A Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut: Deportation, Detention and Dispersal in Europe

Since the increase in the numbers of asylum‐seekers arriving in Europe in the early 1990s, European countries of asylum have been implementing new and increased controls over entry and making conditions more difficult for asylum‐seekers while they are waiting for a decision on their case. This paper explores the ways in which four European asylum regimes use the deportation, detention and dispersal of asylum‐seekers in an attempt to control and exclude them from national societies and territories. Germany, France, Italy and the UK have different migration histories and have introduced different asylum policies at different times; but all have in common the increasingly draconian response to asylum‐seekers since the 1990s. The paper looks at the stated rationale for introducing and extending dispersal, deportation and detention. EU governments have introduced these measures, arguing that they will deter “fraudulent” asylum claims. While the number of claims has fallen in the last five years to the lowest level since 1988, there is no evidence that this is due to such policies. It is clear, however, that these policies penalize all asylum‐seekers, breach their human rights, damage the receiving societies as a whole, and as such should be abandoned.     

Agentive Spaces,the “Background”, and Other Not Well Articulated Influences in Shaping our Lives

What is special about all our living exchanges with our surroundings is that they occur within the ceaseless, intertwined flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things and beings existing as separate entities prior to their inter‐action, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holistic but stranded flow of events, with no clear, already existing boundaries to be found anywhere (Mol & Law, 1994)—a flow of events within which we ourselves are also immersed. We thus become involved in activities within which we find things happening to us, as much as we make things happen in our surroundings—in other words, our surroundings are also agentive in that they can exert “calls” upon us to respond within them in appropriate ways. Consequently, what we can learn in such encounters is not just new facts or bits of information, but new ways of relating or orienting ourselves bodily to the others and othernesses in the world around us—although much can “stand in the way” of our doing this. My concern below is to explore events happening on the (inter)‐subjective side of the Cartesian subject/object divide which “shape” our spontaneous ways of acting in, and reflecting on, the “worlds” within which we live out our lives.     

Backtracking and the Ethics of Framing: Lessons from Voles and Vasopressin

When communicating scientific information, experts often face difficult choices about how to promote public understanding while also maintaining an appropriate level of objectivity. We argue that one way for scientists and others involved in communicating scientific information to alleviate these tensions is to pay closer attention to the major frames employed in the contexts in which they work. By doing so, they can ideally employ useful frames while also enabling the recipients of information to “backtrack” to relatively uncontroversial facts and recognize how these frames relate to their own values and perspectives. Important strategies for promoting this sort of backtracking include identifying the weaknesses of particular frames, preventing misunderstanding of them, differentiating well-supported findings from more speculative claims, and acknowledging major alternative frames.     

组织动员、行动策略与机会结构——业主集体行动结果的影响因素分析

本文从组织动员、行动策略和机会结构三个维度出发,基于发生在1999-2012年的中国191个业主维权案例,系统考察了纠纷类型、参与人数、维权方式、业主组织和政府反应五个因素对业主集体维权结果的影响。研究发现,在涉及政府部门的行政型纠纷和混合型纠纷中,业主不易维权成功;动员一定数量的业主有助于集体维权成功,但并不意味着动员人数越多,成功可能性越大;不同维权方式及其组合会影响维权结果,非制度化的激进行为并不利于业主实现其利益诉求;真正代表业主利益且能有效运作的业主组织可以显著提高业主维权成功的可能性;政府的行政失当行为(包括不当干预和行政不作为)大大增加了业主维权的难度。这些发现在一定程度上揭示了当前中国强国家-弱社会的现状。     

Children's Gender- and Ethnicity-based Reasoning about Foods

This article reports two studies that investigated the ways in which children use gender and ethnicity for making judgments about food choice. In Study 1, White and Asian 5- to 10-year-olds (M  =  7.37) were asked to rate how much they and others would like novel non-stereotyped foods. White children inferred that girls and White others would like the foods more than boys and Asian others would. An 'ethnocentric' pattern was found where children inferred that ethnic in-group others' food-liking would be more similar to their own compared with ethnic out-group others. These patterns were replicated with adults. In Study 2, a larger range of foods was used to assess White, Black, and Asian 3- to 8-year-olds (M  =  5.63), followed by gender and ethnic categorization and constancy tasks. Children from five to six years used ethnicity-based reasoning, which was influenced by their ability to categorize themselves and others by ethnicity. The role of social categories in food choice is discussed in the light of theories and research in category-based reasoning.     

