Gordon Linda
Published: February 2024

This chapter traces the history of birth control and abortion practices across time and shows how modern abortion-related movements might be regressing to the dominant late nineteenth-century view of contraception and abortion as intertwined. Until about two hundred years ago, some forms of birth control were permitted in most societies, including in the United States. In the mid-nineteenth century a strong anti-birth-control/anti-abortion camp arose, tied to paternalistic conceptions of women’s role in society and to racial and class anxieties. The subsequent early twentieth-century sexual revolution was built in part on legalizing contraception without challenging the prohibition on abortion. Public attitudes then shifted towards the relatively abortion-friendly atmosphere in which Roe was decided. Only after Roe, with the emergence of the New Right, did public attitudes begin to return to the late nineteenth-century view of contraception and abortion as one seamless set of options to control reproduction.
Abortion Policy Aimed at Promoting Life As Much As Possible
Authors: Tushnet Mark
Published: February 2024

Western European nations offer an alternative to strict bans on abortion that holds out the promise of protecting life—both fetal and maternal life—as much as possible. More important than the details of policies directly aimed at abortion access are Western European systems of social support for women before, during, and after pregnancy—a thick social safety net in which contraception is readily available, as is medical care during pregnancy and after delivery, with generous family leave policies and widespread availability of child care. And these policies are all set in a “culture of life” that extends beyond the abortion issue itself. These Western European policies emerged from bargains among political parties with distinctive ideologies and histories. However, the contours of U.S. party politics make it difficult to imagine how the Western European model could be implemented in the United States.
American Exceptionalism and the Comparative Constitutional Law of Abortion
Authors: Ginsburg Tom
Published: February 2024

This chapter surveys how countries around the world have dealt with the constitutional questions surrounding abortion. Abortion has not assumed a central role in political conflict in very many places, relative to the United States. Some countries have adopted compromise solutions that seem jurisprudentially superior to the American approach. Others have turned to transnational regional courts and international human rights agreements to answer abortion questions. However, this chapter demonstrates that in some instances, American partisan warfare has spilled over into the politics of other countries, raising the salience of abortion in potentially destabilizing ways. American exceptionalism, then, can generate the conditions for its own demise by virtue of its impact on other countries.
Let Me Google That for You
Authors: Nichols Tom
Published: February 2024

This chapter details how the Internet has undermined expertise by destroying the boundaries between good and bad information, how interacting with online resources often produces the illusion of knowledge, and how social media encourages one to remain attached to one’s beliefs against any contrary evidence. It also describes how online siloing of information and debate is undermining the ability of laypeople to engage in productive conversations.
The Experts, the Public, and the Pandemic
Authors: Nichols Tom
Published: February 2024

The COVID pandemic disoriented experts and the public about the role of expert advice during a crisis. This chapter recounts the failures of the political class, experts—and the public itself. It recounts the failures of elected politicians and the missteps of scientific and medical professionals, and notes that the United States in particular was already ripe for a disaster created out of a mixture of social polarization, suspicion, and political opportunism.
Why Change is Hard
Authors: McLean Kate C.
Published: February 2024

The possibilities of personal growth and change are embedded in American cultural values that center individual autonomy and personal responsibility for charting one’s life course. These values infuse the study of identity development, contributing to the idea that we are the sole authors of our own stories. In this book, the author argues that the promise of the possibility for growth and change, and the personal capacity to do so, are represented in problematic master narratives. Such narratives about personal growth and responsibility serve to limit attention to the systems and structures of society that restrict and deny the expression of individual identities. The argument is made through the prism of the science on personality development, in particular, narrative identity development. The author calls into question the degree to which the theories and methods employed, as well as the data, support the elevation of such master narratives about the possibility for growth, challenging scholars to develop an awareness of their complicity in the maintenance of harmful ideologies.
Theoretical Foundations
Authors: McLean Kate C.
Published: February 2024

