A Comparative Approach to Performance Management: Contrasting the Experience of Australia,New Zealand,and the United States

Abstract

Despite the use of the same vocabulary and seemingly similar agendas, the experience of these three countries cannot be comprehended without attention to the different contexts in which the countries operate. This paper focuses on the experience in these three English speaking countries dealing with the structure or context of the institutional arrangements, the process of defining outcomes, issues related to timing, availability and investment in data systems, predominant values that are at play, experience with gaming, and accountability arrangements. It provides thumbnail sketches of the framework and experience of these three countries and compares their experience in performance management. While there are significant differences that emerge from contextual variety, there are some shared dynamics in the three systems. I call these “normal tensions” in the system. Yet these tensions have been largely ignored in the performance management movement.     

Evaluating US soft power in Asia: military,economic and sociopolitical relationships between Asia and the United States

The changing dynamics of international politics such as the expansion of the European Union, the growing importance of Asia, and the post-11 September environment have raised great concern about US soft power all over the world. At the governmental level, transpacific relationships may have encouraged military, economic and sociopolitical collaboration. The Asians' perceptions about US soft power at the individual level, however, may not be consistent with the governmental level. By using the 2003 AsiaBarometer survey, this article examines the factors that contribute to individuals' perceptions about US soft power in seven Asian nations – China, India, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Three main factors – military, economic and sociopolitical – are considered. Higher assistance by the US government engenders positive responses from the respondents. For causal relationships, economic and sociopolitical variables, rather than the military variable, enforce individuals' positive perceptions about US soft power, according to the multilevel estimates.     

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.     

Chinese interest in Nigeria's oil and the American context

Nigeria is an emerging strategic partner of China. This may at first glance appear to have some important implications for the United States, which has long seen Nigeria as a significant player in the region and has often cast Nigeria as an ally of some import on the continent. However, when examining Sino–Nigerian ties in the context of the United States, the hyperbole about China's role needs to be tamed. Washington, DC does not seem overly concerned by China's rising influence in the country. Though US ties with Abuja are robust, its economic interest in Nigeria is declining and is not threatened by Chinese activities.     

A ‘synchronised attack’ on life: the Saudi-led coalition’s ‘hidden and holistic’ genocide in Yemen and the shared responsibility of the US and UK

Abstract

Since the Saudi-led coalition (Coalition) began its military campaign in Yemen in March 2015, upwards of 13,000 Yemen civilians have been killed, including nearly 2000 women and 3000 children. Additionally, Coalition aerial attacks have intentionally targeted Yemen’s civilian infrastructure, economic infrastructure, medical facilities and cultural heritage. Combined with the ongoing air and naval blockade, which has impeded the ability of Yemenis to access clean water, food, fuel and health services, the violence visited upon Yemen has created near-famine conditions. Furthermore, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) predicts another imminent outbreak of cholera, with the potential to be as deadly as last year’s which infected more than one million children and killed a child every 10?minutes. Through engagement with genocide studies literature, this article applies a holistic conception of genocide to the Coalition military campaign. It finds that the Coalition is conducting an ongoing campaign of genocide by a ‘synchronised attack’ on all aspects of life in Yemen, one that is only possible with the complicity of the United States and United Kingdom.     

Trading in Paranoia: Exploring Singapore's Security-Trade Linkages in the Twenty-first Century

Singapore's rude awakening to independence has led to the creation of one of the most important and strategic entrepôts in the Asia-Pacific. The country's limited territorial lands and natural resources, combined with huge per capita income, high population density and sensitive racial mix, make Singapore the quintessential pragmatic trading state of the twenty-first century. This paper examines how Singapore has embedded itself at the centre of regional and global trade systems by exploiting various forms of free trade activities including multilateral, regional and bilateral FTAs that underpin its security and survival. It argues that in order to maintain the city-state's geo-economic and geo-political viability, the Singaporean government has progressively linked its security interests with its multilevel free trade activities. Given the ‘vulnerability fetish’ and siege mentality that confront Singaporean leaders and policymakers, the pursuit of economic development via free trade has become the heart of its national security policy and strategy. The paper concludes by arguing that the enhancement and preservation of Singapore's survival as a sovereign nation-state demands a strategic utilization of FTAs with different trade partners, especially with regional and trans-regional powers such as the United States and China.     