Minding the Gap: Positivism, Psychology, and the Politics of Qualitative Methods

This article explores the politics and practices of qualitative research, in particular by interrogating the "gap" between qualitative and quantitative approaches to research. Two main claims are elaborated: first, that despite being recommended on grounds of ethical superiority (such as of nonmanipulation and instrumentality), qualitative research is not immune from such problems and may indeed harbor its own practices of exploitation; second, and correspondingly, that the moral high ground associated with qualitative research arises from the ways it is used rather than from any intrinsic features of the methodology. The argument is made that it is important to maintain this distinction in order to counter the tendency toward methodological fetishism so prevalent in scientistic (i.e., aspiring to "natural" scientific status) disciplines such as psychology. After framing these issues with some comments on the current popularity of qualitative methods, the article illustrates these claims by exploring 5 key ways that the positivist agenda of the discovery and control of a natural world can return in qualitative research, especially when this is mistakenly evaluated according to criteria formulated for quantitative analyses. The article concludes with a consideration of the epistemological and political status of attempts either to bridge or exacerbate the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches.     

Mothering Mothers: An Exploration of the Perceptions of Adult Children of Divorce

It is clear that divorce shapes children's and adolescents lives in a variety of ways and that these are largely negative – they have worse physical and psychological health, they are less well‐off financially and have an increased likelihood of themselves divorcing. Aside from outcomes which are easily measurable, less is known about the ways in which divorce impacts on long‐term relationships ‐ particularly those between children and their parents. This exploratory paper looks at the relationships between divorced mothers and their adult children and finds that, like other studies, their relationships are marked by intimacy, but unlike other studies, this intimacy is neither enjoyed nor embraced. The participants report that their mothers were damaged by the separation, that their anger is ongoing many years afterwards. It is argued that these factors, amongst others, contribute to the ambivalent relationships some of the participants perceive they have with their mothers today and their uncertainty about caring for them in the future.     

Property,gender and the life course: Inheritance and family welfare provision in early nineteenth-century England

Drawing upon detailed research of inheritance practices in early nineteenth-century Stockport, this article examines how married men attempted to provide for their families after their death. It is argued that inheritance acted as an informal family welfare mechanism through which specific gender relations associated with middle-class households were reproduced. The evidence presented suggests that married male testators often used inheritance to try and 'fix' their wives into widowhood. Widows were frequently required to act as custodians of family property and maintain the domestic order. Access to property was carefully controlled and various legal devices were used to give authority to the process and ensure that the estate was used by widows to care and provide for children in certain, carefully stipulated ways. In making these claims, the article argues that recent revisionist studies that have attempted to highlight the proprietorial autonomy of middle-class women in industrializing communities ignore the forces at work which constrained the free use of property by women at certain stages in the life course. The findings of the study are also used to highlight the ways in which middle-class men's uses of property were materially and ideologically 'constrained'.     

全球化、文化多样性与当代性

现代化的过程会给民族文化带来各种各样的改变。在全球化的影响下,人们的价值标准在发生着变化。全球化所带来的结果是,人们要把不同地方的艺术放在一起评价。不同的民族文化,有着自身的符号表意传统,这种传统会融化到民族和文化的血液之中。传统还会回潮,会以某种形式顽强地保存下去并展现出来,不断以新的形式活在当代。人是传统的承载体,文化的多样性,意味着个人保持自己的传统的可能性。一个开放的社会与一个封闭的社会的区别在于如何看待这种文化的差异。在不同的文化中,“进步”会以不同的方式表现出来,显示出不同的特点。各种不同的文化有着各自的现代化道路,因而,现代化是复数的。不同的文化有着自己的传统,它们在走向现代的过程中,有可能在原有基础上不断寻求和生成自身的现代因素,从而形成自己的现代文化。现代性也是复数的,不存在单一的现代性。当代社会正在出现一种区别于“后现代性”的“当代性”,它意味着许多重要理论的突破和重要传统的复归,人们可以通过它“回到未来”。     

