FORMATION OF NEW ORGANIZATIONS TO MANAGE RISK1

Differences in statutory mandates, traditions, and attitudes toward risk cause agencies to develop different standards for the same substances. As a response to this fragmentation and uncertainty, common to environment decisions, new organizations emerge to try to coordinate the agencies but usually are created to perform a specific task rather than to coordinate agencies. For these new organizational forms to succeed, they must be in place before the crisis occurs and they must be able to facilitate, not impede, normal adaptive mechanisms of organizations.     

To pay or not to pay: A model of international defaults

Most lenders in international financial markets accede to reschedule overdue payments when sovereign borrowers fail to meet repayment requirements rather than foreclose and force a default. This practice provides borrowers with strong incentives to avoid prompt payment and to sak rescheduling instead. Because lenders cannot distinguish between borrowers who are unable, and those who are merely unwilling, to repay the loan, they will agree to reschedule loans of borrowers who would choose to pay rather than face outright default. This paper augments the traditional lender-borrower model by explicitly considering rescheduling, in addition to default and repayment, and places it in a game theoretic context. It develops a theory of unwillingness to pay, as opposed to inability to pay, and derives strategies by which lenders can at least partially protect themselves against rescheduling requests by borrowers unwilling, but not unable, to fulfill their obligation.     

中国企业发展战略的文化思考

迎接经济全球化的挑战,适应知识经济发展的社会,加大企业改革的力度,都需要加强企业化建设。企业化作为管理理论、管理思想和管理方式,对网络经济和确定以人为本的现代意识,对形成和谐管理的方式,都具有十分重要的作用。实施企业化管理,建设企业化,应该将企业家化的形成、优良传统的继承、讲求个异化特征放在重要位置加以重视。     

The influence of business associations on legislation: The case of Kenya

Interest groups seek to influence public policy. Business associations specifically seek to influence policy related to the environment in which their members operate, with the intention of making it easier for the members, and the wider private sector, to “do business.” Scholars question whether interest groups are influential and, if so, the degree to which their activity influences public policy. Even if they do influence public policy at the margins, it is questionable how effective they are in influencing legislation. As a result, there is little exploration of the factors that may determine whether business membership organizations (BMOs) are likely to be successful. This paper explores the efforts of two BMOs in Kenya to influence legislation: In one case, the BMO persuaded the government to introduce legislation to regulate an activity that had previously not been subject to legislation; in the other, a BMO sought to persuade the government to amend its own proposals to replace existing legislation with new legislation. In both cases, we find evidence that the BMO was successful, though one BMO was significantly more successful than the other. We review the factors perceived by the BMOs to have led to their success. Neither was in a position to rely on economic or other power to strong‐arm the government. Both followed a predominantly insider strategy though with occasional media back‐up. Both were successful on the more “technical” issues. Key factors include the use of a champion, engaging across government, supplying information, and providing evidence and good argumentation.     

思想路线问题是中国革命和建设的一个根本问题

能否坚持实事求是的思想路线问题,是中国革命和建设的一个根本问题,它关系到中国革命和建设需不需要马克思主义科学理论的指导,关系到我们能否把握到中国革命和建设的真谛,关系到我们能否把中国革命和建设从一个胜利推向另一个胜利.在新时期新阶段,面对复杂多变的客观形势,要坚持好实事求是的思想路线,必须有正确的立场,必须有一种批评与自我批评的精神,必须要以民主作保证,必须要有一种坚持真理的勇气,必须要以不断提高我们的能力作保证.     

Constructing and contesting legitimacy and accountability in polycentric regulatory regimes

The legitimacy and accountability of polycentric regulatory regimes, particularly at the transnational level, has been severely criticized, and the search is on to find ways in which they can be enhanced. This paper argues that before developing even more proposals, we need to pay far greater attention to the dynamics of accountability and legitimacy relationships, and to how those in regulatory regimes respond to them. The article thus first seeks to develop a closer analysis of three key elements of legitimacy and accountability relationships which it suggests are central to these dynamics: The role of the institutional environment in the construction of legitimacy, the dialectical nature of accountability relationships, and the communicative structures through which accountability occurs and legitimacy is constructed. Second, the article explores how organizations in regulatory regimes respond, or are likely to respond, to multiple legitimacy and accountability claims, and how they themselves seek to build legitimacy in complex and dynamic situations. The arguments developed here are not normative: There is no “grand solution” proposed to the normative questions of when regulators should be considered legitimate or how to make them so. Rather, the article seeks to analyse the dynamics of legitimacy and accountability relationships as they occur in an attempt to build a more realistic foundation on which grander “how to” proposals can be built. For until we understand these dynamics, the grander, normative arguments risk being simply pipe dreams – diverting, but in the end making little difference.     

