The role of law and ethics in developing business management as a profession

Currently, business management is far from being recognised as a profession. This paper suggests that a professional spirit should be developed which could function as a filter of commercial reasoning. Broadly, management will not be organised within the framework of a well-established profession unless formal knowledge, licensing, professional autonomy and professional codes of conduct are developed sufficiently. In developing business management as a profession, law may play a key role. Where the idea is that business management should be more professsionalised, managers must show that they are willing to adopt ethical values, while arriving at business decisions. The paper argues that ethics cannot survive without legal regulation, which, in turn, will not be supported by law unless lawyers can find alternative solutions to the large mechanisms of the official society, secured by the monopolised coercion of the nation state. From a micro perspective of law and business ethics, communities can be developed with their own conventions, rules and standards that are generated and sanctioned within the boundaries of the communities themselves.

The state of emergency management 2000: The process of emergency management professionalization in the United States and Florida

This dissertation analyzes the current status of emergency management professionalization in the United States and Florida using a qualitative case study. I investigate the efforts of various organizations at the national and state levels in the private and public sectors to organize emergency management as a profession. I conceptualize emergency management professionalization as occurring in two phases: the indirect institutionalization of the occupation of emergency management and the formal advancement toward an emergency management profession. The legislative, organizational, and procedural developments that occurred between approximately 1900 and the late 1970s became the indirect institutionalization of the occupation of emergency management. Over time, as our society developed and became increasingly complex, more disasters affect the security of the population. In order to adapt to increasing risks and vulnerabilities the emergency management system emerged and with it the necessary elements upon which a future profession could be established providing the basis for the formal advancement toward an emergency management profession. ^ During approximately the last twenty years, the formal advancement toward an emergency management profession has encompassed two primary strategies—certification and accreditation—motivated by the objective to organize a profession. Certification applies to individual emergency managers and includes all training and education. Accreditation of state and local emergency management agencies is reached by complying to a minimum level of proficiency with established standards of performance. Certification and accreditation are the mechanisms used to create an emergency management profession and thus act as axes around which the field of emergency management is organizing. ^ The purpose of this research is to provide a frame of reference for whether or not the field of emergency management is a profession. Based on sociology of professions literature, emergency management can be considered to be professionalizing. The current emergency management professionalization efforts may or may not be sufficient to achieve the ultimate goal of becoming a legitimate profession based on legal and public support for the exclusive right to perform emergency management tasks (monopoly) as well as self-regulation of those tasks (autonomy). ^

Mapping Transnational Crime in El Salvador: New Trends and Lessons from Colombia

Since El Salvador’s civil war formally ended in 1992 the small Central American nation has undergone profound social changes and significant reforms. However, few changes have been as important or as devastating as the nation’s emergence as a central hub in the transnational criminal “pipeline” or series of recombinant, overlapping chains of routes and actors that illicit organizations use to traffic in drugs, money weapons, human being, endangered animals and other products. The erasing of the once-clear ideological lines that drove the civil war and the ability of erstwhile enemies to join forces in criminal enterprises in the post-war period is an enduring and dangerous characteristic of El Salvador’s transnational criminal evolution. Trained, elite cadres from both sides, with few legitimate job opportunities, found their skills were marketable in the growing criminal structures. The groups moved from kidnapping and extortion to providing protection services to transnational criminal organizations to becoming integral parts of the organizations themselves. The demand for specialized military and transportation services in El Salvador have exploded as the Mexican DTOs consolidate their hold on the cocaine market and their relationships with the transportista networks, which is still in flux. The value of their services has risen dramatically also because of the fact that multiple Mexican DTOs, at war with each other in Mexico and seeking to physically control the geographic space of the lucrative pipeline routes in from Guatemala to Panama, are eager to increase their military capabilities and intelligence gathering capacities. The emergence of multiple non-state armed groups, often with significant ties to the formal political structure (state) through webs of judicial, legislative and administrative corruption, has some striking parallels to Colombia in the 1980s, where multiple types of violence ultimately challenged the sovereignty of state and left a lasting legacy of embedded corruption within the nation’s political structure. Organized crime in El Salvador is now transnational in nature and more integrated into stronger, more versatile global networks such as the Mexican DTOs. It is a hybrid of both local crime – with gangs vying for control off specific geographic space so they can extract payment for the safe passage of illicit products – and transnational groups that need to use that space to successfully move their products. These symbiotic relationships are both complex and generally transient in nature but growing more consolidated and dangerous.

