Building peace through education

ABSTRACT

Can we pave the way to world peace through education of the next generation? This paper focuses on how teaching social and emotional learning (SEL) skills in schools could promote the positive development of children and youth so that they can choose prosocial, nonviolent ways of building relationships with others. First, research on how belonging and fairness develop early in life is briefly reviewed. Then the authors introduce SEL and the research supporting its impact, and explain how it can be supported through various strategies in the classroom, including programs, teacher–student relationships, cooperative learning, approaches to discipline, and solving problems and dealing with conflict peacefully. Building peace by promoting social and emotional development through education offers hope for future generations.     

Problematical Parents and Critical Children: What Is the Significance of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal's Chequered Family History?

This short article considers four questions about the lives led by Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal, world-famous Swedish social scientists. What were the social conditions for the development of their ideas? What implications (if any) did their developing social science theories have for their personal lives? Is consistency a necessary requirement in matching words and deeds? Is there any necessary relationship between the public and private lives of eminent scholars and public figures? All three of their children, Jan, Sissela, and Kaj, have written autobiographical accounts which, directly or indirectly, suggest that the Myrdal family was dysfunctional. The implications of this are explored.     

Principal,Agent or Bystander? Governance and Leadership in Chinese and Russian Villages

Abstract

What does ‘local self-governance’ mean in post-communist Russia and China? In order to answer this question, the article focuses on village-level governance in both countries by employing a four-fold typology of village leadership in public affairs. In both countries, the withdrawal of state power from local communities and the introduction of legislative ‘self-government’ has not brought autonomy to the local and community levels. The findings here suggest that the single ‘state agent’ category of village leadership that emerged under the communist regime is shifting to become one of the remaining three types, ‘principal’, ‘local agent’ and ‘bystander’. There was a growing tendency towards a non-autonomous type of ‘bystander’-style leadership in China and the ‘local agent’ type in Russia. This article suggests that the development of these local governance styles should not be attributed to a common transitional process departing from the communist past, but is the outcome of four factors that influence village leaders in two countries: administrative distance between local and village level, village social structure, fiscal arrangements and electoral relationships.     

The leadership environment of public sector executives

Olshfski uses critical incident methodology to describe the leadership environment of state cabinet officials. The rich data set offers insight into how state executives (1) learn about their jobs, (2) exercise discretion to determine their policy agenda, and (3) operate in the political environment of state administration. She concludes by pointing out discrepancies in our understanding of leadership and offers suggestions for leadership, research, and teaching.

Somerset Maugham is said to have begun all his lectures by saying there are only three things that one must know in order to be a good writer: the only problem being that no one knows what those three things are. The same might be said of leadership research. For example, Stogdill's survey of leadership research contains over 3,000 references and Bass's revision documents over 5,000 references.⁽¹⁾ The preface to Stogdill's survey assesses the status of leadership research: “four decades of research on leadership have produced a bewildering mass of findings…. The endless accumulation of empirical data has not produced an integrated understanding of leadership. “⁽²⁾ A more pithy evaluation is offered by Bennis and Nanus, “never have so many labored so long to say so little.”⁽³⁾ Yet, most people still vigorously believe in the importance of the leader and leadership research.⁽⁴⁾

Recognizing the confusion in the field of leadership research, this study attempts to describe the context within which public executives operate. It is assumed that the executive's operating environment determines the extent to which leadership is possible. Critical incident methodology is used to illustrate how public sector executives conceptualize their environment and how they operate based on that conceptualization. This research is driven by two questions: What is the leadership environment of the state cabinet executive? Secondly, how does the leadership literature facilitate the understanding and interpretation of executive leadership in the public sector?     

Leadership and innovation in the administrative state

The field of public administration, as well as the social science upon which it is based, has given little serious attention to the importance of vigorous leadership by career as well as non-career public administrators. The field tends to focus on the rigidities of political behavior and the obstacles to change. To reclaim an understanding of the importance of individual leadership the author suggests the use of biography and life history. The behavior and personality of the entrepreneur is an especially helpful perspective on the connection between leadership and organizational or institutional innovation. The case of Julius Henry Cohen, who played a pivotal role in the development of the New York Port Authority, is used to illustrate the connection between the entrepreneurial personality or perspective and innovation.

