Inequality, fiscal capacity and the political regime: lessons from the post-communist transition

Using panel data for twenty-seven post-communist economies between 1987-2003, we examine the nexus of relationships between inequality, fiscal capacity (defined as the ability to raise taxes efficiently) and the political regime. Investigating the impact of political reform we find that full political freedom is associated with lower levels of income inequality. Under more oligarchic (authoritarian) regimes, the level of inequality is conditioned by the state’s fiscal capacity. Specifically, oligarchic regimes with more developed fiscal systems are able to defend the prevailing vested interests at a lower cost in terms of social injustice. This empirical finding is consistent with the model developed by Acemoglu (2006). We also find that transition countries undertaking early macroeconomic stabilisation now enjoy lower levels of inequality; we confirm that education fosters equality and the suggestion of Commander et al (1999) that larger countries are prone to higher levels of inequality.

Organisational justice:new insights from behavioural ethics

Both organizational justice and behavioural ethics are concerned with questions of 'right and wrong' in the context of work organizations. Until recently they have developed largely independently of each other, choosing to focus on subtly different concerns, constructs and research questions. The last few years have, however, witnessed a significant growth in theoretical and empirical research integrating these closely related academic specialities. We review the organizational justice literature, illustrating the impact of behavioural ethics research on important fairness questions. We argue that organizational justice research is focused on four reoccurring issues: (i) why justice at work matters to individuals; (ii) how justice judgements are formed; (iii) the consequences of injustice; and (iv) the factors antecedent to justice perceptions. Current and future justice research has begun and will continue borrowing from the behavioural ethics literature in answering these questions. © The Author(s) 2013.

Data envelopment analysis model for the appraisal and relative performance evaluation of nurses at an intensive care unit

The appraisal and relative performance evaluation of nurses are very important and beneficial for both nurses and employers in an era of clinical governance, increased accountability and high standards of health care services. They enhance and consolidate the knowledge and practical skills of nurses by identification of training and career development plans as well as improvement in health care quality services, increase in job satisfaction and use of cost-effective resources. In this paper, a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model is proposed for the appraisal and relative performance evaluation of nurses. The model is validated on thirty-two nurses working at an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at one of the most recognized hospitals in Lebanon. The DEA was able to classify nurses into efficient and inefficient ones. The set of efficient nurses was used to establish an internal best practice benchmark to project career development plans for improving the performance of other inefficient nurses. The DEA result confirmed the ranking of some nurses and highlighted injustice in other cases that were produced by the currently practiced appraisal system. Further, the DEA model is shown to be an effective talent management and motivational tool as it can provide clear managerial plans related to promoting, training and development activities from the perspective of nurses, hence increasing their satisfaction, motivation and acceptance of appraisal results. Due to such features, the model is currently being considered for implementation at ICU. Finally, the ratio of the number DEA units to the number of input/output measures is revisited with new suggested values on its upper and lower limits depending on the type of DEA models and the desired number of efficient units from a managerial perspective.

Buried voices: Genres and types of female authorship during the Spanish American colonial period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries)

This dissertation analyzes various types of non-canonical texts authorized by women from a wide spectrum of classes and races in the Spanish colonies. The female voice, generally absent from official colonial documents of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteen centuries, left a gap in the complex subject of women's history and social participation. Through the study of personal letters, autobiographies, journals, court documents, inquisitorial transcripts, wills and testaments, edicts, orders, proclamations and posters, that voice is recovered. Thus, the Indigenous, Spaniards and African women and their descendants who lived during this period left their written legacy and proof of participation. Beginning with a thorough history of the native woman's interest in writing, this study focuses on how women of all social levels utilized the few means of writing available at their disposal to display a testimonial, critical and sometimes fictional narrative of their surroundings. ^ This investigation concludes that it is necessary to change the traditional image of the passive women of the colonies, subjected to a patriarchal authority and unable to speak or grow on their own. The documents under study, introduced women who were able to self represent themselves as followers of the tradition while at the same time their writings were denying that very same statement. They passed from the private arena to the public one with discourses that confessed their innermost feelings and concerns, challenged the authority of the Inquisitor or the Governor, exposed their sexual freedom and transvestite narratives, successfully developed stratagems that challenged the official ideology of the oppressive religious environment and established their own authority reaching at last the freedom of their souls. ^

