John Dixon

Middle East Technical University | METU · Department of Political Science and Public Administration

Research on segregation has expanded beyond its traditional focus on the residential demography of cities to explore how, why and with what consequences segregation manifests within activity spaces outside the home. As part of this shift, researchers have become increasingly interested in the time geography of residents' everyday mobility practices...

Developing work on the nature and consequences of negative intergroup contact, this study explores its potential role in sustaining everyday experiences of dehumanization; that is, experiences in which participants report feeling deprived of full human status. As a case study, we explore domestic service relations in a neighbourhood of Pietermaritz...

The social psychology of intergroup relations has emerged largely from studies of how one group of people (e.g., whites) think and feel about another (e.g., blacks). By reducing the social world to binary categories, this approach has provided an effective and efficient methodological framework. However, it has also obscured important features of s...

Institutional structures of segregation typically entrench social inequality and sustain wider patterns of intergroup conflict and discrimination. However, initiatives to dismantle such structures may provoke resistance. Executive proposals to dismantle Northern Ireland’s peace walls by 2023 provide a compelling case study of the nature of such res...

This paper argues that xenophobia in South Africa is entangled in discourses of liberation struggle, which are often used to justify anti-foreigner violence. We first examine some existing academic explanations for xenophobia, namely internalised racism, poverty/inequality, nationalism, and township and informal settlement politics. To avoid determ...

This multi-authored book is intended primarily for university faculty, education administrators, and policymakers in post-socialist Asia and Europe, who might wish to learn from the Bologna Process. The contributors include both policy scholars and education administration professionals with extensive hands-on experience. The main purpose of the bo...

en Lebanon is a small country whose citizens are religiously diverse. It is accommodating 1.5 million refugees from Arab countries. Child poverty is a serious social problem, for it affects child development and has negative outcomes for all children affected. Youth poverty constrains youth achievements. Some 1.35 million Lebanese are living below...

Since independence in 1991, the Kazakhstani government has been aggressively pursuing higher education reform. This has led to the passing of a number of education-related laws and the adaptation of different policies and practices in order to facilitate the government’s initial priority of transitioning to a market economy and more recently, to ac...

This article highlights the objective of the special issue which is to understand the status of public administration in six profiled countries – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey – in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The special issue explores public administration as a concept—the diversity of guiding g...

This chapter tackles the political dimension of place satisfaction, both as a psychological experience and as a conceptual approach to people-place bonds in environmental psychological research. In the first section of the chapter, we locate place satisfaction within a broader set of concepts traditionally used to account for how people feel, think...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive classification of quid pro quo exchange transactions, so as to distinguish the different ways that desired exchange outcomes can be determined and that transactional processes can be conducted. This permits reflection on the generality of the theory of the individual embedded in neocla...

South Africa is particularly interesting in that it has brought groups into contact that had formerly been rigidly separated and reared to fear each other. A central conjecture of social psychology is that contact between groups in disharmony can reduce intergroup hostilities and prejudices. The author's believe that studying the “ecology”, and “mi...

Research on attitudes towards racial equality has identified an apparent paradox, sometimes described as the “Principle-Implementation Gap.” White Americans accept equality as an ideal yet reject interventions designed to achieve that ideal. In this article, we provide a critical review of empirical and theoretical work in the field and outline som...

Research on the contact hypothesis has highlighted the role of contact in improving intergroup relations. Most of this research has addressed the problem of transforming the prejudices of historically advantaged communities, thereby eroding wider patterns of discrimination and inequality. In the present research, drawing on evidence from a cross-se...

Social psychologists typically conceptualize intergroup processes in terms of unequal pairs of social categories, such as an advantaged majority (e.g., 'Whites') and a disadvantaged minority (e.g., 'Blacks'). We argue that this two-group paradigm may obscure the workings of intergroup power by overlooking: (1) the unique dynamics of intergroup rela...

Too many children remain at risk of harm, regrettably, in all too many societies. This is despite the almost universal acceptance of the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Its intention, arguably somewhat naïvely, is to create two state imperatives: to protect children against threats of harm; and to advance their we...

In order to understand when and why social change occurs, we must first understand the psychological processes that lead people to act in ways that sustain or challenge the status quo. This chapter discusses two psychological models of social change: a prejudice reduction model, focused on getting people to like one another more, and a collective a...

