The conflict between naive and sophisticated choice as a form of the ‘liberal paradox’

Pareto-inefficient perfect equilibria can be represented by the liberal paradox approach of Sen, appropriately reconfigured to model intertemporal decision-making by an individual. We show that the preference profile used by Grout (1982) to construct a case in which naive choice Pareto-dominates sophisticated choice can be so represented, if tastes change and if the individual can make decisions at time t, which restrict or determine opportunities available in period t + 1 and beyond. This ability to make a decision that binds oneself in the future is a form of rights assignment. We also show how two resolutions of the liberal paradox work out in the individual decision framework.     

Storytelling,fairytales and autobiography: some observations on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French soldiers’ and sailors’ memoirs

Drawing, in particular, on three memoirs written by French veterans of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, this article demonstrates how authors integrated fairytale motifs into their autobiographies. Their example raises questions about the role of storytelling among migrant male work-communities. Fairytales were more than compensatory fantasies for soldiers and sailors: they provided schemas by which they could understand novel experiences in strange surroundings and, through identification with the hero, they became inspirations to action. Storytelling permitted soldiers and sailors to present themselves to their peers from behind the mask of fiction, and to broach subjects too dangerous to be discussed openly, such as desertion. The dialectic between self-assertion in the tales (even if fashioned from the collective, ubiquitous matter of oral culture) and the communal expectations of the audience, helps historians understand the limits placed on the expression of individuality in traditional societies.     

A choice for ‘me’ or for ‘us’? Using we-reasoning to predict cooperation and coordination in games

Cooperation is the foundation of human social life, but it sometimes requires individuals to choose against their individual self-interest. How then is cooperation sustained? How do we decide when instead to follow our own goals? I develop a model that builds on Bacharach (in: Gold, Sugden (eds) Beyond individual choice: teams and frames in game theory, 2006) ??circumspect we-reasoning?? to address these questions. The model produces a threshold cost/benefit ratio to describe when we-reasoning players should choose cooperatively. After assumptions regarding player types and beliefs, we predict how the extent of cooperation varies across games. Results from two experiments offer strong support to the models and predictions herein.     

Searching for ‘analysis’ in the southwest: AM vs. PM newspapers in four ‘fire zones’

Never in the history of newspapering has our Fourth Estate been so unsure of what its premiere medium should be doing as we approach the 21st century. Because daily newspaper circulation and readership have been declining since 1987, every newspaper consultant in America has an opinion about what papers must do. This exploratory study focuses on what Southwest media managers think newspapers must do—provide analysis and context in local news coverage. Context is defined and eight competing southwestern newspapers in Alburquerque, El Paso, Phoenix, and Tucson are content analyzed for “analysis” by investigating 200 seperate 1994 editions in this non-probability, purposive benchmark sample.     

‘Some hidden purpose’? Class conflict and co-operation in Belfast’s Working Men’s Institute and Temperance Hall 1865–1900

While debates over social control and working-class culture have formed a lively part of British urban and social historiography, they have received much less attention in an Irish context. This article provides an overview of working-class associations in Belfast throughout the nineteenth century, before investigating specific working- and middle-class attitudes towards Belfast’s Working Men’s Institute and Temperance Hall during its early phase in the 1870s. The aims of the institute’s gentlemen founders – to maintain social order by providing workers with an alternative to the tavern, moralizing lectures on topics such as temperance, and evening classes – were only partially achieved. Middle-class motives, although mixed, betray a clear desire for social control. Many of the benefactors’ words and actions were met with suspicion or resistance by a group of fiercely independent working men who, while not averse to self-improvement, carved out their own agenda. A strong working-class identity, free from any sectarian character, was expressed with articulateness and vehemence. This phenomenon is particularly striking in a city not known for working-class activism.     

