Suchergebnisse

This article investigates how local political context—including civil society and political parties—influences the development of migrant care worker policies in Taiwan. This is particularly important in a national context where the government has actively utilized migrant care worker policies to solve the crisis in the social welfare sector. This article draws upon documentary analysis of policy debates on the proposed implementation of Long-Term Care Insurance and in-depth interviews with government officials, public service providers and non-governmental organizations to explore how the political alliances of political parties, social organizations, and interest groups affect policy outcomes. While current research focuses on the relationship between social welfare policies and the employment of migrant care workers, this article highlights the local political context and explores how political alliances have influenced the development of migrant care worker policies. This article argues that institutional path dependency and the strong policy alliance between the progressive party and social welfare organizations have stymied changes in migrant care worker policies and prevented Taiwan from further socializing the eldercare sector.

This article provides a critical assessment of the development of Taiwan's ethical framework for regulating medical and biopharmaceutical innovations. Advancing science, technology and society scholarship that treats ethics as subject to modification, adjustment and negotiation rather than as an abstract set of principles, this article examines the dominant role of East Asian states in the development of the life sciences. It also looks at the logic these states utilise to legitimise their therapeutic standards and to support the biopharmaceutical infrastructure in order to increase their economic competitiveness. In particular, this article traces the establishment of legal regulations in different social settings where innovations in clinical practice and medicine are introduced. It argues that, instead of a comprehensive, coherent ethical framework based on the adoption of international conventions, Taiwan's 2011 Human Subjects Research Act is a techno-political assemblage, an inconsistent legal product involving not only policy makers but also physicians, the pharmaceutical industry and the state. This article also takes a critical stance towards institutional review boards (IRBs), which resolve jurisprudential conflicts within this legal framework of human research. It argues that, rather than being passive organisations that protect research from unethical fraud, IRBs in Taiwan have been institutions in which negotiations among investigators, research sponsors and the government are conducted in the name of health governance.

Abstract
The contribution of Viennese Jews to the cultural milieu of the Austrian capital at the fin de siècle is undisputed. Jewish women and men contributed to the social artistic, economic and philosophical centrality of Viennese culture. But what did Jewish urban, middle-class men wear and in what ways was it significant. This article examines the sartorial habits of two Viennese cultural and literary icons, Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) and Peter Altenberg (1859–1919), and considers how men's fashions in Vienna during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both facilitated and negated the assimilatory aspirations of the city's middle-class Jewish population. A comparison of visual and literary accounts of Jewish acculturation and assimilation will offer a further understanding of the manifestation of visual 'Jewishness' and the heterogeneous Jewish identities present in Vienna during the period.

In October of 2009 the United Nations (UN) General Assembly accepted the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) application for Permanent Observer status. This is an honour usually reserved for non-Member States and intergovernmental organisations; very rarely do non-governmental organisations (NGOs) obtain this position. The position enables the IOC to directly influence General Assembly policy decisions. This paper examines how the IOC was able to obtain such a unique status when other NGOs have had their applications rejected, and asks: what does this appointment mean for the involvement of broader civil society at the UN? The paper argues that there are various factors at play that have influenced the relationship between a global sports organisation and an international development organisation, including the neoliberalisation of development, the global power of sport, and processes of legitimation for both the IOC and the UN.