Races without Racism?: everyday race relations in Singapore

In Singapore, race has a prominent place in the city state’s national policies. Its political ideology of multiracialism proclaims racial equality and protection for minority groups from racial discrimination. However, despite official rhetoric and policies aimed at managing and integrating the different ethnic groups, some scholars have argued that institutional racism does exist in Singapore. While it is public knowledge, with few exceptions, racist provocations and experiences of racism are not publicly discussed. In recent years, the advent of social media has made it possible for Singaporeans oftentimes unwittingly to express racially derogatory remarks. This has highlighted that racism is much more deep rooted. Yet, it still remains the white elephant in the room. This paper examines the sociopolitical context that has contributed to everyday racial discrimination and calls for a public acknowledgement of racism so as to combat racist practices.     

An exact algorithm for the multicriteria ordered clustering problem

In the context of multicriteria decision aid, we address the problem of regrouping alternatives into completely ordered categories based on valued preference degrees. We assume that the number of groups is fixed a priori. This will be referred to as the multicriteria ordered clustering problem. The model is based on the definition of an inconsistency matrix and only uses the ordinal properties of the pairwise preference relations. An exact algorithm is proposed to find the ordered partition and is applied as illustration to the Human Development Index.     

Street‐level discretion,emotional labour and welfare frontline staff at the Australian employment service providers

Despite the current controversial debates about discretion in public bureaucracies in general, and in welfare agencies in particular, the current literature on street‐level bureaucracy mainly assumes that discretion is a distinctive feature of the daily work of public servants. Nonetheless, a pertinent question has not specifically been asked in this literature, that is, given the context of privatisation and increased welfare conditionality in the welfare sector that are seriously challenging welfare frontline staff's commitment to social justice and human rights‐based practices, what are forms of street‐level discretion likely to contribute to improving the quality of welfare services? In this study, we attempt to address this question by exploring discretion displayed by welfare frontline staff in four Australian employment service providers. We argue that emotional labour, especially when being informed by critical empathy, is an important and effective form of street‐level discretion that welfare frontline workers can perform to better support welfare recipients and minimise the punitive aspects of welfare policy.