Taking Care of Later Life: A Matter of Justice?

Correspondence to: Julia Johnson, Senior Lecturer, School of Health and Social Welfare, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK. E-mail: j.s.johnson{at}open.ac.uk Summary This paper reviews current policies and practices regardingthe provision of long-term care for older people. In particularit focuses on three aspects which are central to social workand care management: current developments in residential andnursing home care; charging for care; and the shifting boundarybetween health and social care. It argues that, in all respects,these policies and the ways in which they are being implementedare incompatible with the notion of social justice. Over thelast fifty years, the older generation has invested heavilyin the welfare state and continues to make a significant contributionto it. The security and well-being of those in need of long-termcare is, however, being threatened by the marketization andcommodification of care provision.     

Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône

Jeremy Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy. Women in Work and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (1992), xiii + 406 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £45.00).

David Shaw, The Creation of a Community. The City of Wells in the Middle Ages (1993), xiii + 334 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £40.00).

Joan Larsen Klein (ed.), Daughters, Wives and Widows. Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500–1640 (1992), xviii + 329 (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, $37.50, paperback $14.95).

Linda Pollock, With Faith and Physic. The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (1993), viii + 179 (Collins &; Brown, £25.00).

Lawrence Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660–1857 (1993), xviii + 355 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, £16.95).

G. J. Barker‐Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth‐Century Britain (1992), xxxiv + 520 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, £39.95).

Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), xvi + 213 (Routledge, £19.99).

Anne Hardy, The Epidemic Streets. Infectious Diseases and the Rise of Preventative Medicine, 1856–1900 (1993), xiii + 325 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £40.00).

Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini (eds), Education, Technology and Industrial Performance in Europe, 1850–1939 (1993), xi + 302 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £35.00).

Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (eds), Re‐evaluating the Third Reich (1993), xvi + 270 (Holmes &; Meier, New York and London, £35.00, paperback £13.95).

J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (1993), viii + 294 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £35.00, paperback     

The Tragedy of Dou E: Issues Relating to the Question of Evidence in the Traditional Admin-istration of Justice

本文以元曲《窦娥冤》为材料,分析了该剧隐含的几个重要的法理学问题;论证了剧本中没有证据表明窦娥的悲剧是官员贪污腐败的产物,而主要是因为裁判者的认知能力和传统中国社会技术不发达的局限;并因此对该剧的人物性格和戏剧结构以及中国传统的部分鬼戏做出了新颖的解说。     

Bailouts: The lesser of two evils?

This paper investigates the relation between bailouts and regulation. Regulation, by limiting the room for government intervention in the market, can affect the likelihood and size of a bailout. While a higher level of regulation is associated with a lower likelihood of a direct acquisition, such countries resort to a higher use of State aid. The findings suggest the more transparent nature of direct acquisitions, makes them the lesser of two evils. In this light, policymakers should monitor State Aid and bailouts together, with the aim of making the former more transparent.     

On the Nature of Toddlers' Helping: Helping or Interest in Others' Activity?

Toddlers' helping has been interpreted as early evidence of cooperation and altruism. We consider whether this important social activity might, instead, be due to toddlers' interest in participating in the activity of others, and we illustrate this possibility with diary observations of infants' social and communicative development. This alternative view of toddlers' helping as one manifestation of a more‐general tendency for social engagement requires a different approach to the explanation of this aspect of social development. We argue for a relational developmental systems account of the emergence and further development of infants' social and emotional engagement leading to toddlers' helping.     

The Academic History of Literature and Art as a “ Disease of Interpretation”: On the Paradoxical Nature of Interdisciplinary Boundaries

This article represents an academic response to Professor Zhang Jiang’s article “On Imposed Interpretation” published in Russian in the journal October (no. 1, 2015). It argues that the problems observed by Zhang arise from the reality of Western literary criticism over the past decades, and are associated with the contention between philosophy and philology that had its orgins in the West’s Platonic heritage. In outlining the complex symbiotic relationship between the two disciplines in Western literary history, this article finds that two theoretical motive forces catalyzed the process: the “philologization of philosophy” and the “philosophization of philology.” The writer argues that based on a full understanding of the paradoxical relationship between philosophy and philology, which are distinct from and yet attracted to each other, contemporary literary criticism can adopt the principles of “practical conservatism” and “cutting back of methodologies” as a means of healing the ever worsening “disease of intepreretation” in literary history.     

