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This article examines how the Commission has approached the subject of organisational ethics as part of its post-1999 administrative reform. It begins by explaining the relationship between the Commission resignation and the reform that followed. It then reviews some of the relevant ethics literature, identifying a useful conceptual framework on reform and ethics. The third section introduces the reform proper, arguing that it is loosely in line with new public management thinking. The fourth section then identifies the ethical dimension of the reform package presented during the Prodi Commission, with the aim of explaining the Commission approach. The article concludes that the Commission has taken an eclectic approach to ethics, so that while the Commission's approach to ethics is very much in line with new public management ideas, it has been supplemented by compliance-based ethics management, albeit of a modest kind. This approach, it is argued, may have a detrimental impact on organisational ethics within the Commission, though the author accepts that is too early to pass judgement on this final point.

AbstractCoping with complexity is at the heart of the systems approach. Several methodologies can be discerned which have proved to possess extraordinary power in dealing with complex issues. System dynamics is a general‐purpose methodology for modelling and simulation employed in order to deal with dynamic complexity. Cybernetics has brought forth structural models to enable organizations to deal with the complexity of their environments. The main proposition of this paper is that these two methodological strands show potential synergies. A proposal for leveraging the complementarities of system dynamics and organizational cybernetics is made. The paper also argues that it is necessary to conflate qualitative and quantitative modelling and design approaches, as well as to improve the quality of models and strategies by strengthening the processes of validation. At a higher level of abstraction, the author postulates that, for the sake of relevance, this methodological synthesis is to build upon both the positivist and interpretivist traditions. On this basis, a framework called integrative systems methodology is proposed to help actors at different levels to achieve the requisite variety. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Leaving China is, in part, a study of the televisual and filmic representation of Chinese emigration. The book is partly autobiographical, since it draws on the author's own lived experience as a China-born scholar established abroad. The author, born in the PRC, is now based in Australia, but as the list of acknowledgements indicates, she is imbricated in a global network of China-related academics. The other strand of Wanning Sun's research is imaginary travel and virtual migration: the Chinese spectator's consumption of a filmed elsewhere – especially the elsewhere inhabited by émigré Chinese.This is a book about recent migration from the PRC and Chinese perceptions of emigration. Leaving China does not attempt to address the history of the older diaspora of the 19th and 20th centuries, for instance, the now forgotten communities whose story is told in the Chinese-Australian writer Brian Castro's book Birds of Passage (Allen & Unwin, 1983). In the parts of the book that focus on lived migratory experience, Sun is concerned more with people like herself, her generation, and her class.

This article examines press coverage of track and field athlete Carl Lewis amid reports in April 2003 that he tested positive for three banned stimulants prior to United States Olympic Trials in 1988. Lewis, of course, won the 1988 100-meter gold medal after Canadian Ben Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids, a development that brought disgrace to Johnson and adulation to Lewis, the 'purer' athlete. Because Lewis repeatedly, and perhaps arrogantly, declared himself drug-free throughout his career, berating competitors from other nations, the author expected to observe differences in how newspapers published in the United States and newspapers published internationally covered the story. Contributing to this expectation was the time at which the story broke, when the Bush administration, dismissing the concerns of other nations, launched a military assault on Iraq. Content analysis found support for expected differences in that international journalists were highly critical of Lewis and the US Olympic Committee, portraying both as sanctimonious, arrogant, and hypocritical, not unlike broader portrayals of the Bush administration amid perceived US aggression in the Middle East.

The scope and purpose of this article is to examine the effectiveness of the discipline of Africology as a holistic academic discipline. Often referred to as Africana studies, African American studies, Afro-American studies, Black studies, and Africology, this exercise of nomenclature can be defined as the study of Africana phenomena from an Afrocentric perspective. While reviewing literature and the current debates in higher education, the author theorized, queried, and critically examined the organizational structure concerning the validity and substantial merit of tenure and promotion, graduation and retention of students, and the advancement of this interdisciplinary matrix of knowledge as an academic agency. Indeed, many detractors have attempted to label and subjugate this academic enterprise in comparison to traditional disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. On the other hand, the emphasis of a hegemonic perspective acknowledges the imposition of external and conflicted cultural perspectives that enable the composition of the creation of a subordinate group status. This article tills the idea of an Afrocentric perspective as an optional viewpoint to describe and evaluate the historical and cultural experiences of Africana phenomena within the interdisciplinary matrix of Africology.

