Keeping Creativity Downtown: Policy Learning from San Francisco,Seattle, and Vancouver for Municipal Cultural Planning in Toronto

I examine Toronto's interest in the policy learning process regarding possible solutions to development pressure downtown though understanding policies from San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. Grounded by the analysis of creative city interventions and incorporating a theoretical framework of policy adaptation, the investigation is informed by interviews with fifty-one multi-sector stakeholders, historical and archival materials, and policy documents. Return to urban living and the creative cities movement challenge city centers in preserving creative and cultural businesses and organizations. Emergent data themes include: (1) research and strategic planning; (2) stakeholder partnerships; and (3) economic development incorporating economic benefit and social good.     

The Strategic Use of Public Information in Anti-Corruption Agencies: Evidence from the Asia-Pacific Region

In this era of anti-corruption policy-making, the Internet provides a potentially critical strategic resource for anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) aiming to promote organizational and policy learning. Realizing its potential is a creative challenge that will tap different types of capacities in the agency and its environment. We present a framework for understanding the information-related functions that underpin policy and organizational learning for ACAs, develop a rating criteria to assess strategic information usage, and then assess five ACAs in the Asia Pacific region on one aspect of strategic information usage: dissemination via the Internet. Agencies differ markedly in the degree to which their use of public information dissemination via the Internet is “strategic” in nature, pointing towards a new arena for capacity building and strategy development.     

侵权补充责任之理性审思与解释适用

《侵权责任法》仅列举了侵权补充责任的数类适用情形,缺乏统一的客观适用标准,亦未明确具体的适用规则.责任分担是责任成立的后续命题,不应再以责任构成原理为立论基点,而应以外部被侵权人受偿及内部各侵权人终局责任分担为考量因素.按份、连带责任的终局责任分担困境及不真正连带责任全额赔偿的僵化,使得补充责任不可或缺.由该正当性可推知,侵权补充责任应适用于“具有全部原因力的直接作为侵权＋过失不作为侵权”之一般情形.补充责任人应承担与过错、原因力相当的补充责任,并可向直接责任人全额追偿.     

Performance Evaluation in the Arts and Cultural Sector: A Story of Accounting at Its Margins

In this article, I present a review of financial and management accounting literature on the arts and cultural sector. My objective is to understand to what extent this literature is able to offer a critical perspective on the study of performance evaluation practices in arts and cultural organizations, as it is currently missing in the arts management literature. Adopting a critical perspective means shifting the focus of research from the technicalities of evaluation rules and procedures to their embodiment by the different organizational and societal actors of the arts and cultural sector.     

Can Twitter Add to Performance Evaluation in the Area of Performing Arts? Reflections from La Scala Opera House

ABSTRACT

Social media are continuously diffusing in performing arts organizations. Yet little is known on how social media data can contribute to the performing arts evaluation process. This article addresses this issue by investigating if and how Twitter data can add a valuable source of information to the performance evaluation process. A literature review with an empirical application on the evaluation of the performance Aida at Teatro Alla Scala provides evidence about the type of indicators that can be derived from Twitter and support a discussion about potentialities and pitfalls connected to their adoption for the evaluation of performing arts.     

Mapping an agenda for the study of youth sexual aggression in Europe: assessment,principles of good practice,and the multilevel analysis of risk factors

ABSTRACT

Sexual aggression is a serious threat to young people's sexual health in Europe, but establishing the exact scale of the problem has been hampered by a variety of conceptual and methodological problems. This article presents a framework for studying youth sexual aggression that addresses both prevalence and risk factors of victimisation and perpetration. It proposes a research tool to comprehensively assess the perpetration of, and victimisation by, sexual aggression that captures different coercive strategies, sexual acts, victim–perpetrator relations, and gender constellations. The instrument is rooted in a clear conceptual definition of sexual aggression and was pilot-tested in 10 countries of the European Union (EU). Furthermore, a list of good practice criteria is proposed to promote the quality and comparability of research on youth sexual aggression in Europe. A multilevel approach combining individual-level and country-level predictors of sexual aggression is outlined and illustrated with data from the pilot study in 10 countries.     

The Paradoxical Effects of CHD Risk Factors in the Oldest Old

No abstract available for this article.     

A Response to the Critiques of Tobacco Sales and Tobacco Possession Laws

SUMMARY

Several researchers within the anti-smoking community have recently claimed that youth access tobacco programs are ineffective and drain limited resources. They make these claims because they feel that youth access programs do not affect teen smoking prevalence. Others have argued that anti-smoking interventions should not fine minors for possession of tobacco. In this last article, we provide a response to these arguments.     

THE DESIGN AND USE OF PERFORMANCE INFORMATION IN INDONESIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS UNDER DIVERGING STAKEHOLDER PRESSURES

Public sector managers in less developed countries are confronted with opposing forces. A lack of sufficient resources along with a tradition of corruption are obstacles for developing and using performance measurement systems. However, recent public sector reforms in less developed countries, including decentralisation and anti‐corruption programmes, stimulate the development and use of such systems. On the basis of a framework, which distinguishes different types of stakeholders, each with particular performance interests, we analyse how public sector managers are coping with the two opposing forces, given the relative power positions and the interests of their stakeholders. On the basis of four cases studies of local government agencies in Bali (Indonesia), we found that with respect to the annual performance reports, managers in these agencies focus more on fulfilling the formal requirements regarding the format of these reports and on their timely submission than on their contents, which are all symptoms of a symbolic rather than functional use of performance information. However, the reports include information on inputs that is linked to similar information in short‐term reports, which the managers use in a functional manner. These managers show a kind of juggling behaviour, in the sense that they partially try to serve conflicting performance interests. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Review of: “Rogelio Alonso. The IRA and Armed Struggle.”

ABSTRACT

In the conceptual literature on terrorism, there is no shortage of answers to the question: “What is terrorism?” Indeed, the terrorism literature has been heavily criticized for a deluge of definitions. And yet the booming quantitative terrorism literature generally examines a narrow set of “what is terrorism?”: how country-level factors explain variation in the number of terrorist attacks. This article demonstrates the variety of ways in which scholars currently operationalize terrorism and compares them to the ways it could be operationalized. I replicate studies using alternative operationalizations of terrorism to examine the consequences of the terrorism literature’s collective bet to focus on attack counts at the country level. Finally, I discuss the implications of the narrow set of operational choices with an eye towards how a greater variety of approaches would produce a more robust research agenda.