This submission for a PhD by published work looks at employment relations in the Civil Service and the National Health Service( NHS) over the last decade and in particular at management/union relations, pay determination and equal opportunities. The focus of research over this period was the extent to which private sector norms are advocated by the State impacted on public sector practices: a) in the Civil Service compared to the NHS b) in employing bodies within the Civil Service(ie executive agencies and employing bodies within the NHS (ie NHS trusts). The submission is in three parts. First, the distinctions between the private and public sectors are discussed along with the change agenda pursued by successive governments since 1979 to make the public sector more like the private sector. Second, four key debates are rehearsed: whether the state as employer is no longer a 'model' employer, whether there has been trade union renewal; whether the public sector ethos has been undermined; and whether the accession of the Labour government in 1997 was a watershed in respect of public sector employment relations. Third, the author's contributions to these debates are demonstrated.

This dissertation develops a method for the analysis of political discourse from the work of Foucault which it uses to construct the Labour Party in the 1930s, in a specific relation to the issues of antisemitism and Indian independence. These issues are chosen because they are some of the issues in which a conception of race is posed in the implicit and explicit discourse. The central thrust of the investigation is to establish the ways in which the notion of political community is constructed in these particular discourses, and then assess the extent to which this informs constructions of race. It has been possible to develop a method for 'reading' political statements which asks how a particular position was arrived at, its conditions of formation. Two of the key mechanisms in this are constraint and structuring mechanism. This is a way of designating the factors which limit the range of political possibilities in the issue of statements. Through this method of reading it has been possible to construct the Labour Party as a discoursing institution from the variety of positions offered to it as definitions of particular issues. It. has been possible to determine which positions it chose to sanction as official and which it chose to reject. A close examination of official and unofficial statements facilitates a number of comments on the ideological nature of the positions which the Labour Party chose to sanction and those which were unacceptable to it. The Labour Party's definitions of Indian independence reveal its conceptions of commonwealth. As a key institution in defining the British commonwealth it awarded India second class status as a political community, through an independence constitution which did not enfranchise the majority of its population. On the issue of anti semitism the Labour Party revealed itself to be unable to countenance a multi racial political community by posing Fascism and anti semitism as separate issues, the former to be challenged by the Labour movement, the latter to be eased by Zionism. The conclusions consider the extent to which constructions of race have changed and then what might be the contemporary relevance of these historical debates in the study of race.

This research is about administrative and political decentralisation processes, especially the efforts made by the Chilean state towards regional decentralisation. Thus the analysis is focused on two reforms: the creation of the Division of Planning and Development within the regional government and the direct election of regional councillors, which aims to reorganise the regional governments. Qualitative research and instrumental case study approach were used in order to develop this research. The research addresses three main topics: the understanding of decentralisation that key actors have, so that the agency according to that understanding; the scopes of the two reforms so far; and the relationship between the central state and the regions. Thus, the main findings are that Chilean decentralisation has been implemented with excessive caution and gradualism and that informal relations between key actors are essential in the creation of collaborative spaces. The research also discusses whether decentralisation is a process or a sequence of isolated events in Chile. Finally, the tension between administrative and political decentralisation is analysed in order to have a better understanding of both processes.

The central argument of the thesis is that accountability is an illusion. We take accountability to mean being liable for actions and answerable to some body, but then we encounter the opacity of ‘liable in what particular respect?’ and ‘answerable to whom?’ Accountability is muddled with other concepts which we take to be implicit in its meaning. We appeal to ‘transparency’, but transparency is never absolute, and how would we know if it were? To make all processes and all information transparent to everyone who needs to know, wants to know, or claims to have an interest, would be a stifling endeavour. I will show that ‘accountability’ is a term much used but rarely understood, and that this can have tragic consequences not only for individuals but for society as a whole. Using Plato’s allegory of the cave as a structure for the thesis, I will develop the argument by following the prisoner’s journey through changing contexts, towards self-awareness and the understanding that our knowledge is always open to revision. Within accountability and audit culture, I will explore the entangled notions of transparency, truth, trust, freedom of information, justice and democracy, considering how our interpretation of concepts is context-dependent and how this affects communication, our understanding of our experience, ourselves and our world. The thesis is essentially phenomenological in style and approach. Integral to my inquiry is an examination of how our experience influences our understanding. Over time and in the process of everyday living, we accumulate experience and we interpret this experience. Our conclusions change, are constantly open to revision and are dependent on both our individual perspective and the wider context; our perspective and context are themselves subject to change with the passage of time. Awareness of this variability is fundamental to effective human communication because it allows us to move across different domains, maintaining some level of mutual understanding even as it is transformed by context. Yet, not withstanding this awareness, there is also the potential for intentional and non-intentional misuse of terms, resulting in misunderstandings and a failure of intelligibility and communication. If concealed and exploited rather than acknowledged and disclosed, this failure can alter the course of events irrevocably, and with disastrous consequences. This breakdown results in an erosion of trust on all scales, international, national, corporate, and individual, and once lost, this trust is hard to re-establish. Paradoxically, even when we discover the fragility of trust, we are drawn to trust again, sometimes with little choice, but the consequences of a continuing implicit trust can be serious, and I will elaborate on this idea with reference to several high profile examples. Finally, I will argue that we often seek security in our illusions, like Plato’s prisoner we can be dazzled by them and pained when they are dispelled, yet even when we are disabused of our illusions, we are never entirely free of them. We can never escape the Cave for we must trust in the potential for accountability of those responsible to us. I suggest then that we must move away from the rituals of accountability and towards an honest accountability where our common project is to seek truth, however painful that might be.

No description available.

This research looks into forms of state crime taking place around the U.S.-Mexico border. On the Mexican side of the border violent corruption and criminal activities stemming from state actors complicity with drug trafficking organisations has produced widespread violence and human casualty while forcing many to cross the border legally or illegally in fear for their lives. Upon their arrival on the U.S. side of the border, these individuals are treated as criminal suspects. They are held in immigration detention facilities, interrogated and categorised as inadmissible ‘economic migrants’ or ‘drug offenders’ only to be denied asylum status and deported to dangerous and violent zones in Mexico. These individuals have been persecuted and victimised by the state during the 2007-2012 counter narcotic operations on one side of the border while criminalised and punished by a categorizing anti-immigration regime on the other side of the border. This thesis examines this border crisis as injurious actions against border residents have been executed by the states under legal and illegal formats in violation of criminal law and human rights conventions. The ethnographic research uses data to develop a nuanced understanding of individuals’ experiences of state victimisation on both sides of the border. In contributing to state crime scholarship it presents a multidimensional theoretical lens by using organised crime theoretical models and critical criminology concepts to explain the role of the state in producing multiple insecurities that exclude citizens and non-citizens through criminalisation processes.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The subject of this dissertation is presidential term limits in Latin America (1990 - 2010). In contemporary presidential democracies there is a wide variation in how many times a president can run for reelection. In some countries presidents can be reelected for an unlimited number of terms; others allow presidents to be reelected for up to two consecutive terms; others establish that presidents must wait at least one or two terms before competing again for the presidential post; and others establish that presidents can be in office only for one term -- i.e. reelection is prohibited. The three papers comprising this dissertation seek to explore the relationship between these different presidential term limits provisions and political and economic outcomes in Latin America.