Relative Power Position Research Articles

E.M. Hull and the Valentino cult: gender reversal after The sheik

In 1919 the now largely forgotten popular novelist E.M. Hull sparked a decade of infatuation with the ‘desert romance’ on the publication of her first book, The sheik. The obsession with the genre, fuelled by the release of Melford's 1921 film adaptation of the book, saw women swooning in the aisles at ‘screen god’ Rudolph Valentino's starring role. My aim here is to broaden the focus on Hull away from the much maligned novel, The sheik, by suggesting that Hull's subsequent novels, though never straying very far from the lucrative formula she cultivated with her first novel, were, in part at least, written in reaction to the uproar caused by this novel. I argue that Hull's representation of androgynous and cross-dressing women allows for her heroines to inhabit positions of relative power in relation to their male counterparts.

White, European, and Hardworking: East European Migrants’ Relationships with Other Communities in London

This article examines East European migrants’ relationships with other communities in the context of waged work through in-depth interviews with recent Polish and Lithuanian migrants to London. These migrants found themselves newly surrounded by greater racial and ethnic diversity. By distinguishing themselves from other workers on the basis of skin color and legal status, they present themselves as members of the host country's ‘white’ majority, which places them in a position of power in relation to other migrant groups in London.

EXPORTING KNOWLEDGE THROUGH TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE AND CAPACITY BUILDING

With a significant increase in the number of countries with antitrust laws, technical assistance (TA) to improve the capacity of antitrust agencies has become a key priority for international antitrust aid efforts. Donors have assigned a significant amount of time and financial resources to TA to raise the capacity and effectiveness of younger agencies. However, quantitative analysis of the impact of this TA remains limited at best. In this article, we focus on what appears to be a particularly important part of TA and capacity building—the use of long-term advisors (LTAs) and short-term interventions (STIs). In a year-long project, the International Competition Network surveyed its member antitrust agencies on antitrust TA. The questionnaire contained over 1,000 questions on various aspects of TA. We provide an analysis of the data using formal modeling. The most important findings from the model relate to two structural features of recipient antitrust agencies. First, recipient agencies absorb LTA and STI services best when the agency head has a rank of minister or higher and when agencies have prosecutorial discretion. At the heart of this agency feature is the relative power position of the agency in the recipient country's domestic political and economic structure. Those agencies with a strong power base seem well positioned to receive the current formatted TA involving LTAs and STIs. Second, bilateral donor relationships did remarkably better than multilateral relationships in helping the agencies with their strategic mission.

Postnationalism, Postmodernism and the German Discourse(s) of Weltmusik

Since the mid-1960s, just after the time at which Jameson posits the emergence of postmodernist aesthetics, (1) German musicians and producers, operating in a range of fields of musical production from highbrow Ernste-Musik ('serious music') to jazz and rock, have experimented with notions of Weltmusik (a term I will not translate since, in German discourses, Weltmusik has tended to signify western music in which various musical components are thought to synthesise into a whole, whereas the English term 'world music' has often been used by the music industry as a marketing label to represent 'authentic' musics from the margins). (2) These musicians include the high modernist Karlheinz Stockhausen, the various modern jazz musicians who participated in the producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt's Jazz Meets the World Series (1965-71) and Weltmusik summits (1983-85), the 'Krautrock' group CAN (with its so-called Ethnographic Forgery Series, 1968-78), and others. Weltmusik activities have not been 'merely' musical; they have frequently been subjected to considerable ideological interpretation. Readers familiar with English-language debates about 'world music' and 'world beat'--debates conducted with a vehemence that escalated markedly in the 1990s--will not be surprised to learn this. As David Bennett has shown in a recent article, following Steven Feld's useful typology, the positions taken in these Anglophone debates generally adhere to either 'anxious' or 'celebratory' narratives of world music. Anxious narratives, taking a neo-Marxist tack, tend to focus on the ways in which western musicians and the large recording companies, protected by their position of relative economic power and by copyright law, are able to appropriate (or expropriate) musical material from the margins and turn a profit from it, a profit in which the musical creators from the margins do not equally share. By contrast, the celebratory narratives stress ideas of 'fluidity, hybridity and collaborative exchange ... underpinned by postmodern anti-essentialist theories of the performative, dialogical and porous nature of all cultural identities'. (3) While the German discourses of Weltmusik reflect many similar concerns, this article will show how and why they diverge from their Anglophone counterparts. Significantly, the German debates were initiated well before the rise of 'world music' and 'world beat' as marketing terms in the English-speaking world in the mid-1980s, and they were strongly influenced by the comparatively recent memory of National Socialism. For this reason, they were also highly polemical. My analysis will focus, in particular, on the notions advanced by J-E. Berendt, as one of the foremost and longest-running champions of Weltmusik, as well as on the critiques that he attracted from German critics, musicologists, sociologists and philosophers, including Peter Sloterdijk and others. I shall examine how a peculiarly German antinationalist Weltmusik discourse has been informed by the trauma of National Socialism, just as it has contended with postmodernity and broader anxieties (also reflected in the wider English-language discourses on world music) about the breakdown of grand narratives and with utopian hopes arising from the processes of globalisation. My aim is thus to unpack the paradoxical meanings of Weltmusik as a music that acknowledges the fragmentation of (post)modernity and yet yearns for a new wholeness--and as a music that deliberately questions earlier notions of cultural essentialism and is capable of celebrating cultural inauthenticity, but which still retains concepts of 'otherness'. Finally, the essay performs what the musicologist Veit Erlmann calls an ethnography of Weltmusik, by analysing some of the ways in which the experience of 'authentic' alterity and global communication have been constructed within extra-musical discourses (such as in articles, cover notes, concert and record reviews). (4) It also examines the processes in which--to use an expression of Timothy Taylor's--'different sounds' have been mobilised in Germany 'as a way of constructing and/or solidifying new identities'. …

