How do international organizations (IO) influence domestic social policy? This paper answers this question using a comparison of IO participation in the social insurance policymaking process in Mexico in the 1940s and 1990s. There are similarities and differences between the periods. During both periods, IOs contributed technical expertise to the policy design process. The principal IO particip...

This paper explores the two-way relationship between sustainability and the accelerating corporatisation of academia. It shows that ‘sustainability’ is capable of being mobilised to serve neo-liberal interests and further drive this corporatisation. However, the paper also argues that within the discourses and practices of sustainability lies a radical critique of the very neo-liberalism which ...

The purpose of this paper is to account for the revival of both academic and substantive interest in what had long been seen as an unimportant byway of social policy: the role of social partners, especially trade unions, in the management of national social insurance systems. The answer is found in the budgetary crises facing these systems along with the frequent embedded role of the social par...

This paper analyzes power relationships and the resulting failure in complying with information security rules. We argue that inability to understand the intricate power relationships in the design and implementation of information security rules leads to a lack of compliance with the intended policy. We conduct the argument through an empirical, qualitative case study set in a Swedish Social S...

More than 5 years have passed since publication of Brian Abel-Smith’s study for the World Health Organization (WHO) ;1 It still is widely recognized as the only definitive study in the international health field with adequate comparability of data. An earlier Social Security Administration (SSA) analysis, attempting to update the figures in the 1967 WHO study, appeared in the BULLETIN for Decem...

Section 1110 of the Social Security Act provides for a cooperative research grants program. The grants given by the Social Security Administration under this program are to nonprofit organizations for research in the broad area of social security. Reports on two recently completed grants projects are summarized below. Similar summaries will be published in the BULLETIN as the projects are concl...

In 1997 with Wagner and Brewer, and again in 2002, we looked at the then-current state of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) for the Internet. [27, 26] Now, in 2007, we take a third look. Technologies to help users maintain their privacy online are as important today as ever before—if not more so. Identity theft is the fastest-growing crime in the US today [47] and it is all too easy for wou...

In the early 1970s, James Buchanan and Gordon TuUock held a series of seminars examining anarchism as a feasible method of social organization (Tullock 1972b; Tullock 1974b). The general consensus was that that good which may be termed "security" is a public or collective good. Since "security" is both (a) essential for the very existence of any social order and (b)incapable of being supplied v...