Migration Intermediaries and Codes of Conduct: Temporary Migrant Workers in Australian Horticulture

Over recent decades, developments in network governance have seen governments around the world cede considerable authority and responsibility to commercial migration intermediaries for recruiting and managing temporary migrant labour. Correspondingly, a by-product of network governance has been the emergence of soft employment regulation in which voluntary codes of conduct supplement hard (enforceable) legal employment standards. This paper explores these developments in the context of temporary migrant workers employed in Australian horticulture. First the paper analyses the growing use of temporary migrant labour in this industry. It then describes how different types of intermediaries interact with this workforce. The paper then outlines both hard and soft employment regulations, and contrasts them with actual employment conditions, questioning how a network governance approach has affected this vulnerable workforce. The paper concludes that changes in network governance of migration and employment relations have emasculated formal legal regulation, leaving market forces to operate without effective or ethical constraints at the expense of the public good.     

Counting the cost: the reserve price scheme for wool 1970‐2001

This paper provides a policy commentary on the collapse in 1991 of the Australian Reserve Price Scheme for wool. A key cause of the collapse in the Scheme was a change in the RPS's governance arrangements, which led to increased political pressures to raise prices to unsustainable levels. In addition, in this paper an estimation has been made of the direct, upfront costs of the operation of the scheme, drawing on the financial accounts of the various agencies operating the RPS and subsequent wool stockpile. This was undertaken to determine the scale of the policy failure.     

Do Court Decisions Drive the Federal Trade Commission’s Enforcement Policy on Merger Settlements?

Mergers are generally conglomerate in nature with only minor (if any) horizontal overlaps. Under U.S. law, an enforcement agency may challenge any anticompetitive aspect of the merger and the consequent delay associated with litigation would impose costs on the firm. These costs may give the enforcement agency “leverage” to extract a settlement even when the firm would prevail in court. This paper explores whether the FTC’s decisions to challenge transactions approximate the case law. We find that the representative enforcement regimes of the FTC and the courts are remarkably similar, although the FTC credits efficiencies, while courts consider buyer sophistication as a mitigating factor.     

Detroit’s Municipal Bankruptcy: Racialised Geographies of Austerity

ABSTRACT

Urban geographer Jamie Peck theorises austerity urbanism as a dominant state practice of financially ‘restructuring’ the fiscal agendas of local governments in order to reduce government budget deficits in times of economic recessions. This project seeks to investigate the role of race in the context of austerity urbanism in Detroit following the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. What is clear is that subprime lending in Detroit was explicitly a raced event. Analysis of austerity politics in Detroit demonstrates that the city is clearly spatially divided along racialised lines. Black city pensioners, former public sector employees, and ‘deliquent taxpayers’ were blamed for Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy in narratives centering on their bloated and generous benefits during the city’s financial decline. The policy outcomes of austerity programmes during the city’s financial crisis impacted racialised, poor communities, specifically the outcomes of privatising the city’s water services that led to state-sanctioned water shut-offs. This paper explores the ways in which race figures in the causes (race-based credit redlining/subprime super-inclusion lending practices) in the way the crisis was narrated to wrongly apportion blame to the racialised poor and city pensioners, and in the effects of the crisis, where water shut-offs wrought punishment on the racialised poor.     

American institutionalism and its British connections

Abstract

This paper examines the connections between American institutionalists and a number of ‘non-Marshallian’ British economists and social scientists, several of whom were associated with the Fabian Society or the London School of Economics or both. Specifically, the links between institutionalists such as Walton Hamilton and Wesley Mitchell and British social scientists such as John A. Hobson, Henry Clay, R.A. Tawney, William Beveridge and Graham Wallas. It is argued that these connections were related to common views on the importance of institutions, compatible methodological views, common interest in questions of social value, shared policy concerns (particularly unemployment and the coal industry), shared interests in the development of new institutions for education and research in economics and shared connections with the funding activities of the Rockefeller Foundation. These connections were much more extensive than has usually been realized. Some reasons for this British group not to form into a movement similar to American institutionalism are explored.     

Service line reporting in a National Health Service foundation trust: an initial assessment of its relevance and applicability

Financial management and control systems are key components of effective management in NHS organizations. Systems have recently been enhanced by the introduction of service line reporting (SLR) in NHS foundation trusts (NHSFT). This article explores the extent to which SLR has been introduced into one NHSFT and what achievements have been made so far. It also considers the extent to which the SLR approach aligns with modern thinking about budgetary systems.     

Regulatory fit effects of gender and marketing message content

Many US adults do not get enough daily physical activity. To change behavior, governments and other agencies design marketing messages encouraging more physical activity. A lab experiment draws on Regulatory Focus Theory to examine health communication's persuasive effects on physical activity. This study identifies gender differences in chronic regulatory focus and shows that congruence between message regulatory focus and the message recipient's gender is effective, particularly for males. Results also show that emotions mediate regulatory fit effects on intentions. Further, chronic regulatory focus mediates these effects on emotions. Results inform implications for theory as well as for practitioners who design health-marketing messages.