Realism, Deconstruction and the Feminist Standpoint

Feminist Standpoint Theory claims that by virtue of their social positioning women have access to, or can achieve, particular and/or better knowledge of gendered social relations. The epistemology, various versions of which are reviewed in the paper, has been criticised for over homogenising women. In its simplest form this critique claims that women's diversity rules out communality and collective interests, and that FST unawarely takes white middle class Western women as representative. In its stronger, postructuralist form this critique undermines feminism by reducing the category 'women' to an effect of discourse whose referent is, and should be, constantly shifting. The paper argues for the reality of sex difference and puts forward a realist defence of a modified Feminist Standpoint Theory.     

A Unified Bayesian Decision Theory

This paper provides new foundations for Bayesian Decision Theory based on a representation theorem for preferences defined on a set of prospects containing both factual and conditional possibilities. This use of a rich set of prospects not only provides a framework within which the main theoretical claims of Savage, Ramsey, Jeffrey and others can be stated and compared, but also allows for the postulation of an extended Bayesian model of rational belief and desire from which they can be derived as special cases. The main theorem of the paper establishes the existence of a such a Bayesian representation of preferences over conditional prospects, i.e. the existence of a pair of real-valued functions respectively measuring the agent’s degrees of belief and desire and which satisfy the postulated rationality conditions on partial belief and desire. The representation of partial belief is shown to be unique and that of partial desire, unique up to a linear transformation.     

Rehabilitation policy for drug addicted offenders in China: current trends,patterns, and practice implications

ABSTRACT

Drug use in China is both associated with criminal behaviour and regarded as social deviance. Drug addicted offenders can either be assigned criminal punishment or compulsory drug treatment, depending on the severity of the crimes they have committed. Compulsory drug treatment is in many ways similar to imprisonment in China. However, both compulsory drug treatment and imprisonment fail to prevent drug relapse. The authorities have implemented methadone maintenance treatment and non-medical social work interventions, although they are still in their infancy. More efforts should be made to deliver post-institutionalization programmes to help ex-inmates stay away from drugs and crime.     

Quantity competition, endogenous motives and behavioral heterogeneity

The article shows that strategic quantity competition can be characterized by behavioral heterogeneity, once competing firms are allowed in a pre-market stage to optimally choose the behavioral rule they will follow in their strategic choice of quantities. In particular, partitions of the population of identical firms in which some of them are profit maximizers while others follow an alternative criterion, turn out to be deviation-proof equilibria both in simultaneous and sequential game structures. Our findings that in a strategic framework heterogeneous behavioral rules may be consistent with individual incentives is a first attempt to provide a game-theoretic microfoundation of heterogeneity.     

Justice,utility, and interpersonal comparisons

One of the most common objections against utilitarianism is that it cannot account for the claims of distributive justice. This objection can be answered by appeal to the principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility (DMU), which says that the value of a given portion of a commodity tends to increase as a person's supply of the commodity decreases. DMU implies that, other things equal, the way to maximize the value of a commodity is to distribute it equally. Some economists have objected to DMU on the ground that it presupposes interpersonal comparisons of utility, but the arguments which they have advanced against the objectivity of such comparisons are unsound. Moreover, the interpersonal comparisons presupposed by DMU are ordinal, rather than cardinal, and there are reasons for believing that ordinal comparisons, at least, do have an objective basis.     

Mirror Neurons and Practices: A Response to Lizardo

Lizardo argues that The Social Theory of Practices is refuted by the discovery of mirror neurons. The book argues that the kind of sameness of tacit mental content assumed by practice theorists such as Bourdieu is fictional, because there is no actual process by which the same mental content can be transmitted. Mirror neurons, Lizardo claims, provide such a mechanism, as they imply that bodily automatisms, which can be understood as the basis of habitus and concepts, can be shared and copied from one person to another. This response to Lizardo points out that the Gallese arguments on which Lizardo relies relate to phylogenetic and universal body movements, not to the learned movements characteristic of practices, and that there is no sameness producing mechanism parallel to the genetic one.     