This chapter focus on the theoretical approaches to identity, stories, and change taken in the volume. Identity development is defined in terms of integration at various level of experience—temporal (integration across time), contextual (integration across contexts), and cultural belonging. Identity integration is argued to be both a product of personal and collective efforts. Theoretical perspectives on whether and how change might occur in personal identity are discussed from the lens of personality psychology, developmental psychology, and cultural psychology. The challenge of change arising from the human need for prediction and the cultural press for stability is discussed as an important new lens for existing theoretical perspectives.
Evidence for Change From the Field of Personality Development
Authors: McLean Kate C.
Published: February 2024

The evidence for change in personality traits and attachment representations is reviewed, as well as evidence for posttraumatic growth. The extant literature generally does not show clear evidence of profound and sustained change over time. The literature is also compromised by the available methods for collecting data on change at various levels of personality. However, the emphasis on the possibility of change is still emphasized and is often messaged to the larger culture, beyond academia, a problematic issue in need of attention. An emphasis on greater reflexivity and awareness of our own biases as scientists is needed.
Thalamocortical Assemblies
Authors: Destexhe Alain , Sejknowski Terrence
Published: February 2024

Thalamocortical Assemblies: Sleep Spindles, Slow Waves, & Epileptic Discharges explores the underlying neural mechanisms involved in generating low-frequency oscillations through interacting neural assemblies in the thalamus and the cortex. During sleep, the mammalian brain generates an orderly progression of low-frequency oscillations as the brain moves from sleep onset into deep sleep. Moreover, oscillations are involved in the consolidation of experiences in long-term memory during sleep. Thalamocortical Assemblies overviews the properties of ion channels, synaptic interactions, and intrinsic cellular mechanisms into biophysical models of neural oscillations in local circuits and distributed networks. It also tackles the key mechanisms of sleep spindles and how they are hijacked by epileptic seizures.
Introduction
Authors: Destexhe Alain , Sejnowski Terrence J.
Published: February 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of rhythmic activity in the thalamocortical system. It primarily focuses on the biophysical mechanism underlying the genesis of rhythmicity and the interplay between rhythmically active elements. With the advent of precise intracellular recording techniques, pharmacological manipulations and molecular biology, the biophysical mechanisms underlying oscillatory activity in neurons have been well characterized. The chapter presents the history of studying brain rhythmicity and the identification of key neuronal structures, such as spindle waves. It also considers the issues concerned with computation models, which include complex behaviours observed with intracellular electrophysiological recordings from thalamic and cortical neurons.
Electrophysiological properties of thalamic reticular neurons
Authors: Destexhe Alain , Sejnowski Terrence J.
Published: February 2024

This chapter presents the electrophysiological properties of thalamic reticular (RE) neurons. The aforementioned neurons share some electrophysiological properties with TC cells, such as a rebound burst. However, there are also significant differences owing to the presence of different calcium-dependent and other voltage-dependent currents. The chapter examines two kinds of models for thalamic reticular cells, one of which investigates the interaction between several intrinsic ionic currents while the other investigates the electrophysiological consequences of localizing the T-current in dendrites. It also considers a multicompartment model to address the important influence of dendrites and dendritic currents in shaping the behaviour of cells.
The Age and Crime Distribution and its Explanation
Authors: Wikström Per-Olof H. , Treiber Kyle , Roman Gabriela Diana
Published: February 2024

The age–crime curve has fuelled the criminological imagination for some time, and yet there remains no agreed upon explanation for the relationship between age and crime. SAT argues that changes in people’s crime propensities and criminogenic exposure explain changes in their crime involvement; hence aggregate changes in crime propensities and criminogenic exposure would be expected to predict aggregate changes in crime involvement—i.e. the age–crime curve. Consequently, this chapter specifically examines if age-related changes in crime propensity and criminogenic exposure mirror age-related changes in crime, and the extent to which the link between age and crime propensities and criminogenic exposure accounts for the link between age and crime. To this end, the chapter critiques current approaches to explaining the age–crime curve and present several different analyses examining the extent to which patterns of development in participants’ crime propensities and criminogenic exposure align with their criminal careers, for all participants and by crime trajectory group. It finds support for SAT’s assertion that participants’ crime propensities and criminogenic exposure can explain much of the relationship between their age and their crime involvement.
Crime Propensity and Criminogenic Exposure
Authors: Wikström Per-Olof H. , Treiber Kyle , Roman Gabriela Diana
Published: February 2024

