The county administrator and productivity improvement: An examination of contrasting styles

The study examines productivity improvement efforts among a sample of United States County Administrators. Administrators' actions were divided into “tough” and “soft” approaches which were then examined in light of external and internal environment, governmental actors, duties of the office, management and policy actions and roles, and personal and demographic characteristics. Strong correlates were found in the areas of external environment, managerial role, and personal characteristics.     

Efficiently Taking Soundings in a Sea of Change: Two Histories of Public Budgeting and Finance

Books reviewed:
Irene S. Rubin, Class, Tax, and Power: Municipal Budgeting in the United States.
Donald R. Stabile, The Origins of American Public Finance: Debates over Money, Debt, and Taxes in the Constitutional Era, 1776–1836.     

Facilitating technology transfer among organizations: An applied communication strategy concept for organizational boundary spanners

Facilitating technology transfer from one organization to another is a complex process. Organization representatives are key players in the facilitation process and act to span the boundary between organizations. This paper offers a conceptual framework concerning organizational “boundary” spanners who must cross lines to transfer technology. From a communication viewpoint, boundary spanners need to reduce uncertainty, process information, and provide representation in order to achieve organizational outcomes of building relationships, achieving performance, and applying technology. This framework describes several strategies involved in the process of technology transfer: inquiry, self-disclosure, enhancing self-image, bargaining, and relationship-building. In short, we argue that individual boundary spanners need to be effective communicators when facilitating the technology transfer process.     

Decentralising to Villages in Indonesia: Money (and Other) Mistakes

Nearly 15 years after embarking on its large‐scale decentralisation programme, Indonesia has decided to extend its efforts to the village level. Decentralising to villages is intended to improve service delivery performance at the lowest administrative tier and reduce social inequality and poverty. A number of potential difficulties with the design of Indonesia's nascent village decentralisation initiative have already become apparent. Methods used to allocate funds to villages are particularly problematic. Oddly, fund distribution procedures insist to a large extent on equal per village allocations, despite the significant heterogeneity of villages. And they ignore other sources of revenue to which villages have access. In the event, village revenues will be very inequitably distributed: villages with high levels of poverty will receive less money than they need and villages with access to significant funding from oil and gas revenues will receive more than required. Also, village service responsibilities are unclearly defined, village financial management systems are inadequately prepared to handle large increases in funding, and mechanisms to monitor and control village spending are underdeveloped. These difficulties will severely constrain the achievement of official objectives and create further challenges for reformers in their attempts to combat corruption at the subnational level. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Crime Trends in the EU

The paper’s aim is to show to EU policy makers, academics, journalists and the general public what the available information tells us about crime levels, trends in crime and public opinion about crime among Member States. The paper centres on an analysis of current trends on crime levels and trends based on the data available both from victimisation surveys and police statistics. The victimisation survey source is the published data collected in the International Crime Victimisation Survey. A separate analysis based on the Eurobarometer was also carried out. Data on police statistics present two separate sources i.e. the Council of Europe Sourcebook and the crime data published annually by the UK Home Office. These two sources both add considerable value to the raw police statistics by their choice of data, their commentary and their technical explanations and definitions. The paper compares data on three crime types (robbery, domestic burglary and theft of a motor vehicle) across the 15 Member States of the European Union (as in 2003). These three types were selected in line with the priorities of the EU Commission and as types of crime that are a major concern for EU-citizens. The paper has been modified from a report produced by the European Crime prevention network for the EU Directorate of Justice and Home Affairs with the permission of the EU. The members of the network are listed in the appendix.     

Prediction of first ballot mock jury votes by the Analytic Juror Rater

Two scales of Abbott's (1987) Analytic Juror Rater (AJR) were used with 24 mock jurors to predict first ballot mock jury votes. Each participant observed one of two mock trial proceedings involving an actual second degree murder case. In a moot courtroom, they heard arguments from attorneys and witnessed examination of the defendant and actors portraying witnesses. The Cosmopolitan Lifestyle Scale of the AJR successfully predicted first ballot votes of participants (p<.02), while the Non-Authoritarian Scale showed a non-significant trend in the hypothesized direction. It was concluded that, in cases where evidence is not strong, the AJR may lend modest assistance to the attorney using peremptory challenge to eliminatevenire members who may be biased against a defendant.     

Psychosocial factors related to wife abuse

This paper reports the results of a comparative study of wife abuse. Factors that distinguished 94 physically abused women from a comparison group of 110 women were sought. The groups were matched on number of years married or cohabiting and socioeconomic status. Evidence was found that further supports a learning theory explanation of wife abuse. The study also found that wife abuse is no more likely to be displayed by blacks than by whites when the variable of social class is controlled.