Can charity and rights-based movements be allies in the fight against HIV/AIDS? Bridging mobilisations in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa

The activist-fuelled responses to HIV/AIDS around the world have resulted in unprecedented changes to the way infectious disease is defined and treated and in the mobilisation of resources for treatment in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the communities that have been critical sources of response are widely divergent. In the United States, where the epidemic was first identified, the strongest response was within the gay community, with its attendant rights-based orientation. In sub-Saharan Africa, faith-based communities have been critical actors, and have generally taken a charity-based approach to their work. As globalisation and the successes of the global AIDS movement draw these groups into closer contact, the question of whether these divergent approaches can work in alliance becomes ever more important. In this paper I use the concepts of collective identity and framing to examine the development of both approaches and to suggest that the activity of frame extension may be a helpful tool in bridging divergent approaches.     

US democracy assistance programs in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution

The 2004 Orange Revolution failed to skyrocket Ukraine into the ranks of consolidated democracies. Some previous research claimed that, in the similar case of post-Rose Revolution Georgia, its vague democratic perspectives can be explained by, among others, a negative impact of politically biased US democracy assistance programs. This article examines five groups of US programs (electoral aid, political party development, legislative strengthening, NGO development and media strengthening) implemented in Ukraine in 2005–2010, and concludes that US diplomatic support for the pro-Western “Orange” leadership did not translate into political bias of US-funded democracy assistance programs.     

Full and Open Competition in Public Procurement: Values and Ethics in Contracting Opportunity

ABSTRACT

Governments have sought to respond to increasing pressures to accomplish aims with efficiency and at low cost. A perception of the potential for corruption and waste of public resources has been met with calls for transparency and accountability. Competition is believed to lead to impartial, optimal outcomes, but attention paid to competition in the literature suggests that the benefits are not universally clear. This paper considers ‘full and open competition’ as a policy promise, ethical obligation, and a matter of justice, drawing upon work of John Rawls and others, in the United States case. The research question is: What do Federal procurement data tell us about the nature of full and open competition in practice? This study draws upon contract data available from the U.S. Federal government, for fiscal years from 2015 to 2018. Through an ordinal regression, it is suggested that variation in the extent of competition results in part from size of project, size of the business (or potential business) receiving the project, and the industry classification, particularly in cases centering on commercial acquisitions. While ‘full and open competition’ is frequently employed, the difference between the normative value of the concept in statute, and practical outcomes in implementation, is clear. This difference has consequences for both vendors and the government.     

New Hispanic Migration and HIV Risk in New York

Abstract

This paper reports on research designed to assess access to care by Latino immigrant populations in the New York area. A qualitative approach and methods were employed, involving focus groups with PWAs and affected men and women from Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Central America to explore the perceptions, beliefs, experience and knowledge of HIV care issues and the issues affecting health-seeking behavior. Among the data collected to provide context, depth and detail to the issue of access and utilization of services, was the detailed information on migration and HIV risk reported here.

A total of 57 men and women participated, ranging in age from 19-61. Results included information on migration patterns, obstacles for Latino immigrants living in the U.S., social networks, community resources, knowledge of HIV/AIDS, risk behavior and access to information. Data support the conclusion that to be effective in reaching and providing services to these immigrant groups, it is crucial to understand the environment from which they come and the impact of immigration. Poverty; repressive governments; lack of education/literacy; ethnicity, class; color-based stigma; and cultural norms are crucial factors in determining their attitudes, motivations, decisions and behavior. The key elements for the provision of services to this population appear to be those which build on cultural norms and which network human and institutional resources.     

Developing a Model Intervention to Prevent Abuse in Relationships Among Caribbean and Caribbean-American Youth by Partnering with Schools

SUMMARY

This paper proposes a model intervention to prevent relationship abuse among Caribbean and Caribbean-American adolescents. Specifically, the model partners with a high school with a strong Caribbean student population and incorporates education, prevention and intervention, as the three core components. This paper highlights the importance of working with young people in a school setting, working with young people before they have fully tackled the developmental task of defining norms of and values in relationships, utilizing culturally competent staff and specialized programming, and emphasizing the need for early intervention in the instances of adolescent relationship violence before its evolution into adult domestic violence. The model proposed serves as an outline for further development of culturally-specific and competent interventions to prevent and address relationship violence among adolescents.     