Desegregation is a process through which members of formerly separated groups are brought together, often through the removal of institutional barriers to interaction. Two recurring arguments have been presented in favor of desegregation. The first holds that the process promotes intergroup harmony and tolerance; the second holds that it promotes s...

This article develops an identity performance model of prejudice that highlights the creative influence of prejudice expressions on norms and situations. Definitions of prejudice can promote social change or stability when they are used to achieve social identification, explanation, and mobilization. Tacit or explicit agreement about the nature of...

Child protection and welfare have become international issues in a globalized world. Ideas about childhood and the upbringing of children vary widely, depending upon the prevailing economic, socio-cultural, religious, and political contexts. These have had dramatic effects on the way societies value children, and the role acquired by the state in t...

Racial segregation encourages members of historically advantaged groups to form negative intergroup attitudes, which then motivate practices of discrimination that sustain inequality and disadvantage. By implication, interventions designed to increase intergroup contact have been proposed as a means of reducing dominant group prejudices and promoti...

The dissolution of the fundamental dualisms underlying most of the traditional and critical approaches in social psychology lies at the heart of the so-called ‘Psychosocial Studies’. Based on the main assumptions of this framework of epistemological contestation, in this paper we present a re-conceptualisation of the idea of place and of place-expe...

The social construction of human-environment relations is a central concern of an emerging tradition of research on place, which extends the so-called “discursive turn” in social psychology. This research highlights the primary role of everyday linguistic practices in the production of place meanings, challenging the prevailing tendency among envir...

We live in an ever-changing social world, which constantly demands adjustment to our identities and actions. Advances in science, technology and medicine, political upheaval, and economic development are just some examples of social change that can impact upon how we live our lives, how we view ourselves and each other, and how we communicate. Thre...

This paper aims to encourage greater reflexivity about the limits of prejudice reduction as a model of social change, particularly when applied to societies characterised by historically entrenched patterns of inequality. We begin by outlining some underlying values and assumptions of this model. We then elaborate how our research on political atti...

Suicide as a form of political protest is a little studied social phenomenon that cannot be dismissed simply as being irrational or patholognomic. We consider protest suicide to be a meaningful social action as purposive political act intended to change oppressive policies or practices. This paper synthesizes theoretical propositions associated wit...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the accounting standards reforms that have moved the accounting profession away from rules‐based towards principles‐based accounting practice and financial reporting, and to explore the implications for boards of directors of fair value estimates of the unknowable contaminating financial...

The battle over administrative reform is a battle between contending perspectives of who should populate and manage public organizations, or put differently, between definitions of the ideal civil servant. This article reflects upon the hierarchical civil servant ideal-type by exploring its model of man, homo hierarchicus. The article describes hom...

Recovering affect from place identity The construction and management of space has been an important means for securing social privilege. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the use of segregation to produce and maintain racial hierarchy (Cell, 1982). The slogan of 'separate but equal' was employed to defend both Jim Crow segregation in the USA a...

State crimes against democracy (SCADs) (deHaven-Smith, 2006), embracing economic state crimes against democracy (E-SCADs) (Johnston et al., 2010a, 2010b), have been defined by deHaven-Smith (2010) as concerted actions … by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty [with] potential to subvert p...

This response clarifies, qualifies, and develops our critique of the limits of intergroup liking as a means of challenging intergroup inequality. It does not dispute that dominant groups may espouse negative attitudes towards subordinate groups. Nor does it dispute that prejudice reduction can be an effective way of tackling resulting forms of inte...

For most of the history of prejudice research, negativity has been treated as its emotional and cognitive signature, a conception that continues to dominate work on the topic. By this definition, prejudice occurs when we dislike or derogate members of other groups. Recent research, however, has highlighted the need for a more nuanced and “inclusive...

Abstract Neoliberalism is an economic, social, and political philosophy that derives, but significantly deviates, from classical liberalism. It has supreme trust in the marketplace and in the omniscience of market forces. It postulates that poverty is an objectively knowable social phenomenon. It theorizes that poverty's causal explanation is groun...

Being in a state of material poverty can be a persistent or an episodic experience that can be life-threatening, life-restricting, or life-disempowering. When combined with being socially excluded, marginalized, or disadvantaged, it qualifies those in this dual state for membership of the underclass. They are seen, variously, as de-motivated free-r...

This article presents an historical survey of intergroup attitudes in South Africa, tracing social distance scores back to 1934 and semantic differential scores back to 1975. We compare the attitudes of different race groups towards each other over time by standardizing the scores from different historical periods on a common metric. This enables u...