‘As a slave woman and as a mother’: women and the abolition of slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro*

Abstract

This article explores how enslaved and freedwomen in Rio de Janeiro and Havana, the capital cities of the Americas' last two slaveholding territories, played a crucial and specific part in helping speed and shape the gradual emancipation processes that unfolded simultaneously in each context during the 1870s and 1880s. In each city, women were at the front line of legal battles for freedom waged by the enslaved and their freed relatives. The article suggests several reasons why. First, in both Brazil and Cuba, the abolition process was shaped by ‘free womb’ laws which, along with other subsequent legislation, created specific new opportunities for women to make legal claims on the basis of motherhood. Second, such petitions chimed not only with official legal stipulations but also with broader Atlantic anti-slavery rhetoric that sought emotive responses to the plight of slaves and appealed particularly to specific notions about maternal love. Third, these (ex-)enslaved women's struggles were shaped by their own understandings of the significances of freedom and of motherhood, and by their daily lives in these two Atlantic port cities, where women had long been a significant presence in each city's population and economic and cultural life. Looking beyond their ‘individual’ claims for freedom reveals how such claims emerged from a collective context of proximity, cohabitation and exchange of information and help. Despite the major differences between the broader economic and political trajectories of each country and city, it is the similarities between women's actions and contributions to the emancipation process that are particularly striking.     

‘Growing Old’ in Shelters and ‘On the Street’: Experiences of Older Homeless People

Homelessness among older people in Canada is both a growing concern, and an emerging field of study. This article reports thematic results of qualitative interviews with 40 people aged 46 to 75, carried out as part of a mixed-methods study of older people who are homeless in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Our participants included people with histories of homelessness (n = 14) and persons new to homelessness in later life (n = 26). Interviews focused on experiences at the intersections of aging and homelessness including social relationships, the challenges of living on the streets and in shelters in later life, and the future. This article outlines the 5 main themes that capture the experience of homelessness for our participants: age exacerbates worries; exclusion and isolation; managing significant challenges; shifting needs and realities; and resilience, strength, and hope. Together, these findings underscore the need for specific programs geared to the unique needs of older people who are homeless.     

The scrapbooking detective: Frederick Porter Wensley and the limits of ‘celebrity’ and ‘authority’ in inter-war Britain

Frederick Porter Wensley was one of Scotland Yard's ‘Big Four’ detectives, head of the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department and responsible for establishing the Flying Squad. On his retirement in 1929, he used the two bound scrapbooks of press clippings and photographs he had collated to document his personal life and career to inform his 1931 autobiography Detective Days and serialized press articles. Through examining the interaction of material between scrapbooks and autobiographical writings, this article explores how Wensley constructed his post-retirement persona as ‘celebrity detective’ from a canny understanding of what had made him a commercial subject for the press. It argues that Wensley recast his life to promote his own successes at the expense of a narrative of police unity, providing a vehicle for him to suggest further changes to the structure of the police force without official sanction. By juxtaposing this against tightening legislation on police communication with journalists during the inter-war period under the Official Secrets Acts, this article demonstrates how the ‘celebrity’ that Wensley sought to occupy was increasingly regarded as irreconcilable with police ability to effect ‘impartial’ regulation, anticipating the concerns raised by the 2012 Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. The article thus charts a turning point in defining the relationship between police and press.     

The measurement and implication of the older people’s social function in the community: a Shanghai experience

Abstract

The study employed a quantitative approach to measure the social function of the older people. From a questionnaire survey in a Shanghai community, we found that participants’ party affiliation, education, age group, functional capacity (IADL) and occupational status were the major factors affecting older people’s social function. The older people participated more actively, tended to trust others more and enjoyed better social function in the community. These findings lead to implications for social work practices and policymaking procedures on active ageing.     

‘Pragmatic complexity’ a new foundation for moving beyond ‘evidence-based policy making’?

