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A growing body of work suggests that welfare and punishment should be understood as alternative, yet interconnected ways of governing poor and marginalized populations. While there is considerable evidence of a punitive turn in welfare and penal institutions over the past half century, recent studies show that welfare and carceral institutions increasingly comanage millions of people caught at the intersection of the welfare and penal sectors. The growth of “mass supervision” and the expansion of the social services sector help explain the blurring of welfare and punishment in the United States in daily practice. We suggest that these developments complicate the idea of an institutional trade-off and contend that welfare and punishment are best understood along a continuum of state management in which poor and socially marginalized populations are subjected to varying degrees of support, surveillance, and sanction. In presenting the punishment–welfare continuum, we pay particular attention to the “murky middle” between the two spheres: an interinstitutional space that has emerged in the context of mass supervision and a social services–centric safety net. We show that people caught in the “murky middle” receive some social supports and services, but also face pervasive surveillance and control and must adapt to the tangle of obligations and requirements in ways that both extend punishment and limit their ability to successfully participate in mainstream institutions.

The paper addresses the issue of contrasting constructions of social problems. Using “hate crime” as an example, we focus on portraits of the problem in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports and in the New York Times. The analysis illumines how fundamental contrasts in representations of hate arise from differences in the underlying, and institutionalized, sense-making practices of scorekeeping and storytelling. We conclude by discussing the larger implications of the findings for further development of the theoretical model of “dialogical constructionism.”

It is widely recognized by scholars that superhero stories tend to glorify vigilante justice; after all, these stories often maintain that extralegal acts of violence are necessary for combatting existential threats to personal and public safety. This scholarly common sense fosters a widespread dismissal of superhero stories as uncomplicated apologia for an authoritarian politics of law and order that is animated by hatred of unpopular people and ideas. However, some prominent contemporary Batman stories, including those told in the graphic novels of Grant Morrison and in the blockbuster movies of Christopher Nolan, are ambivalent: in their portraits of Batman and Joker as dark twins and secret colleagues, these stories both legitimize and challenge the countersubversive politics of American law and order.

“Cargo tariffs are agreed through the IATA machinery, and in theory approved by governments….the IATA Tarff Coordination Conferences still agree cargo tariffs on over 200,000 separate routes. But these tariffs bear little relevance to what is actually charged in the marketplace.” (Doganis, 2002)

“The stipulations ICAO standards contain never supersede the primacy of national regulatory requirements. It is always the local, national regulations which are enforced in, and by, sovereign states, and which must be legally adhered to by air operators making use of applicable airspace and airports……ICAO is therefore not an international aviation regulator, just as INTERPOL is not an international police force. We cannot arbitrarily close or restrict a country's airspace, shut down routes, or condemn airports or airlines for poor safety performance or customer service. Should a country transgress a given international standard adopted through our organization, ICAO's function in such circumstances…….is to help countries conduct any discussions, condemnations, sanctions, etc., they may wish to pursue, consistent with the Chicago Convention and the Articles and Annexes it contains under international law.” (ICAO, 2021)

In spite of being a growing liberalized global industry served by many firms, much of the international air cargo sector operated as an admitted cartel from 1999 through 2006. Partly due to the way the cartel was discovered, it seems very little empirical analysis to date has been done about the case. We use publicly available airline data to examine whether a diligent antitrust authority could have identified cartel/collusive behavior using established empirical methods. Our findings point to a regulatory failure in an industry whose long-standing business practices effectively “slipped through the cracks,” failing to protect the many shippers of air cargo.

For more than a decade, public opinion polls have shown that nearly 80% of Americans support hate crime legislation as a response to violence committed because of the victim's race, color, religion, and sexual orientation. Americans' widespread support for legislation aimed at bias-motivated crimes is not matched by the federal and state efforts devoted to responding to such crimes. This chapter describes the myriad factors contributing to America's limited police and prosecutorial response to hate crimes. After a discussion of the patchwork of state and federal legislation aimed at hate crimes, the chapter analyzes the substantial legislative and administrative structures that hamper the enforcement of hate crime law in the United States.

In this chapter, an air cargo shipment planning problem is considered by including individual risk factors of any sub-contracted agents. Due to competitive market conditions, air cargo forwarders are advised to remain flexible in operations. A mixed integer linear programming formulation including the potential for divisible activities is developed to model the shipment planning problem. To solve this complicated problem, we employ an ant colony optimization (ACO) methodology. Numerical examples are generated using data from both the extant literature and from a global air cargo company, allowing investigation of the viability of the novel methodology. We find that the algorithm/methodology provides effective solutions for small problem sizes.

Supply chains deliver goods and services between shippers and receivers, covering collection, transportation, distribution as well as their handling and storage in between. In particular, transportation services are carried out by different transport modes. In some modern supply chains, different categories of air cargo carriers – combinations, freighter-only, and/or integrators – provide critical transport services.

This chapter develops a methodology for estimating the performance of supply chains served by an air cargo carrier network. The methodology is based on indicators of infrastructure use, technical/technological level, operational factors, economic factors, and environmental performance. This proposed methodology is applied to estimate performance of supply chains served by an integrated air cargo carrier – FedEx Express – operating a single hub in the US domestic air network. Results indicate that the methodology may be useful for estimation of overall supply chain performance under the condition that relevant data are available.