Mixed messages & bounded rationality: The perverse consequences of real ID for immigration policy

Policies concerning undocumented immigrants are inevitably ambivalent, creating uncertainty and confusion in the implementation process. We identify a clear example of this ambivalence —U.S. law setting standards for determining the credibility of asylum seekers—that resulted in an increase in asylum grants despite policymakers' intention to make it harder for individuals to obtain the status. We argue that this law, The REAL ID Act of 2005, sent mixed messages to immigration judges (IJs), street-level bureaucrats who implement immigration policy. It increased IJ discretion, but set vague limits. We theorize that IJs, behaving in a bounded rationality framework, use their professional legal training as a short-cut and look primarily to the courts for guidance. Our evidence supports our argument. After the passage of the REAL ID Act, IJ decision-making is more closely aligned with the preferences of their political and legal principals, and, in the final score, the federal circuit courts are the winners.     

Political Commitment,Policy Ambiguity,and Corporate Environmental Practices

A lack of clear political commitment together with confusing rules and enforcement often characterize the institutional context of policy implementation and regulatory compliance in developing countries. By connecting such contextual features to existing models of policy implementation and regulatory compliance, we examine how regulatory factors are related to basic and proactive corporate environmental management practices in the Pearl River Delta region in China. Drawing on data derived from both a survey and in‐depth interviews, we show that a perception of clear political commitment to environmental protection across multiple government levels and units is positively associated with business efforts in basic environmental practices, regardless of the specific enforcement intensity. Nevertheless, a perception of clear political commitment is not related to proactive environmental practices. Conversely, a perception of policy ambiguity, in the form of confusing regulatory standards and enforcement, is negatively associated with corporate efforts in both basic and proactive environmental practices; yet, intensive inspections mitigate these negative associations with policy ambiguity.     

The Agnotology of Eviction in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings: How Institutional Ambiguity and Deliberate Ignorance Shape Sensitive Spaces

A significant part of Lebanon's Palestinian refugees live in unofficial camps, so‐called “gatherings”, where they reside on Lebanese land. Many of these gatherings are now threatened with eviction. By means of two qualitative case studies this article explores responses to such eviction threats. Residents, it turns out, engage in deliberate disinformation and stalling tactics and invoke both a professed and real ignorance about their situation. In contrast to dominant discourses that project Palestinian refugees as illicit and sovereignty undermining, I explain these tactics as a reaction to, and duplication of, a “politics of uncertainty” implemented by Lebanese authorities. Drawing on agnotology theory, and reconsidering the gatherings as sensitive spaces subjected to aleatory governance, I propose that residents’ responses to the looming evictions are a manifestation of the deliberate institutional ambiguity that Lebanese authorities impose on the gatherings. As such, the article contributes to understanding the spatial dimensions of strategically imposed ignorance.     

部门管理人员感知的组织支持与组织氛围对旅游企业员工角色压力的影响

欧美学者普遍认为,角色压力是影响员工服务态度和服务行为的一个极为重要的因素,包括角色负担、角色冲突、角色模糊等3个组成成分.本文对我国11个地区的33个旅游企业进行了一次实证研究,检验部门管理人员感知的组织支持、企业的支持型领导氛围、授权氛围和员工服务行为评估氛围对员工角色模糊的影响.多层次线性模型分析结果表明,部门管理人员感知的组织支持会通过企业的支持型领导氛围,间接影响员工感知的角色模糊.企业的支持型领导氛围会通过企业的授权氛围,间接影响员工感知的角色模糊.此外,部门管理人员感知的企业支持还会调节员工感知的角色负担和角色冲突对他们的角色模糊的影响.     

Expressing Ideology Without a Voice, or Obfuscation and the Enlightenment

The consumer culture produced by the Industrial Revolution obfuscates diversity in the archaeological record. Mass-manufactured goods might be read as mass-manufactured culture. It is important for historical archaeologists to attempt to decode the complexities of consumption. Using a feminist approach, I examine one archaeologically visible way in which muted groups simultaneously embrace and resist the tenets of a dominant ideology. I compare ceramic assemblages from four nineteenth/twentieth-century sites in Annapolis, Maryland, two mid-nineteenth-century assemblages from New York City, and some additional selected examples from North America.     

