"Governmental authority and civil society are increasingly threatened by transnational networks of crime, narcotics, money laundering and terrorism. Access by underworld groups to sophisticated information technologies and weaponry as well as to the various instrumentalities through which the global market economy functions is vastly increasing the potential power and influence of these groups,...

Since publication of the 3rd Edition of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Drinking Water Quality guidelines, global adoption of water safety plans (WSPs) has been gathering momentum. Most guidance lists managerial commitment and 'buy-in' as critical to the success of WSP implementation; yet the detail on how to generate it is lacking. This commentary discusses aspects of managerial commitment...

BACKGROUND Managers in general practice perform a variety of roles, from purely administrative to higher-level strategic planning. There has been little research investigating in detail how they perform these roles and the problems that they encounter. The new General Medical Services (GMS) contract contains new management challenges and it is not clear how practices will meet these. AIM To i...

Though political theorists have emphasized the importance of political discussion in non-political spaces, past study of online political discussion has focused on primarily political websites. Using a random sample from Blogger.com, we find that 25% of all political posts are from blogs that post about politics less than 20% of the time, because the vast majority of blogs post about politics s...

Abstract Questions of structures and agency are significant in any serious considerations the possibilities, limits, effects educational reforms. But interrelations between policy practice cannot be answered unless we deal directly with a number issues: Who agents what structures, movements, identities that might lead to actions support or resist dominant policies practices. In this chapter, I ...

This dossier focuses on the framing of migratory phenomena as a crisis, with particular focus what discourses crisis do to reception. It brings together contributions from researchers various disciplines, who investigate both discursive constructions migration and migration.

Studies of political economy in recent years have placed emphasis on the operating characteristics of political and economic institutions. The premise of this work is that constitutional features of the political economy provide a structure of institutional incentives inducing equilibrium behavior and practices by optimizing agents. At both the theoretical and empirical levels there are compari...

In every society in many arenas, the reality of collective decision making falls far short of the democratic ideal in countless ways. These shortfalls include disenfranchisement, unequal influence operating through formal and informal mechanisms, political apathy and alienation, misinformation, and misperception. Part of the solutions to these challenges lies in a sound democratic constitution....

Pundits and scholars laud online campaigning for its potential to democratize politics and praise the 2008 Barack Obama campaign for using new information technologies to mobilize voters. Underneath these extraordinary forms of technologically-enabled political participation, however, is an infrastructure and industry for political data that has received far less attention. To help fill this ga...