Attempting to satisfy their political masters in a target-driven culture, Soviet managers had to optimize on many margins simultaneously. One of these was the margin of truthfulness. False accounting for the value of production appears to have been widespread in some branches of the economy and...

The proliferation of social organizations in China has engendered a lively debate about how to conceptualize these social forces. This paper argues that such a conceptualization should take into account the role that both the party-state and social actors attribute to social organizations. With...

The paper explores conceptually the relationship between trust and deception. The author advances five main propositions, which concern deceptive signals of trustworthiness, the suspension of uncertainty in trust, the moral implications of trusting and deceiving, the trustor's self-deception,...

In all Central American countries we witness a struggle to define, interpret and classify types of violence, delinquency, crime and (in)security. Although this struggle has highly relevant political and social implications, it has not been analyzed systematically. This article evaluates the...

It has become common to state that criminal violence has superseded political violence in Central America. This paper presents the first results of a research project which analyses the social construction of violent realities in Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua. The authors describe the...