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The last decade has witnessed a tendency for the right to use violence to be handed into private hands. A huge private military industry is emerging which, as well as having serious effects on our daily life, exerts an destructive influence on the state and established institutions, and on the way the law is commonly understood. The main reason for this development, which will have certain political, military and legal effects on the structure of all countries whether developed or under-developed, has been the presentation of new opportunities for colonialism. In this article, the main focus will be on private military companies, which play a crucial role in the violent policies of colonialism, as well as in recent wars. What are the advantages to colonialist powers of using these companies, whether external to or 'attached' to national armies; and why are they needed now more than they were previously?

Within the context of social, demographic, and historical change and informed by a life course perspective, this article examines patterns of relating between grandparents and grandchildren within families across and within generations. Using qualitative data from a study of 10 multigenerational families ( N = 86), the analysis assesses continuity and change in grandparent—grandchild ties across three generations of adults. Although findings reveal change in social and family circumstances over time, half the families experienced considerable continuity in grandparent—grandchild ties and whether close or distant, were characterized by distinct grand cultures. In the remaining families, different configurations of individual, family-related, and social factors led to intra- and intergenerational variations. Divorce and remarriage influenced grandparent—grandchild relationships in most families, yielding highly variable outcomes. Ultimately, the study families' experiences demonstrate how social, historical, familial, and individual circumstances merge to influence grandparent—grandchild ties, producing behaviors ranging from loving and supportive to indifferent and abusive.

Background  The disability policy in Taiwan has traditionally emphasized residential care in large institutions and, more recently, medium‐sized group homes. This paper compares the relative costs, services provided and outcomes between the traditional institutions, medium‐sized group homes and new small‐scale community living units that were launched in 2004 in Taiwan.Materials and Methods  Cross‐sectional analysis was used to investigate the three current residential service models. A total of 248 participants with intellectual disabilities were interviewed, including all residents from the existing 25 small residential units and purposively sampled respondents from the other two residential models.Results  Outcomes for the Taiwanese participants were consistent with the existing literature on deinstitutionalization from Western societies. Small homes provided better subjective and objective quality of life than both medium‐sized community‐based units and traditional institutions.Conclusion  Participants living in small residential homes experienced better outcomes at lower cost than persons living in medium‐sized group homes or institutions.

This article examines the interrelationships among employee trust in the chief executive of the organization, trust in the organization and work satisfaction. These three concepts capture the essential experience of the employee's work life, but their interrelationships have been more often a subject for speculation than for research. Employees in one government organization and one manufacturing firm offered their visions of critical features in managerial trust and organizational trust. With respect to defining chief executive trust, employees emphasized the manager's employee orientation, honesty, ability, fairness and forthrightness. Critical features that employees used to define organizational trust included the social significance of organizational mission, quality of output, and the organization's persistence beyond the human lifespan. Trust in the chief executive and organizational trust were found to be uncorrelated with one another, as expected from the conceptual review. Instead, these variables were conceptually linked through their individual relationships with employee work satisfaction.

The global distributive implications of automatically allocating political membership according to territoriality ( jus soli) and parentage ( jus sanguinis) principles have largely escaped critical scrutiny. This article begins to address this considerable gap. Securing membership status in a given state or region— with its specific level of wealth, degree of stability, and human rights record— is a crucial factor in the determination of life chances. However, birthright entitlements still dominate both our imagination and our laws in the allotment of political membership to a given state. In this article we explore the striking conceptual and legal similarities between intergenerational transfers of citizenship and property. The analogy between inherited citizenship and the intergenerational transfer of property allows us to use existing qualifications found in the realm of inheritance as a model for imposing restrictions on the unlimited and perpetual transmission of membership—with the aim of ameliorating its most glaring opportunity inequalities.

Using data from the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, this study provides timely evidence on the effects of on‐site child care at the workplace and employer‐provided family leave on worker absenteeism, turnover, and productivity. The study found that workplaces with on‐site child care compared with workplaces with no on‐site child care had lower rates of absenteeism and higher ratings for worker productivity. Workplaces that had a family leave policy also had lower rates of absenteeism than workplaces that had no such policy in place. Analyses also suggest that workplace characteristics, such as presence of a human‐resources manager or union representative, are associated with higher worker productivity. Firm size, mission, and shift work were other predictors of worker performance. The findings argue strongly for an extensive, new workplace survey that can elucidate how parents today manage to abide by new workplace agreements while still handling the demands of family life.

In this article, I compare drawings of "Sunday lunch" produced by Fijian village children in 1990 and 2005 and their responses to prepared drawings in 1982, which show remarkable continuity over time. I suggest this continuity is largely attributable to the ritualization of eating practices. At the same time, the children's data indicate that a substantive, if subtle, change is occurring in ideas of the inclusiveness of the household; I suggest that this change may be a function of an intensification of commodity exchange in day‐to‐day village life. As the children's data demonstrate, continuity as well as transformation in ideas over time may be understood as a function of the self‐same ontogenetic process through which we make sense of our relations with others in the lived world. I argue that such ethnographic studies of ontogeny enable us both to appreciate the material validity of our informants' ideas and to render them analytical.

This qualitative study contributes to knowledge about the strategies women use to establish their presence in professional roles in the highly gendered construction sector.The article focuses on construction site culture that is hierarchical and 'laddish' with sexual harassment an entrenched feature of life on site.Women find this threatening but are unable to challenge it, because being part of the 'building team' requires their silence. These negative experiences contrast with the pride expressed in their socially useful work bringing both aesthetic and technical satisfaction. Modernization of the industry that one participant framed as 'dragging it out of the dark ages' was seen as a priority.The two most pressing issues are the long-hours culture and the conflict-ridden nature of the sector. A feminist interpretive lens is used to draw out the continuing problems women face in the industry and concludes that the prospects for change to cultural practices remain bleak.