The core proposition of Situational Action Theory (SAT)’s Developmental Ecological Action (DEA) model is that changes in people’s crime involvement are a consequence of changes in their crime propensities and criminogenic exposure. At the heart of SAT’s explanation of crime is the interaction between people with particular crime propensities and places with particular criminogenic features. Capturing and analysing this interaction and its association with crime and, further, changes in this interaction over time and its association with criminal careers, is a challenging enterprise. This chapter discusses these challenges, both conceptual and empirical, and employs a variety of analytical techniques to explore stability and change across short and long time intervals, within and between individuals (e.g. cross-sectional regression analysis, path analysis, fixed effects methods, analysis of change scores, and analysis of trajectory classes and components). Across all these different analyses, it finds robust relationships between changes in crime propensities and criminogenic exposure and changes in crime involvement, and hence consistent support for SAT’s DEA model.
Introduction
Authors: Sanchez-Graells Albert
Published: February 2024

This chapter introduces the book and provides the background for the emergence of the dual role of public procurement in the process of public sector digital transformation: gatekeeping and experimentation. The chapter summarizes main trends in the accelerating transition towards new modes of digital public governance, contextualizing the emerging roles of procurement in the broader global ‘race to AI’ and ‘race to AI regulation’. The chapter then focuses on emerging trends of digital technology regulation to stress how the European and British approaches converge around a model of light-touch risk-based self-regulation. The chapter stresses the regulatory implications of these approaches. It finishes by highlighting how ‘regulation by contract’ through public procurement fits within the broader model of light-touch risk-based self-regulation.
Revisiting the Promise
Authors: Sanchez-Graells Albert
Published: February 2024

Mitigating the allure and ‘policy irresistibility’ of digital technologies requires reassessing their true potential benefits and, more importantly, the necessary enabling mechanisms, likely roadblocks, and new risks that come with them. This chapter takes a closer functional look at the technologies to generate a better understanding of the constraints on their contribution to improving procurement governance. It argues that such constraints should serve as a counterpoint to the hype that follows superficial or techno optimistic assessments, and help recentre policy agendas towards establishing proper foundations for digital adaptation in the long term. The chapter evidences the importance of data availability and quality across technologies. This leads to an analysis of the difficulties in generating an enabling big data architecture, despite efforts led by the European Commission, or the Open Contracting Partnership, for example. It argues that big data architecture will remain the main constraint on the implementation of digital technologies in the near future. Thinking further ahead, the chapter highlights the displacement, rather than avoidance or resolution, of governance risks that the adoption of digital technologies can generate. The chapter closes with a recapitulation of the feasibility boundary for digital procurement governance.
Conclusion
Authors: Sanchez-Graells Albert
Published: February 2024

This chapter brings together the main strands of analysis developed in the book, which has questioned whether procurement can act as an effective gatekeeper of the public interest in the process of public sector digitalization through ‘regulation by contract’. It summarizes how, focusing on the emerging experiences in the European Union and the United Kingdom, the book has tested this intuition or regulatory strategy against the basic requirements of effective regulation and gatekeeping: skills, independence, and effective enforcement tools. Both by reference to theoretical analysis and the detailed case study of procurement digitalization as a site of unregulated public sector technological experimentation, the chapter highlights how the book has shown that the intuition is misleading and cannot achieve the regulatory goals it seeks. It has demonstrated that ‘regulation by contract’ is a strategy incapable of closing the regulatory gap left by the absence of general legislation and rules controlling the accelerating process of public sector digitalization. The chapter closes by reiterating the ways in which the proposed alternative regulatory strategy would make a positive contribution to governing the transition towards new modes of digital public governance.
Serving the Meals
Authors: O’Brien Nanette
Published: February 2024