Go West: Georgia's European identity and its role in domestic politics and foreign policy objectives

This article sheds light on the Euro-Atlantic discourse in Georgia by situating it in a wider frame. It provides an analysis of its Euro-Atlantic orientation by presenting it as a continuation of past efforts to involve European powers in Georgian affairs and highlights changing trends in this aspect of contemporary foreign policy. Far from determining whether or not the Georgians are European, the different arguments that have been used to support Georgian “Europeanness” are evaluated to assess its role in the national identity construction process. Focusing primarily on the United National Movement government led by Mikheil Saakashvili, we demonstrate how the Euro-Atlantic discourse has been employed domestically by the political elite as a legitimacy management strategy and explore its function in seeking Western patronage, a key foreign policy goal.     

Career Values of Public Administration and Public Policy Students in China,Malaysia and the United States

With governments around the world needing to attract talented professionals, this exploratory, cross-cultural research analyzes career values of 384 MPA and MPP students at major universities in the capitals of China, Malaysia and the United States. Malaysians and Americans structured 23 goals along dimensions that contrasted sharply to those of the Chinese. Moreover, Malaysians and Americans cared more about self-actualization and less about co-worker comradeship than did the Chinese. All three groups prioritized elements of altruism and affluence. Segmentation analysis uncovered six distinct subgroups (Acheivers, Altruistic Analysts, Administrators, Altruistic Affluents, Acquiescents, and Apathetics) with their distributions varying by country.     

Planning,Budgeting, and Health Care Performance in Ukraine

Abstract

The Government of Ukraine has not pursued health care reforms now commonplace in the rest of Europe and Central/Eastern Europe that rely less upon centralized, state delivery of services and more on decentralized operational responsibilities and competition for services that increase patient choice. The Ukrainian health sector suffers from personnel overspecialization and facility overcapacity, resulting in high-cost, low productivity services. Budget funds are unavailable for operations and maintenance resulting in poor quality services. The state provides health care as a constitutionally-protected monopoly, relying on the traditional command and control model which ignores cost/quality competition options and responsibilities to patients. Overall, the system which produces these results is over-centralized, requiring achievement of physical service norms without providing sufficient funds. The centralized system does not monitor or evaluate services beyond narrow financial accountability and control requirements. The health care system is paradoxically over-centralized but unable to regulate or control local health care official decisions to ensure compliance with national standards. Needed are reforms in the health care policy and operational areas to produce the supply of services needed for national economic recovery. In the short-term, the budgetary framework can be improved as an operational/management guide through development of comparative information on results. Most of this information can be based on the economic classification consistent with the chart of accounts. Funding stability can be increased to improve expenditure control by implementing a new fiscal transfer formula that provides discretion (i.e., block grants) and performance criteria (i.e., outcome measures). In the medium-term, building on the technical foundation of physical norms and statistical reporting, the health care budgeting and financial management system should shift emphasis to: program planning, policy and management analysis, and public communications. The results of these reforms should lead to decentralized health care operations, service analysis, and delivery responsibilities. At the same time, the reforms should lead to proper centralization of responsibilities for strategic policy decisions, safety regulation, national standards, and program evaluation.     

Immigration in the Life Histories of Women Living in the United States-Mexico Border Region

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role that immigration plays in the lives of very low-income women living along the United States-Mexico border. Life here is distinct from that in any other part of the United States, due to the international, social, political, and economic interdependence that characterizes this region. Thus, from the perspective of migration as a social process, this “contact zone” can provide insight on migration issues that occur within a transborder context. Based on life history interviews and focus groups with women living in two adjoining border cities, Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, we observed the trajectories of women at two points of the migration course: (a) migration from the interior of Mexico to the northern border and (b) emigration across the international boundary to the United States. The study shows that although these women held expectations that migration would improve their lives and the lives of their families, their social and economic integration in the border region met with limited success.     

Disparities in Infant Mortality Rates Among Immigrant Caribbean Groups in New York City

SUMMARY

This study examined infant mortality rates (IMR) in New York City (NYC) to identify those groups reporting higher IMR concentrations in recent years and to determine what factors and explanations are associated with this new trend.

Analysis of data from NYC Department of Health (DOH) identified infant mortality patterns throughout the City by both maternal birthplace and NYC Health Districts. In addition, infant mortality rates for those NYC populations with the highest concentrations were compared to the most recently available IMR data from their countries of origin. Focus group sessions were conducted with women in the identified groups in New York City in an effort to obtain their perspectives on causality and other factors associated with the new trend.