In the social sciences—and especially in the study of American political institutions—primary attention is given to the role of interest groups and to bureaucratic routines and other institutional processes that shape the behavior of executive agencies and legislative bodies. In view of the powerful and sustained pressures from these forces, the opportunities for leadership—to create new programs, to redirect individual agencies and broad policies, and to make a measurable impact in meeting social problems—are very limited. At least this is the message, implicit and often explicit, in the literature that shapes the common understanding of the professional scholar and the educated layperson in public affairs.⁽¹⁾ For administrative officials, captured (or cocooned) in the middle—or even at the top—of large bureaucratic agencies, the prospects for “making a difference” seem particularly unpromising. In his recent study of federal bureau chiefs, Herbert Kaufman expresses this view with clarity:… The chiefs did not pour out important decisions in a steady stream. Days sometimes went by without any choice of this kind emerging from their offices … If you need assurance that you labors will work enduring changes on policy of administrative behavior, you would do well to look elsewhere. ⁽²⁾

There are, of course, exceptions to these dominant patterns in the literature. In particular, political scientists and other scholars who study the American presidency or the behavior of other national leaders often treat these executives and their aides as highly significant actors in creating and reshaping public programs and social priorities. ⁽³⁾ However, based on a review of the literature and discussions with more than a dozen colleagues who teach in political science and related fields, the themes sketched out above represent with reasonable accuracy the dominant view in the social sciences.

The scholarly field of public administration is part of the social sciences, and the generalizations set forth above apply to writings in that field as well.⁽⁴⁾ (Indeed, Kaufman's book on federal bureau chiefs won the Brownlow Award, as the most significant volume in public administration in the year it was published.) Similarly, the argument regarding scholarly writing in the social sciences can be extended to the texts and books of reading used in courses in political science and public administration; what is in the scholarly works and the textbooks influences how we design our courses and what messages we convey in class. The provisional conclusion here, then, is that in courses as well as in writings the public administration field gives little attention to the importance of vigorous leadership—by career as well as noncareer administrators. Neither does it give much attention to the strategies of leadership that are available to overcome intellectual and political obstacles which impede the development and maintenance of coalitions which support innovative policies and programs.⁽⁵⁾

The further implication is that students learn from what we teach, directly and indirectly. Students who might otherwise respond enthusiastically to the opportunities and challenges of working on important social programs learn mainly from educators that there are many obstacles to change and that innovations tend to go awry.⁽⁶⁾ And there the education often stops, and the students go elsewhere, to the challenges of business or of law. Those students who remain to listen seem to be those more attracted to the stability of a career in budgeting or personnel management. Public administration needs these people, but not them alone. If career officials should have an active role in governance and if the general quality of the public service is to be raised, does it not require a wider range of young people entering the service—including those who are risk-takers, those who seek in working with others the exercise of “large powers”?

Taken as a class, or at least in small and middle-sized groups, scholars in the fields of public administration and political science tend to be optimistic in their outlook on the world. Informally, in talking with their colleagues, they tend to convey a sense that public agencies can do things better than the private sector, and they sometimes serve (even without pay) on task forces and advisory bodies that attempt to improve the “output” of specific programs and agencies and that at times make some modest steps in that direction. Why, then, do public administration writings and courses tend to dwell so heavily on the rigidities of political behavior and the obstacles to change?

One reason may be our interest, as social scientists, in being “scientific.” We look for recurring patterns in the complex data of political and administrative life, and these regularities are more readily found in the behavior of interest groups and in the structures of bureaucratic cultures and routines. The role of specific leaders, and perhaps the role of leadership generally, do not as easily lend themselves to generalization and prediction.

Perhaps at some deeper level we are attracted to pathology, inclined to dwell on the negative messages of political life and to emphasize weakness and failures when the messages are mixed. Here, perhaps more than elsewhere, the evidence is impressionistic. ⁽⁷⁾

Some of the concerns noted above—about the messages conveyed to students and to others—have been expressed by James March in a recent essay on the role of leadership. He doubts that the talents of specific individual managers are the controlling influences in the way organizations behave. He, however, questions whether we should embrace an alternative view—a perspective that describes administrative action in terms of “loose coupling, organized anarchy, and garbage-can decision processes.” That theory, March argues, “appears to be uncomfortably pessimistic about the significance of administrators. Indeed, it seems potentially pernicious even if correct.” Pernicious, because the administrator who accepts that theory would be less inclined to try to “make a difference” and would thereby lose some actual opportunities to take constructive action.⁽⁸⁾

