Intellectual Capital and Public Management： A Bibliometric Analysis

Starting from the premise that public management, in the context from the emergent knowledge society, needs new forms to act and new tools to reach its objectives, this paper aims to find evidence of the adoption of the principles of intellectual capital under the public management, by raising scientific articles about the subjects, and aims to select theoretical referential about intellectual capital and public management, by bibliometric analysis. The processes presented 100 constant articles in the final portfolio, available in the data base Web of Science, Science Direct and Scopus. The bibliometric indicators show that the studies were published as from 1969, released by 15 international periodicals, written by 164 authors, used 241 key words related to the constructs of this study. It is believed that the identification of the main references helps the understanding of the foundations of this research field. Additionally, this paper provides many inputs that contribute to the comprehension of the subject at an international level, and that can be utilised in the development of future works.     

Going Nordic—Can the Nordic model tackle grand challenges and be a beacon to follow?

Nordic countries are known for having extensive welfare services, a highly compressed wage structure owing to strong social partners, as well as effective regulation and governance in public administration. Various typologies capture aspects of the institutional features of families of nations across various policy areas, showing that there is a specific Nordic variant of political economy. While there is an extensive literature focusing on socio-economic outcomes in the Nordic countries, there is less scholarly focus on the linkages between the regulatory processes, and their policy output, in response to various challenges. This volume examines how exogenous challenges (market liberalization promoted by EU integration and the gig economy, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic) and endogenous challenges in the welfare state (regulation of child-care quality and retirement ages) are tackled in a selection of Nordic countries. After a bibliometric analysis on the state of the literature, features of the Nordic model are presented. Then, the contributions of the articles to the special issue are summarized, after which lessons for other models of political economy are pinpointed. We find that although there is high variation within the Nordics in the studies of the special issue, there is a trend whereby, over time, a broader range of actors involved in the policy and regulatory process. Although not perfect, challenges are solved incrementally and often at an early stage. In other words, the Nordic regulatory model is highly adaptable to different challenges. Thus, the Nordic model does present crucial lessons for other types of political economy.     

Epistemic Community or Tower of Babel? Theoretical Diffusion in Public Administration

This article takes a comparative look at the development of the public administration discipline in three countries: Australia, Brazil and Canada. The nature of the international public administration academic community is assessed through content analysis of articles in the Australian Journal of Public Administration (AJPA), Revista de Administração Pública (RAP), and Canadian Public Administration (CPA). The method is based on that used by existing United States (US) research, allowing for comparison with that national context. The focus is on the diffusion of theoretical approaches between these national contexts, assessing whether the international public administration discipline better approximates an epistemic community, in which theoretical approaches move seamlessly between the national contexts; or a ‘Tower of Babel’, in which the different national contexts remain largely isolated.     

Can the hidden hand of the market be an effective and legitimate regulator? The case of animal welfare under a labeling for consumer choice policy approach

In Australia, labeling for consumer choice, rather than higher government regulation, has become an important strand of the policy approach to addressing food animal welfare. This paper illustrates the usefulness of “regulatory network analysis” to uncover the potentials and limitations of market‐based governance to address contentious yet significant issues like animal welfare. We analyzed the content of newspaper articles from major Australian newspapers and official policy documents between 1990 and 2014 to show how the regulatory network influenced the framing of the regulatory problem, and the capacity and legitimacy of different regulatory actors at three “flashpoints” of decisionmaking about layer hen welfare in egg production. We suggest that the government policy of offering consumers the choice to buy cage free in the market allowed large‐scale industry to continue the egg laying business as usual with incremental innovation and adjustment. These incremental improvements only apply to the 20 percent or so of hens producing “free‐range” eggs. We conclude with a discussion of when and how labeling for consumer choice might create markets and public discourses that make possible more effective and legitimate regulation of issues such as layer hen welfare.     

A Comparative Study of Nonprofit and For-Profit Web-Based Issue Advocacy

Abstract

Using the Web to advocate positions and actions on public issues is an emerging and potentially powerful means of shaping public opinion and action. Building on studies of Web advocacy in the political sector, this research employs content analysis to examine Web-based advocacy by U.S. for-profit and nonprofit organizations. For-profit organizations were found to engage in much more Web advocacy than nonprofit organizations. Those organizations that did engage in extensive advocacy, or were committed to multiple social values, appear to have come to adopt these postures or activities consistent with what a cost-benefit analysis of the impact on their enterprise would predict. With respect to region, the Northeast and South evidenced a higher and lower pattern of advocacy, respectively. Finally, greater financial resources predicted more extensive advocacy content generally; the particular issue areas this study examined were community focus, charitable causes, environmental issues, and diversity.     

