Efficient Nonprofits?

This article looks at efficiency as it relates to nonprofit activities. I argue that average return-on-investment measures are inadequate for nonprofit organizations, and that nonprofits should seek instead to measure marginal returns to investments in nonprogram areas, such as administration and fundraising. Using a national sample of approximately two hundred fifty thousand nonprofits from 2002, I find that some types of organizations spend their nonprogram funds efficiently, while other types do not. These findings have implications for nonprofit management.     

Comment on ‘A Bayesian approach to ageing perinatal skeletal material from archaeological sites: implications for the evidence for infanticide in Roman Britain’ by R.L. Gowland and A.T. Chamberlain

In 1993, I published a paper noting that the age distribution of perinatal infants for some Romano-British sites did not conform to a natural mortality pattern but rather showed a pronounced peak at a gestational age corresponding approximately to a full term infant. I interpreted this as suggestive of infanticide, given that the deed is generally carried out immediately after birth. Gowland and Chamberlain have recently published in this journal (J. Archaeol. Sci. 29 (2002) 677) a reconsideration of the problem of Roman infanticide in which they suggest that the peak I observed in the Romano-British perinatal age at death distribution may have been an artefact of the particular ageing technique I used, and they hence call into question the evidence for Roman infanticide. In this comment I argue that their work is seriously flawed and, using a re-analysis of my 1993 data, I demonstrate that the perinatal peak I observed in the Romano-British age distribution is a robust result that supports an interpretation of infanticide.     

Europe of love: re‐centring intercultural affairs

The present collection of essays is the first collective result of the research project ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’ that is being conducted at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI), Essen.1 The original inspiration for this type of research came to me at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, where I spent the year 1992–93; I continued the research at the European University Institute, Florence, in the years 1994–2002. The first product of this research was my book Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London: Tauris, 1999 and New York: New York University Press, 2000) that takes 1930s Britain as a case study, by situating it within a European context of longue durée. The present project has been funded by the Kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschungspreis des Landes Nordrhein‐Westfalen from 2002 to 2004. Within its general framework, the members of the research group, directed by Luisa Passerini, have developed their own individual projects; they are Liliana Ellena, Alexander Geppert, Jo Labanyi, Ruth Mas, Almira Ousmanova, and Alison Sinclair. Guests of the project have been invited for periods of time up to a month; numerous seminars, workshops and conferences have been organised, with the participation of junior and senior scholars from various countries. The majority of the papers presented on these occasions will be published at the end of the project. View all notes The approach of our research is that of a cultural history of Europe, and the focus is on the historical connection between the idea of Europe and a certain type of personal emotion. The project aims to explore the relationships between political forms of identity and cultural attitudes in the field of emotions in Europe. More specifically, it is engaged in understanding the relationship between the formation of identity in the European context, on the one hand, and the idea of courtly and romantic love, on the other. I have argued elsewhere that European cultural identity must be distinguished from the political version based on the sense of belonging to the European Union. In the course of this introductory essay I always refer to a cultural Europe.2 Cf. Luisa Passerini, ‘From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony’, in A. Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. The original inspiration for this type of research came to me at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, where I spent the year 1992–93; I continued the research at the European University Institute, Florence, in the years 1994–2002. The first product of this research was my book Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London: Tauris, 1999 and New York: New York University Press, 2000) that takes 1930s Britain as a case study, by situating it within a European context of longue durée. The present project has been funded by the Kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschungspreis des Landes Nordrhein‐Westfalen from 2002 to 2004. Within its general framework, the members of the research group, directed by Luisa Passerini, have developed their own individual projects; they are Liliana Ellena, Alexander Geppert, Jo Labanyi, Ruth Mas, Almira Ousmanova, and Alison Sinclair. Guests of the project have been invited for periods of time up to a month; numerous seminars, workshops and conferences have been organised, with the participation of junior and senior scholars from various countries. The majority of the papers presented on these occasions will be published at the end of the project. View all notes This introduction is divided into a presentation of the project, the specific itinerary that we propose in this special issue, and some considerations on its thematic.     

