A Practical Approach to Evaluating and Improving Juvenile Justice Programs

For more than a decade, the juvenile justice field in the United States has been dominated by the seventh “moral panic” over juvenile delinquency. This panic led to an overreaction to juvenile delinquency by legislators and juvenile justice officials. The main consequence is a “crisis of overload” in many state and local juvenile justice systems across the country. Tools are available to help juvenile courts effectively manage the overload of court clients. Most important, a new method has been developed for evaluating existing programs against research‐based standards that have been synthesized from juvenile justice program evaluations. This tool enables states and localities to take a practical approach to improving juvenile justice system programs.     

Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy1

Transculturation is a frequent point of reference in Latin American cultural studies, but overuse is tending to create a new critical orthodoxy, and inattention to precise definition may be compromising effectiveness. This article assesses current deployments of the term and, through a close reading of the theoretical section of Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano, seeks to establish an understanding of what is involved in the cultural and human experience of transculturation. It concludes by examining recent critiques of the term and suggests a sceptical view of the potential for and limits on transculturation in the global context of Latin American cultures.     

DECENTRALIZING HEALTH SERVICES IN THE UK: A NEW CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Decentralization is a central plank of current government health policy. However, it is possible to discern both centralist and decentralist movements in the UK. This paper examines existing frameworks of decentralization in relation to identifying whether policy is decentralist or not and identifies a number of problems that limit their value. Key problems relate to the way decentralization is conceptualized and defined. Existing frameworks are also highly contextualized and are therefore of limited value when applied in different contexts. The paper then presents a new framework which, it is argued, provides a more useful way of examining centralization and decentralization by providing a way of categorizing policies and actions and avoids the problems of being contextually constrained. The paper ends with a discussion of how the framework can be applied in a health context and shows how this framework helps avoid the problems found in previous discussions of decentralization.     

English Education Policy after New Labour: Big Society or Back to Basics?

This article considers possible future directions for education policy and public service governance under the Conservative‐led coalition government. The article considers the extent to which Conservatives might develop a distinctive strategy for managing public services that breaks decisively with that of the New Labour era. The coalition faces a markedly different political and economic context for public service reform compared to its predecessor. This article argues that these contextual constraints make a continuation of the New Labour governing strategy less viable, but unresolved tensions in the coalition education policies enacted to date may hinder the development of a novel project for education reform. As a consequence, the New Labour education project seems likely to remain largely intact for the foreseeable future.     

DECENTRING POLICY NETWORKS: LESSONS AND PROSPECTS

This Conclusion reflects on the contributions the various articles in this special issue have made to decentred studies of policy networks. It concentrates on three areas: the role of meaning in action in shaping networks; new research agendas that have been potentially opened; and key theoretical debates. In considering the theoretical debates, this Conclusion considers various criticisms of the decentred approach to exploring policy networks, before offering some suggestions for those who want to undertake decentred studies of policy networks.     

REMOVING THE CULTURAL AND MANAGERIAL BARRIERS IN PROJECT‐TO‐PROJECT LEARNING: A CASE FROM THE UK PUBLIC SECTOR

Project‐based initiatives form a major part of government investment and, so, learning from past projects should be a major concern for public sector organizations. Previous research has explored systems and processes for project‐based learning but little research has examined the social and cultural factors that enable this learning to be applied with useful effect. This paper reports on two successive major UK government projects. The introduction of independent learning accounts (ILAs) and the subsequent introduction of educational maintenance allowances (EMAs) following the scrapping of the former. Although similar in many respects, the first was a major failure while the second, having learned the lessons of the first, was acclaimed as a success. Using a cultural analysis, this case study shows how project‐to‐project learning enabled the EMA project team to learn from the failed project. This resulted in two significant changes in government and civil service organizational culture.