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Draws upon recent legislative changes to Wales to provide new evidence and understanding of the way in which government reforms in the UK have impacted upon the promotion of equality of opportunity at government level. Analyses the problems and challenges that this new legislative duty presents for the elected representatives and bureaucrats as well as the civil groups it was designed to help. Points out a wider significance of these changes and engages the debate about the relationship between government, law and the promotion of equality.

Women's movements played a significant role in the recent campaigns for constitutional reform in the UK. Their aim was to overturn the prevailing male domination in politics. This article explores this process in Wales, a polity where the women's movement was comparatively weak and fragmented. In contrast to more familiar patterns of mass mobilization, “strategic women” used elite advocacy and “insider strategies” to engender the process of constitutional reform. Thus, this case study tests three widely held theoretical assumptions: that engendering state restructuring must be combined with broader activism; that insider strategies are more effective in influencing state actions; and, that the elite nature of such strategies means they can be neither democratic nor inclusive. The research findings detail the ensuing rise of state feminism and gains in women's representation and provide evidence of a paradox whereby elite action may translate into greater democratization in contexts where women's movements are comparatively underdeveloped.

Here we examine some of the contemporary challenges facing Plaid Cymru — the Party of Wales, the principal nationalist political party and one of the mainstays of the nationalist movement in Wales. Against the backdrop of the establishment of the first directly-elected national government forum in Wales for 600 years, we present new research and explore how the party's response to the ‘inclusive’ politics of the mid-1990s was central to Plaid Cymru's recent dramatic electoral breakthrough into the political mainstream and how it will be crucial to hopes for its future advancement. We contextualise this as part of this nationalist party's overall transformation during the last 75 years. This has been a journey from espousing an exclusive to purportedly inclusive nationalist ideology. Such development has been shaped along a number of non-discrete axes that include: the geographical spread of the party's organisational structures and electoral support, its readiness to embark upon co-working with other parties and groups, its evolving policy agenda, its stance on the Welsh language and, latterly, its response to ‘inclusive’ politics and constitutional reform. We test what Plaid's former leader has described as, the ‘inclusive philosophy’ underpinning Plaid Cymru's ‘civic nationalism’ against the party's record of engagement with some of the most marginalised groups in Welsh society: women, disabled people and people from an ethnic minority. These groups must be engaged if Plaid's claims of inclusiveness are to be meaningful and it's growing influence in Welsh, U.K. and European politics consolidated. We base our discussion and findings on the analysis of published interviews and documents together with transcriptions of 280 semi-structured interviews undertaken between May 1999 and September 2000. We have interviewed over a third of the Assembly Members of the National Assembly for Wales, key officials, members of Plaid Cymru, managers of ninety membership organisations and over 150 key individuals and practitioners associated with the marginalised groups under study.

The title of this series, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, reflects the triple foci of its volumes. These three issues that are so central to the identity of this series – social movements, conflicts, and change – are also prominent features with regard to the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. Thus we open this 27th volume of the series with three papers analyzing various aspects of Northern Ireland's civil rights movement, a social movement working for political and social change in a society marked by protracted conflict. The first paper, by Gregory Maney, innovatively analyzes the interrelationships between the Irish Republican Army's campaigns of armed violence and the nonviolent civil rights movement.

In recent years, the concept of subculture has been fiercely criticized, with some scholars even claiming that it is no longer relevant in a multi-cultural world (Muggleton, 2000; Chaney, 2004; Stahl, 2004). However, the authors argue that by revisiting the Chicago School tradition and reconceptualizing subculture on the basis of acknowledging its limitations and its potential, subculture theory remains applicable in the context of contemporary China. Through an eight-month ethnographic study of a group of deviant students in a secondary school in urban China, the purpose of this paper is to contend that the subculture of these young people from lower-class backgrounds is a means to negotiate their space and power in a failing school system situated in a drastically transforming society full of diversified yet often conflicting values.

In this study, the authors undertook an ethnographic study to follow a group of deviant students for eight months, trying to understand their everyday lives and the process of their identity construction. The research was conducted in Xiamen, a coastal city located in the southeast part of mainland China. Unlike large metropolitan areas such as Beijing and Shanghai, where most studies have been conducted so far, Xiamen represents one of the medium-sized cities, which are the majority in China. After a process of sampling among 11 classes from five schools in different tiers, the authors chose one class in Grade 2 at a medium-level secondary school called “Central Park Secondary School” as a pseudonym. The authors stayed in the field for the main study and the authors also paid another visit to the school to follow up on students’ recent development.

In this study, a group of problem students identified with each other and shared the same problems and situations, and collectively formed a subcultural group, from within which they could challenge the authority of teachers and parents and negotiate power in the school; for example, reaching a truce with teachers so that they could have an easier time at school until they graduated. Their subculture and resistance may seem like a self-defeating practice, because what they learned at school and the qualifications they obtained could only assure them laboring jobs and reproduce their lower class status. However, this subculture offered an alternative way to safeguard their happiness and healthy development, which in this case is psychological well-being and better interpersonal skills.

This paper could provide the teachers and school administrators with a new perspective to look at some of their students’ poor performance and disruptive behaviors. With a deeper understanding of their “deviant” students, the teachers may develop more pertinent measures to help their students.

This paper argues that, through revisiting the Chicago School tradition and reconceptualizing subculture on the basis of acknowledging its limitations and potential, subculture theory remains applicable in the context of contemporary China.

An interesting issue little explored in the celebrity endorsement literature is whether or not the activities of a celebrity endorser affect company performance. We examine the impact of Tiger Woods’s tournament performance on the endorsing firm’s value subsequent to the contract signing. We do not find a relationship between Tiger’ss tournament placement and the excess returns of Fortune Brands (parent of Titleist). This is likely due to Titleist being a very small contributor to the total market value of Fortune Brands. We also fail to find a significant relationship for American Express suggesting the market does not view a golfer endorsing financial services as credible. We do, however, find a positive and significant impact of Tiger’s performance on Nike’s excess returns suggesting that the market values the additional publicity that Nike receives when Tiger is in contention to win.

Fudenberg and Tirole (1995) argue that concern about job security creates an incentive for managers to smooth earnings. Consistent with their model, Defond and Park (1997) show that managers smooth earnings in consideration of both current and future relative performance. To provide a more direct evidence of anticipating smoothing and job security, we hypothesize that the extent of income smoothing will vary with managers' job security concerns as proxied by the level of the investment opportunity set or growth opportunities. Our results confirmed our predictions.