Twelve certain men: The impact of emotional appraisals on juror decision-making

Our jury system is predicated upon the expectation that jurors engage in systematic processing when considering evidence and making decisions. They are instructed to interpret facts and apply the appropriate law in a fair, dispassionate manner, free of all bias, including that of emotion. However, emotions containing an element of certainty (e.g., anger and happiness, which require little cognitive effort in determining their source) can often lead people to engage in superficial, heuristic-based processing. Compare this to uncertain emotions (e.g., hope and fear, which require people to seek out explanations for their emotional arousal), which instead has the potential to lead them to engage in deeper, more systematic processing. The purpose of the current research is in part to confirm past research (Tiedens & Linton, 2001; Semmler & Brewer, 2002) that uncertain emotions (like fear) can influence decision-making towards a more systematic style of processing, whereas more certain emotional states (like anger) will lead to a more heuristic style of processing. Studies One, Two, and Three build upon this prior research with the goal of improving methodological rigor through the use of film clips to reliably induce emotions, with awareness of testimonial details serving as measures of processing style. The ultimate objective of the current research was to explore this effect in Study Four by inducing either fear, anger, or neutral emotion in mock jurors, half of whom then followed along with a trial transcript featuring eight testimonial inconsistencies, while the other participants followed along with an error-free version of the same transcript. Overall rates of detection for these inconsistencies was expected to be higher for the uncertain/fearful participants due to their more effortful processing compared to certain/angry participants. These expectations were not fulfilled, with significant main effects only for the transcript version (with or without inconsistencies) on overall inconsistency detection rates. There are a number of plausible explanations for these results, so further investigation is needed.

Une vie en prison

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Unnatural History: Ecological Temporality in Post-1945 American Literature

While environmental literary criticism has traditionally focused its attention on the textual representation of specific places, recent ecocritical scholarship has expanded this focus to consider the treatment of time in environmental literature and culture. As environmental scholars, activists, scientists, and artists have noted, one of the major difficulties in grasping the reality and implications of climate change is a limited temporal imagination. In other words, the ability to comprehend and integrate different shapes, scales, and speeds of history is a precondition for ecologically sustainable and socially equitable responses to climate change.

My project examines the role that literary works might play in helping to create such an expanded sense of history. As I show how American writers after 1945 have treated the representation of time and history in relation to environmental questions, I distinguish between two textual subfields of environmental temporality. The first, which I argue is characteristic of mainstream environmentalism, is disjunctive, with abrupt environmental changes separating the past and the present. This subfield contains many canonical works of postwar American environmental writing, including Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. From treatises on the ancient ecological histories of particular sites to meditations on the speed of climate change, these works evince a preoccupation with environmental time that has not been acknowledged within the spatially oriented field of environmental criticism. However, by positing radical breaks between environmental pasts and environmental futures, they ultimately enervate the political charge of history and elide the human dimensions of environmental change, in terms both of environmental injustice and of possible social responses.

By contrast, the second subfield, which I argue is characteristic of environmental justice, is continuous, showing how historical patterns persist even across social and ecological transformations. I trace this version of environmental thought through a multicultural corpus of novels consisting of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Some of these novels do not document specific instances of environmental degradation or environmental injustice and, as a result, have not been critically interpreted as relevant for environmental analysis; others are more explicit in their discussion of environmental issues and are recognized as part of the canon of American environmental literature. However, I demonstrate that, across all of these texts, counterhegemonic understandings of history inform resistance to environmental degradation and exploitation. These texts show that environmental problems cannot be fully understood, nor environmental futures addressed, without recognizing the way that social histories of inequality and environmental histories of extraction continue to structure politics and ecology in the present.