‘On Diego Garcia no one never got ill’ (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The history of the Chagos Islanders was recently highlighted in a semi‐fictionalised production A few man Fridays performed by the Cardboard Citizens Theatre company at the Riverside Studios in London. The month‐long run finished on March 10. I went to the penultimate performance. Also in attendance were a small number of native‐born Chagossians and their children. During the interval, I fell into conversation with Anthony, a 50‐year‐old Chagossian, who was born on the island of Diego Garcia. Along with other members of his family, Anthony was deported from his homeland by the British authorities to make way for a strategically important US base. With 500 or so compatriots he was taken by boat and dumped in the Seychelles. Around 1500 other Islanders were taken to Mauritius. In 2002, however, Chagossians were granted British citizenship. Some 1500 islanders, mainly those from Mauritius but a few from the Seychelles, have now settled in Crawley in West Sussex. But Anthony, along with his sister and her children, is living in rented accommodation in Pimlico in south London. According to Anthony, a primary motivation for his coming to the UK was to seek better healthcare to deal with his type II diabetes. “On Diego Garcia no one ever got ill,” he said. Perhaps this claim should be taken more seriously than conventional functionalist explanations allow.     

The Judicial Bookshelf

The death of Justice Byron R. White on April 15, 2002, occasioned numerous assessments, as had happened when he retired in 1993. From his perspective, he was the accidental jurist. "Well, I never wanted to be a judge," he confessed to a reporter in a rare interview in 1999. "I said to the president I would give it a try." White's "try" lasted thirty-one years, among the longest tenures of twentieth-century Justices. Yet many appraisals of White passed over a critical point: the Supreme Court in 1993 was a very different institution from the one he joined in 1962. This was true beyond the obvious changes in personnel. No one on the bench in 1962 was still sitting when White retired. In 1962, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who succeeded him, was only four years out of Harvard Law School and was completing a year as a research associate at Columbia University Law School prior to joining the professorate at Rutgers in Newark.     

Experimental Consensus: Negotiating with the Irrigating State in the South of Laos

Abstract

It is common to view Laos as a political culture prone to “consensus”, yet it is also true that policy is constantly changing there, often radically. If everyone is always “in consensus”, what can explain this change? I suggest that the answer is found in the particular kind of consensus at play: it is informed by a wider “experimentarian” ethic evident in rural Laos, where ideas (including the latest policies) are put to the test through practical implementation. The results of these experiments are used to validate policy change and reversal. This allows rural residents a degree of manoeuvrability in their engagements with the state that is striking given the “authoritarian” status of the current regime. It can explain and is used to justify, for instance, the oft-observed gap between policy and actual practice. This room for manoeuvre comes at the price of “playing the game”, at least for a while, of the latest policy fad, sometimes with disastrous consequences for rural livelihoods. I use the example of an irrigation project that was implemented in the south of Laos from 1999–2002 to examine “experimental consensus” at work as policy was received, engaged and eventually relinquished.     

Gay Games: Performing 'community' out from the closet of the locker room

Matters of community, performativity, bodies, space, belonging, oppression, resistance and their relationship to culture are explored in this paper within the context of Sydney's 2002 Gay Games. I begin the paper considering how the everyday meaning and practices of sports produce spaces that are oppressive to many gay men. I then introduce the Gay Games as a site of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and intersex resistance, established to rupture stereotypes of heteronormativity in sports. Drawing upon my own research of Sydney's Gay Games I next explore how willingness to participate amongst self-identifying gay men depends upon how they understood their performance within the context of the event. I conclude the paper by arguing that willingness to participate in Sydney's Gay Games illustrates fundamental issues about the connectedness of bodies and space through the discursive body as space and the material body in space.     

Warm nationalism: Mapping and imagining the Jordanian nation

In 2002, fourteen years after their withdrawal from the West Bank, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan revealed its new national program known as “Jordan First.” The Palace initiated this campaign as part of its shifting national discourse which now sought to actively unite Palestinian-Jordanians and East Jordanians living to the east of the Jordan River. This campaign, and particularly its common map-logo symbol, has evolved over the last fourteen years into a rather “banal” national discourse and symbol. However, Jordanian nationalism and the everyday symbols of the Jordan First campaign are not forgotten. Instead, for many Jordanians, the campaign is a reminder of “hot” geopolitics and palpable identity politics. Drawing from Michael Billig's theorizations of banal nationalism, I examine the relationship between banal and hot forms of nationalism in Jordan and argue that scholarly work on banality needs to focus attention on the connections between these categories. As such, I suggest that framing nationalism as something quite “warm” can in many instances more aptly capture the complexity of nationalism. Using a multi-method approach that includes analyses of national maps and map-logos of Jordan and in-depth interviews with Jordanians about their national identities, I highlight the connections of hot and banal nationalism. Through my analysis, I also show that a Jordanian national identity is multi-scalar, merging Arab supranationalism with Jordanian and Palestinian identities; and thus I also extend Billig's work to examine the multiple scales of nationalism.     

