Politics in Spain: A Case of Monitory Democracy

Analysing the current political context in Spain is a major challenge to political theory. Spain is experiencing the accumulation of trends that in recent years have focused the attention of most theorists and political scientists: discrediting of the major parties, falling numbers of party members, disaffection, etc. In parallel, this trend has been accompanied by citizen mobilisations that, since 15 May 2011, are manifest in numerous channels and strategies. The aim of this paper was to analyse the complex Spanish context from the monitory democracy proposal. The results show how in recent years processes of public scrutiny have been consolidated through a range of citizen initiatives. The study offers an in-depth analysis of the main characteristics of the most notable cases and monitoring initiatives, and also reflects on their democratising potential.     

The Role of Emigration in Foreign Aid Policies: The Case of Spain and Morocco

This article analyses the relationships between emigration and Official Development Aid (ODA) policies, taking the cases of Spain and Morocco as the backdrop to the study. It discusses the principal characteristics of both the Spanish state and non-governmental cooperation in Morocco, the underlying motivations of the principal stakeholders, and the way international cooperation policies now encompass the phenomenon of emigration. The paper compares the field of co-development, which encompasses a rather limited understanding of immigration, with ODA policies, in which immigration is an increasingly important agenda item for both the central government and the Spanish autonomous communities. The article then examines the relationship between migration and development, and considers necessary changes of perspective required to enhance the development and emigration policies in both Spain and Morocco. Lastly, we conclude with a series of recommendations, based on our analysis, aimed at Spanish and Moroccan stakeholders, both state institutions and non-governmental organizations.     

Women and Politics in Comparative Perspective:

No abstract available for this article.     

Politics of Identity and Identity Policies in Europe: The Case of Peruvian Immigrants in Spain

The indigenous quest for self-determination is an attempt to give voice to local injustice in a universal language, and to make claims to difference via a right that applies equally to all peoples. This article explores recent developments in the transnational indigenous movement's struggle for the right of self-determination by pointing out that this polyvalence-like the indeterminacies of the concepts of "peoples" and "indigenous"-is a productive one that enables indigenous activists to make a unique intervention in international law. Their work aims at creating a new international legal personality based on collective rather than individual rights, and on an understanding of "peoples" as self-determining entities not necessarily aspiring to statehood. This new understanding hinges, in turn, on an emerging perception of the capacity to culture as a general human right. This article addresses recent anthropological texts critical of the transnational indigenous movement to show that the "self" in self-determination as articulated by indigenous activists is not only not accounted for and not protected under current international legal regimes, but is also "a self" through which radical claims to culture and territory are being made.     

A Coalition Perspective on Nonprofit Governance Quality: Analyzing Dimensions of Influence in an Exploratory Comparative Case Analysis

We answer the call that governance research should focus more on processes outside the boundaries of boards, especially for nonprofit organizations. In particular, we suggest and elaborate concrete steps with respect to the advantages of a leadership coalition perspective to focus more on the behavioral and informal aspects of governance. Through a comparative case analysis of five nonprofit organizations, we explore contingencies between characteristics of nonprofit leadership coalitions and governance quality. We identify two dimensions to classify leadership coalitions: centralized versus diffused influence and specific versus holistic influence. These dimensions are subsequently related with observed governance quality. We frame our finding in the existing literature on group faultlines, which are socially constructed dividing lines within groups, and we discuss the importance of establishing a balanced coalition between a weak or nonexisting and a strong dominant coalition to ensure high governance quality. We also present propositions on how governance quality and its various sub-dimensions can be studied as a complex, nonlinear intermediate concept between coalitional aspects of leadership groups and nonprofit organizational performance. Finally, we discuss concrete avenues for further testing and verification of our theoretical interpretation.     

The Case of Jessica Chang: A Business and Industry Perspective

This discussion presents a business and industry perspective on Jessica Chang's career. Jessica's career issues are analyzed from an organizational perspective and from a career counseling perspective, with attention to salient cross-cultural counseling issues. The discussion emphasizes actions that organizations can take to anticipate similar situations, and explores how Jessica could have better managed her career development in view of the challenges she encountered.     

The Disclosure Panacea: A Comparative Perspective on Charity Financial Reporting

This article examines the charity financial reporting regimes of three common law jurisdictions: Ireland, the UK and the US. It assesses whether these respective disclosure models improve either nonprofit behaviour or enforcement odds. Three core aspects of the regimes are reviewed: the reliability of the disclosed information, the consistency of such information and its ability to facilitate comparison between charities, and the level of enforcement arising from disclosure. Particular attention is paid to oversight mechanisms, including audits, and their rates of effectiveness in the regulation of charities. The article examines ongoing efforts to reform broader international accounting standards and considers the impact such moves are likely to have at both regional and national level for charity accountability. It concludes that given the markedly different spheres in which for-profits and nonprofits operate, care should be taken in modelling charity disclosure regimes on those developed for for-profit entities.     

Rethinking Affect in Education From a Societal-Historical Perspective: The Case of Mathematics Anxiety

Affect tends to be treated in educational research as a factor external to, but influencing, cognition. This is so even in those approaches that ally themselves with cultural-historical approaches that denounce the separation of affect and intellect. In this study, the authors use the case of mathematics anxiety to exhibit and exemplify the ways in which affect tends to be theorized. The authors then present the radical alternative that L. S. Vygotsky initially proposed and that was further developed by scholars that advanced his idea of unit analysis. There are several consequences for the measurement of affect and its relations to other dimensions of activity.     

