Social science research - recent publications
A sample of recent work by Reading's spcial scientists includes:
Publication titles:
- The Legal Regulation of Pregnancy and Parenting in the Labour Market
- Economics of the Caspian Oil and Gas Wealth Companies, Governments, Policies
- War Child: Children Caught in Conflict
- Children: the invisible victims of war
- Sex Markets: A Denied Industry
- Demanding Sex: Critical Reflections on the Regulation of Prostitution
- Reputation and Defamation
- The English Wool Market c. 1230-1327
Dr C. Grace James, Lecturer, School of Law
The Legal Regulation of Pregnancy and Parenting in the Labour Market
(Routledge-Cavendish, November 2008)
Drawing on findings from a large scale Nuffield Foundation funded research project, this book aims to deconstruct law's engagement with the interception between pregnancy, early parenting and the workplace.
Transformations within both the labour market and family life, as well as relevant theoretical debates, theories and critiques, provide the context for this investigation. Within this context, the book reveals a fundamentally high level of pregnancy-parenting / workplace conflicts, the nature and implications of which are explored in order to highlight how childbirth can still cause tensions that upset workplace equilibriums to the point of relationship dissolution, impacting not only upon the lives of individuals but also upon wider political goals of social justice and substantive gender equality. A 'litigation gap', a gap between the numbers of people experiencing conflict and the numbers seeking legal redress, is revealed, which underscores the inability of the current legal framework to effectively regulate pregnancy-parenting / workplace conflicts.
The book investigates potential reasons for law's failure to provide adequate legal protection: assessing relevant policy directions, the substance and application of the legislation as well as the mechanics of the employment dispute resolution system. This consideration offers a vehicle for investigating the legal regulation of pregnancy-parenting / workplace relationships, rather than the search for an 'answer'.
However, the process of this exploration as a whole does reveal various lacunae in the legal regulation of pregnancy-parenting / workplace relationships in general and conflict resolution in particular. Overall, the findings and wider discussions bolster feminist challenges to law's innate claims to neutrality and rationality and the ability of legal rights, alone, to ever provide adequate solutions in this context.
Dr Yelena Kalyuzhnova, Senior Lecurer in Economics, Henley Business School
Economics of the Caspian Oil and Gas Wealth Companies, Governments, Policies
(Palgrave Macmillan, August 2008)
This book focuses on three Caspian economies - Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan – and explores the economic challenges involved in managing hydrocarbon wealth, ultimately the most important issues facing a resource-rich economy as it develops an exploration and production strategy. The role of the operating companies, and the prudential management of hydrocarbon wealth in the Caspian Sea region, are increasingly important topics. And discussions must now begin within government in resource-rich countries with regard to designing optimal energy policies. This book explores the crucial issues of oil and gas wealth in the Caspian region, and draws on the author's first-hand experience in dealing with the governments of the region, and her inside knowledge of the role and activities of major companies in the area.
Dr Kalyuzhnova's expertise in the area is also reflected in her editorship of a 2008 Symposium on the management of oil and gas revenues in Comparative Economic Systems, a leading international journal focusing on economic policy issues in newly emerging market economies. All the papers of the symposium highlight challenges that can typically confront policy-makers in resource-rich emerging market economies. They share a common theme: that well-designed policies can make a crucial difference in unlocking potential gains from natural resource endowment, while flawed policies may deepen distortions and seriously damage the prospects for economic growth. Energy endowment is a given; but whether it ends up as a blessing or a curse depends crucially on the quality of decisions made by policy-makers, and the transparency of the frameworks they put in place.
Economics of the Caspian Oil and Gas Wealth - publication details
Dr Martin Parsons, Director of the Research Centre for Evacuee and War Child Studies; Senior Lecturer, Institute of Education
War Child: Children Caught in Conflict (The History Press, March 2008. ISBN. 978-0-7524-4293-8)
'In September 1939 nearly 400,000 children were evacuated from London, followed by many more from other cities in the UK. Many of them were unaccompanied, and for most it was the first time
away from their parents. Yet this well-known disruption of childhood is a drop in the ocean compared to the effects conflict continues to have on children throughout the world. Children have always been the victims of war, and this fascinating new history examines the effects on conflict on
those from Britain, Germany and Finland during and after the Second World War, as well as those caught up in more recent conflicts in West Africa and other areas. Taking first hand accounts from survivors, diaries and authentic documents, this eye-opening history reflects the untold story of
hundreds of thousands of children whose lives were affected by the horrors of war'.