Law Enforcement Actions in Urban Spaces Governed by Violent Non-State Entities: Lessons from Latin America

In response to a crime epidemic afflicting Latin America since the early 1990s, several countries in the region have resorted to using heavy-force police or military units to physically retake territories de facto controlled by non-State criminal or insurgent groups. After a period of territory control, the heavy forces hand law enforcement functions in the retaken territories to regular police officers, with the hope that the territories and their populations will remain under the control of the state. To a varying degree, intensity, and consistency, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica have adopted such policies since the mid-1990s. During such operations, governments need to pursue two interrelated objectives: to better establish the state’s physical presence and to realign the allegiance of the population in those areas toward the state and away from the non-State criminal entities. From the perspective of law enforcement, such operations entail several critical decisions and junctions, such as: Whether or not to announce the force insertion in advance. The decision trades off the element of surprise and the ability to capture key leaders of the criminal organizations against the ability to minimize civilian casualties and force levels. The latter, however, may allow criminals to go to ground and escape capture. Governments thus must decide whether they merely seek to displace criminal groups to other areas or maximize their decapitation capacity. Intelligence flows rarely come from the population. Often, rival criminal groups are the best source of intelligence. However, cooperation between the State and such groups that goes beyond using vetted intelligence provided by the groups, such as a State tolerance for militias, compromises the rule-of-law integrity of the State and ultimately can eviscerate even public safety gains. Sustaining security after initial clearing operations is at times even more challenging than conducting the initial operations. Although unlike the heavy forces, traditional police forces, especially if designed as community police, have the capacity to develop trust of the community and ultimately focus on crime prevention, developing such trust often takes a long time. To develop the community’s trust, regular police forces need to conduct frequent on-foot patrols with intensive nonthreatening interactions with the population and minimize the use of force. Moreover, sufficiently robust patrol units need to be placed in designated beats for substantial amount of time, often at least over a year. Establishing oversight mechanisms, including joint police-citizens’ boards, further facilities building trust in the police among the community. After disruption of the established criminal order, street crime often significantly rises and both the heavy-force and community-police units often struggle to contain it. The increase in street crime alienates the population of the retaken territory from the State. Thus developing a capacity to address street crime is critical. Moreover, the community police units tend to be vulnerable (especially initially) to efforts by displaced criminals to reoccupy the cleared territories. Losing a cleared territory back to criminal groups is extremely costly in terms of losing any established trust and being able to recover it. Rather than operating on a priori determined handover schedule, a careful assessment of the relative strength of regular police and criminal groups post-clearing operations is likely to be a better guide for timing the handover from heavy forces to regular police units. Cleared territories often experience not only a peace dividend, but also a peace deficit – in the rise new serious crime (in addition to street crime). Newly – valuable land and other previously-inaccessible resources can lead to land speculation and forced displacement; various other forms of new crime can also significantly rise. Community police forces often struggle to cope with such crime, especially as it is frequently linked to legal business. Such new crime often receives little to no attention in the design of the operations to retake territories from criminal groups. But without developing an effective response to such new crime, the public safety gains of the clearing operations can be altogether lost.