Lewis S. Feuer: The Scholar as Intellectual

The career of Lewis S. Feuer spanned several disciplines—Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, and History (especially the History of Ideas); his books and articles covered several centuries, and were devoted primarily to exposing the emotional undercurrents that animated the thought of intellectuals. Feuer tended to be highly suspicious of intellectuals, because they were susceptible to the allure of ideologies, which masked a dangerous will to power. His greatest achievement was to connect the contours of political and social thought to the drives of persons and to the context of institutions; his greatest limitation was to miss, at least in the United States, the deeper problem of popular hostility to science and to knowledge itself.     

Congressional Responses to the Rehnquist Court's Federalism Decisions

Scholars who have sought to assess the consequences of the RehnquistCourt's federalism decisions have identified various means bywhich Congress can overcome the effects of these rulings, butthere have been few efforts to investigate the degree to whichCongress has employed these means. This study finds that Congresshas enjoyed limited success in responding to the Court's rulings.Significantly, though, the failure to overcome the effects ofthese decisions is rarely attributable to the fact that theCourt's constitutional doctrines have erected insurmountablebarriers to congressional action. Rather, the Court's decisionshave forced congressional supporters of the invalidated statutoryprovisions to build and hold political coalitions in supportof the repassage of these laws, and this has frequently provedto be difficult to accomplish, whether due to a lack of enthusiasmfor such efforts, conflicts with other policy goals, or oppositionfrom other groups.     

Terrorism and pork-barrel spending

The horrifying, tragic events of 9/11 made Americans aware of their vulnerability to terrorist attacks and triggered the creation of the Department of Homeland Security along with a substantial increase in federal spending to both thwart terrorist attacks and to increase our ability to respond to such emergencies. Much of this large increase in spending was in the form of direct transfers to states and cities through several grant programs. Homeland Security grants may be used for protection against terrorist activities, thereby enhancing public interests, or as wealth transfers to state and local governments, enhancing the reelection efforts of incumbents, and thus, private interests. Using 2004 per capita Homeland Security grant funding to states and their cities, we find that the funding formula used for some of the grant programs, which allocates almost 40% of the funds in some grant programs through a minimum percent to each state with the rest allocated based on population, means that per capita funding is related to electoral votes per capita, i.e., to the politics of Presidential re-election. However, the funding in other grant programs is also related to some of the dangers and vulnerabilities faced by states and their cities. Some of the variation in per capita grant allocations is also explained by the amount of airport traffic in the state and the state's population density, which are variables closely linked to the state's vulnerability to attack. Per capita Homeland Security grant allocations, however, do not seem to be related to the closeness of the 2000 presidential race.     

ADMINISTRATIVE CHRONICLE VICTORIA*

In its final months the outgoing Thompson Liberal Ministry was largely pre-occupied with the implementation of its New Directions strategy. It introduced a public service bill in December to bring about greater effectiveness in the public service and ensure that its policy priorities were understood, thus complementing the Effectiveness Review Committee already set up, and it began a review of the three central coordinating agencies, the Public Service Board, the Treasury and the Department of the Premier, with an independent American consultant. The thrust of these three measures was to advise the government on proposals to set up new departments, relocate personnel and manpower resources, to set up programs for effectiveness reviews, and to bring forward amendments to the Public Service Act of 1974 which had followed Sir Henry Bland's inquiry in the early 1970s. These were intended to give the Public Service Board extended powers to allow it to conduct effectiveness reviews into statutory authorities, to extend Board employment powers to such authorities and to bring them into the public service framework, ensuring a more cohesive and less fragmented State public service. Senior staff could now be employed on term appointments, with performance-oriented objectives, giving greater flexibility at the top. And finally, the Board was to have power to become involved in specific industrial issues at the departmental level, sharpening its current generalized industrial powers.     