Chapter 3: ‘Serving the Meals: Gertrude Stein and Domesticity’ continues the thread between autobiographical modernist writing in a transatlantic context; it focuses on the more stylistically radical modernist work by Gertrude Stein. It argues that Stein unexpectedly aligns modernism with domesticity by presenting servants’ preparation of food as a fundamental metaphor for authorial creativity in France and America. Stein’s conservative political and social vision of ‘civilization’ as stressing historically traditional domestic roles and routine allows her to reframe the work of domestic servants as productive and even radical. Bound up with an imperial worldview and problematic as Stein’s politics were, Stein nevertheless ascribes traditionally marginalized figures such as German–American immigrant cooks in Three Lives and Vietnamese–French cooks in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography with agency, adopting their language and cookery techniques in her other creative works.
Social Provisioning Puzzles
Authors: Hickey Sam , Sen Kunal
Published: February 2024

There is a growing appreciation that social provisioning in the global south is closely shaped by politics, particularly in terms of the level of public expenditure that governments are willing to commit to sectors such as education and health. However, much less is known about what drives elite commitment and state capacity to delivering higher-quality public services. This question is particularly acute in the case of education, where the important gains made in broadening access to children in low-income households have not been matched by a rise in the quality of education on offer, generating a learning crisis. Within the health sector, there have been major improvements on key indicators, including maternal mortality rates, but the rate of change has been very uneven across different countries. This chapter argues that the nature of elite commitment within the domain of education is shaped by the greater power of the coalitions and incentives aligned with access (or ‘schooling’) compared to those for quality (or learning), on the other, both at the national and the local levels. Importantly, dominant political settlements may perform worse here, given the problems with enabling local agency and policy learning in such contexts. Within the health domain, we identify two different pathways to the rapid reduction of maternal mortality rates: one involving a significant role for non-state actors, the other driven more by a dominant ruling coalition capable of institutionalizing a strong system of top-down performance management and local monitoring.
An Empirical Research Study on Barriers, Facilitators, and Strategies to Promote Bystander Intervention in Intimate Image Abuse Contexts
Authors: Flynn Asher , Scott Adrian J. , Cama Elena
Published: February 2024

Research suggests that support for, and intervention by, people who witness abusive behaviours can reduce the extent and impacts of those behaviours, problematic attitudes, and harms. Research also suggests that promoting bystander intervention when witnessing violence and discrimination may be an effective prevention tool. In this regard, bystanders could play a greater role in preventing intimate image abuse (IIA). This chapter builds on the existing bystander intervention theory and literature base to better understand bystander intervention in relation to IIA. Utilizing data from thirty-five in-person focus groups with 219 participants in four Australian States, this chapter explores barriers and facilitators to bystander intervention in IIA contexts, and how messaging could be improved to promote safe and effective bystander intervention. It was found that bystander intervention was affected by perceptions of safety and the potential risks of intervening; gender; perceptions of how the intervention would be perceived by the perpetrator and other bystanders; relationships; the age, physicality, and mental state of the perpetrator; and the presence of others. The chapter concludes by discussing what mechanisms participants identified as potential ways to improve bystander intervention when witnessing IIA.
Second Conversation
Authors: Pattison George
Published: February 2024

Several weeks later, the narrator comes home to find Dostoevsky browsing his bookshelves. This leads to a discussion of Dickens and the portrayal of the death of children in literature, comparing Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop with Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured and The Brothers Karamazov. Discussion of Dostoevsky’s literary influences, including the respective roles of European and Russian literature, leads to considering the importance of the Bible for literature and in Dostoevsky’s life and novels. This in turn introduces the figure of Christ, with particular reference to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and the story ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, addressing the question as to whether Dostoevsky’s Christ is too weak to save.
Waste Paper in Early Modern England
Authors: Reynolds Anna
Published: February 2024