Despite a range of criticism, the realm of policy still remains dominated by the rational, positivist and quantitative approaches of New Public Management, ‘evidence-based’ approaches and target/accountancy oriented ‘scientific’ management. Two notable attempts to develop an alternative to this dominant framework, however, have come from the older tradition of American pragmatism and the newer approach of complexity. In this article we introduce some of the core concepts of pragmatist philosophy and complexity relating to policy making. We then explore some of the key premises for bringing these two fields together and subsequently apply this ‘pragmatic complexity’ approach and a Stacey Diagram to drug policy. We argue that a marriage of pragmatism and complexity can provide a positive alternative conception of the relationship between scientific knowledge and decision-making and offers a way to integrate a scientific approach with democratic deliberation and values.     

China's ‘Socializing Social Welfare’ policy: a study on service quality in society-run homes for the aged in Beijing

This study aims to examine service quality in the emergent society-run homes (SRH) in Beijing from the perspective of residents in the context of ‘Socializing Social Welfare’ policy reform. Quantitative and qualitative research methods were combined to provide a comprehensive approach. A novel instrument for measuring service quality was developed and validated. Nine dimensions and three domains of service quality were identified and explored. The measuring instrument reveals that service quality in the SRH is barely satisfactory. With the findings of this study and the corresponding recommendations, it is hoped that the quality of institutional care service for the elderly can be improved, the social capital of the SRH can be promoted, and an integrated system of diversified care services can be formed and serve the needs of the increasing population of aged people.     

Friedman's ‘instrumentalism’ and constructive empiricism in economics

This reassessment of the long debate about Friedman's thesis on the pointlessness of testing assumptions in economics shows that Friedman's three famous examples, on which a large part of the credit given to this thesis is based, far from substantiating it, can be used to establish radically opposite conclusions. Furthermore, it is shown that this so-called instrumentalist thesis, when applied by Friedman to economics, is of a quite different nature and raises much more serious problems than the standard instrumentalist thesis devised by some methodologists of physics. To disentangle these ambiguities concerning realism and instrumentalism applied to physics or to economics, this paper refers to Van Fraassen's constructive empiricism, which is helpful in reformulating, in a more satisfactory way, the essentials of Friedman's considerations about empiricism and anti-realism.     

‘Unfit for reform or punishment’: mental disorder and discipline in Liverpool Borough Prison in the late nineteenth century

This article examines how Liverpool Borough Prison, opened in 1855 as one of the largest local prisons in England to adopt the separate system, categorized and dealt with mental distress and disorder amongst its prison population in the late nineteenth century. High prison committal rates in Liverpool, alongside high levels of recidivism, especially among female prisoners, led to severe overcrowding and encouraged a harsh disciplinary regime. Exacerbated by the poor physical and mental condition of the prisoners, this produced a challenging environment for maintaining the separate system of confinement and prisoners’ mental well-being. While official figures for the rates of mental disorder in local prisons are not readily available, Liverpool Prison’s diverse and under-exploited archives and official reports indicate that insanity caused prison officials and visiting justices great concern, and many prisoners were declared unfit for the rigours of prison discipline. Our article explores the implications of the ever more punitive, deterrent and physically taxing penal policy implemented in the late nineteenth century on the minds of prisoners. Despite the heavy toll on prisoners’ mental well-being, such cases were often retained by prison medical officers reluctant to acknowledge the failure of the prison to deter, reform and redeem.     

Transparency and ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ in child protection

Australia's child protection systems and the provision of out-of-home care, in particular, have been subject to sustained criticism for decades from dozens of official inquiries and reviews. It is now well established that many children in state care are treated significantly less well than required by relevant legal frameworks and community standards. Much attention and significant resources have been directed toward trying to ameliorate this ‘wicked problem’ and yet it continues. This article focuses on one reason the problems persists, namely the secrecy and closed cultures that characterize relevant organizations which reinforce strategies of denial that avoid acknowledging or dealing with ‘uncomfortable knowledge’. It is a situation many people in child protection systems confront. It is, for example, when we know abuse is taking place, or when they see or are ourselves party to corrupt or negligent practices. It is knowing that important ethical principles are being abrogated. We draw on recent official reports and inquiries noting the repeated calls for greater transparency and independent oversight. An argument is made for a default position of total transparency subject to caveats that protect privacy and any investigation underway. An account of what this can look like is offered.