Creating a Performance Culture? Performance-based Pay in the Australian Public Service

This article provides a critique of the operation of performance-based pay in the Australian public service from 1992 to 1996 and questions proposals for further experimentation with such managerial initiatives. Performance agreements underpinning performance-based pay were unable to measure adequately the performance of senior officers undertaking policy work. Appraisal reviews of these agreements also failed to increase performance feedback between supervisors and senior officers. The process of rating senior officers by supervisors, and the moderation of those ratings by senior agency management, proved to be inherently subjective and considerably increased the prerogatives of public service managers over senior officers. Linking pay to individual performance undermined teamwork and increased friction between those eligible for performance bonuses and junior officers excluded from the scheme. Yet the emphasis on individual employment relationships did not serve to undermine collective values, in particular workforce commitment to unionism.     

Islamophobic conspiracism and neoliberal subjectivity: the inassimilable society

O’Donnell analyses the confluence of Islamophobia and anti-government conspiracy theory in the works of the far-right think tank, the Center for Security Policy (CSP). He argues that, rather than only being a contemporary form of the religious and racialized demonologies that code ‘Islam’ as being the constitutive outside of ‘the ‘West—irrational, religious and authoritarian versus rational, secular and democratic—Islamophobic conspiracism should also be examined in the context of anxieties over the erosion of personal and state sovereignty under neoliberalization. Mobilizing an Islamophobic demonology that constructs ‘Muslims’ as inassimilable to ‘American’ subjectivity, the CSP's Islamophobic conspiracism projects this construction of absolute alterity on to American social and state systems. In doing so, O’Donnell contends, Islamophobic conspiracism takes neoliberalization's estrangement of the state and its citizens to its logical conclusion, transfiguring the societal processes that impact on the freedom of the individual—notably the state and civil society—into something inassimilable to that individual's claims to self-ownership and self-mastery.     

STR analysis of artificially degraded DNA-results of a collaborative European exercise

Degradation of human DNA extracted from forensic stains is, in most cases, the result of a natural process due to the exposure of the stain samples to the environment. Experiences with degraded DNA from casework samples show that every sample may exhibit different properties in this respect, and that it is difficult to systematically assess the performance of routinely used typing systems for the analysis of degraded DNA samples. Using a batch of artificially degraded DNA with an average fragment size of approx. 200 bp a collaborative exercise was carried out among 38 forensic laboratories from 17 European countries. The results were assessed according to correct allele detection, peak height and balance as well as the occurrence of artefacts. A number of common problems were identified based on these results such as strong peak imbalance in heterozygous genotypes for the larger short tandem repeat (STR) fragments after increased PCR cycle numbers, artefact signals and allelic drop-out. Based on the observations, strategies are discussed to overcome these problems. The strategies include careful balancing of the amount of template DNA and the PCR cycle numbers, the reaction volume and the amount of Taq polymerase. Furthermore, a careful evaluation of the results of the fragment analysis and of automated allele calling is necessary to identify the correct alleles and avoid artefacts.     

Adolescent self-esteem related to feelings toward parents and friends

The study was conducted to see if there is a developmental process whereby the self-esteem of young adolescents is more closely related to feelings toward parents and that of older adolescents more closely related to feelings toward best friends. The subjects, 138 eighth-graders and 139 eleventh-graders, completed the Inventory of Family Feelings with regard to parents and best male and female friends and the Tennessee Self Concept Scale. Self-esteem was found to be significantly related to feelings toward parents and toward friends for adolescents of both grades. Feelings toward parents were generally more closely related to self-esteem than feelings toward friends, although the relationship between self-esteem and feelings toward parents was decreased with the older group. If a developmental shift in the relationship between self-esteem and feelings toward friends occurs, it does so slowly, showing only a slight beginning by the eleventh grade.Received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Major interests are self-concept and psychosocial stress.     

Practice tips for managing challenges in parenting capacity assessments in child protection court

Courts frequently rely on parenting capacity assessments to make decisions about visitation and case progress in child protection court. Although these evaluations can provide valuable information to courts, they often involve assessing areas of human behavior that are not clearly defined in the literature. For example, mental health professionals are often tasked with identifying risk and protective factors for child maltreatment while identifying factors that can impede progress towards reunification. Although some of these factors may be easy to identify and assess (e.g., symptoms of mental illness or substance abuse), others may be more challenging. For example, factors such as denial and minimization about risk factors and maltreatment, a parent(s)’ ability to protect their child(ren) from future incidents of maltreatment, the parent(s)’ potential for change, and the consideration of what is in the best interest of the child are hard to assess. This article will provide a summary of the research in these areas, provide tips for managing these areas, and highlight directions for future investigation that will help inform parenting capacity assessments in child protection court.