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The premise that the U.S. Supreme Court never veers too far off from the dominant national political coalition (Dahl, 1957) has become widely accepted among social scientists today. To fulfill that promise, however, the confirmation process for justices must serve as a plebiscite through which the public can ratify or reject future justices based on their views. Unfortunately, modern confirmation hearings have become an exercise in obfuscation, providing little meaningful dialogue on important issues. Because conservative Republican presidents have made the lion's share of appointments in recent times, social conservatives have most often benefited from a process that has severed the link between Supreme Court nominees and the polity they must serve.

The 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision accomplished more than the national legalization of same-sex marriage; it also laid bare a deep rift among US Supreme Court justices over the question of whether and how religious objections to same-sex marriage should be accommodated in this new era of marriage equality. This chapter will explore the rift revealed in Obergefell between the Court’s differing conceptions of religious free exercise and will highlight the ways in which this legal dispute was translated into a forceful mode of conservative religious activism in the buildup to the groundbreaking 2016 election.

Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem calls into question the claims of both the state and individuals when they purport to act for the benefit of future children. This paper discusses how adoption of the non-identity argument as a legal argument could affect reproductive and family policy, demonstrating that it undermines the child-centric approach to assigning legal parentage. The paper concludes, however, that these non-identity problems can be solved by the expected value approach, which demonstrates that efforts to benefit future people can be logically coherent even if those efforts also affect the genetic identities of the future people.

New Zealand is widely recognised as extreme in its New Public Financial Management reforms. Scrutiny of the reformed financial management system reveals its consistency with a controversial political agenda: trade liberalisation of even core social services such as social welfare, health and education. Further, the detailed requirements are systematically biased towards withdrawing from government services (by running them down) and/or privatising them (by artificially inflating reported costs, thus projecting an appearance of inefficiency). The legislation underpinning the New Zealand model was shepherded through parliament by a Minister of Finance who publicly opposed exposing social services to market forces. Drawing on archival records, this article provides a historical account of how this legislation came into being. The legislation handed key levers of power to extend the reforms to the Treasury. Particular attention is paid to the friction within the government of the time over extending the reforms to social policy, and the role of the Treasury. Possibly, some ministers who drove the reforms through did not appreciate their nature. Alternatively, the handover of the levers of power could be perceived as an attempt to avoid blame.

From one angle, abortion law appears to confirm the regime politics account of the Supreme Court; after all, the Reagan/Bush coalition succeeded in significantly curtailing the constitutional protection of abortion rights. From another angle, however, it is puzzling that the Reagan/Bush Court repeatedly refused to overturn Roe v. Wade. We argue that time and again electoral considerations led Republican elites to back away from a forceful assertion of their agenda for constitutional change. As a result, the justices generally acted within the range of possibilities acceptable to the governing regime but still typically had multiple doctrinal options from which to choose.

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of research and developments relating to the use of Web 2.0 technologies in education. As opposed to early educational uses of the Internet involving publication of static information on web pages, Web 2.0 tools offer a host of opportunities for educators to provide more interactive, collaborative, and creative online learning experiences for students. The chapter starts by defining Web 2.0 tools in terms of their ability to facilitate online creation, editing, and sharing of web content. A typology of Web 2.0 technologies is presented to illustrate the wide variety of tools at teachers’ disposal. Educational uses of Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, and microblogging are explored, in order to showcase the variety of designs that can be utilized. Based on a review of the research literature the educational benefits of using Web 2.0 technologies are outlined, including their ability to facilitate communication, collaborative knowledge building, student-centered activity, and vicarious learning. Similarly, issues surrounding the use of Web 2.0 tools are distilled from the literature and discussed, such as the possibility of technical problems, collaboration difficulties, and plagiarism. Two case studies involving the use Web 2.0 tools to support personalized learning and small group collaboration are detailed to exemplify design possibilities in greater detail. Finally, design recommendations for learning and teaching using Web 2.0 are presented, again based on findings from the research literature.

This chapter addresses commentary about constitutional law and politics in this current era of a conservative domination of the judiciary.¹ Its primary concern is the different ways in which a working majority on the Court and its judiciary of appointees by Presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush might be conservative,² and the different ways in which domination might take place.³ The frame for the chapter is what I call an “indifference thesis” for analyzing constitutional law and politics. Stated boldly, the thesis is that there should be a commentary distinguished by an interpretive attitude that distrusts, and intentionally resists, analysis based on preconceived notions about the strengths and weaknesses of any constitutional law and politics, be it conservative or left-liberal.⁴ Perhaps, to many readers, an indifference thesis for commentary appears methodologically odd, if not politically perverse. Therefore, the first order of business is to try to make the thesis less odd and perverse by explaining its provenance and attributes.⁵

This chapter presents a typology, a comprehensive overview and a deconstruction of food counterfeits. In this chapter, common targets, defined by type of commodity, supply chain (node) and location, are identified based on incident reports and vulnerability assessments in global food supply chains. As a second step, the effects of counterfeiting on brand owners, consumers and governments are detailed, which is followed by the characterisation of the groups of buyers and suppliers. To comprehend the counterfeiting process and its most important factors in greater detail, counterfeiting is disassembled into and analysed for existing motivational drivers, opportunities and control measures. Lastly, various strategies are proposed to deter counterfeiting and disrupt these practices.

This study addresses the debate regarding employee discretion and neo-normative forms of control within interactive service work. Discretion is central to core and long-standing debates within the sociology of work and organizations such as skill, control and job quality. Yet, despite this, the concept of discretion remains underdeveloped. We contend that changes in the nature of work, specifically in the context of interactive service work, require us to revisit classical theorizations of discretion. The paper elaborates the concept of value discretion; defined as the scope for employees to interpret the meaning of the espoused values of their organization. We illustrate how value discretion provides a foundational basis for further forms of task discretion within a customized service call-centre. The study explores the link between neo-normative forms of control and the labour process by elaborating the concept of value discretion to provide new insights into the relationship between managerial control and employee agency within contemporary service labour processes.

This paper argues for the following sensitizing proposition. At its core, much of consumer behavior that involves brand meanings is an attempt to influence, or symbolically mark, interpersonal relationships.

This paper presents a conceptual argument based on a literature review.

First, I argue that our pervasive concern with other people is a basic genetic component of human beings, and discuss some possible evolutionary pressures that may have led to this result. Then I discuss how this pervasive concern influences consumer behavior related to brand meanings. This discussion is structured around two aspects of social relationships: interpersonal closeness and social status. Relationship closeness is discussed with regard to brand communities, gifts, special possessions and brand love, and the often hidden ways that social relationships permeate everyday consumer behavior. Social status is discussed with reference to materialism. Materialism is sometimes misunderstood as an obsession with physical object, or as occurring when people care more about products than they do about people. In contrast, I argue that materialism is better understood as a style of relating to people.

This paper integrates a range of disparate findings in support of a broadly applicable generalization that nothing matters more to people than other people. This generalization can function as a sensitizing proposition that managers and researchers can bear in mind as they seek to interpret and understand how brand meaning influences consumer behavior.