Performance and Management in the Public Sector: Testing a Model of Relative Risk Aversion

Research has demonstrated that management influences the performance of public organizations, but almost no research has explored how the success or failure of a public organization influences the decisions of those who manage it. Arguing that many decisions by public managers are analogous to risky choice, the authors use a well‐validated model of relative risk aversion to understand how such choices are influenced by managers’ perceptions of organizational performance. They theorize that managers will be less likely to encourage innovation or give discretion to employees when they are just reaching their goals relative to other performance conditions. Analyses of responses to the 2011 and 2013 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys provide considerable support for these assertions. The findings have significant implications for our understanding of the relationship between management and performance in public organizations.     

Human Rights as Reputation Builder: Compliance with the Convention Against Torture

A strong record of human rights protections is an important factor for a state to maintain a positive international reputation. In this article, we suggest that states will use compliance with human rights treaties as a mechanism by which to improve their reputations to help achieve their foreign policy goals. We hypothesize that international human rights compliance is a means to improve a state’s reputation in three specific situations: when the state is facing regional pressures as the result of a desire to join a regional organization; when the state is facing regional pressures not to run afoul of a court within a regional organization; or when a state seeks foreign assistance from an entity with human rights requirements for the receipt of such assistance. We examine our theory by analyzing human rights reports regarding state compliance with specific treaty obligations outlined in the Convention Against Torture (CAT). While the evidence for our hypotheses is mixed, we do find some support for our assertion that state compliance is linked to reputational concerns. In particular, states comply with the CAT when they are part of a regional organization that has a human rights court, and when they are receiving conditional aid from the European Union.     

The tripartite regulation of America's health services

The Republican takeover of Congress suggests that the payer-driven forces of managed care, capitated payment, and the regional networks (alliances) will serve as centerpieces to improve the organization, financing, and delivery of our nation's health services. These "voluntary" alliances, frequently as an amalgamation of health providers and health insurance underwriters, often foreshadow the powerful, geographically linked regional health networks that are evolving into oligopolies. The authors anticipate, as a result, the formation of state health services commissions that will regulate market share, the scope of health services, reimbursement rates and allowable profits. State departments of public health and insurance will have their own regulatory duties. Complex relationships will result as these groups will often have conflicting, politically-charged goals.     

The challenges facing public housing authorities in a brave new world

Abstract

Public housing authorities (PHAs) are entering a brave new world. Major proposed changes to the public housing program will force PHAs to compete with private sector providers for tenants. To succeed, they will have to act more like entrepreneurial market participants: to change their management practices, the types of tenants they house, and the kinds of developments they operate, and to attract private capital for the development and operation of public‐private public housing ventures.

PHAs must confront the challenges of transformation while pursuing four mutually conflicting goals: housing the neediest, achieving diversity of tenantry, cross‐subsidizing by attracting unsubsidized tenants, and attracting private capital. Success, or even survival, may require sacrificing one or more of these goals. Whether PHAs can increase housing production to such an extent that they can provide sufficient housing for the neediest while fulfilling the other goals as well remains unclear.     

Tackling Corruption at its Source: The National Corruption Prevention Bureau

In Spring 2007 as part of its ongoing anticorruption efforts, the PRC announced the establishment of a new organization called the “National Corruption Prevention Bureau” (NCPB). The article first examines the origins of the NCPB and its position in the current Chinese anticorruption regime. The NCPB will concentrate primarily on information collection and coordination work. Given these goals, This article examines the organization’s potential for improving work in three areas related to information collection and coordination; increased oversight of the private sector, improving information quality and dissemination, and strengthening routine anticorruption activities. The final section examines potential problems that will likely limit the ability of this new organization to improve anticorruption work, such as the possibility of increasing complexity within the anticorruption system, and the NCPB’s limited independence from the agencies it seeks to coordinate.