Challenges of managing local elections in transitional and developing countries: an illustrative essay

The purpose of this investigation into local elections in developing and transitional countries is to highlight typical challenges to the management of local elections, emphasizing the difficulties that appear to be peculiar to local as opposed to national elections; and help explain why they often turn out to be more difficult to manage than national elections, are of less interest to the public, and often less satisfactory in outcome. It gives attention first to differentiating between categories of subnational elections, and then deals with a number of problems faced in local elections. These are size, scale and complexity of managing such elections, lack of public interest, potential for local manipulation, challenges to fair or adequate media coverage and campaign finance arrangements. The article sets out to challenge simplification and optimism about local elections in developing and transitional societies. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Development of Local Government Debt Financing Markets: Application of a Market‐Based Framework

Needed is clear guidance on how to develop market‐based debt financing systems in transitional and developing countries. We propose an analytical framework useful for identifying constraints to financial development and providing recommendations to overcome constraints to develop municipal financing capacity. The proposed framework is applied to five country case studies: Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, and South Africa. The thesis of this paper is that municipal credit market development is related to improvements in the legal/regulatory framework governing local borrowing, the capacity of financial institutions to assess risk, and borrower capacity to support and manage debt.     

How much is good health worth?

A consumer-demand or subjective-value approach to valuing government health activities is recommended. The human-capital valuations generally used in cost-benefit analysis are unrelated to peoples' preferences and, therefore, irrelevant to political decisions. A number of important policy conclusions emerge from applying the suggested principle that government activities be valued on the basis of what people would be willing to pay for them: Beyond programs to aid the poor, government health efforts should be restricted to overcoming deficiencies in the operations of the private marketplace; that is, to regulatory actions, control of infectious disease and environmental pollution, and aid to biomedical research. Free services provided to the poor should be justified by the willingness of the nonpoor to pay for them. Thus, the preferences of the nonpoor are important in designing optimal poverty programs. Under present circumstances, direct money transfers to the poor seem preferable to further increases in poverty medical programs. The value of existing programs could be increased by giving more weight to what the poor want instead of what medical experts say is most important for their health.The people who have assisted in the preparation of this paper are truly too numerous to mention in total. I am particularly indebted to Ed Park and Jim DeHaven of Rand for their helpful discussions, to Paul Feldman of the Institute for Defense Analysis for ideas, stimulation, and encouragement, and to Dick Zeckhauser of Harvard for his perceptive comments on an earlier draft.     

Demand Responsive Services: Towards an Analytical Framework for Administrative Practice in Indigenous Settlements

Demand responsiveness is an established principle in the efficient operation of markets. The principle has been applied to government services in international development overseas, and mainstream government service delivery in Australia, but only recently to Indigenous settlements. Shifting the balance in services from supply to demand is seen to have the potential to improve access, outcomes, and sustainability of services. In Indigenous settlements, an important relationship between demand and supply of services does exist, but a deeper analysis is necessary beyond the economic model to account for the complex sociopolitical geographies involved. Further research is required to develop a framework to explain the interactions that occur in practice, to determine the conditions which permit productive relationships to develop between consumers and service providers. The article presents an analytical framework through which to proceed, structured around five proposed research questions.     

Justice and Culture: Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum and O'Neill

Is it possible, in a multicultural world, to hold all societies to a common standard of decency that is both high enough to protect basic human interests, and yet not biased in the direction of particular cultural values? We examine the recent work of four liberals – John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and Onora O'Neill – to see whether any of them has given a successful answer to this question. For Rawls, the decency standard is set by reference to an idea of basic human rights that we argue offers too little protection to members of non-liberal societies. Sen and Nussbaum both employ the idea of human capabilities, but in interestingly different ways: for Sen the problems are how to weight different capabilities, and how to decide which are basic, whereas for Nussbaum the difficulty is that her favoured list of capabilities depends on an appeal to autonomy that is unlikely to be acceptable to non-liberal cultures. O'Neill rejects a rights-based approach in favour of a neo-Kantian position that asks which principles of action people everywhere could consent to, but this also may be too weak in the face of cultural diversity. We conclude that liberals need to argue both for a minimum decency standard and for the full set of liberal rights as the best guarantors of that standard over time.     