Policies and programs designed to challenge the effects of racial discrimination (such as affirmative action) are hotly contested. Factors which have been proposed to explain opposition to these policies include racial prejudice, group threat and self-interest, and perceptions of intergroup justice. We report the results of two random national tele...

Being in existential poverty means living in a state of, or near, persistent material poverty while also being socially excluded, marginalized, or disadvantaged. It is a life-disempowering experience, one that privileges both immediacy over the future, and welfare over work. This results in learned helplessness, manifesting as a lack of will to tak...

The last thirty years have seen the fundamental re-structuring of many public sectors. Policy-makers looked to markets to overcome political conflicts triggered by the perceived increase in the scarcity of resources, including the once-sacrosanct public domain of social security (Dixon/Hyde 2001; Dixon/Kouzmin 2001a, 2001b; Hyde/ Dixon/Drover 2006)...

A Random Digit Dialing survey (n = 794) examined the interracial contact experiences and racial attitudes of White South Africans. The survey measured racial attitudes not only in terms of individuals' prejudice, but also in terms of their perceptions of group threat, perceived injustice, and support for various government policies designed to rect...

The pressures for the privatization of public services over the last 30 years are the reaction to the perceived excesses, inefficiencies, and inadequacies of public provision. They drew strength from the spirit of neoliberalism and the logic of neoclassical economics and its offshoot, rational choice theory. The dilemma that has now emerged is that...

By the mid-1990s, 163 countries had statutory general disability programmes. Most have adopted social insurance as their primary policy instrument, which restricts coverage to those in paid formal employment, makes benefit eligibility dependent upon the satisfying of specific minimum contribution period requirements and provides earnings-related pe...

A random digit dialing survey (N = 596) investigated the relationship between quantity and quality of interracial contact and Black South Africans’ perceptions of racial discrimination in postapartheid society. Results showed that harmonious contact was associated with lower levels of perceived collective discrimination, an effect that was mediated...

We investigate the effects of sociopolitical change on intergroup contact and social distance attitudes in South Africa, and the effect of these variables on intergroup attitudes and racial policy attitudes. The data come from secondary analysis of surveys conducted between 1991 and 2005, as well as a dedicated survey conducted in 2006. The results...

Brij Mohan's legacy to comparative social welfare is his centering of the person rather than social welfare institutions and programs. This follows his commitment to the principle that the public social welfare provision should always seek to improve the existential human condition. The existential humanist proposition is that, in a very real sense...

Research on intergroup prejudice has generally adopted a model of social change that is based around the psychological rehabilitation of members of advantaged groups in order to foster intergroup harmony. Recent studies of prejudice-reduction interventions among members of disadvantaged groups, however, have complicated psychologists’ understanding...

Purpose For much of the scholarly literature regarding retirement, private pensions are incapable of engaging the trust of those who depend on them. However, this appraisal is flawed by its one‐dimensional emphasis on the importance of social solidarity to trust. The purpose of this paper is to develop an assessment of the private sector against a...

For a growing number of social policy analysts, the privatisation of pensions should be understood as an integral element of welfare retrenchment. Driven by the core values of “neo-liberalism”, it is intended to diminish collective responsibility for retirement income futures. We take issue with this characterisation of pensions privatisation. A cr...

Much of the literature regarding distributive justice and pensions has focussed disproportionately on the material preconditions for social solidarity, particularly statutory measures that would narrow the scope of differentials in the distribution of income and wealth. While we are sympathetic towards this emphasis, we contend that justice is comp...

This article takes issue with the neoliberal conception of justice that has informed much of retirement pension policy in recent decades. Drawing upon an appraisal of a spectrum of liberal philosophical perspectives, it develops an evaluative framework that specifies the appropriate normative foundations of the design of retirement pension systems....

Mark Hyde and John Dixon review Shapiro's (2007) Is the Welfare State Justified? , assessing its merits as well as its flaws.

This article explores the idea that racial segregation is a process operating across a range of scales of social life. We argue that much previous research is characterized by 'mono-scale bias', and under-specifies the theoretical relationship between analytic and phenomenal scale. By way of contrast, we argue that scale should be explicitly incorp...

