EXECUTIVE EDUCATION FOR STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT: A SURVEY

ABSTRACT

Executive education is a growth industry in the United States. Executive education programs and, more particularly, the variety of teaching techniques they use, promise to be key issues in the field of public administration in as much as they may be precursors of techniques and technology that will be used in more traditional teaching venues. This study reports the results of a survey of executive education programs conducted in 1998 under the auspices of the South Carolina Executive Institute. The survey covered four areas – curriculum, participants, faculty, and program administration. We conclude that the immediate future of executive education likely will be marked by a continuing emphasis on customization, experimental learning, and rigorous evaluation of the results. Two areas in which there are likely to be more significant departures from existing practices in public sector executive education are program alliances and the use of new communications and information technology.     

The American University in Bulgaria and U.S. Agency for International Development Relationship

Abstract

Upon recognizing a need for a center of western oriented university education, an initiative committee including representatives from the Republic of Bulgaria, the city of Blagoevgrad, and the University of Maine obtained support from philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Institute and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to start a university in Bulgaria in 1991. The hallmark of its existence was that its programs would be oriented toward teaching democratic values through the American liberal arts tradition. Instruction would be in English so it could draw on students throughout the region if they were proficient in English. The university has grown from a small enrollment of 208 students to over 700 students in several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG) has become a regional institution, the AUBG–USAID relationship has been crucial. Now it is beginning to offer an EMBA program and has developed an excellent reputation through its graduated students.     

Leadership Climate in the Public Sector: Feelings Matter Too!

Abstract

Although there is substantial empirical evidence supporting the important role of leadership in organizational contexts, there is limited empirical evidence that focuses on the distinction between how employees feel about senior leaders and what they think about senior leaders. This is particularly true in the public-sector environment. In this paper, a model is tested that identifies key consequences of affectively and cognitively based perceptions of public-sector senior leadership. Data collected from a large public-sector organization were examined to identify the correlates of affectively and cognitively weighted perceptions of leadership. A series of regression analyses was conducted to identify more clearly the extent to which affectively and cognitively based perceptions of leadership influenced affective commitment, attitudes to change, intention to turnover, and extra-role performance. The results suggest that both affectively and cognitively based perceptions of leadership influenced organizational commitment and cynicism toward change. Extra-role behavior was influenced by the affective dimension alone, and intention to turnover was influenced by the cognitive dimension alone. The results also showed a significant interaction between the affective and cognitive dimensions in predicting intention to turnover. In general terms, the findings will prove helpful to human resource practitioners interested in diagnosing and managing the transformational leadership climate in public-sector organizations.     

An Exploratory Study into the Understandings and Awareness of Leadership Ethos and Its Inherent Critical Success Factors by Public Sector Officials in the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Ministry of the National Economy (ECONAT)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine the understandings of public sector leaders about Leadership Ethos (LE) and its inherent Critical Success Factors(CSFs) looking at their application in the public policy implementation process. The study applied an adapted theoretical paradigm on leadership that borrows from the Western and African contexts. In the light of the aim and objective of the study, both the interview schedule and survey questionnaires were used to gather information with regard to LE and its inherent CSFs. In this view, a semi-structured interview schedule was used to guide both interviews with senior public officials - one in the DTI and one in the ECONAT. A survey questionnaire was administered to public officials at middle and lower management levels working and reporting directly to the interviewed senior public officials. The purpose of the questionnaire was to reduce personal biases inherent in the responses of the senior officials, which appear to be a challenge emerging from self-perception assessments. Research findings suggest that leaders at the DTI and the ECONAT do not sufficiently demonstrate an awareness of LE and its inherent CSFs in the practice of leadership. LE enables leaders garner followers’ trust and obtain their consent; encourage followers’ commitment to organisational goals; and introduce and encourage participatory decision making processes as key factors to successful public policy implementation.     