Required to assimilate? The content of citizenship tests in five countries

In order to investigate questions about the assimilatory or liberal nature of obligatory integration measures for immigrants in Europe, this article systematically analyses and compares the content of citizenship tests in Austria, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. Based on a two-dimensional classification of citizenship test questions – along 14 thematic and two normative categories – the analysis has produced a surprising result: no hypothesis from the existing citizenship and civic integration literature can explain the content of all five citizenship tests. Furthermore, I find that the characteristics of a citizenship policy regime are not a good predictor for the content of the respective citizenship tests. In the sample, countries renowned for having an ethno-cultural understanding of citizenship implemented citizenship tests conveying a politically liberal idea of a community of citizens, united around legal and political norms, rather than around sociocultural ones. By contrast, the Netherlands – a country with a liberal and multicultural reputation – also requires immigrants to be aware of and accept certain sociocultural norms.     

Developing the Digital Content Industry in Taiwan

The average global annual growth rate of digital content products has grown exponentially. This is because of the technology advancement, cost reduction, and availability of the enabling technologies, e.g., digital processing, digital storage, and digital telecommunications. The development of the digital content industry (DCI) requires a strong cultural background, creative ideas, respect of intellectual property rights, and telecommunications infrastructure, which are all dependent on government supportive policies. This study summarizes the government policies, progress, and obstacles in the development of Taiwan's DCI and compares these subjects with other countries, including the United States, EU countries, Japan, and Korea. In this paper, Taiwan's DCI opportunities and challenges will be discussed, and strategies and recommendations will be provided, based on Taiwan's unique resources and competitive advantages.     

The Iraq War and the Responsibility to Protect: Uses,Abuses and Consequences for the Future of Humanitarian Intervention

Before the 2003 Iraq war, the political leadership of the United States and United Kingdom had to sell the case for war to their people and the world. This was attempted through a number of speeches that employed rhetorical justifications for the war. Two prominent justifications used during this period involved the employment of security and humanitarian narratives. The security narrative focused on claims regarding Iraq's undermining of international law, possession of weapons of mass destruction and threat to the world. The humanitarian narrative revolved around claims about human suffering in Iraq and the need to liberate its people. While it is widely assumed that security is the dominant casus belli in the post-9/11 world, there is much evidence to suggest that the humanitarian justifications that played a critical role in the military interventions of the 1990s were still important after 9/11. The use of humanitarian justifications for the Iraq war clearly has implications for the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement, which has gained prominence since the December 2001 publication of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report. Based on an extensive content analysis of speeches by the US and UK political leadership before the war, this article will quantify the relative importance of each narrative and analyse what the findings mean for the ongoing debates within the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement.     

Sustainability Reporting by Australian Universities

There is continuing debate about the consequences of climate change and an increasing emphasis placed on the disclosure of social and environmental indicators by organisations. Universities have been traditionally known as places where intellectual inquiry and advances in knowledge are paramount. Therefore, there is an expectation that universities would place much emphasis on sustainability reporting to fulfil the needs of a range of stakeholders. The objective of this study is to investigate the nature and extent of sustainability disclosures reported by Australian universities in stand‐alone sustainability reports. The findings suggest significant differences in the nature and extent of sustainability disclosures. This study has implications for policy‐makers and university administrators and is a call to senior university leaders to take up the challenge and contribute to the global conversation with regard to sustainability reporting.     

Party contestation and Europe on the news agenda: The 2009 European Parliamentary Elections

In this article we analyse the news coverage of the 2009 EP elections in all 27 EU member states (N = 52,009). We propose that the extent to which these second-order elections are salient to the media depends on political parties contesting the elections. Consistent with expectations, the findings suggest that the saliency of EP elections is increasing and that the degree of political contestation over Europe contributes to this development in a non-linear fashion so that only when contestation develops beyond a certain point, does media coverage increase.