Citizenship (Beiner, 1994; Clarke, 1994; Heater, 2004; Marshall, 1950, 1965) denotes membership of a polity, but it is more than a legal status in relation to a territorial political unit, for it constitutes a normative ideal that is manifest in a polity’s set of written or unwritten citizenship rights and obligations (see Chapman and Sage, 2002)....

At the heart of any public-sector reform discourse are the conflicting contentions about what constitutes good public leadership. The battles fought - and to be fought - over public-sector reform are over the appropriate role of the state. These contending perspectives are the traditional hierarchical model and the neo-liberal managerialist model o...

SpickerP. (2006), Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Bristol: Policy Press. £60.00, pp. 208, hbk. - Volume 37 Issue 4 - JOHN DIXON, MARK HYDE

The role of racial segregation in perpetuating racial prejudice and inequality has been widely investigated by social scientists. Most research has concentrated on the macro-sociological organization of institutions of residence, education and employment. In this paper, we suggest that such work may be usefully complemented by research that investi...

Purpose According to one influential set of arguments, the privatization of public pensions has been informed by neoliberalism, and has thus been an integral element of a broader program of welfare retrenchment, which is inconsistent with social cohesion. The paper aims to take issue with this negative characterization of pensions privatization. D...

Research on racial attitudes indicates that acceptance of the principle of racial equality is frequently offset by opposition to policies designed to eliminate injustice. At the same time, research on the contact hypothesis indicates that positive interaction between groups erodes various kinds of prejudiced attitudes. Integrating these two traditi...

As policy makers have sought to reconfigure the public–private boundaries of their pension systems, trust has become an increasingly salient issue. At stake is the attainment of desired policy outcomes regarding retirement. By what criteria, then, should the capacity of pension institutions to build and sustain trust be assessed? This article empha...

There is much talk of a ‘Blair Presidency’.1 Although people are not always clear about the meaning of this expression, it commonly refers to the centralisation of power on the prime minister and his office at No. 10 Downing Street. However, even as people tell tales of a centralised Blair presidency, they also tell stories of fragmented British go...

The main focus of the following editor collection is to discuss ways and means by which ongoing efforts to modernise the management of state and administration can be driven to higher levels of efficacy.

The state’s governance role in advanced liberal democracies has certainly become more problematic and more complex in the face of a diverse array of delivery modes for the provision of public policy outcomes (Dixon 2003). On a command-market spectrum these would range from ‘central’ (national) ‘public’ provision, to ‘devolved’ (local and regional)...

Globalisation-driven demands to increase efficiency and effectiveness require nearly all OECD member states to strategically modernise their management of state and administration. In this book, internationally renowned scholars and practitioners elaborate on political as well as managerial questions, as how to make overriding Public Governance ch...

Marx and Feltham-King offer an insightful critique of the special focus section of the South African Journal of Psychology (SAJP) (volume 35 number 3 2005) on ‘racial’ contact and isolation in everyday life. They note several methodological limitations of the studies presented and point to some potential misinterpretations of the overall message. I...

Drawing on research in urban sociology, cultural geography, and social psychology, this paper explores some of the moral rules that govern social relations in public places. In particular, we consider how certain practices become classified as everyday incivilities—infractions of the moral order that sustains public life. In order to develop this n...

This article argues that an adequate social psychology of racism needs to take seriously people's lived experiences of ‘race relations’. This involves an empirical focus on social life in ordinary contexts in which everyday practices are structured around ‘race’. In particular, we argue that such a social psychology of racism needs to understand th...

The contact hypothesis proposes that interaction between members of different groups reduces intergroup prejudice if--and only if--certain optimal conditions are present. For over 50 years, research using this framework has explored the boundary conditions for ideal contact and has guided interventions to promote desegregation. Although supporting...

This article provides a general background to this special focus section on 'racial in- teraction and isolation in everyday life'. Both the geographic literature on segregation and the psychological literature on the contact hypothesis are extended, and the call is for more research on how, when and why racial isolation manifests at a micro-eco- lo...

Recent approaches to the study of intergroup contact have emphasised the need for naturalistic studies and the importance of paying attention to the spatiality of contact. In this article it is argued that it is important to preserve both spatiality and temporality when studying inter-group contact in naturalistic settings. This is not easy to do w...

Social psychologists have long been interested in the effects of ‘contact’ between racial groups. The conditions under which this contact can manifest have usually been experimentally manipulated in order to determine optimal combinations. A shortcoming of this approach is that it constructs contact situations that are unnatural and contrived. Some...

