Public sector employees in a challenging work environment

Public sector employees are expected to perform well in a work environment that is characterized by a variety of challenges. This Symposium aims to shed light on how environmental changes impact the shared identity, attitudes and behaviour of public sector employees; how public sector employees take charge of continuous change and deal with challenges in their work environment; and how organizations can help employees to tackle such work‐related challenges. We identify four specific gaps in literature—some methodological and some more substantive in nature—and explain how this Symposium helps to address these gaps.     

Verfassungsschranken und die Privatisierung öffentlicher Dienstleistungen im internationalen Vergleich

This paper examines the impact of constitutional barriers on the privatisation of public utilities in 21 OECD-countries between 1980 and 2009. We present new and improved indicators for privatisation and constitutional barriers. Three empirical findings stand out: First, national privatisation trajectories differ across both countries and sectors. Second, there is a significant cross-national variation in terms of constitutional provisions related to public utilities which, thirdly, constitute important impediments to privatisation.     

Inspections Services and Inter-Rater Reliability: Differentiating Professional Role Identities of Dutch Veterinary Inspectors

Inter-rater reliability is a prominent topic within inspection services. We address inter-rater reliability as a problem beyond the technical concern for improving regulatory instruments. We combine theories on professionalism and identity theory to deal with an issue overlooked in much of the literature on regulation and inter-rater reliability: the potentially diverging ways inspectors perceive their professional role. Studying veterinary inspectors in the Dutch food safety services, our focus is on how we can empirically differentiate between different role identities and how these identities diverge from ideal-typical expectations the organization holds of its inspectors.     

Crime Victims and the Social Services: Social Workers' Viewpoint

The aim of this article is to analyse how social workers in the social services describe crime victims and their role in supporting these victims. Based on focus groups with social workers in the social services, it is established that social workers discriminate between a categorical understanding of crime victims and an assessment of individuals in need. The categorical understanding of crime victims is connected to weakness and innocence, and the discussions are constructed with a focus on women and children. However, when the social workers move beyond this idea and describe individual victims of crime they have met, they attribute a more complicated picture and acknowledge the complexity of crime and victimization. The social workers give themselves a vague role regarding support to victims of crime. They consider themselves as able to connect individuals in need with helping resources, but they do not regard themselves as resources in this area. According to the social workers, an individual should not receive support from the social services just because he or she is categorized by them as a victim of crime. One conclusion is that the category ‘crime victims’ has not gained acceptance among the social workers.     

The Janus Face of Europeanisation: Explaining Cross-Sectoral Differences in Public Utilities

Although policymakers have sought to liberalise network-based utilities, a more detailed look at privatisation pathways reveals remarkable sector-specific differences. This article examines why efforts to privatise public utilities have differed so greatly in the telecommunications, postal, and railway sectors. By estimating probit models, it is demonstrated that firm characteristics and sector-specific EU integration account for cross-sectoral differences in privatisation. More specifically, governments dispose of the most efficient firms first to maximise revenues from privatisation sales with low political costs. Regulations at the European level pushed governments to privatise their national postal providers, while privatisation in the telecommunications sector is a global trend. In the railway sector, exceptional clauses and regulations have decelerated privatisation.     

Is there such thing as ‘global sex trafficking’? A patchwork tale on useful (mis)understandings

This article intends to respond to a recent call (e.g., Zhang Global Crime 10(3):178–195, 2009; Brunovskis and Surtees International Migration 48(4):1–38, 2010) for more innovative studies and methodologies in order to move beyond the current discourse on human trafficking. We do so by describing three ethnographic fragments on the dynamics of (dealing with) sex trafficking within Europe. The concepts of ‘friction’ and ‘collaboration’ (Tsing Cultural Anthropology 15(3):327–360, 2000, 2005) are used to analyse these fragments. These concepts refer to creative processes that occur as people interact across differences. They give insight into how universal ideas on freedom and justice enable collaboration between parties involved in fighting human trafficking who do not necessarily share a common goal. We conclude that the presented method of ‘patchwork ethnography’ is useful in studying sex trafficking as it implies a strong focus on connections between ‘sites of diverse knowledge’, without losing sight of individual stories of people making those connections. ‘Patchwork ethnography’ is innovative and it allows researchers to expose and untangle the workings of the supposedly all-powerful phenomenon and the encompassing, uniform, hegemonic discourse surrounding human (sex) trafficking.     

Human trafficking revisited: legal,enforcement and ethnographic narratives on sex trafficking to Western Europe

In this paper we focus on the ways ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ are imagined in the narratives on women who have been trafficked to West Europe for sexual exploitation. Three specific domains: international/national law, local law enforcement and ethnographic academic perspective are particularly important as they strongly influence political reaction to trafficking and describe the phenomenon from the perspective of the individuals concerned. In our analysis, an explanation of the diversity of the perceptions in these three domains is provided.