Factors driving territory size and breeding success in a threatened migratory songbird, the Canada Warbler

Successful conservation of migratory birds demands we understand how habitat factors on the breeding grounds influences breeding success. Multiple factors are known to directly influence breeding success in territorial songbirds. For example, greater food availability and fewer predators can have direct effects on breeding success. However, many of these same habitat factors can also result in higher conspecific density that may ultimately reduce breeding success through density dependence. In this case, there is a negative indirect effect of habitat on breeding success through its effects on conspecific density and territory size. Therefore, a key uncertainty facing land managers is whether important habitat attributes directly influence breeding success or indirectly influence breeding success through territory size. We used radio-telemetry, point-counts, vegetation sampling, predator observations, and insect sampling over two years to provide data on habitat selection of a steeply declining songbird species, the Canada Warbler (Cardellina canadensis). These data were then applied in a hierarchical path modeling framework and an AIC model selection approach to determine the habitat attributes that best predict breeding success. Canada Warblers had smaller territories in areas with high shrub cover, in the presence of red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), at shoreline sites relative to forest-interior sites and as conspecific density increased. Breeding success was lower for birds with smaller territories, which suggests competition for limited food resources, but there was no direct evidence that food availability influenced territory size or breeding success. The negative relationship between shrub cover and territory size in our study may arise because these specific habitat conditions are spatially heterogeneous, whereby individuals pack into patches of preferred breeding habitat scattered throughout the landscape, resulting in reduced territory size and an associated reduction in resource availability per territory. Our results therefore highlight the importance of considering direct and indirect effects for Canada warblers; efforts to increase the amount of breeding habitat may ultimately result in lower breeding success if habitat availability is limited and negative density dependent effects occur.

Realism and national identity in 'Y Tu Mamá También': an audience perspective

When referring to cinema and its emancipatory potential, realism, like Plato’s pharmakon, has signified both illness and cure, poison and medicine. On the one hand, realism is regarded as the main feature of so-called classical cinema, inherently conservative and thoroughly ideological, its main raison d’être being to reify and make a particular version of the status quo believable and to pass it out as ‘reality’ (Burch, 1990; MacCabe, 1974). On the other, realism has also been interpreted as a quest for truth and social justice, as in the positivist ethos that informs documentary (Zavattini, 1953). Even in the latter sense, however, the extent to which realism has served colonizing ends when used to investigate the ‘truth’ of the Other has also been noted, rendering the form profoundly suspicious (Chow, 2007, p. 150). For realism has been a Western form of representation, one that can be traced back to the invention of perspective in painting and that peaked with the secular worldview brought about by the Enlightenment. And like realism, the nation state too is a product of the Enlightenment, nationalism being, as it were, a secular replacement for the religious - that is enchanted or fantastic - worldview. In this way, realism, cinema and nation are inextricably linked, and equally strained under the current decline of the Enlightenment paradigm. This chapter looks at Y tu Mamá También by Alfonso Cuarón (2001), a highly successful road movie with documentary features, to explore the ways in which realism, cinema and nation interact with each other in the present conditions of ‘globalization’ as experienced in Mexico. The chapter compares and contrasts various interpretations of the role of realism in this film put forward by critics and scholars and other discourses about it circulating in the media with actual ways of audience engagement with it.

State Political Parties in American Politics: Innovation and Integration in the Party System

What role do state party organizations play in twenty-first century American politics? What is the nature of the relationship between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections? These questions frame the three studies presented in this dissertation. More specifically, I examine the organizational development of the state party organizations and the strategic interactions and connections between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections.

In the first empirical chapter, I argue that the Internet Age represents a significant transitional period for state party organizations. Using data collected from surveys of state party leaders, this chapter reevaluates and updates existing theories of party organizational strength and demonstrates the importance of new indicators of party technological capacity to our understanding of party organizational development in the early twenty-first century. In the second chapter, I ask whether the national parties utilize different strategies in deciding how to allocate resources to state parties through fund transfers and through the 50-state-strategy party-building programs that both the Democratic and Republican National Committees advertised during the 2010 elections. Analyzing data collected from my 2011 state party survey and party-fund-transfer data collected from the Federal Election Commission, I find that the national parties considered a combination of state and national electoral concerns in directing assistance to the state parties through their 50-state strategies, as opposed to the strict battleground-state strategy that explains party fund transfers. In my last chapter, I examine the relationships between platforms issued by Democratic and Republican state and national parties and the strategic considerations that explain why state platforms vary in their degree of similarity to the national platform. I analyze an extensive platform dataset, using cluster analysis and document similarity measures to compare platform content across the 1952 to 2014 period. The analysis shows that, as a group, Democratic and Republican state platforms exhibit greater intra-party homogeneity and inter-party heterogeneity starting in the early 1990s, and state-national platform similarity is higher in states that are key players in presidential elections, among other factors. Together, these three studies demonstrate the significance of the state party organizations and the state-national party partnership in contemporary politics.

