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Deconstruction has sometimes been championed as if it was a kind of poetic (as opposed to say analytic) writing. The identification has encouraged some to relegate deconstruction to the shadows or sidelines, the sideshows, of serious philosophy. Both tendencies are foolish. There nonetheless remains the question of the relation between two enigmatic discourses: poetry and deconstruction; some deep complicity is surely implied. Reading in the texts of philosophy and poetry the adventure and performance of the names themselves, philosophy, poetry and deconstruction, it is possible to outline the consistency of a logic, according to which: as poetry must have its thing, so too must deconstruction; and philosophy would be deconstruction's poetic thing. The common ground (of poetry and deconstruction) would be the photograph (in ancient and modern senses) recording the loss of what disappears into its appearance. After deconstruction philosophy can therefore only be accomplished otherwise, not as poetry, but as a poetic thing.

AbstractThe author improves on the measurement of U.S. state public opinion by (1) applying previous methods used only on cross-sectional data to create dynamic measures of state public opinion and (2) providing a systematic comparison of the performance of the various methodological approaches on these dynamic measures. The author shows that scholars can use multilevel regression, imputation, and poststratification (MRP) coupled with a simple moving average to measure state public opinion over time. Compared to aggregation, the MRP approach has less error and is more reliable, particularly for the less populated states. The author shows the applicability of the MRP approach by measuring and validating state partisanship and state ideology over time. The validated measures are available for public use. Armed with a method to measure state public opinion over time, scholars can begin to more fully understand the dynamic relationship between public opinion and policy in the U.S. states.

RésuméLe formidable développement urbain du Japon au XVIIe siècle provoqua la prolifération de populations de mendiants que les autorités guerrières des cités cherchèrent à contrôler. Dans le cas d'Ôsaka, certains groupes discriminés et relégués dans des ghettos, les hinin, avaient fait de la mendicité leur principale activité professionnelle. Mais il existait d'autres types de quêteurs qui prenaient un prétexte religieux pour recueillir les aumônes, parfois en se livrant à diverses performances. Ces individus réduits à la mendicité, mais qui n'étaient pas à l'origine issus de groupes discriminés, étaient en concurrence les uns avec les autres pour capter la charité des citadins. Aussi, bien qu'écartés en apparence de toute forme de propriété, ces individus cherchaient parfois à se regrouper et à former des associations sous le patronage d'une institution religieuse reconnue, afin de défendre leurs intérêts et de les faire reconnaître par les autorités de la ville, soucieuses de leur côté de mieux encadrer ces populations suspectes.

China has been held up as a modern-day exemplar of 'market-preserving federalism.' This article challenges this popular belief by showing that its local governments face soft budget constraints. Fiscal indiscipline among subnational governments, which risks national indebtedness and macroeconomic instability, can pose serious dangers to federations. A large body of literature which proposes solutions to fiscal indiscipline through electoral incentives and political party structure cannot be applied to China. The Chinese Communist Party's cadre-evaluation and dual accountability systems make it an imperative for local officials to augment fiscal revenue and allow them to tap resources at local credit institutions. This has resulted in mounting local government debt, the lion's share of which is unrepaid loans owed to local credit institutions. To harden budget constraints, political institutions need to be reconfigured to allow the central government more effectively to hold local authorities accountable for resources deployed in achieving their job-performance targets.

The purpose of the article is to analyse the economic growth of Sub-Saharan African countriesin the last decades, with special focus on the period 2000-2009. Economic development in Africa has been mostly positive in recent years with growth pace binge moderate and steady. However, significant differences exist between specific countries, stemming from abundance of mineral resources, location, size of the population or policy of central government. Countries which managed to introduce deep structural reforms, improve the investment climate, diversify output and exports as well as actively searched for new trading partners outperformed. Countries economy which is purely based on exports of crude oil reported also good economic performance,. However influx of investments there as well as general economic development is constrained by risk of the fiscal destabilization, which sudden plunge in commodity prices could originate. In our research we focused on the following growth indicators: GDP, savings rate, FDI, foreign trade and external aid.

Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this article explores young teen girls' negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis complicates contemporary debates around the 'sexualization' moral panic by troubling developmental and classed accounts of age-appropriate (hetero)sexuality. We explore how girls are regulated by, yet rework and resist expectations to perform as agentic sexual subjects across a range of spaces (e.g. streets, schools, homes, cyberspace). To conceptualize the blurring of generational and sexual binaries present in our data, we develop Deleuzian notions of 'becomings', 'assemblages' and 'schizoid subjectivities'. These concepts help us to map the anti-linear transitions and contradictory performances of young femininity as always in-movement; where girls negotiate discourses of sexual knowingness and innocence, often simultaneously, yet always within a wider context of socio-cultural gendered/classed regulations.

Democracy and press freedom have a long, intertwined history. This article builds on previous research examining democratic consolidation by developing a theoretical model to explicate the multilevel relationships between the openness of national media systems and citizens' perceptions about press freedom in emerging democracies. We combine individual-level public opinion data from the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Survey with institutional data from Freedom House to examine institutional and individual predictors of perceived supply and citizen demand for press freedom. The results of the analyses demonstrate a relationship between characteristics of national media systems and citizen perceptions and preferences about press freedom, although individual factors such as educational attainment, reliance on print media, evaluations of media and state performance, and regime support play a more meaningful role in shaping perceptions about press freedom. Theoretical implications for understanding citizen attitudes about press freedom and their relationship with democratization are discussed.

Abstract This paper examines the ability of various financial and macroeconomic variables to forecast Canadian recessions. It evaluates four model specifications, including the advanced dynamic, autoregressive, dynamic autoregressive probit models as well as the conventional static probit model. The empirical results highlight several significant recession predictors, notably the government bond yield spread, growth rates of the housing starts, the real money supply and the composite index of leading indicators. Both the in‐sample and out‐of‐sample results suggest that the forecasting performance of the four probit models is mixed. The dynamic and dynamic autoregressive probit models are better in predicting the duration of recessions while the static and autoregressive probit models are better in forecasting the peaks of business cycles. Hence, the advanced dynamic models and the conventional static probit model can complement one another to provide more accurate forecasts for the duration and turning points of business cycles.

Studies evaluating the effects of territorial state organization on the performance of democratic political systems produce ambiguous results. The authors argue that research so far has suffered from insufficiently conceptualizing federalism and decentralization as two distinct dimensions. This article makes use of the advantages of a nested design and detects micro-level causal mechanisms underlying statistically confirmed effects. The authors conduct in-depth case studies comparing policy processes in four countries (Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, and Denmark) in the area of regional development policy, an area that exhibits typical effects in a macro-quantitative analysis, to back their hypothesized and corroborated macro-level relationships by micro level causal evidence. The case studies show that federalism induces subnational actors to adopt divergent positions and push through individual interests in processes of decision making, thus increasing transaction costs and preventing substantial policy shifts. Decentralization and subnational discretion induces actors to vary service delivery in an efficiency-enhancing way.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate and quantify the impact of delivery restrictions on costs and environmental performance for a distribution operation.Design/methodology/approachData were gathered from a company and several scenarios with varying delivery restrictions were investigated.FindingsThe results show significant reductions in cost and environmental impacts are achieved when restrictions are relaxed. However, the research also highlighted the importance of adopting a supply chain (SC) approach to the removal of restrictions and the need for public/private sector cooperation.Research limitations/implicationsThe case study is based on one company only. However, the company performs many trips each day to many different customers.Practical implicationsThe paper provides insight into the scope for change in the SC decision‐making processes in order to reduce environmental impacts (and identifies limitations).Originality/valueThe paper is a contribution to better understanding the importance of logistics decisions and not only transport when considering urban freight problems.