Ultimately, then, the project offers three conclusions. First, it suggests that the second version of environmental temporality holds more value than the first for environmental cultural studies, in that it more compellingly and accurately represents the social implications of environmental issues. Second, it shows that “environmental literature” is most usefully understood not as the literature that explicitly treats environmental issues, but rather as the literature that helps to produce the sense of time that contemporary environmental crises require. Third, it shows how literary works can not only illuminate the relationship between American ideas about nature and social justice, but also operate as a specifically literary form of eco-political activism.

Food Swamps, Obesity & Health Zoning Restrictions on Fast Food Restaurants

Protecting public health is the most legitimate use of zoning, and yet there is minimal progress in applying it to the obesity problem. Zoning could potentially be used to address both unhealthy and healthy food retailers, but lack of evidence regarding the impact of zoning and public opinion on zoning changes are barriers to implementing zoning restrictions on fast food on a larger scale. My dissertation addresses these gaps in our understanding of health zoning as a policy option for altering built, food environments.

Chapter 1 examines the relationship between food swamps and obesity and whether spatial mapping might be useful in identifying priority geographic areas for zoning interventions. I employ an instrumental variables (IV) strategy to correct for the endogeneity problems associated with food environments, namely that individuals may self-select into certain neighborhoods and may consider food availability in their decision process. I utilize highway exits as a source of exogenous variation .Using secondary data from the USDA Food Environment Atlas, ordinary least squares (OLS) and IV regression models were employed to analyze cross-sectional associations between local food environments and the prevalence of obesity. I find even after controlling for food desert effects, food swamps have a positive, statistically significant effect on adult obesity rates.

Chapter 2 applies theories of message framing and prospect theory to the emerging discussion around health zoning policies targeting food environments and to explore public opinion toward a list of potential zoning restrictions on fast-food restaurants (beyond moratoriums on new establishments). In order to explore causality, I employ an online survey experiment manipulating exposure to vignettes with different message frames about health zoning restrictions with two national samples of adult Americans age 18 and over (N1=2,768 and N2=3,236). The second sample oversamples Black Americans (N=1,000) and individuals with high school as their highest level of education. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of six conditions where they were primed with different message frames about the benefits of zoning restrictions on fast food retailers. Participants were then asked to indicate their support for six zoning policies on a Likert scale. Subjects also answered questions about their food store access, eating behaviors, health status and perceptions of food stores by type.

I find that a message frame about Nutrition and increasing Equity in the food system was particularly effective at increasing support for health zoning policies targeting fast food outlets across policy categories (Conditional, Youth-related, Performance and Incentive) and across racial groups. This finding is consistent with an influential environmental justice scholar’s description of “injustice frames” as effective in mobilizing supporters around environmental issues (Taylor 2000). I extend this rationale to food environment obesity prevention efforts and identify Nutrition combined with Equity frames as an arguably universal campaign strategy for bolstering public support of zoning restrictions on fast food retailers.

Bridging my findings from both Chapters 1 and 2, using food swamps as a spatial metaphor may work to identify priority areas for policy intervention, but only if there is an equitable distribution of resources and mobilization efforts to improve consumer food environments. If the structural forces which ration access to land-use planning persist (arguably including the media as gatekeepers to information and producers of message frames) disparities in obesity are likely to widen.

