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Since the 1990s, the French government has offered tax exemptions for people who buy property and rent it out for at least nine years. This legal framework, centered on incentives, can be considered a new kind of (de)regulation of housing policy, triggering a multiplication of private intermediaries devoted to finding clients for tax exemptions. Based on interviews with 28 investors who feel they have been abused (many of them have started legal proceedings against professionals from whom they bought a property), this study provides a new entry for analyzing legal intermediation, showing that it does not affect all laypeople in the same way, especially when looking at the latter’s social and economic resources. We analyze how and with what devices professionals, whose commercial practices are not fully regulated by law, rely on the law for the success of their transactions, especially with taxpayers who have money to become investors but who are not rich enough to pay for the services of a tax professional. We argue that the ability to resist the appeal of putting money into investments that turned out risky depends on investors’ social and economic resources. Finally, we analyze how the process of legal intermediation described in this chapter impacts investors’ legal consciousness and creates distrust toward the law.

This chapter focuses on how people with a history of short-term incarceration engage with the criminal justice system. It is based on analysis of interview data with men and women who had been incarcerated in a county-level facility in Massachusetts; they were interviewed up to five times (once prerelease and four times postrelease). A primary goal of most was to be free of or minimize criminal justice system contact (not just incarceration), and this drove their approach to criminal justice system contact. In spite of this goal, they often remained ensnared for lengthy periods.

Conceptualizing trust alone or as the starting point for understanding both trust and distrust is insufficient. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the construction of phenotypic trustscapes and distrustscapes that permit an abstract exploration of the concepts of trust and distrust using societal and dyadic relationships and perceptions of the individual as the units of analysis. For theoretical understanding of trust and distrust, it uses social and evolutionary biologic multi-level theory. This chapter builds on the existing trust literature in three ways: (1) by triangulating on trust and distrust through the use of a number of research methodologies; (2) by placing trust and distrust in value orientation theory and models; and (3) by extricating trust and distrust from reciprocity constructs, and placing them into separate phenotypes: trustscapes and distrustscapes. These efforts show that both trust and distrust are naturally occurring phenomena, with one or the other predominant in specific contexts. The chapter includes scenarios in Japan, Bulgaria, and Indonesia to demonstrate how micro- and macro-level examples of trustscapes and distrustscapes function.

Organizational studies fail to examine organizations in terms of the several environments in which they operate, both internally and externally. That is, studies tend to focus on climate, or time, or trust, or leadership. This chapter builds on academic research that discusses organizational environments in ways that show all of these environments are important for organizational understanding, especially for organizational leadership. In particular, this chapter offers a paradigm of understanding organizational leadership realities through multi-level understanding of the organizational environments of climate, knowledge, ethnos, and time.

The chapter first discusses five enviroscapes – climate, knowledge, ethos, time, and leadership. Each of these enviroscapes has two phenotypes – business and commerce. Each of these enviroscapes, with its concomitant phenotypes, is used differently at multiple levels of management and leadership by senior managers, middle managers, and entry-level managers. The scope of organizational reach, in terms of global, regional, and local levels of analysis, provides additional context for the use of enviroscapes. After a review of the theoretical bases for each enviroscape, the chapter applies appropriate theory and models to an extended time case study of land purchase in Indonesia.

In this commentary on Trustscapes…, The American University in Bulgaria Case section is praised. Its rich description of how those working to build a new university, who came from societies with different levels of generalized trust, struggle to create an organization with structures, policies and practices that reflect their own propensities to trust or distrust. The Case generated extended discussion of the power of distrust, governments’ roles in the production of trust and distrust, and how individuals seek to make sense of the multiple conflicting cues regarding whether to trust or distrust in their organizational settings.

This chapter draws on both theoretical and empirical literature on trust and discusses the role of trust in strategic communication. It also examines the importance of trust for organizational success, the dimensions of trust and distrust and discusses quantifiable proxies to measure trust and distrust on social media. The theoretically driven dimensions of trust and distrust served as a framework to examine how Boeing and Airbus use Twitter to communicate with their stakeholders and publics. 6,926 Twitter messages were examined in the process of content analysis. The following proxies of stakeholder and publics' trust in an organization were identified for Twitter: number of followers, friends and likes; frequency of online activities; length of messages; use of hashtags, links, exclamation and questions marks; and use of specific words and phrases in messages. Two separate lists of words and phrases were created, one for proxies of trust and one for proxies of distrust. In addition, the following trust building actions that organization can engage in on Twitter were identified: listening and engaging in dialogue by following users, mentioning users in messages, replying to enquiries, providing and encouraging feedback.

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

U.S. health policy promotes HIV testing and linkage to care (test-and-treat) with an emphasis on high risk groups such as convicted offenders. We sought to identify whether or not laws for mandatory HIV disclosure to sexual partners are a barrier to HIV testing among offenders under community supervision.

A total of 197 probationers and parolees were surveyed in a closed/item-open-ended item methodology on two reporting days in Alabama. Three main questions were asked: (1) What do offenders know about HIV? (2) What do they know about the law? (3) Do they support mandatory disclosure and HIV testing? Data for the quantitative items were analyzed with SPSS and matched with open-ended responses for explanatory purposes.

Testing and criminalization of non-disclosure were fully supported as key elements of HIV prevention. This support was framed by conceptions of HIV as a killer disease, of people with HIV as potential murderers, and by low self-awareness of HIV risk.

While the study involved only a single group of convicted offenders in a southern state, the results suggest that disclosure laws legitimize HIV stigma and undermine test-and-treat strategies among communities at risk.

The research is the first of its kind to investigate possible links between HIV criminalization and barriers to HIV prevention and care among convicted offenders.