The fallacy of the social State in Colombia

This document carries out a normative and jurisprudential analysis on the model of the Social State of Law and Social Rights introduced by the 1991 Constitution, to validate its development. The main goal is to contrast the normative design with the reality of Colombian society to consider whether the social purposes of the state are met or if, on the contrary, the Social State of Law is a legal discourse and not a reality. To achieve such goal, the emergence and evolution of the concept of Social State of Law and its application in Colombian constitutionalism are taken into account; The study of social rights is carried out in conceptual and quantitative terms with satisfaction/deficiency indicators to identify the effectiveness degree those rights that allow the progress or setbacks of the Social State of Law to be concluded. The contrast among constitutional norms, jurisprudential rules and empirical data on the effectiveness of social rights lead us to the conclusion that in 30 years of legitimacy of the Colombian Constitution 1991-2021, the Social Rule of Law in our country is a fallacy that needs to be transformed into reality by social actors to undertake the programmatic content of the constitution. To fulfill social needs, there are legalpolitical instruments such as the National Development Plan and the Multi-Year Budgets, which meet public policy to procure the improvement and quality of life of Colombians and show that the Social State of Law is not a simple constitutional formula.

Populism and the Rule of Recognition

By reference to legal positivism and Hart’s Concept of Law, the paper argues that populism targets and aims to reconstruct the democratic rule of recognition. In particular, populism exploits the ambiguities in the nature of this social rule, by advocating the extension of the group whose consensus determines the criteria of legal validity from the restricted sphere of judges and officials, to the people at large. Populism instrumentalises the functions of the rule of recognition, aiming to provoke uncertainty in the system in order to accomplish a shift and, thus, alter the content of the rule. Infiltrating concepts with meanings that suit its ends and reordering the criteria of legal validity, populism prioritises an absolute form of popular sovereignty over a thin, dubious version of the rule of law. Nevertheless, the latter’s ambiguity allows populism to claim that the rule of law still forms part of its rule of recognition.

Aiming at the Organizational Sustainable Development: Employees’ Pro-Social Rule Breaking as Response to High Performance Expectations

Despite the continuous increase in empirical research on pro-social rule breaking (PSRB), why organizational members conduct this behavior volitionally still requires further exploration. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, our study investigated the impact of leaders’ high performance expectations on employees’ PSRB, following a hypothetical model with work stress as the mediator and perceived organizational support as the moderator. A three-waved time-lagged survey covering 208 dyad data of supervisor-subordinate from 41 teams of five enterprises in Shanghai, China, provided support for our hypotheses. After analyzing, we found that high performance expectations increased employees’ work stress, and further influenced employees’ PSRB substantially via stress, where the relationship was moderated by perceived organizational support. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed from a sustainability perspective.

Trust, Mistrust, and Desertion in Civil Wars

This chapter mentions Viet Cong (VC) companies in South Vietnam that developed serious morale and motivation problems, which pose a major risk of desertion and defection. It investigates where trust and cooperation will come from if soldiers look for their chance to desert and put up a false front of enthusiasm and conviction. It also proposes a crucial way of keeping soldiers fighting through a norm of cooperation in a military unit, emphasizing a social rule saying that each will fight if others do. The chapter discusses whether an armed group can rely simply on the threat of punishment to keep combatants fighting, even if trust is not in the cards. It describes deeply mistrustful armed groups that use factional memberships or stereotypes to assess soldiers' loyalties, showing coercion as arbitrary persecution.