Interest Group Competition and Cooperation at Legislative Hearings

Legislative committee hearings have attracted little attention from scholars, yet Schlozman and Tierney (1986) found that testifying is the advocacy tactic most frequently used by interest group lobbyists. I argue that opportunities to testify are valuable enough to lobbyists that they may be willing to put aside competitive differences with rival groups to jointly support committee agendas. I test this argument using data on lobbyist testimony before 20 committees on six issues from 1999 to 2002. The results suggest that whether legislators actually desire competing lobbyists to present a united front behind the committee may depend on the committee's own ideological relationship with the parent chamber. I also find that the attractiveness of the incentive to testify is less enticing to lobbyists when it requires them to compromise their organization's position on issues of importance to their members, or when competition between interest groups is especially great.     

MORE EARLY HELLADIC SEALINGS FROM GERAKI IN LACONIA,GREECE

In 2002, excavations conducted by the University of Amsterdam at the acropolis site of Geraki (Laconia) revealed a storage room attached to the EH II defensive wall, apparently a casemate built into that wall. Along with pottery and abundant destruction debris were many fragments of clay sealings, some stamped with seal impressions. Sealings had already been discovered at Geraki in 1997 (OJA 18.4, 1999 = Geraki I). Together with the new sealings, Geraki becomes second only to Lerna in terms of the quantity of published sphragistic material from the EH II Aegean. This report considers their significance in terms both of recent finds in the Aegean islands and western Anatolia and their implications for exchange relations across the Aegean. Two appendices describe the formation of the contexts of the new sealings, and a further 12 sealings found elsewhere on the site, suggesting still other areas with sealing activity on the acropolis.     

Cultural Barriers to Activist Networking: Habitus (In)action in Three European Transnational Encounters

Transnational coordination is a key aspiration of activists seeking to mobilize globally, yet the literature pays insufficient attention to the impact of cultural differences on transnational networking. In this article I draw on ethnographic data from three European autonomous social movement encounters in the Global Justice Movement (2002–2004) to demonstrate the impact of culture clashes between activists on transnational networking. I use the concept of habitus to explore how routinized, taken for granted, symbolic systems of meaning that individuals from shared locations have in common shape their interactions in transnational encounters. This conception of culture is underutilized in social movement analysis yet offers important insights into internal movement dynamics. I argue that despite the autonomous commitment to radical openness and plurality, a lack of attention to the empirical reality of place‐based activist subcultures and habitus actually works against the “cosmopolitanism” that many activists and scholars aspire to.     

The Rise and Fall of the Australian Greens: The 2002 Cunningham By-election and its Implications

This article examines the 2002 by-election in the Australian federal seat of Cunningham, in which the Australian Greens secured their first and only member of the House of Representatives. This case study of Greens voting suggests that the electoral support base of the Greens in Cunningham was consistent with what is known about the support base of the Greens elsewhere in Australia. At the same time, it makes the case that local factors were at least as important as national issues in explaining the high Greens vote in Cunningham. A suburb-by-suburb analysis of Greens voting in the 2002 by-election suggests that traditional markers of Greens voting, such as higher than average incomes and educational qualifications, were a necessary, but not a sufficient, explanation of Greens voting in the case of Cunningham.     