Research-based approaches to HIV risk reduction are available but not readily adopted by community-based treatment programs. This exploratory survey study assessed staff (N=116) attitudes as a function of direct research participation, treatment program type, and study performance within seven methadone maintenance and eight psychosocial outpatient substance abuse treatment programs that participated in the NIDA Clinical Trials Network HIV risk reduction trials. Clinical staff who directly participated in the research reported intervention components as useful and were more likely to report perceived increases in HIV testing/referrals compared to staff who did not directly participate. However, those directly involved reported less positive attitudes about clinical impact and research impression. Results suggest a positive influence of research participation on awareness of program services, but also the need to address practical and professional issues related to research collaboration. Effectiveness trials offer a valuable opportunity to assess provider-level factors associated with adoption and implementation.

Nonprofit organizations are increasingly advised to become fiscally self-sufficient and reduce resource dependence to preserve autonomy. However, little is known empirically about the relationships between particular resource streams and the roles espoused by nonprofit organizations that define their public value, including service delivery, innovation, advocacy, individual expression, social capital creation, and citizen engagement. To address this gap in the literature, we collect and analyze survey data from more than 100 nonprofit organizations, developing and testing a new "Nonprofit Sector Public Role Index" that assesses their perceived performance on six different roles simultaneously. Furthermore, we evaluate characteristics that make nonprofits more or less likely to fulfill various roles, with primary emphasis on financial resources. We find evidence that particular resource streams are strongly associated with particular nonprofit roles. Therefore, resource dependence—particularly dependence on public support—may play an important value preservation role in the nonprofit sector.

This paper investigates the currency regime choices of six Southeast Asian (SEA) countries, namely Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, for the period 1973-99 from the perspectives of optimum currency area (OCA), macroeconomic stabilization and currency crisis. Regime transition dynamics are insignificant among three broad categories of regimes, such as fixed, intermediate and floating regimes but significant among a variety of intermediate regimes. Economic development, financial liberalization and inflation are found to be significant to the pegged regime choice, while high degree of trade openness, capital mobility, real exchange rate volatility and fiscal performance are significant to the choice of a more flexible regime. However, the policy of financial (capital account) liberalization under a pegged (intermediate) regime was paradoxical in nature and has been proved to be inappropriate in the aftermath of crisis. Except this, the static regime choice in SEA countries is largely consistent with the predictions of international macroeconomics.

The balance between work and family plays a pivotal but evolving role in human resource policy. Ensuring that human resource policy responds to rapidly changing American family demographics, particularly the recent sharp increase in single unmarried Americans, is a major challenge. Compensation policy long has focused on family‐oriented values by promising increased capacity to provide for a family in exchange for higher work performance. Now, employees are voicing concerns about matters such as quality time with family, and, in turn, employers are responding by implementing more benefits to achieve a better work–family balance. Strong counterarguments against human resource goals targeted only at families advocate personal policies that emphasize work–life balance for all employees. How well has personal policy kept pace with the shifting compensation preferences of public employees? Results suggest that implementation policies are keeping pace with employee satisfaction. However, levels of employee satisfaction often differ widely by demographic characteristics.

People with mental illness constitute a substantial proportion of smokers and an important population for smoking cessation research. Obtaining informed consent in this population is a critical ethical endeavor. We examined performance on a three-item instrument (3Q) designed to screen for understanding of several key elements of research: Study purpose, risks, and benefits. Patients were clinically diagnosed with primary unipolar depression (n = 40), a primary psychotic disorder (n = 32), both mood and psychotic disorders (n = 17), and primary bipolar disorder (n = 14). Among an ethnically diverse sample of 124 psychiatric inpatients approached for a smoking cessation trial, 107 (86%) performed adequately on the 3Q (i.e., obtained a score of at least 3 out of a possible 6). Patients were better able to identify the study risks and benefits than to describe the study purpose. The 3Q appears to be a useful tool for researchers working with vulnerable psychiatric patients.