Michelson's analysis of almost 150,000 divorce trials reveals routine and egregious violations of China's own laws upholding the freedom of divorce, gender equality, and the protection of women's physical security. Using 'big data' computational techniques to scrutinize cases covering 2009–2016 from all 252 basic-level courts in two Chinese provinces, Henan and Zhejiang, Michelson reveals that women have borne the brunt of a dramatic intensification since the mid-2000s of a decades-long practice of denying divorce requests. This book takes the reader upstream to the institutional sources of China's clampdown on divorce and downstream to its devastating and highly gendered human toll, showing how judges in an overburdened court system clear their oppressive dockets at the expense of women's lawful rights and interests. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Chinese courts, judicial decision-making, family law, gender violence, and the limits and possibilities of the globaliza
Are social practices actions, or institutional frameworks of interaction structured by common rules? How do social practices such as signing a cheque differ from international practices such as signing a peace treaty? Traversing the fields of international relations (IR) and philosophy, this book defends an institutionalist conception of practices as part of a general practice theory indebted to Oakeshott, Wittgenstein and Hegel. The proposed practice theory has two core aspects: practice internalism and normative descriptivism. In developing a philosophical analysis of social practices that has a special relevance for international relations, Silviya Lechner and Mervyn Frost depart from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of practice that dominates the current 'practice turn' in IR. The authors show that the contemporary global realm is constituted by two distinct macro practices - the practice of sovereign states and that of global rights.
Jurisprudence has up until recently largely neglected international law as a subject of philosophizing. The Nature of International Law tries to offset against this deficiency by providing a comprehensive explanatory account of international law. It does so within an analytical tradition, albeit within the one which departs from the nowadays dominant method of the metaphysically-driven conceptual analysis. Instead, it adopts the prototype theory of concepts, which is directed towards determining typical features constitutive of the nature of international law. The book's central finding is that those features are: normativity, institutionalization, coercive guaranteeing, and justice-aptness. Since typical features are context sensitive, their specificities at the international level are further elucidated. The book, finally, challenges the often raised claim that fragmentation is international law's unique feature by demonstrating that international institutional actors, particularly a
Are social practices actions, or institutional frameworks of interaction structured by common rules? How do social practices such as signing a cheque differ from international practices such as signing a peace treaty? Traversing the fields of international relations (IR) and philosophy, this book defends an institutionalist conception of practices as part of a general practice theory indebted to Oakeshott, Wittgenstein and Hegel. The proposed practice theory has two core aspects: practice internalism and normative descriptivism. In developing a philosophical analysis of social practices that has a special relevance for international relations, Silviya Lechner and Mervyn Frost depart from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of practice that dominates the current 'practice turn' in IR. The authors show that the contemporary global realm is constituted by two distinct macro practices - the practice of sovereign states and that of global rights.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has achieved deeper regional market integration to lay a socio-economic foundation for the development of a regional community, yet inter-state trust is by no means assured as Southeast Asian nations remain steadfast in maintaining their political regime stability against external interference. However, through its institutional practices, ASEAN has emerged as a distinct model of security institution, while the region's contemporary security landscape has diversified with various non-traditional security issues. By looking beyond the veneer of diplomacy and prevailing political circumstances, this book examines the legal nature and form of ASEAN's authority to address diverse regional security issues. It provides a fresh perspective on ASEAN's role as a security institution. With an interdisciplinary analysis, this book reveals the normative role that ASEAN plays in facilitating the processes of norm development, localisation and inter
Anthony Keddie investigates the changing dynamics of class and power at a critical place and time in the history of Judaism and Christianity - Palestine during its earliest phases of incorporation into the Roman Empire (63 BCE–70 CE). He identifies institutions pertaining to civic administration, taxation, agricultural tenancy, and the Jerusalem Temple as sources of an unequal distribution of economic, political, and ideological power. Through careful analysis of a wide range of literary, documentary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, including the most recent discoveries, Keddie complicates conventional understandings of class relations as either antagonistic or harmonious. He demonstrates how elites facilitated institutional changes that repositioned non-elites within new, and sometimes more precarious, relations with privileged classes, but did not typically worsen their economic conditions. These socioeconomic shifts did, however, instigate changing class dispositions. Judae
In A Political Economy of Modernism, Ronald Schleifer examines the political economy of what he calls 'the culture of modernism' by focusing on literature and the arts; intellectual disciplines of post-classical economics; and institutional structures of corporate capitalism and the lower middle-class. In its wide ranging study focused on modernist writers (Dreiser, Hardy, Joyce, Stevens, Woolf, Wells, Wharton, Yeats), modernist artists (Cézanne, Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg), economists (Jevons, Marshall, Veblen), and philosophers (Benjamin, Jakobson, Russell), this book presents an institutional history of cultural modernism in relation to the intellectual history of Enlightenment ethos and the social history of the second Industrial Revolution. It articulates a new method of analysis of the early twentieth century - configuration and modeling - that reveals close connections among its arts, understandings, and social organizations.