Fixing History: Narratives of World War I in France

For nearly a century, the French have entertained an unshakable conviction that their bility to recognize themselves—to know and transmit the essence of Frenchness—depended on the teaching of the history of France. In effect, history was a discourse on France, and the teaching of history—" la pédagogie centrale du citoyen "—the means by which children were constituted as heirs and carriers of a common collective memory that made them not only citizens, but family. In this essay, I examine the rhetorical and conceptual effects on history writing that emerge out of this preoccupation with the elaboration of a continuous, coherent national identity.
Focusing on schoolbooks, I begin by looking at the dominant, nearly hegemonic model of French history created by Ernest Lavisse in the 1890s—a model informed by the dream of a unified, unitary French nation, embodied in and articulated through the history of France—and at the disruption of this paradigm in the aftermath of the Great War. I then consider a text written in the 1990s specifically to repudiate the kind of nationalist narratives that prevailed for most of this century—a new supranational history of Europe. I argue that, in their different experiments with fixing history, both Lavisse and the contemporary textbook authors did not so much repair a deficient history as produce a historical fixation, creating mythicized histories that are complete, closed, predictable, and at bottom ahistorical. Finally, I turn to a recent World War I novel, A Very Long Engagement by SébastienJaprisot, in order to suggest ways in which the narrative strategies of a fiction writer may be useful to historians in thinking about a different kind of historical project.     

Gender and Agenda Diversity: Cognitive Differences in Representatives’ Information Processing

A growing body of research examines the role of information processing on decision making in a variety of organizational settings such as authoritarian and democratic governments, subnational organizations, and market systems. Although an increasing number of scholars point to the importance of cognitive capacities of individuals in explaining macrophenomena, scant attention has been devoted to how individual human beings process incoming information. Utilizing original datasets of parliamentary speeches and the biographies of 1,100 members of parliament (MPs) who served in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 2002 and 2011, I explore female–male differences in MPs’ issue attention in the parliament. Drawing together the literatures on political agenda setting, gender studies, and cognitive psychology, I argue that women’s higher potential for empathic response to societal issues (i.e., lower cognitive threshold of urgency for social problems) leads them to speak about a wider range of issues facing society and find strong support for this hypothesis. The conclusion considers potential implications of these findings.     

Ethnic Dimensions of Regional Development in Macedonia: A Research Report

An American geographer analyzes patterns and trends relating to the distribution of ethnic group populations at the level of Macedonia's 123 municipalities (major civil divisions), utilizing data reflecting the two most recent census enumerations in 1994 and 2002 and interviews in Skopje in 2002 and 2004. Geographic concentrations of ethnicity correlate with economic and political indicators that have a significant bearing on the country's development potential and underlie current tensions in the country. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I00, J10, O15. 3 figures, 3 tables, 21 references.     

Book Reviews

Friends' schemes, also known as membership schemes, societies and associations share a common purpose, namely that of providing support for a specified host. This paper makes a contribution to heritage management in two areas by drawing together the limited literature on Friends' and membership schemes and presenting the findings of the first sector‐wide study in the UK. A questionnaire was circulated to members of the British Association of Friends of Museums (BAFM) in 2002. It updates past predictions as to the number of memberships held across the sector, reports on trends, and characterises membership schemes by discussing their nature, management, status, purpose and activities.     

Negotiating Place and Value: Geographies of Waste and Scavenging in Buenos Aires

Abstract: This article focuses on debates over the place and value of waste and waste scavengers in Buenos Aires during and following the economic crisis of 2002 in order to consider how waste functions as a fundamental category for organizing social space. I argue that conceptualizations of waste as both zero value and “matter out of place” need to be combined with a recognition of the commodity potential of waste in order to better understand how waste works to constitute social structures and space. I demonstrate that while the displacement of waste and waste scavengers associated with the crisis opened a space for the transformation of established social relations, in ongoing negotiations, waste continues to be defined as that which belongs elsewhere and is of no value, reinforcing the marginalization of garbage scavengers.     

Rafael Pinedo’s Trilogy: Dystopian Visions and Populist Thought in Argentina’s Turn-of-the-century Narrative

The three short novels written by Rafael Pinedo (Argentina, 1954–2006) before his untimely death are increasingly attracting the attention of academic researchers, not only because of their complexity but also because of their take on Argentine politics and ideology. The following article analyzes how these novels operate within what Tom Moylan defined as a critical dystopian narrative. By narrating each story as a future world in agony, where all social interactions are described with a militant pessimism, the novels envisage the consequences of the populist’s policies grip on the country’s social and cultural environment. I argue that Plop (Casa de las Américas Prize 2002), Frío (Finalist for the 2004 Planeta Prize), and Subte can be read as a trilogy since they propose a radical thought experiment about the limits of the social and cultural practices of populist policies, as well as a mise-en-scène of its hijacking and betrayal of utopian values. The article also underlines how, despite its pessimistic tone, the novels offer a glimmer of hope by returning to basic concepts of community and empathy.