March does not, however, conclude that the “organized anarchy” theory is correct. He is now inclined to believe that a third theory is closer to the truth. Administrators do affect the ways in which organizations function. The key variable in an organization that functions well is having a “density of administrative competence” rather than “having an unusually gifted individual at the top.” How does an organization come to have a cluster of very able administrators—a density of competence—so that the team can reach out vigorously and break free from the web of loose coupling and organized anarchy? Here March provides only hints at the answer. It happens, he suggests, by selection procedures that bring in able people and by a structure of motivation “that leads all managers to push themselves to the limit. “⁽⁹⁾     

Mobilizing Change in Public Services: Insights from a Systems Leadership Development Intervention

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the mobilization of systems change through analysis of a place-based ‘systems leadership’ development intervention aimed to develop the capacity of cross-sector partnerships to tackle ‘wicked’ health and social care challenges. Particular attention is given to the role of independent ‘enablers’ in opening up ‘adaptive spaces’ where partners can navigate competing priorities and develop new ways of working. This paper contributes to existing literature by providing an overview of recent developments in the field of public leadership, applying these to the challenge of developing systems leadership capacity and considering implications for future research, development and practice.     

Anxiously Awaiting the Future of Restorative Justice in the United States

Abstract

The problems of mass incarceration and other criminal justice system failures in the United States—such as racial disparities, wrongful convictions, and high recidivism rates—have reached a tipping point. For the first time in decades, coalitions of politicians on the left and right are seeking criminal justice reform. What is the place of restorative justice in these efforts? What is the depth and breadth of restorative justice implementation? How familiar is the American public with restorative justice? How successful is the restorative justice movement? In this article, we seek answers to these questions as we try to assess the future of restorative justice in the United States.     

ADULT LEARNING,SOCIAL SCIENCES,AND TECHNOLOGY: A COMBINATION FOR THE FUTURE

ABSTRACT

As people age and mature, their interest in the social and behavioral sciences increases. Occupations where personal experience becomes increasing valuable intellectual property are viewed as professions and desirable paths to pursue versus occupations where valued knowledge has a half-life and decays over time. Employers competing for competitive advantage and talent understand and value having the human energy of their organizations capable of contemporary work skills. Improvements in and the availability of information processing technology and tools allows collaboration and distributed learning. The right equation for teaching the social sciences in the future lies in the active mixture of an environment that is friendly to adult learners, satisfies the needs of the stakeholders, and leverages investments made in technology.     

With the best of intentions: Lessons from UNOSOM I and II

The introduction of United Nations peacekeeping troops into Somalia was supposed to be the first of many such operations in the new world order. What went wrong in Somalia and what implications are there for the future of U.N. peacekeeping? This article explores these questions and identifies a list of lessons designed to assist the United Nations in fulfilling the potential suggested by the Somali operations, while avoiding some of the pitfalls. These lessons include the need for early warning and early action, coordinating with NGOs and local actors, strengthening command and control, not sending a traditional peacekeeping force to do an enforcement job, humanitarian assistance‐ during conflict requiring enforcement action, peacekeeping not always translating into conflict resolution, and peacekeeping being inherently problematic in civil conflict.     

Educating Managers to Lead Community Enterprises

Abstract

The increased interest in social and community enterprises, and their role in social and economic regeneration, has been underlined by the publication, on July 23, 2002, of the Social Enterprise Strategy by the UK Government.[1 DTI, 2002, Social Enterprise: A Strategy for Success. retrieved 05.08.02 www.dti.gov.uk/social enterprise  [Google Scholar]] Alongside the growth in the sector, the need for education and training to both improve performance and support those employed within the sector has been recognized. The DTI Strategy emphasizes the importance of education and training as a tool for capacity building, sharing knowledge, and communicating best practice throughout the sector. This paper focuses on education, training, and learning in the social and community enterprise sector, concentrating in particular on those who are who are leading their organizations or at least aspiring to these positions.

The scope of education and training within the social and community enterprise sector is reviewed. This reveals a distinct gap in provision of rigorous evidence-based learning that is nevertheless firmly rooted in practice for leaders at senior management level. For this group, issues concerning time, cost, method, content, availability, and effectiveness of management education and training, including implementation of learning, are particularly important. These issues are discussed in the paper and the way in which they informed the development of the part-time Masters program in Community Enterprise offered by the Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, are outlined.

Data on the value the students have obtained from the course has been collected regularly from students and this shows five key benefits arising from the course:

• implementation of organizational learning;

• learning new developments;

• gaining a more strategic perspective;

• networking opportunities; and

• personal development.

The teaching philosophy and the students’ responses in these areas are analyzed and conclusions are drawn on the educational needs of leaders in the sector and how they can best be addressed.

