Recent Administrative and Managerial Practices and Public Service Motivation: Evidence from Seoul City Government,South Korea

This study aims to investigate the impact of recent administrative and managerial practices of public organizations on public service motivation. Using data from a survey of 1840 civil servants in Seoul City Government, this research uses hierarchical linear modeling to empirically assess the aforementioned associations. The results show that recent administrative and managerial practices have both positive and negatives on public service motivation. At the end of the study, the administrative and managerial implications of the study are also discussed in light of these results.     

Complementing the local discipline inspection commissions of the CCP: empowerment of the central inspection groups

Rampant corruption among China’s party members suggests that the existing system of party discipline is too fragile to function effectively. The question now is how the central leadership reinforces party supervision over leading cadres in both government and state firms. The Chinese leadership, after some period of experimentation, has introduced new institutions, named zhongyang xunshizu (central inspection groups), to complement the existing discipline system. This article examines how these central inspection groups complement the existing groups institutionally and normatively, and explores the Chinese Communist Party’s institutional engineering efforts to maintain legitimacy, organizational integrity and sustainability. This article considers these initiatives from the view of institutional complementarity and compensation. Theoretically, the application of institutional complementarity to China’s party discipline inspection should expand the scope of analysis into China’s institutional reform of party discipline. Empirically, the central inspection groups are the least known, but perhaps most significant, direct channel for central supervision of leaders in both local government and key state-owned enterprises. By comparing the rationale and operation of disciplinary inspection commissions (DICs), this article attempts to explain how the central inspection groups complement the supervision of local DICs in terms of scope, structure and methods of control.     

Can the EU be a serious security actor in Asia?

Following the US “pivot” to Asia, the European Union (EU) announced its own pivot to Asia in 2012 with stepped-up engagement. A flurry of high-level visits to Asia, and in particular, Southeast Asia, by the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy followed. The EU is looking for a much more comprehensive engagement of Asia, but at the same time, within Asia; there is always this nagging doubt as to whether the EU can be a serious security actor in Asia. This short brief surveys the constructive role that the EU can play in Asia and argues that the EU should stop fretting about whether it is seen as a serious security actor in Asia and instead focus on what it can do best and do its best in Asia.     

Social motherhood and the sexual communion of labour in British Social Science, 1850-1950

This article explores the way in which women both accepted and subverted the sexual division of labour in middle-class social science between 1850 and 1950. For women facing a mid-nineteenth century crisis in femininity, the kind of social science embodied in the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1857-86), offered a promising pathway into the public sphere. This article examines how women helped to develop the two key conceptions of the sexual communion of labour and of social motherhood, conceptions which structured their role in social science well into the twentieth century. However useful these concepts proved in their negotiations with middle-class men for public space, the contradictions in their practice of social motherhood posed real problems for the creation of sisterhood with working-class women     

Killing in defence of property

This article comprises a study of several approaches by member states of the Commonwealth on the question of when, if ever, it is permissible to kill in defence of property. Arising from this study, the suggestion is made that the law should recognise a right to apply fatal force where the danger includes a combination of a threat to property and to the person. Furthermore, the law should recognise a partial defence to murder where excessive force has been used in defence of property.