The Westminster parliament is a highly visible political institution, and one of its core functions is approving new laws. Yet Britain's legislative process is often seen as executive-dominated, and parliament as relatively weak. As this book shows, such impressions can be misleading. Drawing on the largest study of its kind for more than forty years, Meg Russell and Daniel Gover cast new light on the political dynamics that shape the legislative process. They provide a fascinating account of the passage of twelve government bills - collectively attracting more than 4000 proposed amendments - through both the House of Commons and House of Lords. These include highly contested changes such as Labour's identity cards scheme and the coalition's welfare reforms, alongside other relatively uncontroversial measures. As well as studying the parliamentary record and amendments, the study draws from more than 100 interviews with legislative insiders. Following introductory chapters about the Westminster legislative process, the book focuses on the contribution of distinct parliamentary 'actors', including the government, opposition, backbenchers, select committees, and pressure groups. It considers their behaviour in the legislative process, what they seek to achieve, and crucially how they influence policy decisions. The final chapter reflects on Westminster's influence overall, showing this to be far greater than commonly assumed. Parliamentary influence is asserted in various different ways - ranging from visible amendments to more subtle means of changing government's behaviour. The book's findings make an important contribution to understanding both British politics and the dynamics of legislative bodies more broadly. Its readability and relevance will appeal to both specialists and general readers with interests in politics and law, in the UK and beyond.
How do we reduce and prevent crime? This is a question with which governments, academics and criminal justice professionals have been grappling for decades. Crime Prevention explores the legislative developments, policy changes and practical strategies that have been put in place in recent years in an attempt to manage the level of crime in our society. The book also assesses how governments' approaches to serious crime, the war on terror, human rights and race and immigration policies have influenced ideas about community safety and crime prevention. It offers a handy glossary, along with suggestions for further reading, in order to enhance understanding of critical issues. Accessible and compelling, this book is essential reading for students of criminology, criminal justice and social policy. It is also an indispensable analytical tool for professionals working within the criminal justice arena.
This book describes the unfolding of a global phenomenon: the legal prohibition of physical punishment of children. Documenting the stories of countries that have either prohibited corporal punishment of children or who are moving in that direction, this volume will serve as a sourcebook for scholars and advocates around the world who are interested in the many dimensions of physical punishment and its elimination.
This revised and expanded third edition offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the criminal justice system of England and Wales. Starting with an overview of the main theories of the causes of crime, this book explores and discusses the operation of the main criminal justice agencies including the police, probation and prison services and the legal and youth justice systems. This book offers a lively and critical discussion of some of the main themes in criminal justice, from policy-making and crime control to diversity and discrimination to the global dimensions of criminal justice, including organized crime and the role of the EU. Key updates to this new edition include: increased discussion of the measurement, prevention and detection of crime; a revised chapter on the police which discusses the principle of policing by consent, police methods, power and governance as well as the abuse of power; further discussion of pressing contemporary issues in criminal justice, such as privatization, multi-agency working and community-based criminal justice policy; a brand new chapter on victims of crime, key developments in criminal justice policy, and the response of the criminal justice system. This accessible text is essential reading for students taking introductory courses in criminology and criminal justice. A wide range of useful features includes review questions, lists of further reading, timelines of key events and a glossary of key terms.
This book is concerned to explore the idea of imaginary penalities and to understand why the management of criminal justice and criminal justice systems has so often reached crisis point. Its underlying theme is that when political strategies of punitive populism are combined with managerialist techniques of social auditing, a new all-encompassing form of governance has emerged - powerless to deliver what it promises but with a momentum of its own and increasingly removed from proper democratic accountability. A highly distinguished international group of contributors explores this set of themes in a variety of different contexts taken from the UK, N. America, Europe and Australia. It will be essential reading for anybody seeking to understand some of the root causes of increasing prison populations, social harms such as recidivism and domestic violence and the increasingly important role of criminal justice within systems of governance.
The movement toward greater openness represents a change of philosophy, ethos, and government and a set of interrelated and complex changes that transform markets altering the modes of production and consumption, ushering in a new era based on the values of openness: an ethic of sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration enabled through new architectures of participation. These changes indicate a broader shift from the underlying industrial mode of production—a “productionist” metaphysics—to a postindustrial mode of consumption as use, reuse, and modification where new logics of social media structure different patterns of cultural consumption and symbolic analysis becomes a habitual and daily creative activity. The economics of openness constructs a new language of “presuming” and “produsage” in order to capture the open participation, collective co-creativity, communal evaluation, and commons-based production of social and public goods. Information is the vital element in the “new” politics and economy that links space, knowledge, and capital in networked practices and freedom is the essential ingredient in this equation if these network practices are to develop or transform themselves into 'knowledge cultures'. The Virtues of Openness investigates the social processes and policies that foster openness as an overriding educational value evidenced in the growth of open source, open access, and open education and their convergences that characterize global knowledge communities. The book argues that openness seems also to suggest political transparency and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of the logic of inquiry and the dissemination of its results. The Virtues of Openness examines the complex history of the concept of the open society before beginning a systematic investigation of openness in relation to the book, the “open text” and the written word. These changes are discussed in relation to the development of new open spaces of scholarship with their impact upon open journal systems, open peer review, open science, and the open global digital economy.
Approximately 1% of births in the UK were conceived using IVF. At present IVF and embryo research are controlled by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority which was formed by a 1990 Act, since then scientific progress has been rapid and the Department of Health has announced a review of that Act. This extensive inquiry will inform that review. It covers: regulation of assisted reproduction, problems with HFE Act; the operation of the Act; provision of infertility services; review of the Act; legislative and regulatory models. It makes recommendations on issues such as choosing the sex of babies; the need for a separate review of abortion; the regulatory bodies required; and a legislative framework that balances the freedom of the individual with the interests of the state, so that any intervention has a sound ethical base.
ARIST, published annually since 1966, is a landmark publication within the information science community. It surveys the landscape of information science and technology, providing an analytical, authoritative, and accessible overview of recent trends and significant developments. The range of topics varies considerably, reflecting the dynamism of the discipline and the diversity of theoretical and applied perspectives. While ARIST continues to cover key topics associated with "classical" information science (e.g., bibliometrics, information retrieval), editor Blaise Cronin is selectively expanding its footprint in an effort to connect information science more tightly with cognate academic and professional communities. Contents of Volume 40 (2006): SECTION I: Information and Society Chapter 1: The Micro- and Macroeconomics of Information, Sandra Braman Chapter 2: The Geographies of the Internet, Matthew Zook Chapter 3: Open Access, M. Carl Drott SECTION II: Technologies and Systems Chapter 4: TREC: An Overview, Donna K. Harman and Ellen M. Voorhees Chapter 5: Semantic Relations in Information Science, Christopher S. G. Khoo and Jin-Cheon Na Chapter 6: Intelligence and Security Informatics, Hsinchun Chen and Jennifer Xu SECTION III: Information Needs and Use Chapter 7: Information Behavior, Donald O. Case Chapter 8: Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval, Jonathan Foster Chapter 9: Information Failures in Health Care, Anu MacIntosh-Murray and Chun Wei Choo Chapter 10: Workplace Studies and Technological Change, Angela Cora Garcia, Mark E. Dawes, Mary Lou Kohne, Felicia Miller, and Stephan F. Groschwitz SECTION IV: Theoretical Perspectives Chapter 11: Information History, Alistair Black Chapter 12: Social Epistemology and Information Science, Don Fallis Chapter 13: Formal Concept Analysis in Information Science, Uta Priss.