The ubiquity of waste paper in early modern England has long been misunderstood. Although references to waste paper in insults and modesty tropes are widespread, they are easily dismissed as nothing more than rhetorical flourishes. Working under the common misconception that paper would have been too valuable to ‘waste’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these tropes are often read as scatological flights of fancy. Waste Paper in Early Modern England demonstrates that these commonplaces are in fact indicative of everyday, material experience—of an author’s, reader’s, housewife’s, or city-dweller’s immersion in an environment brimming with repurposed scraps and sheets—and that waste paper makes visible a radically different understanding of waste matter in the early modern period than in our own. More than a rhetorical aside, repurposed pages were both materially and figuratively useful. Drawing on a range of literary, pictorial, and bibliographical sources, Waste Paper in Early Modern England reveals how layers of meaning accreted around paper fragments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how, because of the widespread sensitivity to the life cycle of paper and books, wasted pages prompted meaningful imaginative work. The book’s five chapters recount how, in this period, the biography of waste paper provided a thing to think with concerning matter and temporality—a potent and flexible emblem for the troublesome passage of books and all other sorts of bodies through time.
Tackling Crises and Austerity
Authors: Barbera Carmela , Steccolini Ileana
Published: February 2024

At the time of writing, we are witnessing a new global crisis affecting our societies and economies. The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Ukrainian war are only the most recent of a long chain of shocks and crises. Others include 9/11 and several other terrorist attacks, the global financial crisis, refugee and immigration challenges, and a myriad of accelerating climate-change impacts. Individually, these have each caused major immediate disruptions; taken together, they have resulted in significant, and lasting, global effects on our societies and economies. Governments have been consistently on the frontline to tackle crises, although, at times, it appears their responses to them have been slow and inadequate. Given this, it seems appropriate that more emphasis should be placed on the resilience (that is, the capacity to deal with shocks and uncertainty) of governments in the face of such a context. Taking stock of past research on resilient approaches adopted by local governments in times of austerity, this chapter argues the need for such a resilient perspective. In particular, it puts emphasis on how governments can build on existing capacities, or invest in new ones, in order to anticipate and cope with difficult times in an attempt to ensure public-service provision functions effectively and efficiently despite the challenges. An aspect of the chapter explores the extent to which NPM can support (or hamper) the development of such capacities, as well as the role played by accounting in shaping them.
Civil Society's Democratic Potential
Authors: Bolleyer Nicole
Published: February 2024

Which civil society organizations (CSOs) contribute to democracy, how, and why? Organized civil society including interest groups, political parties, and service-oriented associations is traditionally considered a cornerstone of democracy. Their potential to contribute to democracy is more often than not treated as a given. Nevertheless, individual CSOs’ readiness and ability to serve as venues for participation, vehicles of democratic representation, or indeed both at the same time have remained a matter of ongoing debate across different social science disciplines. Prominent notions such as ‘NGOization’ and ‘cartelization’ have problematized CSOs’ and parties’ increasing state dependency, professionalization, and bureaucratization, shifting organizational priorities away from societal values towards instrumentally driven self-maintenance, supposedly diminishing their contribution to democratic governance. This study argues that two contrasting governance templates—the ‘voluntary association’ and the ‘professionalized voluntary organization’—allow theorizing fundamental trade-offs shaping CSOs’ ability to simultaneously ‘perform’ on three dimensions central to their democratic contributions: participation, representation, and societal responsiveness. The study’s theoretical framework is examined through a mixed-methods design that combines the analysis of survey data across four European democracies (Germany, Norway, Switzerland, UK) with qualitative case studies of individual organizations’ long-term trajectories over several decades.
VAT in the Digital Era
Authors: Xu Yan
Published: February 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the main theme of the book and the main points of individual chapters. It notes current practices and value-added tax (VAT) rules in the world’s three major economies (the European Union, the United States, and China), Australia (a front-runner in developing rules and measures to VAT challenges in the digital economy), Japan (a jurisdiction with a VAT system characterized by unique design features), and South Africa (a representative of developing jurisdictions with a modern VAT). The chapter reviews the role of international guidance in creating consistent application of the destination principle to cross-border supplies of services, lessons that can be learnt from regional and subnational state harmonization on VAT, and theoretical exploration and actual attempts from international income tax reforms to address the tax challenges of the digital economy. Drawing upon a comprehensive survey of the future of VATs and an examination of VAT administration relating to cross-border digital supplies, the chapter explores the prospects of international VAT harmonization in the digital era.
The Digital Economy Challenges to the Japanese Consumption Tax
Authors: Nishiyama Yumi , Krever Richard
Published: February 2024