Uncomfortable 'truths' and the centenary anniversary of the 1916 Rising in Ireland

How to deal with uncomfortable ‘truths’ from the past has long posed problems for historians and politicians alike and this is exemplified by attempts to ‘deal with’ the centenary anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland. How do we recognise the revolutionary ‘heroes’ of the past and their contribution to the building of the new ‘nation’ state to which we may pledge allegiance, without exposing the contradictions inherent in the way that ‘nation’ state has transformed, subverted and indeed corrupted many of the ideas for which they fought? More controversially, how do we honour the actions of revolutionaries in the past which led to death and destruction in pursuance of a grand ideal, while at the same time condemning others today who claim to have been likewise engaged, using similar methods, during the recent ‘Troubles’ (1969-98 and counting)? Attempts by the Irish state to deal with the centenary seem to illustrate the point.

Race, Debt and the Welfare State

In this article I explore how the figure of debt illuminates the racial politics of welfare in neoliberal Britain. I begin by giving a reading of the simultaneous unfolding of post-war race politics and the Beveridgean welfare state, and then turn to consider the interpellative appeal of neoliberal debt to minoritiSed subjects who have, in certain respects, been de facto excluded from prevailing models of welfare citizenship. In particular, this article considers the ways in which household debt might, even as it increases social inequality, simultaneously produce ideas about equality and futurity, as well as gesture towards the possibility of post-national forms of identity and belonging. If we are to challenge the lowest-common-denominator logics of ‘capitalist realism’ it is necessary to develop orientations to the economic that are as convincing as the popular stories that circulate about the operations of the neoliberal marketplace, and which are as meaningful as the social relations they play a part in constituting. Rather than reproduce the racialized model of welfare citizenship that is implicit to the ‘defence’ of the postwar welfare state, I suggest that there are elements of prevailing neoliberal market relations that might themselves serve as a more substantial basis for expressions of racial equality. There is, in other words, something that we can learn from neoliberal debt regimes in order to develop a more egalitarian future-oriented politics of social welfare and economic redistribution.

Ecuadorian migration and family strategies of social mobility: dialectic relation between emotional and financial capital

This text deals with transnational strategies of social mobility in Ecuadorian migrant households in Spain. We apply the capital accumulation model (Moser, 2009) for this purpose. The main target of this article is, beyond thinking in terms of capital stock and accumulation, the analysis in depth of the dynamics of the different types of capital, that is to say, how they interact with each other in the framework of the social mobility strategies of the migrants and their families. We are bringing into light the way some households adopt investing decisions in capitals that don't translate into any addition or earnings in all cases, on the contrary, concentrating all their efforts on the accumulation of a certain asset they may, in some cases, lead to a loss of another. We will concentrate our analysis primarily on the dynamics between the physical and financial capital and the social and emotional capital, showing the tensions produced between these two types of assets. At the same time, we will highlight how migrants negotiate their family strategies of social mobility in the transnational area. Our study is based in empirical material obtained from qualitative fieldwork (in-depth interviews) with families of migrants in the urban district of Turubamba Bajo -(south of Quito) and in Madrid. A series of households were selected where interviews were carried out in the country of origin as well as in the context of immigration, with different family members, analysing the transnational social and economic strategies of families of migrant members. Family members of migrants established in Spain were interviewed in Quito, as well as key informants in the district (school teachers, nursery members of the staff, etc.). The research was framed within the projects "Impact of migration on the development: gender and transnationalism", Ministry of Science and Innovation (SEJ2007/63179) (Laura Oso, dir. 2007-2010),"Gender, transnationalism and intergenerational strategies of social mobility", Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FEM2011/26210) (Laura Oso, dir. 201-1-2015) and “Gender, Crossed Mobilities and Transnational Dynamics”, Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FEM2015-67164).