In conclusion, given the increasing importance of social and community enterprises, there is potentially a large market for management education for chief executives and senior personnel who lead these organizations. These students need tailor-made programs to ensure that the material they are taught is relevant to their immediate needs as well as being of longer-term benefit. They need considerable support to ensure they can cope with the demands of part-time academic study while also running demanding and often fragile organizations. However, if this can be managed the immediate benefits to the participants are real and have, in many of our students’ cases, transferred into direct gains in winning additional resources, and/or in managing the resources they have more efficiently and effectively.

Such high-quality courses are, however, expensive and unlikely to be affordable by many of those most able to benefit from the degree. Bursaries to enable leaders from the sector to join such courses are urgently required. Governments, local authorities, and charities supporting these organizations need to recognize the benefit of encouraging the organizations that they support to take part in such training and to include resources for this in their budgets.     

THE CHALLENGES TO TEACHERS,TEACHING, AND POST-SECONDARY TEACHING INSTITUTIONS: ASSUMPTIONS,PREDILECTIONS, PROCESSES,AND PROJECTIONS

ABSTRACT

The contemporary forces impacting teachers and teaching are capable of becoming an overwhelming, uncontrollable wave of disaster or an opportunity for proactively redesigning teaching at a higher level of commitment, performance, and relevance to make and shape critically important intellectual and societal contributions for the future. This symposium aims to galvanize the teachers in post-secondary education to reject the deadly viruses of reactive fear, credentialed complacency, and intellectual rigidity in their current stages and replace them with proactive options, alternatives, and designs.

More specifically, this Introduction clarifies why the respective articles were commissioned to appear in this symposium based on the reasons, concerns, and observations that stimulated the Editor to pursue and design a symposium on teaching in the social sciences.

The concluding contention of this Introduction is that all teachers can, and must, influence the events in both their personal and professional lives by actively immersing themselves in the values, visions, and cultural anchors of their profession, discipline, craft, society, and belief systems. There is no doubt in the Editor's mind that the symposium presentations will add much substance that will help make all of us great teachers.

“What in context beguiles, out of context mortifies.”

David Wayne     

Opening up the black box: looking for a more capacious version of capacity in global health partnerships

Abstract

Some versions of capacity building construe the goal of North?South partnerships as rendering African laboratories, doctors, scientists, and universities indistinguishable from their counterparts in wealthier nations. The specificities, histories, peculiarities, or inner workings of African institutions and individuals are black-boxed ? no one needs to know about them. This article draws on research at Malawi’s College of Medicine and the work of other social scientists and historians to sketch out a more capacious model of capacity, one in which capacity building is grounded in specificity, attends to material difference, is flexible and innovative, and involves as much learning as teaching. This model of capacity building requires consideration of areas in which the Northern partners in “global health” can be brought to the level of their colleagues in Africa.     

Russian NGOs and Their Struggle for Legitimacy in the Face of the ‘Foreign Agents’ Law: Surviving in Small Ecologies

Abstract

The essay investigates the survival strategies of foreign-funded Russian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the face of the so-called ‘foreign agents’ law of 2012. Conceptualising NGOs as autonomous social systems and drawing on two qualitative case studies of Russian NGOs in the fields of human rights protection, we show how these organisations manage to cope with the state’s withdrawal of legitimacy by creatively handling their diverse environmental dependencies. Through shifting the relative importance of different audiences and generating new sources of legitimacy, they have eventually created and maintained small supportive ecologies within the overall environment of a political regime that does not tolerate them.     

From London to Beijing: Training and Development as an Agent of Policy Learning in Public Management

The education and training of international public managers is a powerful mechanism for policy learning and transfer. In a way similar to the globalization of MBA studies, which has contributed to the international diffusion of Western derived management concepts, a number of countries are investing in overseas training programs for their public servants to bring back international “know how” and good practice. Although this practice has been coterminous with the expansion of relatively easier and affordable international travel, policy learning activity in the area of administrative reform appears to have intensified.

Though largely undocumented, the UK has witnessed a sharp increase in the number of cohorts of Chinese civil servants arriving to enroll in short courses. Many of these courses are conducted outside the University system and are arranged and hosted by independent organizations. Despite this being a growth industry, the impacts are unclear and raise a number of questions, such as, what is being learned about UK public administration and how much of it is being transferred back to China? What is it about UK public administration that has particular appeal to China? Although training and development may have a multiple agenda, the assumption is that its primary purpose is to facilitate knowledge transfer. This article sets out to understand whether this recent trend constitutes an agent of international policy transfer between Britain and China. To do this, the article analyses the nature of policy learning from the UK within a cohort of senior Chinese public servants.     