Trends in Governance in Further Education

Abstract

The governance of further education colleges has two main phases since the passing of the Education Act 1944 – the period when further education colleges were under local authority control and the period from ‘vesting day’ on 1 April 1993 when colleges became incorporated and further education corporations were formed as charities. This review is primarily concerned with the landscape of college governance since 1 April 1993 and draws upon some of the very limited number of research studies into the practice of further education governance. The experience and contribution of the key governance players – chair of the corporation, governors, the principal, the senior staff, the clerk to the corporation – are discussed. Throughout the period since 1993, college governance has operated within a policy framework provided by government and, to a greater or lesser extent, the implementation of those policies by agencies of government. In simple terms, the pattern may seem to be creativity (in the early years), compliance (following some high profile college governance collapses), micro-management (through the Learning and Skills Council years) and now the most open, imaginative phase as the current government encourages the strong colleges to play a bigger part in local education provision. Perhaps now is the time when the experience of college governance to date is able to draw upon its considerable strengths and show what the accumulation of governance capital can achieve.     

Culturally Appropriate Programs for Asian-American Leukemia Patients

Abstract

This article describes the experience of the Culturally Appropriate Patient Support System (CAPSS), a project designed to help Asian leukemia patients with limited English proficiency in obtaining a bone marrow transplant. The California Endowment funded this two-year program to provide simultaneous translation and interpretation and case management services to Korean- and Vietnamese-speaking leukemia patients in Los Angeles and Orange counties in California. The CAPSS project was based on the assumption that understanding the significance of cultural influences and language difficulties on health beliefs and health behavior is fundamental to the development of successful programs for Asians and Pacific Islander (API) cancer patients. This article focuses on the Korean-speaking element of the program, and evaluates the extent to which program goals were met. It concludes with recommendations for future programs targeting Asian cancer patients with limited English proficiency.     

The Role of Brand Orientation in Developing a Learning Culture and Achieving Performance Goals in the Third Sector Organizations

ABSTRACT

This study is first in nature to find the empirical evidence of relationship between brand orientation (BRO), learning orientation (LO), and its impact on Performance (PERF) of third sector organizations (TSOs) in Pakistan. A structured questionnaire was filled through non-probability snowball sampling method from more than 300 senior managers working in different cities of Pakistan. The structural equation model was used for the mediation by running smart partial least squares software. The results prove that organizations with strong BRO philosophy not only help to develop strong LO culture but also help in achieving organizational performance goals. The study also discussed practical implications, limitations, and areas of future directions.     

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 Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence

Abstract

We replicate and reanalyse the most influential study of microcredit impacts (M. M. Pitt & S. R. Khandker’s, ‘The impact of group-based credit on poor households in Bangladesh: Does the gender of participants matter?’, published in the Journal of Political Economy, 106, 1998). That study was celebrated for showing that microcredit reduces poverty, a much hoped for possibility (though one not confirmed by recent randomised controlled trials). We show that the original results on poverty reduction disappear after dropping outliers, or when using a robust linear estimator. Using a new program for estimation of mixed process maximum likelihood models, we show how assumptions critical for the original analysis, such as error normality, are contradicted by the data. We conclude that questions about impact cannot be answered in these data.     

West Indians in New York

Abstract

The process by which diverse ethnic groups from around the world blended into a unique civilization called the United States of America has provided insight into how mass immigration impacts on the development of human societies. This study explored the economic, educational, and social integration of a group of 409 first generation West Indian immigrants into the fabric of the society in New York City. It used the self-reports of those who were born and had worked in the West Indies, and had migrated and lived for several years in New York. The survey asked about their economic and educational status in the West Indies, compared with their current socio-economic profile, in order to determine the degree and quality of their social mobility. The criterion variables economic integration and experiencing problems of living in the United States of America were associated with nine input factors: age, citizenship, education, gender, income, length of residence, marital status, occupation, and reason for migrating to the United States.     

Historical Origins of Uneven Service Supply in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Role of Non-State Providers

Abstract

Variations in non-state service provision are a relatively understudied dimension of wellbeing inequality in sub-Saharan Africa. This study from Madagascar documents long-term associations between nineteenth-century missionary education and the availability of private schools today. The article exploits an original data set with unusually detailed information on missionary education and contemporary local private school supply. The results indicate high levels of persistence in non-state schooling at the geographic level. The long tradition of faith-based education appears to contribute to religious differences that overlap only imperfectly with more widely studied ethnic divides.     