“Come on in, but not too Far:” Social Capital in an Inclusive Leisure Setting

The purpose of this research was to explore the nature of relationships that develop in an inclusive youth camp context using the framework of social capital. Inclusive recreation contexts are designed to promote awareness and minimize differences among participants with and without disabilities. Eight campers including four with disabilities and four without disabilities ranging in age from 12-16 were interviewed. Three conceptual categories were constructed related to social capital: reciprocity and investment, inclusion as camouflage, and roles played in mediating social capital. Findings indicate that social relationships among the campers were mixed in their facilitation of social capital. The assertion that social structures are hierarchical and reflect relative positions of status, power, and prestige was evident in this context.

An Empirical Evaluation of Long Term Advisors and Short Term Interventions in Technical Assistance and Capacity Building

Technical assistance to improve the capacity of regulatory agencies around the world remains a key priority for international aid efforts. Technical assistance is critical to younger antitrust agencies because more effective agencies can protect consumers against anti-competitive conduct. Beginning in the 1990s, the rapid adoption of antitrust laws and development of agencies to interpret and enforce these laws has transformed the competitive landscape in many countries. Indeed, more than half of the countries with an antitrust legal framework enacted antitrust laws in the past 15 years. Many of the newer antitrust agencies are not as effective as they need to be to improve the well being of consumers and protect against anti-competitive conduct. Consequently, donors have assigned a significant amount of time and financial resources to technical assistance to raise the capacity and effectiveness of these younger agencies. However, quantitative analysis of the impact of this technical assistance remains limited at best. In a previous paper, we undertook a general analysis of antitrust technical assistance. In this paper we focus on what appears to be a particularly important part of technical assistance and capacity building - the use of long term advisors (LTA) and short term interventions (STI). In 2005, the International Competition Network conducted a survey of antitrust agencies that received LTA and STI services from a wide array of donor agencies. We first perform a descriptive assessment of the survey data. We find LTAs to be more effective than STIs in preparing the agency for tackling work they could not have undertaken previously and in confronting cartels. Most LTA and STI services arrived directly from developed world antitrust agencies and lawyers were superior to economists for STI work while economists tend to perform best as LTAs. In a more general empirical framework, we model the effectiveness of LTA and STI interventions using key survey questions about the initial preparation phase, the ability of the interventions to improve internal tactical qualities of the agency, and the ability of the interventions to improve the agency in its strategic mission. We estimate a three equation seemingly unrelated regression system designed to tease out the factors that led to a successful preparation of tactical and strategic technical assistance. The most important findings are related to two structural features of recipient antitrust agencies. Our most prominent finding is that recipient agencies absorb LTA and STI services best when the agency head has a rank of minister or higher and/or when agencies had prosecutorial discretion. At the heart of these agency features is the relative power position of the agency in the domestic political and economic structure. Those agencies with a strong power base seem well positioned to receive the current formatted technical assistance involving LTAs and STIs. Donors should focus on modifying the technical assistance to agencies with less power and should push for stronger agency autonomy and authority. A second prominent finding was that bilateral donor relationships did remarkably better in helping the agencies with their strategic mission. Perhaps bilateral LTA and STI perform better because of a better understanding of the political and economic realities these agencies face or because these donors provide aid through developed world competition agencies. Our suggestion is that multilateral donor agencies work hard to overcome deficiencies that their organizational structure presents to recipient agencies. Overall, our analysis of technical assistance efforts in one field of complex regulation (antitrust) may prove relevant to policies of how to make assistance more effective across regulatory fields.