This paper comes at a time when the social work profession in the UK is redefining its professional ideology and working practices in the face of key government initiatives for social work education and the regulation of practice. It seeks to contextualize and, thereby, inform these deliberations by providing a cross-national perspective. Indeed, t...

Research on segregation has tended to focus on relations located at a macro-spatial level of analysis and unfolding in contexts where boundaries to interaction are formally established. This research, by contrast, investigated segregation as a micro-ecological process by observing patterns of seating in a multi-ethnic cafeteria. A total of 3114 sea...

The concept of ‘underclass’ evokes a multiplicity of attitudes and beliefs about its meaning, existence, causation and, therefore, its resolution. This paper draws upon the philosophy of the social sciences to explicate the contending philosophical perspectives on the ‘underclass's’ causation and resolution by reference to a taxonomy of methodologi...

This article draws upon the philosophy of the social sciences to develop a framework that permits a critical analysis of public management. It uses this framework to construct a taxonomy that enables the identification of the competing philosophical paradigms that underpin contending perspectives on what constitutes good public management, so enabl...

This paper draws upon contemporary perspectives in the philosophy of the social sciences to identify four contending perceptions of community . It then locates the communitarian perspective , within this framework, so as to explore the limitations of its epistemological and ontological premises. Communitarians claim to understand the dynamics of an...

Whatever other changes it engenders, desegregation invariably produces a re-organization of space and place, a fact whose implications the psychological literature on the process has generally disregarded. The present article begins to address this gap. Drawing on research on place–identity processes, we argue that desegregation may alter not only...

This article critically reviews the social-psychological literature on race attitudes, which has assumed that the prejudicial status of any expression is determined by the underlying psychological attitude that motivated it. Variation and inconsistency in individuals' attitudinal expressions and disagreement over how to measure prejudice have bedev...

In a number of recent policy statements, the Labour government has developed a series of reforms for employer-sponsored company pension schemes, an integral element of the contracting out arrangement of compulsory second-tier pensions. At best, the reforms are ambivalent. While they address a number of important issues, they are likely to reinforce...

Our recent paper on state-mandated private pension schemes in Western Europe has been criticised by Ginn because it did not look specifically at the impact of private provision on women. This was not our intent, but she raises important issues that are largely ignored in economics-driven pension privatisation policy discourses. She has addressed th...

This article evaluates recent developments in research on the domestic division of labour. It focuses on the Distributive Justice Framework developed by Thompson (1991) in an extension of Major's (1987) work on the psychology of entitlement. This framework states that in order to explain the persistence of gender inequalities in domestic labour, re...

This paper uses social theory to explicate the competing perspectives on the on-going and, increasing, privatization of public services in the U.K. It suggests that if business ignores these perspectives then political imperatives will come into play that will inevitably turn privatization initiatives commercially sour.  Contrary to political rheto...

This paper explicates and reviews the competing approaches to policy analysis. It does so by constructing a methodological taxonomy that enables the identification of competing philosophical methodologies that underpin contending approaches to policy analysis. This is done by reference to contesting understandings of what constitutes knowledge (an...

The German civil service is embarking on a process that will determine how it will look and function in 2025. The process, if Australia’s experience is any indication, will be messy and confusing, but fascinating, to both the ministers and civil servants involved and to the academics who observe and critically comment. The problems to be addressed...

This paper draws on the philosophy of social sciences to develop a framework that permits a critical analysis of management practice. It uses this framework to construct a taxonomy that enables the identification of the competing philosophical paradigms that underpin contending perspectives on what constitutes “good” management practice, so enablin...

Public pensions privatisation in Western Europe has been seen as being part of a broader programme of welfare retrenchment, informed by neoliberal values, that will intensify poverty among future generations of pensioners. Whilst such fears should not be dismissed lightly, we argue that the notion of welfare privatisation is conceptually much broad...

This article seeks to make a contribution to theory development by explicating the competing approaches (explanatory frameworks and research methods) that can be used in the analysis of episodes of global governance failures—undesirable events (such as war, or incidents of international terrorism) and behaviors (such as rogue political leaders accu...

Used routinely for several centuries, generally when referring to the exercise of authority within a given sphere, the term governance in its contemporary sense is essentially about creating the "conditions for ordered rule and collective action" (Stoker, 1998, p. 17). In its simplest form, governance is the exercise of political, economic, and adm...