Contracting Out and Public Values: A Symposium

The three papers that constitute this symposium were first commissioned for a workshop entitled Citizenship and Contractualism held in October 2000. The theme of that workshop centred on the contractualisation of the relationship between service deliverers and their clients. 1 They have been published elsewhere in a special issue of Law in Context, March 2001, co‐edited by Terry Carney, Gaby Ramia and Anna Yeatman.
These three papers did not fit that theme. They are concerned more with the general use of contracting out as a tool of contemporary governance. I have used the title contracting out and public values because all three of these papers raise fundamental questions about the implications of contracting out for public values.     

A Call to Action—The Essential Role of Advocacy

Editor's Note: The Perspectives featured in this issue of Public Administration Review were adapted from May 2016 commencement addresses: Anna Maria Chavez, the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, spoke on the 12th at Arizona State University's College of Public Service and Community Solutions; Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Leader in the United States House of Representatives spoke on the 7th at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service; and Tommy Thompson, the former Governor of Wisconsin and Secretary of Health & Human Services, spoke on the 15th at the University of Wisconsin's La Follette School of Public Affairs. These Perspectives reaffirm the highest principles of American public administration: that by and large, government is NOT the problem, and quite often indeed holds the solution; that effective and helpful public policy depends on informed expert opinion and research; and that those who enter public service should do so with a commitment to the notion that America best fulfills its promise when we seek the well‐being of all people, including the least fortunate. We chose these messages from among a wealth of commencement speeches because while they come from leaders with quite different political views, background, and experience, taken together they offer a coherent and inspiring call to public service. Dan Feldman, Perspective and Commentary Editor     

Women's political participation in inter-war Poland: opportunities and limitations

Abstract

This article analyses women's participation in public lifewithin the framework of the democratic-parliamentarian Polish state (Poland's Second Republic), rebuilt in the wake of the First World War. It examines the activity of women in parliamentary elections in connection with obtaining political rights equal to those enjoyed by men, as well as the role of women's representation in the two male-dominated chambers of Parliament (the Sejm and the Senate). The minimal presence of women in the state apparatus and in political parties and professional organisations is explained in relation to male hostility towards women's active participation in political life, religious opposition (especially from the Catholic Church) and the unwillingness of women themselves to become engaged in ‘pure politics’. Finally, it examines the rapid growth of women's associations (cultural, educational, cooperative, and professional) which, whilst weakly linked to feminism, bonded with competing political parties and blocks. The associations were divided along the lines of national allegiances within the multiethnic state and, during the 1930s in particular (the era of the authoritarian rule of Pi?sudski and the socalled sanacja camp), succumbed to nationalistic tendencies. Nevertheless, it is possible to see women's growing involvement in education and professional careers as a form of participation in public life.     

The trouble with ‘women in computing’: a critical examination of the deployment of research on the gender gap in computer science

The pessimistic scenario for ‘women in information communications technology’ and for ‘women in technology’ generally is even more paradoxical and insidious with respect to ‘women in computing’. Studies within this field not only report insignificant improvement in the proportion of women in Western countries’ computing fields but also alert us of a declining trend. Moreover, that decline has been accompanied – or even preceded – by years of research and programs that have specifically focused on increasing women’s participation in computing; however, they have not had the expected effect. More surprisingly, there has been a significant increase in the representation of women in all other science-related fields and professions. Our aim is to provide some clues to fight the feeling of inexorability that may be entailed by the research on women in computing. We will argue that part of the problem is related to the static nature of the research deployed around the problem of ‘women in computing’, primarily, the research constructed around the ‘leaky pipeline’ metaphor. We provide a synthesis of the critiques this research has received in recent decades and highlight research trends that render other landscapes visible when studying ‘women in computing’. These trends help us question how we are conducting research within this field and urge us to problematise assumptions about computing and gender that we may paradoxically continue to reproduce even while denouncing the paucity of women in computing and studying the reasons for this state of affairs. In short, we present the need for different researchers’ eyes that allow different landscapes of women and computing to be seen and produced.     

Literatur

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Youth justice conferencing and indigenous over-representation in the Queensland juvenile justice system: a micro-simulation case study

Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is firmly established in Australian juvenile justice, and legislated conferencing schemes are operating in all Australian states and territories. While there is some variation in the terms used to describe restorative justice conferences (e.g., family group conferencing, family conferencing, or youth justice conferencing), there is much more consistency in how the conferencing process is managed across Australian jurisdictions. In Queensland youth justice conferencing is a process that brings together an offender, the victim and their supporters to discuss the harm caused by the offending behaviour and provide the young person with an opportunity to take responsibility for his or her behaviour and make amends. This paper begins by briefly sketching the development of restorative justice conferencing in Queensland and describes the Juvenile Justice Simulation Model (JJSM), a micro-simulation model developed for criminal justice policy analysis in Queensland, Australia. We use this micro-simulation model to conduct an experimental exploration of the effects that youth justice conferencing has on system-wide outcomes for indigenous young people. The model simulates the impact of interventions up until 2011 on the number of finalised youth justice court appearances. Our results indicate that youth justice conferencing is unlikely to reduce the over-representation of indigenous young people in the juvenile justice system. The simulations demonstrated that, by the 2011, youth justice conferencing would result in a 12.5% decrease in finalised court appearances. Unfortunately, this decrease was more apparent for non-indigenous young people (13.7% decrease in court appearances) than for indigenous young people, who had a 10.5% decrease in court appearances. This differential impact of conferencing is due to the different court appearance profiles between indigenous and non-indigenous young offenders, with indigenous young people initiating offending at an earlier age and offending more frequently than non-indigenous young offenders.