Romantic Reverence and Modernist Representation: Vision, Power, and the Shattered Form of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

When John Grierson coined term documentary, he identified things to be corrected as its staple subject: nascent genre was to be defined in part by its dealing conditions that can be changed by human initiative (qtd. in Stott 9). (1) Effaced in that passive formulation is power structure that made documentary practice both necessary and ethically troublesome. For kinds of conditions that attracted documentarians could rarely be changed by people who inhabited them--who were sometimes themselves identified as things to be corrected. Documentarians are usually outsiders, and though seldom possessed of direct political power, they wield at least intermediary power to represent those who cannot represent themselves. (2) But observation and documentation of otherness from a position of relative power, as Paula Rabinowitz suggests, always entails a degree of voyeurism and manipulation that, at best, may be reciprocal: the documentarian is also subject to mockery as an outsider.... The joke is on everyone.... We are complicit in theft of truth, truth gained as [documentarian] deceives his lying informant (7). While economy floundered in 1930s, slipping millions of Americans down into a new powerlessness, documentary flourished. Partly but not entirely under aegis of New Deal programs, photographers and writers produced a plethora of works documenting ravages of Depression across country. The economic crisis was obviously of political and historical importance, but mood of reading public made poverty a marketable subject as well. Thus in 1936 business monthly Fortune sent James Agee and Walker Evans to produce an illustrated feature on tenant farmers in Alabama. The initial product of that assignment was declared unfit for pages of magazine; ultimate product, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, finally published in 1941, is strangest documentary work of that era. Agee threw himself into project with an intensity his editor could hardly have anticipated. He composed an unflinching record not just of his desperately impoverished subjects but of problems with any such record--particularly exercise of power it entails and limits of representational fidelity. Agee interrogates every premise and presumption of documentary practice and condemns his own complicity; he charges himself with violation, betrayal, and abysmal failure, and his readers with sentimentality, fatuity, and bad faith. The 400-odd pages of Famous Men can be seen as a case study in how modernist self-consciousness hopelessly dissolves political clarity, but Agee's tortured scruples have elicited more respect than dismissal. Academic critics largely accept both his anatomy of ethical problems of documentary representation and his apparent conclusion about them: that inevitably fragmentary and distorted representation of lives of oppressed for commercial publication impudent, seems traitorous in deepest: and to do less badly seems impossible (88)--and yet not to investigate and represent at all is to betray ... still worse (89). In short, damned if you do, but damneder if you don't. Assuming, then, that Agee accepts that violations of social documentary are justified by its potential to prompt remedial action, commentary on Famous Men has been largely devoted to identifying textual and photographic strategies Agee and Evans use to mitigate imbalance of power between themselves and their subjects. This focus, however, leads us to overlook one of most pervasive concerns of text. If Agee is working on premise that documentary representation, though necessarily distorted, may lead to remedial action, why does he spend so much time straining toward representational fidelity, as though perfect mimesis of tenant farmers and their conditions of life would in itself achieve something significant? …

