Search results

The international women's movement has always focused on discrimination against women, but only in the past few decades have activists been focusing on violence against women, and within this framework, domestic violence. Global feminist activism found common ground in protecting women from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. This framework traveled to Eastern Europe with the advent of regime changes there. In post-communist Europe, it took only a decade and a half for the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Slovene governments to react to domestic and global pressures and establish new definitions and policies regarding domestic violence. However, the feminist NGOs’ definitions and policy recommendations met with limited success. Feminist-inspired norms, such as specific domestic violence courts and distancing ordinances, diffused to a mediocre level of half-hearted official responses in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This middle-of-the-road approach attempted to de-gender and thus to de-politicize feminists’ fundamental gender-sensitive claims. A norm diffusion to reach the middle ground took place through a complex set of interactions that involved various types of political actors ranging from international governmental organizations, such as the UN and the EU, governments, international and local NGOs. Analyzing the process of these multiple-level and manifold interactions sheds light on the partially deterritorialized nature of globalization. The development of norms and their difffnousion regarding domestic violence policy also inform us about how democratic processes, efforts to achieve gender equality, and the global context interact in CEE.

Although universities have been decentralized for academic freedom and autonomy, resources are being increasingly centralized, and the role of central administration is growing for efficiency and excellence reasons. At the same time, a division of labor is progressing by assigning specific tasks to professionals. The professionals are also centrally managed. Educational development was introduced by central administration to cope with the massification and quality assurance of higher education. Although it played a great part in promoting educational reform, it also suffered from the rejection of academics and the lack of methodology. Unlike ITC service and student service, educational development touches the autonomy of academics and is always torn between the central administration and academics. This chapter analyzes the structural and cultural difficulty of educational development in Japan by tracing its historical development and by comparing to other countries.

Given that a large proportion of refugees and forced im/migrants today are school-age, schools are widely assumed to be sites where integration will happen. How this integration will occur and whether education policies facilitate social cohesion is unclear. Focusing on California and Berlin as examples of politically left-leaning states that receive immigrants in substantial numbers, this chapter seeks to examine their immigration, integration, and education policies. Using an original conceptual framework, this chapter analyzes how relevant federal and state policies have evolved since the 1980s in these two contexts. This chapter considers integration to be the process by which immigrants identify with the receiving country (RC) and their previous contexts, provided that the RC is supportive and accepting. The goal of integration is less inequality along ethnic or cultural lines. By analyzing policies in terms of immigrant students’ identity formation and conceptions of equality, this chapter argues that the evolution of such policies in Berlin and California has not always been linear. Moreover, while both states consider diversity to be positive, their policies do not extend to facilitating a new culture that productively operationalizes the diversity of immigrant and non-immigrant students.

In this chapter, we argue from a theoretical perspective that globalisation has impacted differentiation within higher education systems. The three propositions about mechanisms affecting diversity distinguished by van Vught (environmental conditions, competition for resources and academic norms) remain the same, but the initial conditions have changed. Governmental policy, in particular, affects the degree of openness of higher education systems (positively or negatively), either through (de-)regulation or by affecting higher education institutions’ strategies for internationalisation. Thus, we add as a fourth proposition that increasing institutional autonomy increases system diversity in the context of globalisation.

Purpose – In this chapter, I examine critically the assumption in the literature that many lawyers decide to leave the practice of law, and especially large law firms, due to lawyer dissatisfaction. I take a macro focus on employee flows and networks at large law firms, particularly at the elite level.Methodology/approach – I use a large archival data set of alumni data, internal memos, and newsletters from the 1930s through the 1990s from four large New York City corporate law firms. I perform statistical analysis of 2800 cases. I also include qualitative analysis of the newsletters and firm records of comings and goings. I analyze lawyer migration as a mobility project of lawyers in conjunction with Domhoff#x02019;s class-domination theory to explain the interconnectedness of the corporate community, policy networks, governmental positions, the federal judiciary, and high-powered private lawyers.Findings – I explore the various ways that lawyer migration benefits the original firm by creating or strengthening relationships with other large law firms, corporate clients, and governmental organizations. It is clear that most lawyer departures are not meant to signal negative outcomes. Elite lawyers in large firms make both corporate and political connections through their migration, connections that have important repercussions not only for the lawyers but from their original firms.Originality/value of chapter – A fundamental question for sociological analyses of elite professions, and a more practical concern in the field of legal studies, is why do so many lawyers decide to leave the practice of law? The focus of these accounts, both journalistic and academic, is on the fact that lawyers leave – and, in particular, that they leave the practice of law entirely. The explanatory variable, in many cases, is some variation on individual lawyer dissatisfaction. Instead, I show that most lawyer departures are not meant to signal negative outcomes. Lawyer migration benefits the original firm by creating or strengthening relationships with other large law firms, corporate clients, and governmental organizations.