AbstractBased on a case study of two watershed development projects in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh in India, this article argues that participatory development projects are legitimized by using formalistic compliance criteria, while removing politics as a context. It shows how key aspects of the liberal political framework have not been fully harmonized with communitarian theories; the result is an interpretation of participation as a set of practices that are far removed from politics. As a development practice, participation can turn into the itemizing of participatory objectives, which are then to be fulfilled in the same way as physical and financial targets. The practitioners see their role as merely 'technocratic' and the projects they implement as 'apolitical'. The author argues that, central to these claims, is a limited definition of 'politics' as a one dimensional domain comprising contest and irreconcilable conflict, from which the participatory projects, based on so‐called consensus, publicly expressed, are to be shielded. The article concludes that participatory projects accommodate and reflect existing relations of domination and control much more than their outward orientation would suggest.

This is an important work from a scholar who has already made wide-ranging contributions to our understanding of modern Chinese literature. With Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China, Bonnie S. McDougall now adds a valuable study of its most prominent figure, Lu Xun (1881–1936), contributing in particular to the fast-growing scholarship on the private life of this modern icon. Her study focuses on his relationship with Xu Guangping (1898–1968), the student who became his partner, mother of his son, and for three decades after his death, editor and memoirist.Two wider aims, named in the title, are to examine love letters as a literary genre and privacy as a social variable. Such research performs the task of bringing Chinese data to issues of general concern. The matter is not just a territorial one. As the author says of investigating privacy in modern China, "privacy is a human rights issue: deny a sense of privacy . . . , or claim that it is substantially different, and we deny the people of that culture basic rights of association and communication" (p. 209).

In three recent books by young Jewish American writers, Nathan Englander's For the Release of Unbearable Urges (1999), Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002), and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), each author uses fantasy to represent the Holocaust or to thematize the problem of its representation. In these writers' hands, fantasy can point to the difficulty of directly accessing historical experience, it can be a medium for representing Jewish folk culture before the Holocaust, and it can even provide pleasure and escape through its diversions. In Englander's story "The Tumblers," the famous Fools of Chelm are transplanted into a Nazi environment and miraculously survive. In Everything Is Illuminated, Foer uses magical realist devices to give shape to his imaginary shtetl, Trachimbrod. Chabon's Kavalier & Clay is exceptional in presenting fantasy as a means of therapeutic escape from history. Chabon most directly confronts the problem of representation through non-realist techniques, and strikingly, he sets up a defense of popular escapism as a quintessentially American artistic response to the Holocaust.

In the article questions of a social and economic situation in Latvia on the background of the countries-participants of the European Union are considered (Latvia became a member of the European Union on May, 1, 2004). The author pays attention to the main parameter, describing a condition of a national economy - to inflation and changes of value rates in comparison of these parameters with other countries of Baltic Region (Lithuania and Estonia). In this article the main reasons of inflation process also are revealed.One of the most important nowadays question for all countries-members of European Union is global cross-rates. It is known that costs growth; development of manufacture; savings in the bank and so on are depend on global cross-rates.It is a pity, but for nowadays Latvia according most of economical factors takes the lowest position among all 25 countries-members of European Union.The situation with an internal total product, wages, foreign trade, foreign investments, prospects of use of structural European funds and achievements of European Union advanced countries level is analyzed.

Статья посвящена анализу существующей практики экономической и политической интеграции на постсоветском пространстве СНГ. Основное внимание уделено трем сферам: развитию концепции Содружества, объективным условиям ее реализации и промежуточным итогам функционирования СНГ как интеграции с точки зрения теории экономической интеграции. Рассмотрены факторы, способствующие интеграции и замедляющие ее развитие, а также основные показатели социально-экономического развития стран СНГ в сравнении с другими интеграционными группировками. ; The main idea of the article is concerned with the analysis of practice of economic and political integration on post-soviet territory of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Three problems development of the conception of the Commonwealth, its realization and intermediate results of the CIS activity in the sphere of integration. Fundamental acts that regulate the CIS existence are highlighted by the author as well as specialties that arise in the process of realization of these acts from the position of the theory of economical integration. The factors that are assist the integration and that slowdown the process, and the main indicators of social-economic development of the CIS's members in comparison with such indexes of other integration groups are systemized in the article.