The New Nationalism and the Strategic Architecture of Northeast Asia

[ 38 ] asia policy The New Nationalism and the Strategic Architecture of Northeast Asia Francis Fukuyama While Northeast Asia has been a relatively peaceful and prosperous part of the world for the last two generations, there are developments unfolding in the region that can have destabilizing consequences. This should forceU.S.policymakerstothinkaboutwhetherthelegacysecurityarchitecture for the region, inherited from the Cold War, is adequate to meet new needs arising from these developments. The most troubling development is not North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons—a serious problem about which much has been written— but the upsurge of nationalism in the three main countries of the region: China, South Korea, and Japan. This new nationalism is likely to exacerbate in a very concrete way tensions now simmering beneath the surface, making an issue like North Korean nuclear weapons much more dangerous and difficult to handle. This author is not offering any particular insights about the nature of the newnationalisminChinaandSouthKoreaexcepttonotethatinbothcountries the upsurge in nationalism appears to be associated with generational change. That is, those who have been the most assertive in pushing a nationalist agenda (e.g., the campaign that collected some 22 million signatures in China to keep Japan out of the UN Security Council, or those opposing U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula and promoting an accommodation with North Korea) tend to be younger people who did not directly experience either the Pacific War or the Korean War. Both better educated and more prosperous, this generation can take the peace and prosperity they have enjoyed more for granted than can their parents. The passage of time thus has not softened nationalist attitudes but hardened them. This author has much greater direct knowledge of the nature of new nationalism in Japan. Perhaps the most important point to note is that nationalism is not new: the problem in Japan is not that there has never been a full and open debate in that country that appropriately assigned blame for the debacle of the Pacific War. The real significance of former prime minister Francis Fukuyama is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, and Director of SAIS’ International Development program. He is also Chairman of the editorial board of a new magazine, The American Interest. His latest book is America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006). He is available at . [ 39 ] roundtable • pursuing security in a dynamic northeast asia Koizumi’s visits to the shrine lies not in the symbolism of the twelve class-A war criminals buried there but rather in the Yushukan military museum next to the shrine. Yushukan presents the standard nationalist narrative about the war, which maintains that Japan not only was more a victim than a victimizer but also was liberating Asia from European domination and that Japan’s behavior was not different from that of any other colonial great power. If the one point of view on the war presented by Yushukan museum were just one among many, it might be defensible as an unfortunate but aberrant point of view in an otherwise pluralistic society. The problem is that the Yushukan is the only museum in contemporary Japan dealing with Japan’s twentieth century history and that successive governments have hidden behind the fact that it is run by a religious foundation to protect the museum’s status. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese were never able to break decisively with the prewar narrative, and until the Japanese do so their neighbors will continue to have suspicions of Japanese intentions. Why is this longstanding nationalist narrative making a comeback now? There are two structural reasons for the timing. The first has to do with the collapse of the left in Japanese politics. The Japan Socialist Party was always an obstacle to constitutional revision of Article 9—or a shift to more nationalistic policies—but its collapse in the 1990s has encouraged a broad shift to the right. Second, the long-term trend line of Chinese power is clear to Japan: while the Japanese economy is still several times the size of China’s, relative power positions will change in...

Europe, America and the Unity of International Law

Is international law Europeanized? If so, what are the implications of such Europeanization for the unity and coherence of international law? This paper claims, first, that the application of international law by domestic courts in Europe does not threaten the unity of international law. There may be good reasons for domestic courts not to give effect to international law, based on democratic legitimacy, internal balance of powers or reciprocity with other nations. Yet, the risk of fragmentation or inconsistent interpretations is not one of them. Second, the definition and pursuit of a European agenda or European approach to international law does not threaten the unity of international law. Europe must shed its reluctance to define, and aggressively pursue, such agenda based on European values and interests. Third, and most importantly, when scratching the surface of today's conventional wisdom of Europe as the defender of international law and America as its antithesis, the attitudes, mental framework and reflexes as well as prevailing concerns are strikingly similar across the Atlantic. Most differences in approach are explained not by inherent, substantive disagreements between Europe and the US, but rather by relative power positions and internal constitutional features.

Bullying in the workplace

Bullying in the workplace

Health promotion: a practice framework for midwives

A re-orientation of health policy over the last decade (e.g. DH, 1992, DH, 1999a; DH, 1999b; DH, 2000) has formally put health promotion and;public health on the midwives' agenda. For midwives to address this contemporary challenge effectively, a framework is required that can be used to guide, map and contextualize health promotion intervention. This article offers one such framework for consideration and seeks to articulate the nature and function of four models of health promotion and how they can be used in practice, and the relative positions of power held by practitioner and client. In translating these models into practice. The intention is to help move the debate beyond any narrow or traditional view of health promotion as simple information or advice giving, and highlight the need for a repertoire of approaches and a framework for intervention in the modern arena of midwifery.

The Home Carrier Advantage in Civil Aviation

This paper analyzes the relative economic power position of home carriers in hub-and-spoke systems. Hub-and-spoke systems may lower costs on densely traveled routes and enable economically viable operations on less densely traveled routes. The reverse side is probably that carriers enjoy significant market power at their home base, often labeled the home carrier advantage. The paper offers a concise overview of the literature in this field, and addresses next empirically this issue for European home carriers. We found empirically that at least some European carriers charge premiums for flights originating from their hubs. The hub premiums of Lufthansa, Swissair and Air France are significantly higher than those of the other companies in our sample.

Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours by Kathryn A. Smith (review)

REVIEWS 305 Further fictions appear in David A. Wilson’s witty consideration of Mother Shipton, a Yorkshire prophetess and sage whose 1448 foretellings were published to great acclaim in 1862. Further research (and a deathbed confession) revealed that the collected writings of Mother Shipton arrived from the pen of a nineteenth-century confidence man. There is, however, evidence that the myth of Mother Shipton was prevalent much earlier, perhaps as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Wilson argues that the reality of Shipton’s existence is insignificant when seen in relation to the importance of her legend. Even if she were merely a conglomeration of oral tales and half-baked predictions, her legacy is “part of a continuum of adjusting the product to suit the market and securing the best possible prophet” (322). Regardless of the result of ‘adjusting the product,’ whether it is a legal document, a prophecy, a marriage, a play, or a political role, each article in this volume pays particular attention to the ways in which human ingenuity sometimes runs amok. While some essays are heavy on exposition, perhaps that is unavoidable when addressing such a broad topic as general fraud. Each article essentially builds around a case study, and the specific details of each case are engagingly presented and expounded upon. That being said, further exploration of the ramifications of the fraud or scam would not be amiss in certain of the articles. Each piece in its own right is highly specific and particular, often addressing only one text. Read individually, each treatise is a concise research piece on a specific moment. Read together as a collection, “Shell Games” provides a fascinating overview of the beliefs, the tensions, and the politics of a world in transition and peoples in confusion. Ingenuity and courage are here, as are outright villainy, corrupt courts, and charlatans. In this book, truth is better than fiction, because the truth may be a fiction. KATHRYN B. FALZARENO, English, UCLA Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England : Three Women and their Books of Hours (London: British Library and University of Toronto Press 2003) xix + 364 pp., ill. Kathryn A. Smith’s new volume considering three important insular books of hours from the fourteenth century and their original patrons is an exhaustively researched and generously illustrated synthesis of diverse recent scholarship concerning books of hours, female art patronage of the late Middle Ages, and the construction of medieval identity and spirituality. Smith’s writing is a congenial and lucid vehicle for a prodigious amount of information. Particularly remarkable is the ease with which the author makes the minutiae of heraldic devices, genealogies, and ephemeral medieval alliances coexist on the page with post-modern theories of identity and contemporary literary criticism. The first chapter serves largely to introduce what is known through various sources (largely legal records and the horae themselves) about the production of the manuscripts and their original patrons. Smith underlines the importance of the Hours as biographical sources, stating that the books of hours in question “do more than supplement and enrich the sparse information available about their owners: they are the most tangible and substantial evidence of their owners ’ very existence” (11). This chapter is particularly dense with information regarding the various heraldic elements found throughout the manuscripts, as REVIEWS 306 well as conjecture as to the significance of the many familial and feudal relationship represented by them. Smith emphasizes the often-retrospective importance of these coats of arms, which might both proclaim the illustrious ancestry and/or alliances of the book’s patron and help him or her remember to include the relevant individuals or families in their prayers. Further questioning of the manuscripts reveals a number of clues which help to piece together a vision of the patrons’ lives at the time when each of the hours was commissioned: the ascendancy of Isabel de Byron (patron of the Neville of Hornby Hours) to a position of relative autonomy and power through her widowhood; Hawisia de Bois’s enduring attention to and identification with her natal family’s golden era; the seemingly-harmonious spiritual outlook of the de Lisles which led them to request...

Assignment of Weights to the Member States of the European Union in Order to Model Their Relative Power Positions

Relative power of the member states of the European Union is expressed by weights assigned to the states on the basis of five criteria: population, gross domestic product, national area, political stability, and contributions to the European culture and civilization. The underlying idea is that ratios of these weights should approximate ratios of the five corresponding indicators. In addition, relative power can be moderated when the large member states save their power for issues about which they care more, and it can be amplified when the large states coordinate their efforts in order to dominate a coalition of smaller states. The results of the analysis are used to sketch a power distribution in the enlarged European Union.

Rights, region and identity: exploring the ambiguities of South Africa's regional human rights role

The ANC government's regional human rights role has often been portrayed as confused, contradictory, and marked by failure, in light of South Africa's commitment to make human rights a central ‘pillar’ of its post‐apartheid foreign policy, and its position of relative power in the region. We argue that the government's choices of ‘quiet diplomacy’, its preference for multilateralism, and its sensitivity to considerations of ‘African solidarity’ become more intelligible when interpreted through the prism of the identity imperatives bearing on the ‘new’ South Africa. Without discounting the explanatory power of interest‐based analyses, we seek to broaden the debate and highlight the multi‐dimensionality of South Africa's rights‐based foreign policy. In particular, the government finds itself torn between contradictory commitments to both African solidarity and global integration, implying distinct developmental models and rights emphases (social and economic versus civil and political) respectively. We illustrate the interpretive purchase of the complex yet powerful concept of identity for explaining these dynamics through case studies of South Africa's response to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zimbabwe.