Understandings of transnational families in debates on Migration and development

International migration sets in motion a range of significant transnational processes that connect countries and people. How migration interacts with development and how policies might promote and enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across sending and receiving societies forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remain underexplored. This article sets out to discern the understandings of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policydriven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family literature focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, we ask whether an analytical point of departure in respective transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. We conclude by sketching important strands of inclusions and exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.

Economic Development and Mass Poverty in Africa: Assessment of the Nigerian Experience

The forces surrounding the emerging economies of underdeveloped world, especially Africa has practically stifled its economic progress, growth, development and sustainability. This economic condition brings to the fore the massive onslaught of rural/urban poverty which the African continent grapples with since the post-world war II era to date. The economic misfortunes and incidence of mass poverty in Africa, vis-à-vis Nigeria is used as a point of departure in this study. The paper underscores the ideological and philosophical undertone of international capital manifesting in form of colonialism and imperialism as a major character in the historical process of underdevelopment and mass poverty in peripheral states of Africa, Asia and Latin America, respectively. Of particular interest in this study is the activities of domestic bourgeoisie elite class who have vigorously displayed some degree of lack of much needed vision and abject lack of desires to draw up workable plans to redeem the battered image of African/ Nigerian economic misfortunes. This state of affairs has practically engendered economic underdevelopment, misery and disturbing levels of poverty in the nation-state system. The paper concludes with the forward towards realizing the vision 20-20-20 objectives in the 21t century and beyond.

Standardizing Minzu: A Content Analysis of the Depiction of Shaoshu Minzu in Three Chinese Elementary Curriculum Standards and Textbooks

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Labor Importation Programs, 1942-1964

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Towards participatory political theology: democratic consolidation in Southeastern Europe and the role of Eastern Christianity in the process

This thesis defends the position that the Eastern Orthodoxy has the potential to develop, on the basis of its core concepts and doctrines, a new political theology that is participatory, personalist and universalist. This participatory political theology, as I name it, endorses modern democracy and the values of civic engagement. It enhances the process of democracy-building and consolidation in the SEE countries through cultivating the ethos of participation and concern with the common good among and the recognition of the dignity and freedom of the person. This political-theological model is developed while analyzing critically the traditional models of church-state relations (the symphonia model corresponding to the medieval empire and the Christian nation model corresponding to the nation-state) as being instrumentalized to serve the political goals of non-democratic regimes. The participatory political-theological model is seen as corresponding to the conditions of the constitutional democratic state. The research is justified by the fact the Eastern Orthodoxy has been a dominant religiouscultural force in the European South East for centuries, thus playing a significant role in the process of creation of the medieval and modern statehood of the SEE countries. The analysis employs comparative constitutional perspectives on democratic transition and consolidation in the SEE region with the theoretical approaches of political theology and Eastern Orthodox theology. The conceptual basis for the political-theological synthesis is found in the concept and doctrines of the Eastern Orthodoxy (theosis and synergy, ecclesia and Eucharist, conciliarity and catholicity, economy and eschatology) which emphasize the participatory, personalist and communal dimensions of the Orthodox faith and practice. The paradigms of revealing the political-theological potential of these concepts are the Eucharistic ecclesiology and the concept of divine-human communion as defining the body of Orthodox theology. The thesis argues that with its ethos of openness and engagement the participatory political theology presupposes political systems that are democratic, inclusive, and participatory, respecting the rights and the dignity of the person. The political theology developed here calls for a transformation and change of democratic systems towards better realization of their personalist and participatory commitments. In the context of the SEE countries the participatory political theology addresses the challenges posed by alternative authoritarian political theologies practiced in neighboring regions.