The healthcare sector is one of the fastest growing areas of social and public spending worldwide, and it is expected to increase its government shares of GDP in the near future. Truly global in its scope, this book presents a unified, structured understanding of how the design of a country's health institutions influence its healthcare activities and outcomes. Building on the 'public choice' tradition in political economy, the authors explore how patient-citizens interact with their country's political institutions to determine the organisation of the health system. The book discusses a number of institutional influences of a health system, such as federalism, the nature of collective action, electoral competition, constitutional designs, political ideologies, the welfare effects of corruption and lobbying and, more generally, the dynamics of change. Whilst drawing on the theoretical concepts of political economy, this book describes an institution-grounded analysis of health systems
The healthcare sector is one of the fastest growing areas of social and public spending worldwide, and it is expected to increase its government shares of GDP in the near future. Truly global in its scope, this book presents a unified, structured understanding of how the design of a country's health institutions influence its healthcare activities and outcomes. Building on the 'public choice' tradition in political economy, the authors explore how patient-citizens interact with their country's political institutions to determine the organisation of the health system. The book discusses a number of institutional influences of a health system, such as federalism, the nature of collective action, electoral competition, constitutional designs, political ideologies, the welfare effects of corruption and lobbying and, more generally, the dynamics of change. Whilst drawing on the theoretical concepts of political economy, this book describes an institution-grounded analysis of health systems
This ambitious book presents the first sustained analysis of the evolving representation of Cuthbert, the premier saint of northern England. The study spans both major and neglected texts across eight centuries, from his earliest depictions in anonymous and Bedan vitae, through twelfth-century ecclesiastical histories and miracle collections produced at Durham, to his late medieval appearances in Latin meditations, legendaries, and vernacular verse. Whitehead reveals the coherence of these texts as one tradition, exploring the way that ideologies and literary strategies persist across generations. An innovative addition to the literature of insular spirituality and hagiography, The Afterlife of St Cuthbert emphasises the related categories of place and asceticism. It charts Cuthbert's conceptual alignment with a range of institutional, masculine, northern, and national spaces, and examines the distinctive characteristics and changing value of his ascetic lifestyle and environment - fre
The one bad apple spoiling the whole barrel has become a common metaphor used with reference to risk culture in organisations. This “inside-out” perspective begins with the individual as the unit of analysis and follows with inferences to the broader environment. Since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, risk culture for many has become the explanation for shortcomings, poor decisions, and moral failures in organisations. This volume presents an institutional perspective of the forces that shape risk culture, and culture more generally, in organisations through a multi-disciplinary examination from a variety of leading academics and subject specialists. The authors demonstrate that firms play a role as manufacturers and managers of risk and they challenge common conceptions that attribute risk to chance circumstances or rogue behaviours. The foundational concepts needed for an institutional view of risk culture are highlighted with subsequent links to significant developments wi
The one bad apple spoiling the whole barrel has become a common metaphor used with reference to risk culture in organisations. This “inside-out” perspective begins with the individual as the unit of analysis and follows with inferences to the broader environment. Since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, risk culture for many has become the explanation for shortcomings, poor decisions, and moral failures in organisations. This volume presents an institutional perspective of the forces that shape risk culture, and culture more generally, in organisations through a multi-disciplinary examination from a variety of leading academics and subject specialists. The authors demonstrate that firms play a role as manufacturers and managers of risk and they challenge common conceptions that attribute risk to chance circumstances or rogue behaviours. The foundational concepts needed for an institutional view of risk culture are highlighted with subsequent links to significant developments wi
The sharing economy challenges contemporary property law. Does the rise of access render our conception of property obsolete? What are the normative and theoretical implications of choosing casual short-term use of property over stable use? What are the relational and social complications of blurring the line between personal and commercial use of property? The book develops a novel conceptualization of property in the age of the sharing economy. It argues that the sharing economy pushes for a mobile and flexible vision of engaging with possessions and, as a result, with other people. Property's role as a source of permanence and a facilitator of stable, long-term relationships is gradually decreasing in importance. The book offers a broad theoretical and normative framework for understanding the changing landscape of property, provides an institutional analysis of the phenomenon, discusses the social, communal, and relational implications of these changes, and offers guidelines for la
There is an urgent need to analyze and assess how we prevent torture, against the background of a rigorous analysis of the factors that condition and sustain it. Drawing on rich empirical material from Sri Lanka and Nepal, The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach interrogates the worlds that produce torture in order to propose how to bring about systemic institutional and cultural change. Critics have decried human rights approaches' failure to attend to structural factors, but this book seeks to go beyond a 'stance of criticism' to take up the positive project of reimagining human rights theory and practice. It discusses key debates in human rights and political theory, as well as the challenges that advocates face in translating situational analyses into real world interventions. Danielle Celermajer develops a new, ecological framework for mapping the worlds that produce torture, and thereby develops prevention strategies.
