AbstractAs first responders to incidents, public safety officials must quickly converge on meaning of what occurred, the threat to the university and what information is pertinent to the campus community. Utilizing in‐depth interviews with current campus public safety officials in the Washington, D.C. metro area, this study explored how emergency communicators interpret the concept of timely in campus emergency notification decision‐making and what factors impact their ability to enact this interpretation. Findings from this suggested that the temporal ambiguity of the law creates differing expectations of timely, with prealert processes impacting how quickly notifications can be sent. Further findings indicate that universities with the more sophisticated emergency management roles also had the more robust emergency notification functions.
Party politics in Ireland has been characterised as politics without a social base. This paper calculates political concentration indices for party support in Ireland showing how support for a particular party is concentrated according to identifiable dimensions such as income, education and age. Using data from the European Social Survey, these indices are calculated with respect to elections in 2002, 2007 and 2011. There is evidence of a clear social base emerging after the 2011 election with support for the Fine Gael party concentrated amongst the richer and more educated, while support for Sinn Fein is concentrated amongst lower income and less educated. Preliminary data from the 2016 election is consistent with these developments.
Emergency notification systems have become an essential part of campus security since the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting in the United States. This study explored how a public‐centred perspective can inform campus‐alerting practices. In particular, this study provided depth to two independent variables of the situational theory of publics: constraint recognition and level of involvement. Additionally, this study proposed the development of a subcategorisation of hot‐issue publics called transient publics.
While there has been considerable economic reform in the past few decades, social reform in Australia has remained relatively stagnant. Discussion about policy direction focuses almost entirely around how much funding parties are willing to promise with success is judged in dollars spent, not problems solved. This discourse carries with it the assumption that the national government is the primary institution responsible for addressing social issues that face our communities. Rather than asking who should take responsibility for solving a problem, it is often assumed that the answer is the state, and instead focuses on how the problem should be addressed. Rarely are other institutions discussed, and society is viewed in terms of the individual and the state, and the desired relationship, or balance, between them. This research paper reconsiders the role of Edmund Burke's little platoons of civil society as a primary conceptual, and practical lens to analyse and resolve social problems. From the first conception of the modern nation state of revolutionary France, to the contemporary Australian welfare state, the theme explored throughout the paper is the 'vicious cycle of cause and effect' of democracy's tendency for a seemingly inexorable focus upon both a centralised state and consolidated individuals, at the expense of the natural intermediate associations that dwell between and the valuable social bonds, functions and authorities that reside within them. The first part of the paper traces a coherent intellectual tradition of philosophical and sociological thought over the past two decades to expound this theme, laying a robust theoretical framework of 'social pluralism' that is seen embodied in social policy reforms of state and civil society currently underway in Britain. The second part of the paper analyses this agenda, the 'Big Society', in light of this framework, and assesses the relevance and transferability to the Australian context. It concludes that the social problems plaguing 'Broken Britain' are also relevant to Australia, both exhibiting evidence of the 'vicious cycle'. Due to political, economic, and social factors however, it is unlikely that Australia will be following with such a reform agenda in the near future. This notwithstanding, findings supporting the value of seeking institutional balance of function and authority point to the limitation of the state and promotion of the intermediate associations of civil society as a broad policy recommendation
SummaryThere is now fairly substantial evidence of a socioeconomic gradient in low birth weight for developed countries. The standard summary statistic for this gradient is the concentration index. Using data from the recently published Growing Up in Ireland survey, this paper calculates this index for low birth weight arising from preterm and intrauterine growth retardation. It also carries out a decomposition of this index for the different sources of low birth weight and finds that income inequality appears to be less important for the case of preterm births, while father's education and local environmental conditions appear to be more relevant for intrauterine growth retardation. The application of the standard Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition also indicates that the socioeconomic gradient for low birth weight appears to arise owing to different characteristics between rich and poor, and not because the impact of any given characteristic on low birth weight differs between rich and poor.