The therapeutic misconception,beneficence, and respect

In order to provide benefits to society, human medical trials must place subjects at risk of harm. This activity is thought to be justified in part by the consent of the subjects involved. But, studies have shown that most such consents are based on a therapeutic misconception (TM); the false belief of subjects that their researchers will act as their personal physicians (seeking their benefit and protecting them from harm), rather than placing them at risk of harm for the good of others. Toleration by researchers of the TM in their subjects is a form of "informational manipulation" that renders consent procedures disrespectful to subject autonomy. Consent obtained from subjects who labor under a TM is neither voluntary nor informed; as long as they have not been disabused of the TM, the action they take in enrolling in a trial is not the one they intend nor is it autonomously chosen. Changes in consent procedures should be adopted to ensure that all subjects are aware inter alia that (a) the health interests of future patients (as well as the researchers' and their sponsors' financial interests) may be more important to researchers than the interest of a subject in his or her health, and (b) normal subjects neither understand nor believe this when told. Close attention to the response of prospective subjects to this information should allow for the exclusion of all but the truly altruistic. However, the result of conscientious implementation of such policies would likely be that human medical research could no longer be conducted on more than a minimal level.     

The therapeutic misconception,beneficence, and respect

In order to provide benefits to society, human medical trials must place subjects at risk of harm. This activity is thought to be justified in part by the consent of the subjects involved. But, studies have shown that most such consents are based on a therapeutic misconception (TM); the false belief of subjects that their researchers will act as their personal physicians (seeking their benefit and protecting them from harm), rather than placing them at risk of harm for the good of others. Toleration by researchers of the TM in their subjects is a form of “informational manipulation”; that renders consent procedures disrespectful to subject autonomy. Consent obtained from subjects who labor under a TM is neither voluntary nor informed; as long as they have not been disabused of the TM, the action they take in enrolling in a trial is not the one they intend nor is it autonomously chosen. Changes in consent procedures should be adopted to ensure that all subjects are aware inter alia that (a) the health interests of future patients (as well as the researchers’ and their sponsors’ financial interests) may be more important to researchers than the interest of a subject in his or her health, and (b) normal subjects neither understand nor believe this when told. Close attention to the response of prospective subjects to this information should allow for the exclusion of all but the truly altruistic. However, the result of conscientious implementation of such policies would likely be that human medical research could no longer be conducted on more than a minimal level.     

Drawing out strengths and building capacity in social work with troubled young women

This paper compares the experiences of a group of marginalized young women with two groups that remained socially engaged. Drawing from a qualitative study of young women aged between 13 and 15 years, we identify four areas (understandings and experiences of well‐being, use of space, making wishes, and emotional and household labour) that illuminated the ways in which marginalized young women articulated their experiences differently from those young women who were still engaged in mainstream social life. Drawing on Ungar's work we consider the ways in which marginalized behaviours, which are typically interpreted as socially disruptive and troubled, can also be read as efforts by young women to create a consistent set of social meanings in their lives and to cement reliable relationships around them. Rather than wholly negative, we suggest that these socially disruptive and troubled behaviours should be understood as having health‐enhancing qualities, given the wider contextual challenges the young women faced, and as being the best choices they could make given their circumstances. Social work and support that assists young women on the margins needs to actively engage with these health‐enhancing qualities and to come to a sensitized understanding of the way in which these young women understand their interpersonal worlds.     

Influences on Authorship Issues: An Evaluation of Receiving,Not Receiving,and Rejecting Credit

A survey on credit issues was conducted of academic chemists in Ph.D. granting institutions in the United States. Six-hundred faculty members responded representing 16% of the survey recipients. Fifty percent of the respondents reported not receiving appropriate credit for contributions they had made to published projects. Neither the number of years after receiving their Ph.D., their fields of expertise, their total number of publications, nor their total number of single-author publications showed any significant relationship with the perception of not receiving appropriate credit. Twenty percent of the respondents had discovered that they were an author of a paper, after that paper had been submitted to a journal. Forty-nine percent reported that they had asked to have their name deleted as an author. Relationships between these perceptions and academic background factors were examined. For example, respondents who had asked to be removed from authorship were more likely to give authorship or an acknowledgement to others and were also more likely to have had an authorship problem with others, both of these factors being related to longevity as a publishing scientist.