Transforming Institutions among Pastoralists: Inequality and Land Privatization

This article analyzes how a community of Samburu pastoralists in Kenya transformed their land tenure system from communal to private ownership. It demonstrates the dynamic nature of institutional change processes by examining exogenous and endogenous factors that created conditions conducive to change. Inequalities and conflicting interests among different social groups provided impetus for change as well as ammunition to attack or defend common property. Privatization emerged from conflict among social groups, predicated on the relative power positions of the parties—positions that shifted over time in response to strategic actions of individuals and groups. In turn, the adoption of private property altered social relationships, creating new norms regarding land ownership, individual rights, and authority. [Keywords: institutions, Africa, pastoralism, property rights, social norms]

Framing Reality: Shaping the News Coverage of the 1996 Tennessee Debate on Teaching Evolution

This study triangulated research methods to analyze how the public debate on a controversial issue was framed, and by whom, as a means of understanding the process and outcome of that debate. Its findings support the idea that public debates are framed by all involved parties, not just the news media. It also considered how the relative power position held by each side in this debate may have affected their interactions with the news media.

CIGARETTE SMOKING AND THE DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF ADOLESCENT GIRLS: A DISCOURSE OF RESISTANCE?

The consequences of smoking for women are of particular concern in light of recent observations that more adolescent females than males are taking up smoking. To date, few studies have explored gender differences in depth, but we do know that males and females smoke for different reasons and that current smoking prevention programs may be differentially effective depending on gender. Recent evidence suggests that the school environment may have an important influence on smoking. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to explore gender differences in the relationships between cigarette smoking and adolescents' experiences of school climate and their relationships with the school and significant adults in their lives. A secondary data analysis was done using a data set derived from a student survey conducted in 20 secondary schools in British Columbia (BC), Canada, which included 8,179 students in grades 8 to12. Analyses were primarily descriptive. The results demonstrated that adolescent girls who smoke are more likely than either males or nonsmoking females to experience powerlessness in their school environment and to feel considerably less attachment to the school. Female smokers are more likely than males or female nonsmokers to be engaged in oppositional, distanced, and unsatisfactory relationships with important adults in their lives, particularly those who are in positions of relative power and authority. These findings are discussed in relation to critical and feminist perspectives that suggest smoking is part of a larger discourse of resistance within schools. The implications for health practitioners are discussed.

Self-Initiated Status Transfer

In collectively oriented task groups in which people are differentiated on status, the status characteristics tend to determine the relative power and prestige position of the group members. The current study suggests that it may be possible for a task group member, using his or her association with an accepted higher status “source,” to influence other members of an equal status group. The authors examine influence patterns in task groups when one group member is associated with a higher status person or source. Forty undergraduate students participated in a standardized experiment in which both the participants and their partners were equally low in status. Results indicate that being associated with a high-status, high-ability non-group member raises the status of an otherwise low-status partner.

Democracy and Capitalism: Are They Compatible in the Long-Run

Starting from a discussion of Schumpeter's analysis of the relationships of capitalism, socialism and democracy, it is shown that, in a complex society, democracy is only compatible with a decentralized market economy with safe property rights. But in time democracy shows a tendency to weaken the capitalist system by more and more regulations and an ever-increasing share of government (including the social security system) in GDP. This tendency is a consequence of political competition because of the development of interest groups and the presence of rationally uninformed voters. It leads to a weakening of efficiency, investment, innovation and thus to lower growth rates of GDP. But in time forces opposing this development arise. First, because of the negative consequences of growing government the welfare and regulatory state is bound to move into a crisis in the long run. Thus innovative politicians have a chance to win the support of a majority of voters for reform projects, who perceive finally the ever-increasing burden of higher taxes and regulations and realize that these burdens are not worth the benefits bestowed on them. Second, there are other states with lower taxes and less unnecessary regulations which show higher growth rates of GDP, and gain thus relative advantages in international political and military competition since they can command greater resources with the passage of time. To maintain their relative international power position, reforms are thus considered necessary by rulers. This may be helped by pressure resulting from comparisons of the standards of living done by citizens.