Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum: Delineating the Bounds of the Alien Tort Statute

This commentary previews the upcoming Supreme Court case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., in which the Court will address questions regarding the Alien Tort Statute and its applicability to foreign conduct and foreign litigants. The case will require the Court to reexamine the bounds of a long-ago established tort doctrine in light of more modern considerations and developments in international law

Week One in the Galapagos

Postcard from Michael McGrath, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program at the Galápagos Academic Institute of the Arts and Sciences in the Galápagos Islands, Ecuado

Learning German Culture

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Courtney McGrath describes her observations during her study abroad program at Nürtingen-Geislingen University in Nürtingen, Germany

"And I was a stockman myself…" Interpreting Aboriginal Women’s Work

Social historians concerned with race relations studies are confronted by enormous gaps in evidence when their research relates to non-literate peoples. Consequently, interviews, oral histories, and most valuably; life histories, are becoming increasingly recognized as essential fonns of historical evidence. C-1.tural and linguistic barrierEr~onfronted in the collection of such personal oral evidence. The most serious obstacles, however, might be overcome by resorting to an interdisciplinary approach involving the collaboration of linguists, anthropologists, and historians . This is already beginning and should greatly enrich the study of race relations in Australia. To my knowledge there has not yet appeared a substantial socio-historical analysis of post-contact Aboriginal history which utilizes oral evidence as a major source. My research into the role of Aborigines in the Northern Territory cattle industry 1911 to 1939 presents an opportunity to do so, as there are numerous o1der people living on northern settlements who worked on stations during the latter half of the period under focus. Several have already been willing to co-operate and share their pre-war reminiscences

Organisational culture and information systems implementation: a critical perspective

This research explores how information systems (IS) implementation is accomplished when cultural change of an organisation is attempted and what this accomplishment means for those touched by it. Efforts of this kind are being made in the UK National Health Service (NHS), Where modernisation programmes involving technological rationalisation and change are aiming to make the NHS more responsive to contemporary public demands. This study focuses on the ambulance services and specifically on a history of IS implementation efforts over 20 year at the largest and most appraised of the English services, the London Ambulance Service (LAS). A perceived need for cultural change involving the use of advanced information technologies is pervasive in managerial and ministerial discourses about modernising the health service. Yet the way that ambulance services are regulated and monitored has given rise to a modernisation programme in which cultural change and IS implementation have been conceived largely instrumentally in terms of achieving performance targets. Moreover, goals to which the modernisation efforts aspire are at most partially realised. Organisational change is uneven, and the performance improvements achieved are contradictory, and this is not only true in London but elsewhere in the UK. Drawing from organisational theory and critical social theory, past IS implementation efforts at the LAS are reinterpreted in light of recent developments, with contributions to theory and practice in mind. The theoretical contribution rests in exploring how emotion as well as rationality may be conceptualised to examine historically and culturally constituted working practices. Implications for practice address how IS implementation can give rise to cultural fragmentation, and also how professional identity can constrain IS innovation. Finally, the research contributes to a current debate about the future for ambulance services and the mechanisms used to evaluate their performance