Path-Dependency, Stocks, Switching Points, Flows: Reflections on Long-term Global Change and Local Opportunities

This paper examines the possibilities for peripheral localities to achieve upward mobility in the world-system by “hooking on” to larger processes of world-system accumulation. In particular, is it possible for economies that are dependent on foreign investment to receive a flow of investments that is high enough to overcome the negative impacts of a high stock of foreign investment, thus enabling them to cross a threshold and achieve upward mobility in the world-system? An analysis of therecent experience of the southern Irish “Celtic Tiger” economy during 1990-2000 indicates that such an upward movement is possible on the basis of massive foreign investment inflows. On closer examination, however, the Irish-type model appears to be highly deficient, because a high proportion of growth is illusionary and also on grounds of social desirability and lack of generalizability.

The Experience and Practice of Approved Social Workers in Northern Ireland

This article reports on the first extensive survey of Approved Social Worker (ASW) activity under the Mental Health (Northern Ireland) Order 1986. The integrated health and social services organizational structure, the adverse effects on individual mental health of the legacy of thirty years of civil conflict and the move from hospital to community care are significant features which have influenced the delivery of mental health social work services locally. The practice and experience of ASWs was surveyed by postal questionnaire and user and carer experience of compulsory hospital admission was investigated by a series of focus groups. The study revealed that two‐thirds of ASWs had experience of acting as an applicant in compulsory hospital admission during the past two years. Nearly half (42 per cent) of these ASWs had reported experience of between one and five admissions and one‐tenth had completed over twenty admissions in the two‐year period. In only a small minority of cases did joint face‐to‐face assessment with the General Practitioner (doctor) take place; nearly half of ASWs reported difficulties in obtaining transport; and only one‐fifth of ASWs had experience of acting as a second approved social worker. Half of ASWs reported experience of guardianship, either as applicant or in making the recommendation. Both service users and carers reported a lack of understanding about the role of the ASW and complained about the lack of alternative resources that ASWs could use to prevent hospital admissions. These findings are discussed and a number of recommendations are proposed for improvements to approved social worker practice.

New Ways of Looking at the State Apparatus and the State Archive in Nineteenth Century Ireland: Curiosities from that Phonetic Museum - Royal Irish Constabulary Reports and their Political Uses, 1879-91

This essay seeks to contextualise the intelligence work of the Royal Irish Constabulary, particularly in the 1880s, in terms of the wider British and imperial practice and, as a corollary, to reflect upon aspects of the structure of the state apparatus and the state archive in Ireland since the Union. The author contrasts Irish and British police and bureaucratic work and suggests parallels between Ireland and other imperial locations, especially India. This paper also defines the narrowly political, indeed partisan, uses to which this intelligence was put, particularly during the Special Commission of 1888 on 'Parnellism and crime', when governmentheld police records were made available to counsel for The Times. By reflecting on the structure of the state apparatus and its use in this instance, the author aims to further the debate on the governance of nineteenth-century Ireland and to explore issues of colonial identity and practice. The line of argument proposed in this essay is prefigured in Margaret O'Callaghan, British high politics and a nationalist Ireland: criminality, land and the law under Forster and Balfour (Cork, 199