Children: the invisible victims of war. An Interdisciplinary Study. (DSM. October 2008. ISBN 0954722949)
'Images of children living in war zones, being evacuated from them, or falling victim to armed conflict have been used to illustrate histories and media coverage for many years. What has been less evident is a consideration of children's experience of such conflict as a serious subject of study in its own right rather than an appendage to what are perceived as more weighty 'adult' perspectives. In this book Dr Martin Parsons has brought together some of the world's leading experts in the field of War Child Studies and War Related Trauma in order to provide new insights into what war means to children. Many of the contributors are war children themselves. The effect that their experiences had on their own lives and their families effectively invalidates claims
that, given time, children simply forget or are able to put the past behind them; rather, their stories add a major new dimension to our understanding of conflict'.
Dr Marina Della Giusta, Senior Lecurer in Economics, Henley Business School
Sex Markets: A Denied Industry (with Maria Di Tommaso and Steinar Strom) (Routledge, March 2008)
Demanding Sex: Critical Reflections on the Regulation of Prostitution (with Vanessa Munro) (Ashgate, 2008)
Among economists generally, and also to a large extent feminist economists, there has until recently been a curious reluctance to engage with prostitution, and yet this is an area of socio-economic life that mobilises large numbers of people and vast amounts of financial resources internationally. It also involves many core economic and social science research issues, includinginformation and power asymmetries in exchange, the relationship between formal and informal markets, the role of regulation in fragmented markets, the dynamics of international labour mobility, the allocation of resources within the household, women's entrepreneurship, and pathways out of poverty and social exclusion.
Marina Della Giusta has recently published two books on these issues. Sex markets: a denied industry uses economic analysis to explore the supply and demand of prostitution. Its approach gives a central role to stigma and reputation effects for both clients and prostitutes, and assumes in line with existing empirical evidence that demand for sex and demand for paid sex are not perfect substitutes. It analyses empirically the characteristics of demand for prostitution services by a sample of clients of street sex workers in the US, and finds that demand for control plays an important role.
Demanding Sex: Critical Reflections on the Regulation of Prostitution provides a collection of papers on similar themes. Its focus on the supply/demand dynamic brings into play a range of other societal, economic and psychological factors such as the social construction of sexuality, the viability of alternative choices for prostitutes and clients, and the impact of regulatory regimes on the provision of sexual services. The factors which underlie each component of the supply/demand dyad are also studied and an examination is made of their dynamic interrelation. The collection emphasizes the importance of alerting policy makers to the evidence emerging from empirical studies conducted in different fields of enquiry, in the hope of moving beyond polarity and politics at the local, national and international level.
https://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9747&edition_id=10640
Dr Lawrence McNamara, Reader, School of Law
Reputation and Defamation (Oxford University Press, 2007)
The proposition that the tort of defamation protects reputation has long been axiomatic in the law. The axiom's endurance is surprising: for over a century it has been observed that the law is riddled with inconsistencies and, moreover, the courts and the scholarly literature have rarely discussed exactly what reputation is and how judgments about reputation are made. Reputation and Defamation develops a theory of reputation and uses it to analyse, evaluate and propose a revision of the law. It is the first book to present a comprehensive study of what reputation is, how it functions, and how it is and should be protected under the law.
The study shows that, contrary to the legal orthodoxy, it was not until the nineteenth century that defamation law aimed and functioned to protect reputation. Consequently, the historically derived tests for what is defamatory do not always protect reputation adequately or appropriately. The author argues that the 'shun and avoid' and 'ridicule' tests should be discarded. The principal 'lowering the estimation' test is more appropriate but needs re-working. Christian tradition and Victorian moralism are embedded in the idea of 'the right-thinking person' that provides the test's conceptual foundations, but these are problematic in an era of moral diversity. Instead, 'the right-thinking person' should be associated with an inclusive liberal premise of equal moral worth and a shared commitment to moral diversity; any departure from this must be justified on sound, expressly stated ethical grounds. That demand serves to protect reputation appropriately and effectively in an age of moral diversity.
The book was shortlisted for the 2008 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.
Link to publisher's web site: http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199231454
Adrian R. Bell, Senior Lecturer in History of Finance, ICMA; Chris Brooks, Professor in Finance, ICMA; and Paul Dryburgh
The English Wool Market c. 1230-1327 (Cambridge University Press, August, 2007)
The wool market was extremely important to the English medieval economy and wool dominated the English export trade from the late thirteenth century to its decline in the late fifteenth century. Wool was at the forefront of the establishment of England as a European political and economic power and this volume is the first study of the medieval wool market in over 20 years. It investigates in detail the scale and scope of advance contracts for the sale of wool; the majority of these agreements were formed between English monasteries and Italian merchants, and the book focuses on the data contained within them. The pricing structures and market efficiency of the agreements are examined, employing practices from modern finance. A detailed case study of the impact of entering into such agreements on medieval English monasteries is also presented, using the example of Pipewell Abbey in Northamptonshire.
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521859417