A Lingering Question of Priorities: Athletic Budgets and Academic Performance Revisited1

Many organization theories suggest that divergent goals can hamper an organization's pursuit of its primary mission. An earlier version of this article analyzed the effect of the pursuit of divergent goals on American public schools. This is an update of the original article that adds two years of data to the original study. Using an educational production function, this article assesses the relationships between athletic budgets and various aggregate measures of academic performance. Controlling for various known components of academic performance, athletic budgets have a significant negative relationship with academic performance. Schools that devote a large amount of resources to athletic budgets have lower levels of academic achievement. A focus on athletics seems to institutionalize goals that conflict with the schools’ academic missions.     

BALANCING AUTONOMY AND CAPACITY IN COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS: THE DILEMMA OF OFFICIAL RECOGNITION AND SUPPORT FOR NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATIONS

Community organization helps relatively powerless groups improve their political bargaining position by increasing the stability. persistence, and standing of the group… But… community organizations of relatively powerless groups remain constrained by their need to secure resources and develop incentives to attract constituents. For the most part, those may be acquired only through interactions requiring compromises of group independence and goals.     

Aligning Ideologies and Institutions: Reorganization in the HIV/AIDS Services Administration of New York City

How effective was organizational reform implemented inside one critical New York City health agency? Specifically, we examine the extent to which the reorganization of the HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA) into the Medical Insurance Services Administration (MICSA) achieved three goals: (1) realizing synergies among the component MICSA programs; (2) cross‐fertilizing ideas among MICSA agencies; and (3) facilitating HASA operations through the lens of organization change theory. Qualitative methods including interviews, site visits, and document analysis triangulate the effects of the reorganization. Implications for organization change literature are explored, especially highlighting where more theoretical and empirical studies are needed.     

Activists playing a dual role: identities,organizational goals,and public relations practices

• This study explores the relationship among identities, goals, and public relations practices of an activist organization through in‐depth interviews and document analysis. Findings suggest different levels of the participant organization's identity in communication with its different audiences. In playing its dual role (as a “public” to its target organizations and a “public communicator” to its own publics), the organization acts as an honest representative voice and a credible source of information to both parties, a process that requires a balance position compatible with its mission. Its public relations practices were found to be consistent with the identities it appropriates and the values it respects.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Supporting Dictatorship and Promoting Human Rights? UN Technical Assistance to Egypt

Abstract

Does UN human rights technical assistance weaken or strengthen authoritarian dictatorship in Egypt? Drawing on interviews with UN, donor and domestic human rights non-governmental organization representatives conducted in Egypt in 2007 and 2010, this article focuses on the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)/Egypt's BENAA Human Rights Capacity Building Project. The UNDP partnered with the Egyptian government to train public officials in human rights protections and to facilitate elite socialization, a strategy recommended by social constructivism. Critics, however, assert that such technical assistance strengthens rather than weakens authoritarianism. This article explores conflicts between UN and state goals in implementing technical assistance projects, as well as competing assumptions about norm diffusion and internalization held by supporters and critics of the programme.     

浅析管理度

在管理中管理者能否把握好管理的"度",直接影响着被管理者的能动性,是保证组织各要素协调有序工作,高效地实现组织目标的关键。从内涵、特性以及影响因素三个方面对"管理度"加以分析。     

论组织冲突成因及管理对策分析

组织总是不断面对各种矛盾与冲突。组织的沟通不畅、架构不合理、成员的差异和组织资源的不足,都可造成冲突。组织冲突的管理水平关系着组织内部的和谐与稳定。冲突问题处理不当,直接影响组织目标的实现甚至威胁组织的生存和发展。必须认识到冲突具有正反两方面的作用,管理者应运用合理的管理策略将破坏性冲突转化为建设性冲突,使组织能够不断自我反省,不断创新与进步。文章通过分析、探讨组织冲突的类型和原因以及相关管理对策,为组织冲突管理的研究探索新的思路。     

Accountability issues of the resolution trust corporation

Abstract

No other governmental organization ever created can rival the complex patterns of accountability created to manage the bailout of the savings and loan industry. This complexity has, in turn, led to criticism that the bailout structure is too unwieldy to be managerially effective or politically accountable. While the structure does indeed immensely complicate these problems, it is an inevitable product of the political realities that shaped the bailout strategy. The real issues in maintaining accountability to the public for the bailout are: reporting clearly on how the money is being used; improving Congress's ability to track the complex management of the bailout; and using government officials, not contractors, to supervise the government's goals. Indeed, the biggest potential problem of accountability in the savings and loan rescue is not the convoluted political structure at the top but the heavy reliance on private contractors at the bottom.     

