Stuck in the Middle: Maintaining the Organizational Legitimacy of the Regional Environmental Center

Maintenance of legitimacy is central to the survival of any organization and is of particular importance to non-governmental organizations (NGO) reliant on external sources of income. Interaction with the external environment plays an important role in determining organizational legitimacy, shaping actions and determining opportunities. The ability of an organization to effectively respond to and influence the external environment can potentially strengthen its legitimacy. This paper considers the issue of organizational legitimacy by using resource dependence and institutional theories to analyze the development of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC). The findings indicate that it is possible for an organization to maintain legitimacy through adaptation, responding to the rise and fall of external opportunities and challenges. As predicted by institutional theory, it also argues that external environmental factors place increasing pressure for conformity over time, limiting scope to manoeuvre over the longer-term.     

Stuck in the Slow Lane: Reconceptualizing the Links between Gender,Transport and Employment

This article draws on primary research undertaken in the North East of England to explore the way in which inequalities in access to transport resources impact on women’s opportunities to enter the public domain of paid work. It advances the idea of spatiality as a social construction and, building on previous studies, it explores the way in which a gender division of transport operating in the home and at work limits women’s access to temporal, financial and personal and geographic travel resources; ultimately constraining women’s mobility and restricting their employment opportunities. Finally, the article will argue that, although some women can achieve ‘masculine’ levels of transport resources, the majority of women are stuck in the slow lane and their mobility deprivation often confines them to the private world of the family, or alternatively, to part‐time, low paid work on the periphery of the labour market. This leads to the conclusion that there is an urgent need to provide women with a range of mobility choices which enhance their access to the labour market and to challenge the socially constructed processes which underpin the discrimination women face when accessing the world of paid employment.     

埃及经济中的"B.O.T"制度

近来,在埃及报刊上常常出现B.O.T或B.O.O.T与B.L.T这些词汇,并常有报导说某部将按B.O.T方式来实施某计划,修建某公共福利事业设施;某部长已与某公司签订了B.O.T协议等等.为让读者,尤其是工程承包公司、单位、机构清楚地了解埃及当前工程承包领域里的实际情况,以及相关的法律、手续和相关的基本权益等,更好地与埃方打交道,本文就B.O.T这一制度作一介绍.     

What to Expect: Information and the Management of Uncertainty in Parkinson's Disease

The onset of a chronic illness such as Parkinson's Disease (PD) demands an urgent response to life's fundamental questions. General practitioners (GPs) who care for people with PD may also face anxieties, but these affect their professional rather than their personal lives. However, uncertainty at whatever level requires managing. Both patients and GPs adopt various strategies to resolve their difficulties. One aspect of this process concerns coming to understand, and explaining what to expect of, the disease. Using data from in-depth interviews with people with PD and a separate group of GPs, this paper explores how the differing experience and management of uncertainty by both parties may, if unappreciated by doctors, hinder effective communication between them. Conversely, an imaginative understanding of what PD means may help transform people's experience of the illness. Training GPs to develop skills in understanding the special uncertainties of PD is considered.     

The production of trans illegality: Cisnormativity in the U.S. immigration system

Drawing from critical scholarship on immigrant illegality and transgender studies, this paper examines how trans immigrants may be more prone to vulnerabilities in the U.S. immigration system. Cisnormativity, a hierarchical system of power that structures legal, administrative, and policing systems, produces the “hypervisibility” of gender variance. We add to migration scholarship by analyzing how cisnormativity can intersect with the production of immigrant illegalities and can render trans immigrants as hypervisible and, where possible, attend to the ways in which, paradoxically, trans subjectivity is also erased. Trans immigrants can be more susceptible to arrest, criminal prosecution, detention, deportation, blocked paths to citizenship, or adjustment of status. With trans studies' insights on the criminalization of gender variance and administrative documentation, we investigate the particularities of visibility for trans immigrants as they inform legalities and social exclusions. We end with a call for more empirical research on the experiences of trans immigrants and the complex inclusions and exclusions that structure U.S. immigration policy.     

Evaluation in a down-loaded mental health system.

Speculation that policy and funding shifts in the nation's mental health system would negatively impact program evaluation services in community mental health centers (CMHC) is substantiated. Performance of program evaluation activities was investigated in 71 CMHCs in 15 states over a two-year period. Twenty-five percent of the centers reported cutbacks, including staff attrition and diminished funding devoted to evaluation functions. The majority of centers reported no changes, but many directors representing these centers also indicated that they had never fully developed a capacity for performing evaluations and would cease to devote attention to these activities without available funding. In some centers evaluation functions are being transferred to clinical administrators; integrated into quality assurance activities; performed "as needed' by external consultants; or ignored altogether. Many centers are developing or enhancing a computerized information system to improve internal efficiency and to meet state accountability requirements. The professional issues raised to these trends as well as their implications for federal and state policy are discussed.     

Mental health quality measurement in the Department of Defense. A developing system

In response to the need for high-quality mental health care for its beneficiaries at appropriate cost to the government, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Health Affairs) has developed a quality and utilization management program that requires contracted organizations to manage care through appropriate means. The system provides for oversight of utilization management contractors by a national quality monitoring contractor and a proposed utilization management criteria set based on an analysis of criteria sets currently used in government and industry. This article describes the program at its current level of development.     

Program analysis using the client oriented cost outcome system.

The client oriented cost outcome system has been under development in Pennsylvania community and hospital programs since 1972. The system builds upon the behavioral and decision data generated with or on behalf of consumers. Flexibility for local program system design is permitted if the procedures of consumer intake, review, and termination document each consumer's (a) problems, resources, and goals, (b) overall functioning level in their ordinary community, and (c) services intended and rendered as related to (a), above. While the system's primary application is in providing feedback for local program quality assurance and evaluation procedures, aggregation of data permits program planning and evaluation at county, state, and federal levels in terms of (a) client demographic or diagnostic characteristics, and (b) program service characteristics and objectives.     

Beyond Schumpeter: Nonlinear economics and the evolution of the U.S. innovation system

To the extent that the U.S. has a national innovation system (actually systems), it is in the midst of a dramatic transformation. Essentially, international competition and internal political machinations are causing a shift away from a Schumpeterian system of entrepreneurial capitalism toward a more mercantilistic system. Industrial structures and government policies alike are beginning to mirror their global counterparts. Meanwhile, strategic analyses, both at the level of the firm and the nation state, remain mired in the methods of the past industrial epoch. This conceptual overview contends that the emerging science of nonlinear or advanced systems (chaos and complexity theories) provides a useful addendum to Schumpeter's perspectives. Moreover, tools and strategies derived from nonlinear or advanced systems are better suited to both understanding and managing this transformation.     

Realigning criminal policy. Offender and victim in the Swedish party system over time

The article conducts a case study of criminal policy in the Swedish party system between 1960 and the present. Like other countries, Sweden has witnessed its criminal policy take a ‘punitive turn’ during this time. We hypothesize that this turn is explained by the fact that the discourse on crime has become increasingly victim-centred. Our study of the changes in the parties’ policies suggests that the parties play a central role in this explanation. In order to understand the punitive turn, however, the increasingly victim-centred discourse must in turn be explained. We argue that it is the individualization of society which provides the key here.