Building the Evidence Base for Intensive Family Preservation Services

This article examines the state of intensive family preservation services (IFPS) research. Using studies of IFPS in five states, this article seeks to establish whether IFPS can be regarded as an evidence-based practice, an increasingly important standard for publicly funded services. While reporting rates of repeat child maltreatment, the analysis uses placement rates as the main outcome measure and compares effect sizes using Cohen's arcsine transformation for data reported as proportions. Significant differences in rates of child out-of-home placement and repeat maltreatment were found in some studies, particularly for higher risk families. The findings also underscore the difficulty of identifying which families to serve (targeting), ensuring treatment fidelity, and employing rigorous and appropriate evaluation methods. Overall, additional research is needed to move IFPS from a promising practice to an evidence-based practice.     

Competing for Foreign Direct investment: Efforts to Promote Nontraditional FDI in Costa Rica, Brazil, and Chile

This article examines government efforts in Costa Rica, Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and Chile to promote nontraditional foreign direct investment (FDI). Rather than attempting to account for the overall level of FDI attracted, this article seeks to explain the ability of governments to develop a well-targeted, responsive, and sustained strategy specifically to attract nontraditional FDI. It concludes that three independent variables play an important role in making some governments more effective than others at developing strategies to promote nontraditional FDI. These are the extent of the government's autonomy from special interest groups, both domestic and foreign; the extent of the government's transnational learning capacity; and the extent to which there is an ideological consensus among political parties in the country or state in favor of working closely with the business community. Roy C. Nelson is an associate professor of International Studies at Thunderbird, the Garvin School of International Management. He is currently completing a book entitledHarnessing Globalization: The Promotion of Nontraditional Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America.     

The Changing Structure of Opportunity: Recruitment and Careers in Large Law Firms

Growth and bureaucratization have begun to transform patterns of recruitment and career development in large law firms. Based on a case study of four large Chicago firms, this article examines these changes and their implications. The findings indicate that the social composition of large firms has become substantially more heterogeneous with respect to the status of law school attended, gender, and ethnoreligious background. However, data on lawyers' careers suggest that associates entering firms today face an increasingly bureaucratic organizational context marked by higher levels of turnover, earlier and more intensive specialization, decreased levels of client responsibility, and more frequent assignment to large-scale litigation. The article also addresses the dynamics of individual choice over type of work performed in firms. Lawyers initially working in litigation fields are far more likely to change fields of practice than are lawyers who begin in office practice fields, reflecting the increased tendency for firms to assign new associates to litigation as well as the alienating propensity of large-firm litigation for many associates. Paradoxically, a greater proportion of lawyers in traditionally organized, general service firms than in bureaucratically organized, specialty firms report that their choice of work was dictated by the firm. Also, somewhat surprisingly, the frequency with which firms explicitly direct lawyers into particular fields has not increased from earlier periods. The article concludes that these anomalies result from the fact that firms control the career choices of lawyers, and always have, but that the way such control is exercised varies across firms and historical periods.     

Private Representation in Washington: Surveying the Structure of Influence

Despite the significance of interest representation to theories of law and politics, the social organization of interest representation has not received systematic empirical analysis. Based on interviews with 776 individuals engaged in the representation of private interests concerning national policies on agriculture, energy, health, and labor, this article reports some findings concerning the social and political characteristics of representatives, the nature of their work and their relationships with client organizations. Three models of the social organization of interest representation are developed and examined: a model based on substantive expertise, an institutional targets model, and a client-based model. The findings indicate that representation is predominately organized around client interests Although lawyers constitute a significant and distinctive group among representatives, they are neither as numerous nor as active in policy making as is commonly assumed. The analysis suggests that representatives are not likely to exercise influence in the policy-making process that is autonomous from client organizations.