Uncertainty,exhaustion, and abandonment beyond South/North divides: Governing forced migration through strategic ambiguity

Forced migration studies struggles to counterbalance policy assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the epistemic segregation and theoretical demarcation that reproduce such exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely assumed differences between migration governance in the Global South and North. It juxtaposes in-depth empirical case-studies of refugee governance in Lebanon, the country with the world's highest per capita number of refugees, with a review of critical research on EUropean governance of forced and irregular migrants. This exploration demonstrates that the rationales and manifestations of the ‘politics of uncertainty’ that refugees are subjected to in Lebanon closely mirror those of the ‘politics of abandonment’ and ‘exhaustion’ that migrants face in EUrope. Under both regimes, strategic forms of ambiguity operate to spatially and temporally marginalize refugees and render them controllable, exploitable, and deportable.     

The condition of ‘Cosmo-housewives’: leisure shopping,the mainstream and its ambiguities

‘Leisure shopping’ is a particular kind of shopping activity that is devoted mainly to fashion clothes and accessories. Women are commonly represented as the main leisure shoppers, and consequently, they tend to be at the centre of shopping centres' mainstream discourses. This article argues that interpretations of representations of ‘leisure shopping’ and the corresponding practice have too often ignored the daily and seemingly ‘banal’ experiences of the social actors involved. The primary purpose of this article is to show how gender roles are performed and reified in high-end factory outlet villages in Italy. It adopts a cross-sectional approach to ‘leisure shopping’ that includes an analysis of the ‘languages’ of two Italian high-end factory outlet villages, the ‘social space’ represented by the same sites and the ‘stories’ about a few ideal-typical female shopping experiences. These aspects are situated in the Italian cultural and political context at the time the research was conducted. Very different demands – such as sensuality, efficiency and motherly care – are put on women in Italy, as well as in the majority of Western societies. The analysis reveals that through their practice of browsing in a high-end factory outlet village, women often reproduce stereotypes while simultaneously trying – though ambiguously – to challenge them.     

Dr. Gottlieb Burckhardt the Pioneer of Psychosurgery

The first attempt at psychosurgeryintentional damage to the intact brain for the relief of mental illness–was undertaken in 1888 by the Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Burckhardt. Six chronic schizophrenic patients underwent localized cerebral cortical excisions. Most patients showed improvement and became easier to manage, although one died from the procedure and several had aphasia or seizures. Burckhardt, a learned neuropsychiatrist, presented his results in 1890 and in 1891 published his scientific rationale and detailed clinical outcome in a scholarly paper. Nevertheless his approach had shocked the medical community as reckless and irresponsible. Burckhardt was ridiculed, his academic endeavors ceased and his surgical endeavor largely ignored. Nevertheless he continued practice as a fine psychiatrist and mental hospital director. Burckhardts career and interesting ideas on higher cerebral functions are reviewed and placed in perspective regarding the development of “modern” psychosurgery almost one-half century later.     

Australia’s China policy of strategic ambiguity: navigating between big fish

History, little understood, shows that for 55 years a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ about the application of the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty to Taiwan, a flashpoint in Asia, served Australia well. Return to it could lessen the risks of embroilment in any Sino-American war in East Asia, and enhance Australia’s middle-power options.     

Land acquisition induced conflicts in suburban China: a procedural perspective

Protests and opposition to land acquisition from displaced peasants for fair compensation occur on a daily basis in China and have become the most prominent social problem in rural parts of the country. Employing a procedural perspective on conflict, this paper aims to uncover the complexities and tensions that are triggered in the process by drawing on a case of a land confiscation in Jining City, a medium‐size city in Shandong Province, China. Our research shows that conflicts exist at various scales: both between the local governments and rural households and between the village officials and villagers. The paper argues that ambiguity in de jure and de facto land acquisition procedures has resulted in both an escalation of conflict and increasing inequality in the outcomes and benefits of the process. We discuss and conclude that the differences between de jure and de facto procedures in the process of land acquisition are a significant institutional barrier in the resolution of conflict in this important issue for rural China.