Leadership and the Labour Party:narrative and performance

The relationships between narrative and leadership, between rhetoric and performance, between doctrine and its voicing, are crucial to party politics and are underrated by both practising politicians and scholars. This study analyses the ‘performance of leadership’ in the UK Labour Party, and what this means for a new approach to understanding politics. The main focus of this study is the five-year leadership of Ed Miliband, 2010-2015. The fortunes of the party and the party leadership can be apprehended as a series of performed rhetorical events. A political leader’s persona is a construction that performs – rather like an actor – in the political space. The author identifies and analyses the architecture and the modalities of leadership persona construction and performance in contemporary politics.

Sartori reconsidered: toward a new predominant party system

Despite the success of his party systems theory, Giovanni Sartori’s predominant party system is a type that is consistently avoided by party systems scholars, yet the reasons for this have been unclear. This article exposes the flaws in Sartori’s predominant party system, but we also argue that it remains a useful concept and, consequently, that the literature’s rejection of predominance and retreat to the cruder dominance notion is unnecessary. Instead, we amend predominance to ensure its coherence within Sartori’s typology and consistency with his party systems theory. We show that our amendments improve the value of predominance as a category for empirical analysis of the effects of party systems.

Cycles in public opinion and the dynamics of stable party systems

We study a dynamic model of elections where many parties may enter or exit political competition. At each election a new political leadership arrives for each party. The leadership cannot choose the party's platform (ideological identities are fixed) but must decide whether or not to contest the election. Contesting elections is costly and this cost is higher if the party has recently been inactive. The distribution of voters' ideal policies, or public opinion, changes over time via a Markov process with a state independent persistence parameter. We characterise stable party systems where the set of contestants is invariant to the recent most observed opinion. We show that stable party systems exist only when public opinion is sufficiently volatile, while highly persistent moods lead to instability and change in the party system whenever public opinion changes.

Bridging the divide: measuring party system change and classifying party systems

Party systems research has proceeded along two parallel lines of inquiry, one predominantly “qualitative” and the other “quantitative.” This article attempts to bridge this divide in two ways. First, by showing that qualitative information can be valuable in the construction of quantitative measures. Second, by showing that the results from applying theoretically sensitive measurement tools can be useful for qualitative classification. These analyses are performed using an original dataset of party system changes in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The significant role of third-party logistics (3pl) operators as fosterers of organizational performance in colombian companies

La eliminación de barreras entre países es una consecuencia que llega con la globalización y con los acuerdos de TLC firmados en los últimos años. Esto implica un crecimiento significativo del comercio exterior, lo cual se ve reflejado en un aumento de la complejidad de la cadena de suministro de las empresas. Debido a lo anterior, se hace necesaria la búsqueda de alternativas para obtener altos niveles de productividad y competitividad dentro de las empresas en Colombia, ya que el entorno se ha vuelto cada vez más complejo, saturado de competencia no sólo nacional, sino también internacional. Para mantenerse en una posición competitiva favorable, las compañías deben enfocarse en las actividades que le agregan valor a su negocio, por lo cual una de las alternativas que se están adoptando hoy en día es la tercerización de funciones logísticas a empresas especializadas en el manejo de estos servicios. Tales empresas son los Proveedores de servicios logísticos (LSP), quienes actúan como agentes externos a la organización al gestionar, controlar y proporcionar actividades logísticas en nombre de un contratante. Las actividades realizadas pueden incluir todas o parte de las actividades logísticas, pero como mínimo la gestión y ejecución del transporte y almacenamiento deben estar incluidos (Berglund, 2000). El propósito del documento es analizar el papel de los Operadores Logísticos de Tercer nivel (3PL) como promotores del desempeño organizacional en las empresas colombianas, con el fin de informar a las MIPYMES acerca de los beneficios que se obtienen al trabajar con LSP como un medio para mejorar la posición competitiva del país.

La influencia del Blues en la configuración y creación de The Black Panther Party en Estados Unidos (1966)

El trabajo a continuación tiene como objetivo mostrar cómo la música ha estado ligada al afroamericano desde su llegada al continente Americano en 1800, y cómo ha sido usada para lograr una transformación político-social que permitiría alcanzar la igualdad de trato en Estados Unidos durante la mitad del siglo XX. Se observará la evolución del Blues desde sus raíces y la introducción del R&B como expresión de pensamiento, ideas y experiencias utilizado por The Black Panther Party en la escena social negra de la época. Para lograr el objetivo anteriormente mencionado, se utilizará la Teoría de Campos de Pierre Bourdieu, junto con los conceptos de Capital y Habitus.