The Politics of Everyday Coalition-Building

One of the most important challenges of contemporary progressive politics is building social movements for change that take up the ways that that relations of power are shaped by the interaction and intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and other lines of power. As such, questions related to coalition—political solidarity across difference—are key. How do we build coalitions that take up the complexity of these power relationships? How do we build movements that don't leave people out? In this article, I will distinguish between two approaches to coalition. The first are coalitions grounded in shared or overlapping interests or goals; in such coalitions, groups identify common ground and then work together towards the achievement of mutual goals or interests. The second is grounded in a process of what María Lugones (2003) calls becoming “interdependently resistant” in which people recognize and back up each other’s resistances to multiple relations of power in their everyday lives. This article unpacks the nuts and bolts of building such “everyday coalitions” in our lives.     

Network structure and collaborative innovation processes—A comparative analysis of two elderly service networks in Shanghai

How does the structure of government‐funded service networks affect the process of service innovation? We have conducted a comparative analysis of the structure and processes of collaborative innovation of 2 government‐funded community‐based elderly service networks in Shanghai. We have found that in consistent with the literature, a network that has a network administrative organization structure is better able to manage the process of service innovation in a way that balances the need to achieve government policy goals on the one hand and the imperative to facilitate bottom‐up citizen participation on the other. Surprisingly, contrary to what prior studies have suggested, we have found that a network in which a lead organization plays a dominant role, despite its more centralized process of service innovation, is often able to deliver a variety of high‐quality and low‐cost services addressing citizens' needs. With the leadership provided by the network lead organization and its close affiliation with the street‐office government, the network has been able to solicit government support. Such a hierarchical yet responsive state‐society relation has emerged as a result of the coalescence of a corporatist state legacy and an increasing pressure for local governments to seek citizens' support in service delivery.     

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.     

Deadlines,routines, and change

Routines, the habitual and predictable behavior patterns of an organization, play central roles in both maintaining organizational performance and in adapting such performance to changing conditions. Deadlines interact with routines in important ways in influencing the course of organizational adaptation. This paper examines the role of routines and deadlines in influencing change in a regulatory program. It describes the adaptation of routines in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) water pollution and pesticide programs in response to pressures and deadlines imposed by Congress, the courts, and the White House. The programs analyzed offer contrasting glimpses of the effects of routines on organizational change. Routines may be collective and shared by the members of an organization or unique to the specific groups or subgroups within it. When the organization primarily has widely-shared routines, few options will be perceived; consequently, collective routines tend to blunt the impact of pressures for change. On the other hand, routines that become fragmented, diverse, and individual in the face of repeated external pressures may facilitate change.     

Institutional preconditions of privatization in market-based political economies: Implications for Jordan

Concepts of privatization have been adopted on a global scale. Yet few studies examine issues other than economic and selected political ones. This article argues, however, that a broad spectrum of institutional considerations must be evaluated in order to assess the viability of any proposed privatization strategy. A further distinction must be made between countries with developed markets and those market-based political economies (MBPEs) whose extant institutional configurations have not reached a level of independence to fully support extensive privatization measures. Jordan, Turkey and Egypt would be examples of such countries. This article contends that the enactment and implementation of privatization policies will achieve its avowed goals only (a) if the state-controlled enterprises (SCEs) are sufficiently independent of their supervising bureaucracies (presumably a ministry, the treasury or development planning organization) prior to their transfer to a private partner and (b) if the government possesses requisite monitoring capacity to ensure the fulfilment of contractual obligations of the privatized entity. An ancillary thesis suggests that the societal and organizational culture must be succinctly separated to warrant a full-scale transfer of SCEs to the private sector. In Jordan, privatization has been discussed for a number of years, but no projects have been attempted so far. The article assesses the likelihood of large-scale privatization occurring soon.