Between 1933 and 1945 the right to asylum did not exist. The decisive factor for a successful escape from the National Socialism was finding a country offering refuge. Although Canada had a long history of immigration from German-speaking regions to look back on, it generally kept its doors closed to these refugees. This thesis focuses on the German-speaking refugees who did find refuge in Canada; some Jews, about 1000 Social Democrats from the Sudetenland and those refugees deported from Britain in 1940. Annette Puckhaber addresses the question of the circumstances under which they came and settled in Canada. Three biographical accounts illustrate the experience of the flight from a subjective viewpoint. As a contrast, the author discusses the reasons for the Canadian immigration policies which led to the admittance of the refugees: They extend from economical considerations to protection of its international reputation. In summary, for the refugees, acceptance into the country was a matter of survival. The government in Ottawa however considered immigration to Canada - regardless of its circumstances - as a privilege in itself: a privilege extended to the few.

This paper looks into the concession granted for the new commercial TV station that began broadcasting in May of 2004 on the former 3rd HTV channel. The author was a member of the tender-collecting body. She poses several related questions. In the first part of the paper, she examines the final decision concerning the concession grant in the light of the dubious quality of the so-called media laws in Croatia. In the second part she analyzes the role of the public media in relation to the rampant commercialization of programming. In the third part she looks into the new ownership relations on the media markets & the relentless ownership concentration. By granting this concession, Croatia became the 24th country in which the RTL, a branch of the media giant Bertelsmann AG, is broadcasting. The global trend of the emergence of the media empires has spread even to those markets that have only recently & after much struggle got rid of their former owner: the state. Where does this rise of the new centers of power lead to & what are their goals? 1 Table, 10 References. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract The best predictor of adolescent experimentation with cigarettes is the perception by youth that cigarettes are easily available. Not only does youth smoking have life-long and life-ending health implications, but it is also a leading indicator of other high-risk behaviors among youth. As a result, local communities have a vested interest in the availability and placement of tobacco products, particularly with respect to youth access and exposure to these products. One option to reduce youth access to tobacco may be to use local land use regulations, such as zoning laws, to control the location and operation of tobacco retailers. This law synopsis describes local authority for land use regulation, lists types of local land use regulation, presents examples in which California communities have employed land use regulation to control the placement of tobacco-only stores, and briefly reviews two important issues local governments should consider in this area of the law. Finally, the author highlights the manner in which land use regulation has been successfully applied to other areas of public health.

The author outlines the chief features of the constructivist moral conception in its Kantian variant & argues that such a moral conception had been unjustifiably looked over in relation to the traditional moral conceptions such as utilitariarism, intuitionism & perfectionism. The central idea of Kantian constructivism is linking certain notions of the person & principles of justice that should regulate basic social institutions by means of the constructivist procedure. The author's starting point is the conception of moral persons as free & equal. He claims that an appropriate connection among thus perceived persons & the first principles of justice is established in such a way that the first principles are chosen under reasonable conditions in which individuals possess solely such qualities. The reasonable conditions consist of the symmetrical situatedness of the "choosers," the veil of ignorance (which obscures the morally irrelevant features of persons' attributes) & the publicity condition. The author's goal is to reach a proper viewpoint on the basis of which citizens are to judge their fundamental social institutions & in that way achieve consensus on the need for & the direction of their reform. Adapted from the source document.

The author identifies the strategic-political challenge of effective sovereignty and security, with a focus on nontraditional threats. He recommends that leaders rethink the problem of nontraditional threats and develop the conceptual and strategic-political multilateral responses necessary to deal effectively with them. Piecemeal tactical-operational level responses to nontraditional threats and actors must be supplemented by broader political-strategic efforts. Additionally, cooperative national and international efforts designed to inhibit and reverse the processes of state failure must supplement military and law-enforcement emphasis on the attrition of individual "narco-terrorists." The author's recommendations constitute no easy task. However, if the United States and the other countries of the Western Hemisphere ignore what is happening in Latin America, the expansion of terrorism, "lawless areas," and general instability easily could destroy the democracy, free market economies, and prosperity that has been achieved in recent years. In turn, that would profoundly affect the health of the U.S. economy--and the concomitant power to act in the global security arena. ; https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1771/thumbnail.jpg