The Burden of Caste on Social Identity in India

Abstract

This paper uses the World Values Survey to investigate the determinants of perceived social status in India. Caste is still the largest determinant, yet not the only one, as income, education and occupation are all relevant factors. However, only unlikely improvements in those economic attributes could offset the burden of being from a low caste or tribe on perceived social rank. This study is part of the literature that shows how the internalisation of prejudice and long-lasting discrimination may have impaired individuals’ self-esteem. The results stress the need to account for self-depreciation when assessing the efficiency of affirmative action policies.     

Peer Relations,Violence and School Attendance: Analyses of Bullying in Senior High Schools in Ghana

Abstract

This article focuses on bullying among students and explores the ways it affects the attendance of senior high school students in Ghana. It explores whether having emotional problems, in addition to being bullied, incrementally affects the relationship between bullying and school attendance and the mitigating influence of peer friendships on these relationships. The results show gender differences in which absenteeism associated with bullying was mitigated by the support of friends for boys but not to the same degree for girls, especially those girls who had reported being psychologically bullied. Our findings suggest a school environment in which peer friendship and emotional wellbeing are intertwined in complex ways.     

CAN TEACHING BE SAVED?

ABSTRACT

Future generations of professors may be harder to recruit and to retain compared to the current generation of nearly-retired senior faculty. This is especially the case in public colleges and universities. The condition of academic life in public higher education at the beginning of the twenty-first century was not enviable. Decades of sacking and pillaging by external and internal forces have left the professoriat stranded in purgatory, overrun by larger numbers of under prepared students and evaluated by pseudo processes. The professoriat has also contributed to the demise of liberal learning by substituting escapism for scholarship and by rolling over for various forms of coercion and financial seduction.

This essay discusses one person's teaching experience in the context of evolving cultural norms about learning, of professional standards pertinent to teaching, and of the psycho-social consequences for college teachers of the secular anti-intellectual drift in post-literate society. Public college and university teaching in the last decade of the twentieth century, for most workaday faculty not heavily endowed with external research funds or not capable of manipulating endless leaves of absence, has been a voyage of uncertainty. The combined effects of triumphant managerialism, techno-idolatry, political correctness and bureaucratic rationalization have subverted public higher education, and the subversion has occurred with the willing collusion of many “insiders” in the academic establishment. Worse: so engrained is the system of incentives for self-preservation (on the part of administrators and faculty) and evasion of accountability (on the part of students) that the system is unable and unwilling to correct its own dysfunctions. The absence of complaint from the “consumers” of higher education, students and their parents, is not the result of good institutional performance. It is, unhappily, the result of tacit collusion in the willingness to certify mediocrity and call it excellence.

Many volumes would be required to diagnose and prescribe remedies for the entire matrix in which public higher education now finds itself. Space does not permit comprehensiveness here. Instead, I offer admittedly selective perceptions of my own teaching experiences of more than two decades, as related to the problems cited in the preceding paragraph. However, I doubt that it is a singular view. More than a personal cri de coeur, it represents the frustration of a generation of educators who have seen public higher education seduced and sacked by some of the same forces that might have been expected to nourish and protect it: including the educators themselves.

Of course, the cynical saying of one of my colleagues remains true: “Institutions never lose: individuals always do.” And he is right–higher education will endure and prosper, even if those who still remember what education is forare marginalized or driven into another line of work. No one can doubt that American colleges and universities have succeeded as organizationsand in the pursuit of organizational values over the past two or three decades: many are richer, larger, and as marketing savvy as the most endowed Fortune 500 corporation. Whether American higher education still has anything useful to say about American society and culture is another, and more arguable, matter. There is significant risk that institutional value distortion has pushed the critical faculties of students and teachers into a Phantom Zone of indifference or even hostility, relative to what “really” matters to the governing boards and administrations of many institutions of higher learning. The commingling of academic institutional and organizational–corporatist values has another side: it has betrayed many students by asking of them as little as possible, and many professors by rewarding them for their entertainment value.     

Bayesian Inference in Public Administration Research: Substantive Differences from Somewhat Different Assumptions

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to point out that the standard statistical inference procedure in public administration is defective and should be replaced. The standard classicist approach to producing and reporting empirical findings is not appropriate for the type of data we use and does not report results in a useful manner for researchers and practitioners. The Bayesian inferential process is better suited for structuring scientific research into administrative questions due to overt assumptions, flexible parametric forms, systematic inclusion of prior knowledge, and rigorous sensitivity analysis. We begin with a theoretical discussion of inference procedures and Bayesian methods, then provide an empirical example from a recently published, well-known public administration work on education public policy.     