A Novel Range Test

In a range test, one party holds a ciphertext and needs to test whether the message encrypted in the ciphertext is within a certain interval range. In this paper, a range test protocol is proposed, where the party holding the ciphertext asks another party holding the private key of the encryption algorithm to help him. These two parties run the protocol to implement the test. The test returns TRUE if and only if the encrypted message is within the certain interval range. If the two parties do not conspire, no information about the encrypted message is revealed from the test except what can be deduced from the test result. Advantages of the new protocol over the existing related techniques are that it achieves correctness, soundness, °exibility, high e±ciency and privacy simultaneously.

Password Based Server Aided Key Exchange

We propose a new password-based 3-party protocol with a formal security proof in the standard model. Under reasonable assumptions we show that our new protocol is more efficient than the recent protocol of Abdalla and Pointcheval (FC 2005), proven in the random oracle model. We also observe some limitations in the model due to Abdalla, Fouque and Pointcheval (PKC 2005) for proving security of such protocols.

Exchange relationships in building services maintenance activity : a test of transaction cost economics and the resource dependency view

The firm is faced with a decision concerning the nature of intra-organizational exchange relationships with internal human resources and the nature or inter-organizational exchange relationships with market firms. In both situations, the firm can develop an exchange that ranges from a discrete exchange to a relational exchange. Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the Resource Dependency View (RDV) represent alternative efficiency-based explanations fo the nature of the exchange relationship. The aim of the paper is to test these two theories in respect of air conditioning maintenance in retail centres. Multiple sources of information are genereated from case studies of Australian retail centres to test these theories in respoect of internalized operations management (concerning strategic aspects of air conditioning maintenance) and externalized planned routine air conditioning maintenance. The analysis of the data centres on pattern matching. It is concluded that the data supports TCE - on the basis of a development in TCE's contractual schema. Further research is suggested towards taking a pluralistic stance and developing a combined efficiency and power hypothesis - upon which Williamson has speculated. For practice, the conclusions also offer a timely cautionary note concerning the adoption of one approach in all exchange relationships.

Cooperation using a robotic ad hoc network made from Bluetooth, JXTA, OSGi and other commercial off the shelf (COTS) products

Abstract - Mobile devices in the near future will need to collaborate to fulfill their function. Collaboration will be done by communication. We use a real world example of robotic soccer to come up with the necessary structures required for robotic communication. A review of related work is done and it is found no examples come close to providing a RANET. The robotic ad hoc network (RANET) we suggest uses existing structures pulled from the areas of wireless networks, peer to peer and software life-cycle management. Gaps are found in the existing structures so we describe how to extend some structures to satisfy the design. The RANET design supports robot cooperation by exchanging messages, discovering needed skills that other robots on the network may possess and the transfer of these skills. The network is built on top of a Bluetooth wireless network and uses JXTA to communicate and transfer skills. OSGi bundles form the skills that can be transferred. To test the nal design a reference implementation is done. Deficiencies in some third party software is found, specifically JXTA and JamVM and GNU Classpath. Lastly we look at how to fix the deciencies by porting the JXTA C implementation to the target robotic platform and potentially eliminating the TCP/IP layer, using UDP instead of TCP or using an adaptive TCP/IP stack. We also propose a future areas of investigation; how to seed the configuration for the Personal area network (PAN) Bluetooth protocol extension so a Bluetooth TCP/IP link is more quickly formed and using the STP to allow multi-hop messaging and transfer of skills.

Statutory protections from forfeiture of a leasehold estate following Apriaden Pty Ltd v Seacrest Pty Ltd

In Apriaden Pty Ltd v Seacrest Pty Ltd the Victorian Court of Appeal decided that termination of a lease under common law contractual principles following repudiation is an alternative to reliance upon an express forfeiture provision in the lease and that it is outside the sphere of statutory protections given against the enforcing of a forfeiture. The balance of authority supports the first aspect of the decision. This article focuses on the second aspect of it, which is a significant development in the law of leases. The article considers the implications of this decision for essential terms of clauses in leases, argues that common law termination for breach of essential terms should be subject to compliance with these statutory requirements and, as an alternative, suggests a way forward through appropriate law reform, considering whether the recent Victorian reform goes far enough.