The origins of the public debt of Italy: Geographically dispersed interests?

In this paper we reconstruct the macro regional government deficits of Italy and find that the aggregate deficit resulting from our estimates captures quite well the entire dynamics of the Italian national public deficit. This new data set shows that the ultimate cause of the accumulation of public debt of Italy lies in the extraordinary fiscal imbalance of the Southern regions. The new data allow us to test empirically a simple Common Pool model, augmented by a variable measuring the political influence of each macro region in the Government, to verify the existence of a geographically dispersed interests issue for the Italian case. Our measure of political influence turns out to significantly explain the regions’ deficits also when controlling for population and income gaps. In addition, using a J-test approach, we find that including the predictions of the Common Pool–Pork Barrel regional model into a general model of the Italian national deficit turns out to greatly increase its explanatory power. The results call for deep institutional reforms of the fiscal decentralization so far implemented in Italy.     

The aggregation of preferences: can we ignore the past?

The article shows that a Paretian social welfare function can be history independent and time consistent only if a stringent set of conditions is verified. Individual utilities must be additive. The social welfare function must be a linear combination of these utilities. Social preferences are stationary only if, in addition, all individuals have the same constant discount rate. The results are implemented in two frameworks: deterministic dynamic choice and dynamic choice under uncertainty. The applications highlight that the conditions are unlikely to be met by individual preferences, and that they severely restrict social preferences.     

The study of scientific communities: Bringing space back in?

Traditionally, sociologists have conceived their subject matter in social terms. However, there is a growing awareness that in order to explain social facts it may be necessary to consider variables of the physical environment as socially significant. This research applies such awareness to the study of scientific communities. Previous research in this area has focused on a variety of consensual and interactional aspects. Findings reported here indicate constraints of geographical accessibility as a significant factor in shaping the pattern of interactions among urban sociologists in Canada. Implications for scientific communities more generally are discussed. It is suggested that further research examine more closely the role of spatial distance in the functioning of scientific communities.     

The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love and Outgroup Hate?

Allport (1954) recognized that attachment to one's ingroups does not necessarily require hostility toward outgroups. Yet the prevailing approach to the study of ethnocentrism, ingroup bias, and prejudice presumes that ingroup love and outgroup hate are reciprocally related. Findings from both cross-cultural research and laboratory experiments support the alternative view that ingroup identification is independent of negative attitudes toward outgroups and that much ingroup bias and intergroup discrimination is motivated by preferential treatment of ingroup members rather than direct hostility toward outgroup members. Thus to understand the roots of prejudice and discrimination requires first of all a better understanding of the functions that ingroup formation and identification serve for human beings. This article reviews research and theory on the motivations for maintenance of ingroup boundaries and the implications of ingroup boundary protection for intergroup relations, conflict, and conflict prevention.     

The cross-border portability of social security benefits: Status and progress?

The importance of the cross-border portability of social benefits is increasing in parallel with the rise in the absolute number of international migrants and their share of the world population, and perhaps more importantly with the much higher and rising share of the world population that for some part of their life is working and/or retiring abroad. This article estimates how the rising stock of migrants is distributed over four key portability regimes ranging from portability through bilateral social security arrangements to undocumented workers with no access to any scheme. The comparison of estimates for 2000 and 2013 indicate a modest but noticeable increase in the share of migrants under regime I (full portability) by 1.4 per cent, but the biggest change occurred under regime III (no access to social security but also no contributions required), which almost doubled to 9.4 per cent. Regime II (potential exportability without totalization) reduced by 3.0 percentage points but remains the dominant scheme (at 53.2 per cent). The estimates suggest that the scope of regime IV (informality) reduced by 2.9 percentage points, accounting for 14.0 per cent of all migrants in 2013. This trend is positive, but more will need to be done to progress on benefit portability and various potential solutions lie outside bilateral agreements that are difficult to establish.