An Economic Analysis of the Gap Between Desired and Actual Fertility: The Case of Spain

Family size is the outcome of sequential decisions influenced both by preferences and by ongoing changes in the environment where a family lives. During the last two decades, the gap between the number of children women prefer and their actual fertility has widened in Spain. The paper uses the 1985 and 1999 Spanish Fertility Surveys to study whether the tightening of the labor market and worsening of economic conditions in Spain during the last 20 years are important determinants of this change. I find that women facing high unemployment rates in their mid-twenties tend to restrict their fertility below their ideal level. Among women in the labor force, the stability of a public sector job lessens the difficulties of balancing employment and family and of achieving preferred fertility. Temporary contracts work in the opposite direction. Findings are robust to the inclusion of controls for within-couple discrepancies in either preferences or religious affiliation.

Social Influences and Aggregated Immigration Dynamics: The Case of Spain 1999–2009

This research aims at broadening the applicability and scope of network‐based explanations of international migration to include explanations of aggregated immigration dynamics for multiple immigrant collectives. Using a unique dataset that contains data on approximately 4.5 million international immigration events from 180 different origin countries in Spain between 1999 and 2009, my analysis shows conclusively that information about changes in the supply of immigrant social capital between past and potential immigrants explains the variation in local immigration rates in the destination society. It also show that incorporating information about such social network influences is very informative when the goal is to explain (1) temporal variation in intra‐collective international immigration flows across different locations in the destination, (2) temporal variation in inter‐collective international immigration flows within a specific location in the destination, (3) intra‐collective differences in international immigration across locations in the destination, and finally (4) inter‐collective differences in local international immigration within the same geographical location in the destination.     

Newcomers to Like‐Minded Aid and Donor Darlings: The Strange Case of Spain in Vietnam

This article analyses the motives behind the relations between Spain as a donor and Vietnam as a recipient of international aid. The main hypothesis is that this relationship does not respond to the traditional causes for international aid, as identified by the academic literature. On the basis of qualitative data collected in interviews with elites, the article suggests instead that a ‘learning factor’ and an ‘image factor’ might be at play in the Spanish presence, as well as herd behaviour on the part of the donor community.     

The Sociology of the Family in Spain:

This paper analyses research undertaken in Spain on the sociology of the family. A set of intellectual and cultural condi- tions at the end of the 19th century suggested that there would be a rapid growth of this area of specialisation. Nevertheless, the disci- pline did not become institutionalised despite the efforts of Adolfo Posada, who had taken the initiative to formalise its status. Other factors which should have encouraged developments in this field such as the debate on the role of women in society, the survey of the Ateneo de Madrid of 1901 or the profound legal changes introduced by the Second Republic in fact made little impact. Although the emergence of empirical sociology at the end of the 1960s is related to the study of the Spanish family, it is in other fields of sociology where advances were more marked. With the death of Franco in 1975 and the legislative and social changes which followed, the sociology of the family acquired greater vigour, although many gaps remain to be covered by research.     

Catholic Sociology in Ireland in Comparative Perspective

This paper examines the relationship between the Catholic Church and Irish sociology within a comparative framework. Drawing on archival and documentary research, this linkage is investigated at an institutional and intellectual level, across three stages of the “career” of Irish Catholic sociology, and employing comparisons with Catholic sociology in France, Germany, and the United States. I discern important sources of variation between the four cases including major intellectuals, organisational hosts, and publishing outlets. Irish Catholic sociology’s quite sudden movement in the direction of secular sociology in the 1950s is explained as a result of normative pressure to jettison its value-driven orientation as a result of more frequent interaction with the mainstream discipline via scholarly collaboration, the reforms of Vatican II emphasising engagement with the modern world, the demise of the broader Catholic Action movement of which it was a part, and changes in the national higher education environment.     

Promoting Constructive Conflict from a Conflict Transformation Perspective: The Case of Community-Based Collaboration in Korea

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on developing constructive conflict management in community-based collaborations for macro social workers. Using a conflict transformation perspective as a conceptual framework, we identified significant factors and their dynamic relationships in promoting constructive conflict in the context of 5 community-based collaborations in Korea. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that responsive coordination was a strong predictor of increased perceptions of constructive conflict. Further, a multiple mediator model indicated that open communication was indirectly associated with perceived constructive conflict by enhancing both equal decision-making and responsive coordination. We conclude by highlighting practical implications of our study.     

Export Agriculture and Development Path: Independent Farming in Comparative Perspective

Abstract This paper compares 'regions of "recent settlement' (Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand) and Argentina to help assess the conditions under which export oriented agrarian regions and societies adopt a development path oriented to industrialization, focusing on the 1860s through the 1930s. The paper surveys the available literature to trace how agricultural export sector expansion shaped land tenure, class formation, and agrarian political participation in these societies. It sketches the class alliances and related structural conditions shaping the development path adopted. The regions of recent settlement tended to share a pattern of agrarian social structure and mobilization characterized by a high incidence of family operated farms, relatively little landlord predominance, strong farmer mobilization, and a class alliance and polity adhering to a consensus on industrialization and basic policies. Argentina represents a contrasting case in which landlords prevailed. The paper contributes to broader theoretical debate by relating the impact of export agriculture to the internal organization of the export sector.