Russia, as part of an international comparative examination of health and safety regulatory enforcement in the shipping industry. We discuss the difficulties faced by fieldworkers in ensuring personal safety and maintaining rapport with research respondents in conditions characterized by danger and crisis; a situation made worse by the murder of one of our key gatekeepers. We develop a provisional conceptual framework which draws distinctions between the 'frontier'-like nature of settings associated with some research areas, the challenges posed by researching institutions faced by various kinds of crisis, and the sensitivity of the specific research topic in question. We argue that a combination of these dimensions produce particular social spaces, which we term 'risksaturated', which are especially corrosive of relations with respondents, and which may pose very real physical threats to fieldworkers. K E Y W O R D S : crisis-ridden institutions, dangerous fieldwork, respondent rapport, risk, sensitive research topics A RT I C L E 155
This article considers the prospects for effective regulation of emerging globalized industries by examining the effectiveness of the 'smart regulation' approach associated with the port state control enforcement regime for seafarers' health and safety. Smart regulation seeks to generate incentive structures that promote proactive compliance by ship operators. Drawing on an international comparative study, which included extensive observation of ship inspections in India, Russia and the UK, it is suggested that the main reason why the hoped-for 'market in virtue' is only weakly present turns on the perceived and actual inconsistencies in the implementation of the regulatory regime. These contrasts exist cross-nationally, and are manifested in terms of differences in the local character of enforcement practice, and in levels of trust in national regulatory administrations. The strong overall regulatory framework, the political will to avoid damaging maritime accidents, and the well-developed system of port state control, all suggest that the shipping industry may be taken as a test case for the possibility of effective smart governance of a globalized industry. The limited gains achieved in this sector thus bode ill for effective future governance of other emerging globalizing industries. SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES
Like other sciences, criminology is international and global. But it is well known that for many decades Russian criminology was isolated from scholarship in other countries and under rigorous political and ideological control. However, during the 1960s a ‘parallel’ theoretical and empirical criminology evolved in the former Soviet Union without party or state approval. This parallel tradition both accumulated empirical data and advanced a theoretical perspective which, in contrast with Soviet ideology, saw crime as a social phenomenon influenced by factors such as inequality, intergroup conflicts, strain arising from blocked opportunities, living conditions, and so on. This tradition emerged from underground only at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s when, thanks to Gorbachev’s Perestroika[rebuilding, reconstruction], Russian scholars gained the freedom to teach, to carry out research and to foster professional contacts with foreign colleagues. Emerging from the ‘parallel tradition’, this article summarizes facts about contemporary Russian society that constitute the essential framework for understanding the crime situation. It discusses crime trends, organized crime, drug abuse and corruption. Finally it provides some basic information about social control and punishment in Russia.
Long a tradition in the USA, surveys of citizen perceptions of the police are beginning to gain prominence in emerging democracies. Recently, citizen surveys using common items were conducted in New York and St Petersburg, Russia. This paper reports on a cross-national analysis of data on citizen perceptions of the police using data from these two surveys. The analyses include comparisons of voluntary and involuntary contacts with the police, perceptions of police effectiveness, and perceptions of police misconduct. Results suggest that residents of St Petersburg are more likely to be stopped by the police, while residents of New York are more likely to contact the police for assistance with crime and other neighborhood problems. Police in New York were generally seen as more effective than their counterparts in St Petersburg. In both cities, roughly half of those surveyed believed that the police engaged in misconduct.
Deviant behaviour is one of the most precise barometers of the social, economic, political and moral climate in a society. In this article the author analyses different forms of deviant behaviour in St Petersburg including violent crime, property crime, suicide and drug and alcohol addiction. Two stages in the dynamics of social deviation are identified during the transition period from 'socialist totalitarianism' to democracy. The first stage - from mid-1985 to the end of 1987 - can be characterized by the spiritual and psychological elevation of the population, a sense of liberation and release and the expectation of improvement in standards of living. During this period the level of the main forms of deviant behaviour receded. The second stage begins with the deceleration of economic and political reforms in Russia. This process has been accompanied by an impoverishment in the level and the quality of life and in the basic components of socio-demographic development and, as a result, by increasing levels of deviant behaviour. The advent of a third stage of economic, social and political stability is difficult to forecast. Our analysis of the official statistics and interviews with the people of St Petersburg leads to the following observation: the absolute and relative quantitative components of the basic forms of deviant behaviour have risen intensely and are near to critical. In addition, organized criminality has reached the level of criminal communities which control not only the great number of criminal organizations and groups but also the economic structures. On the one side, a process of criminalization of business is taking place, on the other, the politicization of organized criminality. In the author's opinion, this tendency of the social, political and economic processes militates against any optimistic prognosis for the immediate future. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.
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