‘It's their word against mine’: young people's attitudes to the police complaints procedure in Northern Ireland

One of the central aims of the police reform process in Northern Ireland has been to increase the legitimacy of the policing structures and police officers amongst those who are served and policed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). To meet this aim, structures have been created to ensure that the PSNI is accountable to all sections of the community for its strategy and performance, and in monitoring the attitudes and behaviour of its officers. To that end, the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI), the Northern Ireland Policing Board and 26 District Policing Partnerships have been created. This paper aims to break ground by looking in some detail at young people's attitudes to and experiences of the workings of one of those new bodies, the Police Ombudsman, and to explore issues related to young people's willingness to engage with the PONI.     

Democracy and Grassroots Opposition in Eastern Europe: Hungary and Russia Compared

The aim of the article is to show how the extent of democracy in two Eastern European societies has a strong conditioning effect on the development of social movements. Hungary and Russia are chosen as contrasting cases. The experience of environmental movements before and after the regime change is used as an illustration of grassroots movements. It is shown that environmental movements in Hungary are more numerous and more successful than those in Russia, and that this is linked to the extent of support they have (or lack) from politicians, non-elected officials, and the media.
In Hungary, although ecological issues are not central, politicians and environmental groups mostly co-operate, whereas in Russia the relationship is either hesitant or sometimes even hostile. In both countries, however, apparatchiks are generally a lot more opposed to grassroots groups, such as environmental ones, but their weaker position in Hungary compared with Russia cancels out this effect. Finally, the media in Hungary have been sympathetic to environmental issues and they are also supportive of the environmental movements. In contrast, however, in Russia, after Yeltsin's arrival in power 'glasnost' has been largely reversed and the media have also been hostile to environmental groups. In sum, the position of the media, politicians and officials shapes the prospects for environmental movements and is an index of the differing degree of democracy in the two societies.     

'The Tip of the Ice Berg': Children's Complaints and Advocacy in Wales--An Insider View from Complaints Officers

This paper is based on findings of a Welsh Assembly Governmentfunded review of children’s independent advocacy servicesin Wales with reference to their involvement in complaints madeby children, or by their parents or carers on their behalf,about local authority social services. It draws, primarily,upon qualitative interviews with local authority children’scomplaints officers, whose task is to receive complaints orconcerns, field these to appropriate social services staff,maintain oversight of their progression and keep complainantsinformed of developments. The paper describes the challengesthat complaints officers perceive children encounter in movingcomplaints forward, especially in a context where independentadvocacy services are involved and where these services areviewed with some suspicion by social services staff. It suggeststhat complaints officers play a pivotal part in managing thesometimes contested and complex interface between service providerand child and may do so from a position of limited authorityand influence. The role of complaints officers in engaging withcomplainants and their advocates, and with those colleaguesimplicated in complaints, has rarely been the topic of research.This paper provides accounts from these key staff that helpilluminate the tensions and difficulties that can enter thechildren’s complaints process.     

Managing Production and Distribution for Supply Chains in the Processed Food Industry

We develop and evaluate a modeling approach for making periodic review production and distribution decisions for a supply chain in the processed food industry. The supply chain faces several factors, including multiple products, multiple warehouses, production constraints, high transportation costs, and limited storage at the production facility. This problem is motivated by the supply chain structure at Amy's Kitchen, one of the leading producers of natural and organic foods in the United States. We develop an enhanced myopic two‐stage approach for this problem. The first stage determines the production plan and uses a heuristic, and the second stage determines the warehouse allocation plan and uses a non‐linear optimization model. This two‐stage approach is repeated every period and incorporates look‐ahead features to improve its performance in future periods. We validate our model using actual data from one factory at Amy's Kitchen and compare the performance of our model to that of the actual operation. We find that our model significantly reduces both inventory levels and stockouts relative to those of the actual operation. In addition, we identify a lower bound on the total costs for all feasible solutions to the problem and measure the effectiveness of our model against this lower bound. We perform sensitivity analysis on some key parameters and assumptions of our modeling approach.     

Virus interruptus: An Arendtian exploration of political world‐building in pandemic times

Building upon a series of blog posts and conversations, two feminist scholars explore how political community, trust, responsibility and solidarity are affected by the COVID‐19 pandemic. We explore the ways in which we can engage in political world‐building during pandemic times through the work of Hannah Arendt. Following Arendt’s notion of the world as the space for human togetherness, we ask: how can we respond to COVID‐19’s interruptions to the familiarity of daily life and our relationship to public space? By extending relational accounts of public health and organizational ethics, we critique a narrow view of solidarity that focuses on individual compliance with public health directives. Instead, we argue that solidarity involves addressing structural inequities, both within public health and our wider community. Finally, we suggest possibilities for political world‐building by considering how new forms of human togetherness might emerge as we forge a collective ‘new normal’.     

Consensual commitment: A grounded theory of the meso-level influence of organizational design on leadership and decision-making

This research examined the relationship between organizational design and leadership in decision-making teams. It used a grounded theory-based qualitative research design. The validity of the research was enhanced by data triangulation, wherein quantitative psychometric data augmented the qualitative data that are traditionally used. The research was based upon two organizations within the substantive setting of the knowledge industry. The higher order category of consensual commitment explained effective decision-making. At the meso-level of leadership modeling, organizational design influenced both leadership style and decision-making. Specifically, an organizational design that generated lateral job roles and a relational leadership orientation was found to enhance consensual commitment, and provided a level of assurance against dysfunctional team dynamics.