In its original form, the Japanese Consumption Tax relied on business accounts rather than tax invoices to compute input and output tax. The unique and simple single-rate model was replaced with a conventional tax invoice system in 2019 when it became a dual tax rate system and a hypothecated levy with revenues used exclusively for social welfare expenditures. Originally, no reverse-charge mechanism applied to cross-border B2B services, but recognition of the unfair advantage this created for foreign suppliers to entities not permitted to claim input tax credits led to the adoption of a reverse-charge mechanism in 2015. The system only applies to digital supplies, however. Separately, a foreign supplier registration system was adopted to require foreign B2C digital suppliers to remit tax to Japan. Reforms to address challenges from the sharing economy and imports of low-value goods purchased on foreign platforms remain to be addressed.
VAT and Digital Supplies
Authors: van Zyl Stephanus P
Published: February 2024

The Taxation Laws Amendment Act 43 of 2014 (SA) introduced, for the first time, specific rules to bring cross-border sales in digital goods within the value-added tax (VAT) fold. Further amendments were introduced in 2019 by the Rates and Monetary Amounts and Amendment of Revenue Laws Act 21 of 2018 and the revised Regulations to the Value-Added Tax Act 89 of 1991, which came into effect on 1 April 2019. This chapter provides an overview of the South African VAT rules pertaining to cross-border digital supplies. The aim is to consider whether the South African approach to VAT and e-commerce complies with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) framework for a neutral, equitable VAT system that is underpinned by the recommendations to harmonize VAT rules in respect of cross-border transactions of digital supplies.
Popes, Bishops, and Emperors between Rome and Constantinople
Authors: Ivanova Mirela
Published: February 2024

Chapter 6 situates the Life of Methodios in an intellectual milieu. It demonstrates that the author of the text was using Byzantine materials, but that they did so while addressing a Latinate audience. Against the grain of scholarship, this chapter posits that this text is best situated within the corpus of Latin missionary hagiography. A nuanced study of ideas about missionary activity between Rome and the Carolingian Empire is able to explain specific narrative interventions made by the Life of Methodios into the events presented in the narrative of the Life of Cyril. Through this, it argues that the unification of the brothers and their relationship with the Slavs are best understood as answers to Frankish claims over the ecclesiastical hegemony of Moravia.
Conclusions
Authors: Ivanova Mirela
Published: February 2024

The conclusion offers some summative remarks on the contribution of the book, and highlights that the constant reinvention of Slavonic in the Middle Ages did not result in the replacement of one narrative for another, but rather in the coexistence of multiple Cyrils and multiple iterations and ideas about the alphabet. As such, the conclusion notes that the history of Slavonic letters demonstrates that the more recent the invention, the more contested the alphabet. It finishes with a creative exercise, delving into one of the most recent episodes of Cyrillo-Methodian history, namely the papal visit of Pope Francis to Bulgaria and Macedonia in 2019, to demonstrate how the Slavonic alphabet continues to be reinvented in the present day.
Speculative Time
Authors: Crosthwaite Paul
Published: February 2024

Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation’s risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, as well as on important aspects of visual representation. The conceptions of time—and especially futurity—arising from the theory and practice of speculation provided crucial models for writers’ and other artists’ aesthetic, intellectual, and political concerns and strategies. The attractions and dangers of speculation were most spectacularly apparent in the period’s pivotal economic event: the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book offers an innovative account of how the speculative boom and bust of the “Roaring Twenties” affected literary and cultural production in the United States. It situates the stock market gyrations of the 1920s and 1930s within a wider culture of speculation that was profoundly shaped by, but extended well beyond, the brokerages and trading floors of Wall Street. The early to mid-twentieth century was a “speculative time,” an age characterized by leaps of economic, political, intellectual, and literary speculation; and the notion of speculative time provides a means of understanding the period’s characteristic temporal modes and textures, as evident in work by figures including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Nathan Asch, William Faulkner, Federico García Lorca, James N. Rosenberg, Margaret Bourke-White, Archibald MacLeish, Christina Stead, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.