Une vie en prison

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Pedagogía y política. La campaña de alfabetización CREAR en la historia reciente de la educación de adultos en la Argentina de los '70

La tesis que presentamos es el resultado de un trabajo de investigación sobre la campaña de alfabetización CREAR realizada entre 1973 y 1975. La Campaña de Reactivación de la Educación del Adulto para la Reconstrucción, estuvo dirigida por la Dirección Nacional de Educación de Adultos (DINEA) en la etapa de la recuperación democrática luego de dieciocho años de gobiernos autoritarios combinados con la proscripción de la fuerza política mayoritaria. Apoyada en el registro testimonial de quienes fueron sus inspiradores, conductores, coordinadores, alfabetizadores, la investigación se propone analizar la articulación entre pedagogía y política durante la realización de la campaña. Los testimonios rescatados en la presente investigación, representan figuras destacadas de la campaña de alfabetización en su doble dimensión de pedagogos y militantes políticos. En esta dirección, la presente tesis se propone recuperar los principales debates y discusiones que se generaron en torno a su desarrollo a partir de quienes fueron sus testigos. ¿Qué sueños proyectaban en la alfabetización? ¿Qué formas de imbricación entre lo político y lo pedagógico se produjo en su desarrollo? ¿Cómo se plasmó dicha articulación? ¿Sobre qué ejes vertebraron su discurso? Entre la pedagogía de la liberación y la doctrina del peronismo ¿qué lectura predominó? El desarrollo de este trabajo de investigación se propone invitar a recorrer este camino cargado de tensiones y contradicciones que, esperamos, se convierta en una contribución al campo de la historia de la educación reciente de la Argentina

Peronismo, dictadura y universidades privadas en la Argentina de los años 70

A partir del análisis de normativas universitarias, bibliografía especializada y fundamentalmente fuentes documentales y testimoniales, este artículo aborda la trama del sector universitario privado durante el complejo interregno que significaron los años setentas para la historia reciente Argentina. Observaremos que tras el reingreso del peronismo al poder del Estado en 1973, la alta sustentabilidad adquirida por el sector en años anteriores fue puesta en jaque: conflictos estudiantiles, intervenciones políticas y un crecimiento institucional refrenado, fueron algunos de sus rasgos distintivos. En cuanto a la última dictadura militar (1976-1983), abrió una contradictoria etapa de desarrollo para las universidades privadas. Pese a la alternancia de católicos conservadores en el área educativa y al sesgo privatista identificado como un hito del modelo económico implementado, el sector privado resultó contraído en el marco del avasallamiento más brutal del sistema universitario en su conjunto. Sin embargo, algunas universidades católicas resultaron beneficiadas con importantes estímulos económicos.

Oscuridad y zonas grises en El lápiz del carpintero y La lengua de las mariposas de Manuel Rivas : Con una coda argentina: La pregunta de sus ojos de Eduardo Sacheri

En La lengua de las mariposas y El lápiz del carpintero Manuel Rivas presenta conflictos y personajes inmersos en el contexto de violencia y opresión desatados por el accionar de las fuerzas franquistas triunfantes en Galicia. Por su parte, uno de los hilos narrativos desarrollados por Eduardo Sacheri en La pregunta de sus ojos, se interna en la relación entre el delito, la impunidad y el castigo en el marco de la violencia estatal que se instala en Argentina en los años anteriores al golpe militar de 1976. En los tres relatos los comportamientos indignos o criminales, cuya génesis es inseparable del terror impuesto por una dictadura u otras formas de violencia emanadas de un poder opresor, disparan interrogantes de complejas respuestas. El concepto de zona gris que acuñó Primo Levi en su obra dedicada a testimoniar su experiencia de deportado en Auschwitz ofrece una vía de reflexión para volver más inteligible la respuesta del ser humano en situaciones límite.