SHIFTING REALITIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION: TODAY'S BUSINESS MODEL THREATENS OUR ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE

ABSTRACT

American institutions of higher education have an excellent reputation throughout the world as first rate academic centers that do an exceptional job of preparing young citizens for their future roles of leadership in business, government and our society. Colleges and universities are expected to develop young learners by teaching them knowledge, skills and above all, the ability to engage in critical thinking. This article opines that our universities' outstanding reputations are challenged by the unique pressures upon administrators, faculty, and students to prepare those in our classes for their careers. This treating of the student body as customers has lessened the rigor of the curricula and teaching methods. The authors present several recommendations for improvement of our liberal arts schools in today's rapidly changing world community.     

Political incrementalism: Political lessons from China's 20 years of reform

The recent crackdown by the Chinese Communist Party government on the efforts of Chinese dissidents to organise the China New Democratic Party has raised a serious question among scholars: why has the Chinese leadership been so reluctant to initiate democratic reforms? But an equally important question is: how has the Chinese political system been able to accommodate drastic socioeconomic changes? Although Chinese leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin have strongly opposed the Western style of democracy, they have continuously adjusted the country's political system to prevent socioeconomic chaos from occuring, chaos that has troubled many former communist states and Third World countries. This paper explores China's political incrementalism and explains how incremental political reforms have worked. It argues that, although Chinese leaders have so far been successful in accommodating social changes through incrementalism, they are still uncertain about how to cope with increasing social demands for political reform and democratisation.     

Conviviality,ego, team and theme behavior in transrational peace education

ABSTRACT

The Innsbruck School of Peace Studies is known for its innovative academic teaching methods under the title Transrational Peace Philosophy. This essay introduces the epistemological fundament of this approach to peace education. It presents the didactic principles for its Strategic Capacity and Relationship Building, combined with Strategic Leadership Training. They are based on the conviviality of students and a curriculum that follows the stages of groups’ task behavior and individual learning by `peeling the onion´ of the Ego. It describes how the didactics are designed for the international, intercultural, interreligious and interdisciplinary groups of students. It demonstrates the five stages of Ego, Team and Theme Behavior during a semester and how the curriculum places courses for best learning results. It discusses the main presumptions on convivial learning processes for academics. The focus is on students who want to work later in a broader field of conflict transformation.     

Developing Business Education Infrastructure in Eastern Europe: Albanian Experience

Abstract

Because of its unique characteristics, Albania is faced with severe challenges. Business education is no exception. The baggage of its tragic past, under a ruthless communist dictatorship, especially the isolation of its people from free thought for almost 50 years, still lingers in people's thinking and behaviors. Generally, the Albanian schools system is well developed and there is a tradition of sound education. However, Albanian institutions of higher education are ill prepared to provide modern business education to the future leaders. The University of Nebraska—Lincoln (UNL), under the leadership of the first author, has helped modernize business education infrastructure in Albania through multiyear funding from the United States Agency for International Development and Soros Foundation. This article reports several important initiatives for business education launched by UNL: (1) the first ever MBA and MPA (Master of Public Administration) programs in Albania at the University of Tirana; (2) training more than 5000 university faculty, entrepreneurs, and government officials; (3) establishment of Business Assistance Centers at four universities; (4) development of Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) chapters at most universities in Albania; and (5) focused training for faculty research, teaching methods, teaching evaluations, curriculum development, and outreach services.     

TEACHING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PRINCIPLES TO NON-TECHNOLOGISTS — LESSONS LEARNED

ABSTRACT

Much has been written over the past several decades on the “inevitability” that the technological revolution will transform international, interpersonal, and business relations. But are the effects of technological change as far reaching as the literature suggests and where it does reach does it penetrate very deeply into the general culture, its organizations, or into the psyche of its citizens? The linkage of science and technology education to industrial trends, and its prominence in pubic policy debates makes it all the more important to ensure that the educated public have as complete a grounding in S&T issues as possible. Perhaps it is a unique twenty-first century paradox that it is more important for “progress” and public policy formulation to focus the attention of our educational system upon the inter-relationships, consequences, and implications of current and previous technological developments rather than mindlessly joining the “bandwagon of progress.” Students must be exposed to the theories, language, culture, engineering difficulties, societal implications, and public policy problems posed by the inevitable advance of technology. The primary target of such efforts should be the non-technologists who tend to enter government service, run for public office, enter the teaching profession, are more politically active and where the greatest multiplier effect can be achieved.