Advancing Human Rights Policy: Does Grassroots Mobilization and Community Dispute Resolution Matter? Insights from Chiapas,Mexico

This research examines the impact of grassroots organizing at the community level in Chiapas, Mexico, to address problems associated with human rights advocacy and implementation. Traditionally, the nation‐state has had the primary responsibility to address issues pertaining to human rights violations and the enforcement of international human rights principles and treaties. Local political struggles and acts of resistance by disenfranchised groups in Mexico offer insight to understand the impact of indigenous and other social movements in furthering human rights. Indigenous populations in the state of Chiapas use local community dispute resolution to contest the inadequacy of the state in responding to the problems that give rise to poverty, lack of human dignity, educational access, racial and ethnic discrimination, lack of political participation in government and the right to equality in economic, social, and political sectors. Drawing from research based on participant observations in Chiapas, Mexico, there is some evidence to suggest that since the 1994 EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) uprising several micro‐level political and social movements have contested the power of the state through symbolic and pragmatic organizing efforts. These groups include, but are not limited to, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), women's groups, and indigenous groups. After the Zapatista uprising, these groups were instrumental in making claims against the state through numerous activities: protests to end the war, the development of NGOs to observe human rights violations, civilian‐based Zapatista support groups (base de apoyo), peace camps, and open dialogue with the EZLN. I argue that collective mobilization in local communities serves both symbolic and pragmatic efforts in helping disenfranchised groups empower themselves to address economic, social, and political inequality. Local‐level activism has fueled a sense of self‐empowerment to change state institutional responses and to involve sectors of civil society domestically and internationally to initiate a proper resolution of issues that are fundamentally related to human rights.     

践行科学发展观,遵循"以人为本"发展社会主义文化

我们当前提出社会主义文化大发展大繁荣，提出建设社会主义先进文化，特别是十七大提出增强文化“软实力”。但是，我国的文化发展也面临一系列的难题与挑战，如传统文化如何尽快实现现代化，如何更好地融合本土文化与外来文化，特别是马克思主义的中国化。此外，还要面对文化全球化的冲击；实现文化的现代化的同时还要考虑如何摆脱文化的过度被同化导致的文化丰富性减弱等问题。面对诸多问题，如何更好地发展社会主义文化？最根本的原则就是遵循“以人为本”。     

为"医患矛盾"开处方

医生与患者之间的矛盾被称为“医患矛盾”，医疗体制虽然不断进步完善，但医患矛盾却呈现上升的趋势。本文从医疗单位、医务人员本身和患者三个方面详细地分析了“医患矛盾”产生的原因，并根据现存的问题对“医患矛盾”提出了相应的应对措施和建议，为“医患矛盾”的化解提供了有益的参考路径。     

对我国目前服务业发展存在问题的思考——从经济增长与充分就业角度审视

本文认为我国经济发展的首要目标,不是经济高增长,而是充分就业。为此,我国必须正视服务业吸纳就业能力强的现实,认清服务业发展滞后的主要成因,把确立以服务业为主导的产业结构作为发展方式转变的主攻方向,明晰基本思路,找准战略突破口,采取有效措施,全力推进我国服务业大发展。     

Learning Organizations in the Public Sector? A Study of Police Agencies Employing Information and Technology to Advance Knowledge

In an attempt to reap the purported benefits that "knowledge workers" bring to organizations, many police departments have shifted to a community problem–oriented policing philosophy. Rather than focusing on enforcement and incarceration, this philosophy is based on the dissemination of information to promote a proactive, preventative approach to reduce crime and disorder. In keeping with much of the contemporary literature on the "learning organization" (sometimes called the "knowledge organization"), police departments hope to deter crime through the knowledge benefits that derive from information and its associated technologies. With goals to stimulate productivity, performance, and effectiveness, police departments across the country are employing information technology to turn police officers into problem solvers and to leverage their intellectual capital to preempt crime and neighborhood deterioration.
Many public and private organizations are striving to change their operations toward this same concept of the knowledge worker. Information technology is often touted as a vehicle for capturing, tracking, sorting, and providing information to advance knowledge, thus leading to improvements in service–delivery efforts. Based on an extensive study of police departments that have attempted to implement a knowledge–worker paradigm (supported by information technology initiatives), this research explores the feasibility, effectiveness, and limitations of information and technology in promoting the learning organization in the public sector.