Studies of teachers' lives, careers, and working environments (within the Canadian context) have until recently excluded the narratives of minority and Black women. This gap in knowledge when interrogated provides an informed angle from which to gage the effectiveness of educational policies and initiatives. The particular policy identified in this article is affirmative action, for women teachers that are focused on their promotion to educational administration. This article is informed by a teacher's reconstruction of her experiences "working against the grain" of a White teaching profession and conservative board of education in Southern Ontario that was reticent to accept employment equity for "racial-minority" women teachers before the advent of 1992 racially inclusive legislation. The time frame of the subject's narrative and her struggle for inclusion occurred between 1970 and 1983. The study draws attention to how a Black professional woman finds she must resist these limitations in her day-to-day professional life.

This paper seeks to aesthetically explore the relationship between passion and knowledge. Some of the challenges associated with aesthetic readings surround the location, evocation and representation of multi-sensory experiences and aesthetic expressions. Place-based research indicates that places are important for both aesthetics and meaning. This symbiotic connection between aesthetics and `senses of place' opens an important gangway through which to embark on a journey to locate, evoke and represent the `aesthetic dimension' of seascapes and shipboard life. Conversations with 34 Norwegian seafarers support the relationship between passion and knowledge anchored in seascapes; provide the researcher with a familiar harbour for an impassioned aesthetic reading. Reflections along the voyage consider the importance of an `integrated aesthetic approach' (Brady, 2003) which includes a double focus: on both the aesthetic experiences of organizational members and on the places wherein these experiences are aroused. This aesthetic reading also attends to the `aesthetics' of aesthetic research.

The promotion of marriage and two-parent families as a strategy to reduce welfare dependency continues to be a major public policy goal of the 1996 welfare reform. Based on the assumption that women will marry employed men and that their earnings will lift poor mothers and their children from public dependency, this objective raises important policy questions. In this article, the authors investigate the extent to which unwed mothers—a large proportion of all welfare mothers—enter into and maintain stable cohabiting and marital relationships with economically attractive men. Using retrospective data on relationship histories for 3,872 women from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, the authors examine the marital life course of unwed mothers and document the social and economic characteristics of their partners at midlife. Their marital search model shows that nonmarital childbearing is adversely associated with the ability to marry economically attractive men and maintain long-term marital unions.

AbstractThe concept of sustainable consumption (SC) has been proposed as a way of operationalising sustainable development (SD). However, until now, in view of the difficulties in conceptualising SC, emphasis has been placed mainly on a pragmatic approach. In ana‐conceptual and pragmatic account of SC, many problems remain unaddressed, such as the danger of the notion becoming empty and lack of integration between the different dimensions of sustainability. In this paper, we propose that the informational space provided by the capability approach (CA) offers a conceptual framework to elaborate SC. The CA is employed here (i) to discuss the philosophical underpinnings of SC as part of a strategy for enhancing quality‐of‐life and (ii) to investigate the links between the different dimensions of SC. Emphasis on autonomy, freedom, and public reasoning in the CA can help in contextualising and providing an organising frame for SC policies. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In critiquing a recent book by Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism, this article addresses fundamental questions about collective memories of Communism and the Soviet bloc: Why and how is "the past" remembered selectively? What happens when forgotten events are brought back to the fore of collective consciousness? What are the actual mechanisms of remembering? Who are the often invisible gatekeepers that direct the paths of our memories? Who are the influential rulers of memory attempting to shape our mnemonic repertoire? Scribner's book indirectly touches on these issues, though not in a fully satisfactory way, especially with regard to working-class life under Communism. Although the book does have some strong points, it too often fails to take account of how people in the region (as opposed to leftist intellectuals in the West who "knew" Communism vicariously) experienced manual labor during the Communist era and how they remember it now.

Risks of life on the street caused by inclement weather, harassment, and assault threaten the unsheltered homeless population. We address some challenges of enumerating the street homeless population by testing a novel capture-recapture (CR) estimation approach that models individuals' intermittent daytime visibility. We tested walking and vehicle-based variants of CR in downtown Toronto in March. Estimates that assume individual variability of sighting probabilities are most consistent with our knowledge of the homeless and achieve the most favorable confidence intervals, estimated detection probabilities, and coefficient of variation. Estimation bias from interobserver discrepancies, duplicate counting, and violation of the closed population assumption were minimized with uniform identification criteria, training, and sampling design. Bias caused by the social grouping of the homeless was small. Despite the limitations of visual identification, CR approaches as part of a multiple-method program can aid community responses to immediate needs on the street, especially during the harsh winter months.

European migrants to Spain's coastal areas could be described as the archetypal elite transmigrant. Embodying Papastergiadis' spectre of placeless capital and the homeless subject, `residential tourists' make creative use of modern communication technologies and increasingly accessible air travel to construct fluid migration trajectories, employing transnational affective and instrumental networks. However, research on British migrants to Spain has revealed a high incidence of social, cultural, economic, and political exclusion. Following a dream of star ting a new life in a new place, some migrants do not wish to transcend the assimilationist model, nor have the resources to depend on transnational ties. Their dream is integration, but the tensions inherent in the mobility—enclosure dialectic — the contradictions between freedom of movement and the reasser tion of the nation state, an ambiguous status in Spanish society, their own ambivalent attitudes — constrain both assimilation and their ability to transcend it and lead to marginalization.