Pedagogía y política. La campaña de alfabetización CREAR en la historia reciente de la educación de adultos en la Argentina de los '70

La tesis que presentamos es el resultado de un trabajo de investigación sobre la campaña de alfabetización CREAR realizada entre 1973 y 1975. La Campaña de Reactivación de la Educación del Adulto para la Reconstrucción, estuvo dirigida por la Dirección Nacional de Educación de Adultos (DINEA) en la etapa de la recuperación democrática luego de dieciocho años de gobiernos autoritarios combinados con la proscripción de la fuerza política mayoritaria. Apoyada en el registro testimonial de quienes fueron sus inspiradores, conductores, coordinadores, alfabetizadores, la investigación se propone analizar la articulación entre pedagogía y política durante la realización de la campaña. Los testimonios rescatados en la presente investigación, representan figuras destacadas de la campaña de alfabetización en su doble dimensión de pedagogos y militantes políticos. En esta dirección, la presente tesis se propone recuperar los principales debates y discusiones que se generaron en torno a su desarrollo a partir de quienes fueron sus testigos. ¿Qué sueños proyectaban en la alfabetización? ¿Qué formas de imbricación entre lo político y lo pedagógico se produjo en su desarrollo? ¿Cómo se plasmó dicha articulación? ¿Sobre qué ejes vertebraron su discurso? Entre la pedagogía de la liberación y la doctrina del peronismo ¿qué lectura predominó? El desarrollo de este trabajo de investigación se propone invitar a recorrer este camino cargado de tensiones y contradicciones que, esperamos, se convierta en una contribución al campo de la historia de la educación reciente de la Argentina

Pedagogía y política. La campaña de alfabetización CREAR en la historia reciente de la educación de adultos en la Argentina de los '70

La tesis que presentamos es el resultado de un trabajo de investigación sobre la campaña de alfabetización CREAR realizada entre 1973 y 1975. La Campaña de Reactivación de la Educación del Adulto para la Reconstrucción, estuvo dirigida por la Dirección Nacional de Educación de Adultos (DINEA) en la etapa de la recuperación democrática luego de dieciocho años de gobiernos autoritarios combinados con la proscripción de la fuerza política mayoritaria. Apoyada en el registro testimonial de quienes fueron sus inspiradores, conductores, coordinadores, alfabetizadores, la investigación se propone analizar la articulación entre pedagogía y política durante la realización de la campaña. Los testimonios rescatados en la presente investigación, representan figuras destacadas de la campaña de alfabetización en su doble dimensión de pedagogos y militantes políticos. En esta dirección, la presente tesis se propone recuperar los principales debates y discusiones que se generaron en torno a su desarrollo a partir de quienes fueron sus testigos. ¿Qué sueños proyectaban en la alfabetización? ¿Qué formas de imbricación entre lo político y lo pedagógico se produjo en su desarrollo? ¿Cómo se plasmó dicha articulación? ¿Sobre qué ejes vertebraron su discurso? Entre la pedagogía de la liberación y la doctrina del peronismo ¿qué lectura predominó? El desarrollo de este trabajo de investigación se propone invitar a recorrer este camino cargado de tensiones y contradicciones que, esperamos, se convierta en una contribución al campo de la historia de la educación reciente de la Argentina

Film as an archive for colonial photographs: activating the past in the present

This practice-led research looks at the ways in which the colonial archive, and the colonial photographic archive in particular, can be reconstructed to produce new critical histories. The research argues for the potential of the moving image as a tool for re-staging colonial archives, as a means of generating responsible ways of looking at, and of engaging with our troubled collective pasts. In my practice I mix the photographic archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company(which became BP) with my family’s photographs from Iran, and with the documentation and narrativization of my encounter with both of these sets of materials, within the moving image. Through this process I address questions about the nature of the photographic archive and the search for historical meaning within it; the question of the researcher’s position within the archive and within the history she produces; and I investigate the affective power of colonial photographs within film and the experience of untimeliness which they produce. While addressing problems associated with the failure of photographic archives to offer access to any stable, transparent meaning, I show how engaging with slippages of meaning can produce other kinds of historical knowledge. But I also argue that attending to the impression of the ‘real’ produced by the colonial photograph as it appears within film, makes the past felt in the present tense, in ways that draw attention to the responsibility of being an onlooker in a situation of injustice. In addition I show how registering the place and time of the researcher within the new filmic archive in motion produces an effective means of imaginative time travel and a lively experience of history.