Strong patterns emerged from this study pointing to a concentration of the City's highest IMR among groups from the circum-Caribbean region. Results of focus group sessions with women in the identified population groups yielded a list of specific barriers faced by this population in the utilization of perinatal care services. In addition, the study resulted in some clearly delineated program and policy approaches that can help to address the disparities in IMR.

Myriad causative factors contribute to the high rates of IMR among Caribbean immigrant groups. Expanding the availability of both successful program models and promising practices is critical to decreasing infant mortality in immigrant communities. Specific recommendations are for the development of a strategic set of interventions designed to eliminate this most serious challenge to the health of new immigrant groups in NYC.

Any references to comparisons between data from NYC and data from the countries of origin were merely to serve as a reference point as it is not often possible to determine the level of scientific rigor applied to the collection and analysis of data external to the United States (U.S.).

Implications for social work practice with immigrant populations include the need for delivery of culturally competent services in general and for cultural sensitivity to health beliefs surrounding maternal child health issues in particular.     

Institutions and Economic Performance: The Use and Abuse of Culture in New Institutional Economics

Important research programs within New Institutional Economics advance culturalist arguments to explain failures of economic development. Focusing on the work of Douglass C. North and Avner Greif, this article argues that such arguments rely on an essentialist conception of culture that is both historically inaccurate and analytically misleading. Greif’s work in particular rests on a selective use of empirical data that ultimately distorts the deductive models that are at the core of his work. As a result, both scholars use culture to account for outcomes that are more adequately explained as the product of social conflict and political struggles—struggles in which culture plays a far more contingent and destabilizing role than the one they attribute to it. What is needed, I argue, is to link arguments about the persistence of inefficient institutions with a sociologically informed conception of culture as an ensemble of resources that enhance rather than constrain the scope of individual agency. To come to terms with the effects of culture on institutional formation and change it is necessary to replace the essentialism articulated by North and Greif with a strategic-instrumentalist view in which culture is compatible with a wide spectrum of economic behaviors, individual actions, and thus institutional trajectories.

台湾贫富分化的实像与虚像

进入转型期以来,台湾贫富分化呈现出扩大的趋势。但是检视台湾贫富分化的数据可以发现,台湾贫富差距的客观状态并不严重,相反则是台湾民众对贫富分化的感受远远超过其客观事实。台湾贫富分化这种主观感受与客观状态不匹配的状况不仅是民进党“阶级论述”中对贫富分化议题宣传操纵的结果,更重要的它还是台湾各种经济社会矛盾在台湾民众生活感受中的综合体现。因此,即使抛开政治因素,台湾贫富分化问题也值得台湾当局予以深度重视。     

Decentralisation,socio-territoriality and the exercise of indigenous self-governance in Bolivia

This article analyses the ‘indigenous autonomy’ being constructed in two dozen Bolivian municipalities and territories, in accordance with the 2009 Constitution. It finds that Bolivia’s 1994 decentralisation reforms, which created the country’s system of municipalities, are central to understanding the contemporary implementation of indigenous autonomy. Some indigenous people view as favourable the representative and material gains achieved by municipalisation, which helps explain why more majority-indigenous communities have not yet chosen the new option of indigenous autonomy. However, the new legal framework also limits indigenous self-governance, because territorial delimitations of the country’s municipalities are generally inconsistent with indigenous peoples’ ancestral territories. The new institutions of self-governance are legally obligated to include discrete legislative, executive and administrative functions, reflecting not indigenous norms but a municipal structure of liberal design. This study illustrates the way that indigenous self-determination may encounter obstacles where indigenous territorial jurisdictions must coincide with contemporary boundaries of colonial origins, rather than with pre-colonial territories.     

Management in New Public Service Systems: Reframing the Position of Managers and Their Training and Development

Management training and development (T&D) plays an important part in enabling managers to deal with complexity and change associated with new public service systems. Using a service-dominant logic approach, this paper explores the relevance of T&D in preparing managers for changing roles, responsibilities and relationships that integrated service systems demand. Exploring the views of service managers working in Community Health Partnerships, the study establishes that present management T&D does not support the delivery of integrated services which require different abilities and new ways of working. New public service systems demand new processes of learning where re-framing the position of managers and their T&D becomes increasingly necessary.