The dancing body in peace education

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the potentials of the dancing body in peace education seen from a transrational perspective. The author explores how the multifaceted and creative body as worked with in the conscious dance and movement practice Open Floor can be tapped into and drawn upon to engage the multiple potentials of humans as contact boundaries at work. She reflects in this regard upon her own experiences as an Open Floor teacher. The article first discusses how the experience of dancing in Open Floor unfolds a creative process that is 1) both intrarelational and interrelational, and 2) always in transformation. Further, the article discusses how the dancing body is engaged as holistic, relational and dynamic through the Open Floor teaching tool 4 × 4, and how this dancing body supports a creative engagement with intra-inter dynamics in peace education.     

THE MAKING OF NEW CHINESE BUREAUCRATS: THE CUSTOMS COLLEGE AND THE CHINESE CUSTOMS STAFF, 1908–1949

Abstract

This article examines how new Chinese bureaucrats were made at the Customs College to retrieve the Chinese Maritime Customs Service from the foreign staff in the Service. The policies of training new bureaucrats vacillated between three courses: generalist education, specialist training, and cadre cultivation. China’s assertion of control over the Service set the scene for four decades of political struggle between the Inspectorate of Customs, Chinese governments, and the Nationalist Party.

The article’s first section explores how China’s drive to self-modernization generated the needs for new bureaucrats, led to the College’s initiation, and shaped its educational program and policies. The second section examines how the Nationalist Party politicized the College’s education and discusses interrelations between the war decade from 1937–1949 and the decline of the College’s status. Finally, it concludes by discussing the continuity of the College in Mainland China and Taiwan after 1949.     

Diffraction,transrational perspectives,and peace education: new possibilities

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on the theoretical lens of diffraction to conceptualize a new approach to transrational peace education theory and praxis in the post-2016 posttruth political era and Industry 4.0 economic period. The paper reviews foundational concepts and approaches from key founders of the field – Paulo Freire and Betty Reardon – before turning to two contemporary peace education scholars – Wolfgang Dietrich and Hilary Cremin – to investigate the contributions of recent scholarship toward diverse diffractive possibilities for transrational peace education. In this sense, diffraction offers pluralistic views and transformative possibilities for transrational peace education in varied contexts. Transrational peace education builds upon peace education to integrate affective and aesthetic perspectives into peace education theory and praxis. Before concluding, we offer some theoretical implications and pedagogic responses for scholars seeking to work at diffractive transrational intersections. The contribution of the paper is toward theorizing new perspectives for transrational peace education theory and praxis in the 21^st century.     

The Antisocial Police Personality: A View from the Inside

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the results of two surveys, conducted in 1993 and 1997, which inquired into the attitudes towards aspects of their immediate and external working environments of New Zealand's senior health officials. The surveys are in the tradition of a growing body of international research which seeks to categorize respondents in terms of their bureaucratic “type.” Where the 1993 survey produced baseline information, the 1997 exercise served as a follow-up. Accordingly, the paper compares various results and discusses shifts in attitudinal orientation and bureaucratic classification. Key findings are that, in 1997, there has been a growth in both the number of “technocrats,” respondents with an aversion to politics but a strong commitment to policy programmes, and in the number of “classical bureaucrats,” respondents, again, with a dislike of politics but, in contrast to technocrats, with a short-term focus and tendency to react to policy problems as they arise. It is concluded that, while restructuring of the New Zealand health sector continues, there is a need to nurture “political bureaucrats:” those who can operate in a politicized environment and who can plan ahead with the participation of the attentive public.     

How do Migration and Remittances Affect Human Capital Investment? The Effects of Relaxing Information and Liquidity Constraints

Abstract

This article explores the heterogeneous effects of the migration–remittance process on the educational attainment of Nepalese children. The results suggest that when controlling for remittances, the children of more educated or informed parents suffer from parental absence, while the children of less informed parents gain from migration, implying that the migration experience helps less educated parents estimate the value of and returns to education more precisely. The results also suggest that remittances help severely credit-constrained households enrol their children in school and prevent dropouts. These remittances help households that face less severe liquidity constraints increase their investment in quality education.