Planning,evaluation, and legislative capabilities

Virtually all examinations of governmental planning have been restricted to the executive branch. However, over the last fifty years, Congress has acquired a relatively sophisticated, though latent, planning capability which has greatly increased its potential for policy making that is both more anticipatory and more comprehensive. While the transformation of Congress from a quintessential liberal institution into an institution dominated by planning is certainly an unlikely prospect, the reforms of the 1970s, building on the reforms of 1946, have changed Congress significantly. These reforms have vastly expanded congressional sources of internal support, have created and enhanced external congressional support agencies, and have reorganized the internal structure of Congress. It is important to recognize the planning implications of each of the structural modifications, and grouping them all together as part of a grand congressional planning capability puts past reforms and proposals for future reforms in a new and enlightening perspective.     

THE CHALLENGES TO TEACHERS,TEACHING, AND POST-SECONDARY TEACHING INSTITUTIONS: ASSUMPTIONS,PREDILECTIONS, PROCESSES,AND PROJECTIONS

ABSTRACT

The contemporary forces impacting teachers and teaching are capable of becoming an overwhelming, uncontrollable wave of disaster or an opportunity for proactively redesigning teaching at a higher level of commitment, performance, and relevance to make and shape critically important intellectual and societal contributions for the future. This symposium aims to galvanize the teachers in post-secondary education to reject the deadly viruses of reactive fear, credentialed complacency, and intellectual rigidity in their current stages and replace them with proactive options, alternatives, and designs.

More specifically, this Introduction clarifies why the respective articles were commissioned to appear in this symposium based on the reasons, concerns, and observations that stimulated the Editor to pursue and design a symposium on teaching in the social sciences.

The concluding contention of this Introduction is that all teachers can, and must, influence the events in both their personal and professional lives by actively immersing themselves in the values, visions, and cultural anchors of their profession, discipline, craft, society, and belief systems. There is no doubt in the Editor's mind that the symposium presentations will add much substance that will help make all of us great teachers.

“What in context beguiles, out of context mortifies.”

David Wayne     

Health care finance in the US: Past,present, and future

Presently the US is the only major industrialized nation that does not insure universal access to health care for all of its citizens. Although the US spends one out of every eight dollars on health care, over one-eighth of all Americans lack basic health insurance coverage. Another concern is health care cost inflation. The quest for comprehensive health care coverage for all Americans began shortly after the turn of the century and has received varying degrees of support since then. Since the historical course of health policy in the US has followed an evolutionary rather than revolutionary course, unless consistent policies are developed to rationalize the incentives facing consumers, providers, and insurers, alike, the future path of American health policy will continue to be characterized by disjointed incrementalism. National health insurance can provide decision makers with a tool to structure and focus the American health care system. In order for cost control measures to be effective they must be coordinated with measures to promote universal access, and vice versa. NHI can be a catalyst to focus attention on the dual goals of access to care and cost containment.     

Net social profitability,domestic resource costs,and effective rate of protection

Net social profitability (NSP) and domestic resource costs of foreign exchange earned or saved (DRC) are conceptually related, since each can be derived from the other. The effective rate of protection on value added (ERP) is algebraically identical to DRC if all importable inputs are actually imported or are zero, NSP is zero, and (ERP+1) is multiplied by the shadow price of foreign exchange. A decision rule for allocation of resources is to approve all projects with a positive NSP and a DRC ratio less than the shadow price of foreign exchange. No comparable rule can be stated for ERP, except under special assumptions.     

Music and society in the 20th century: Georg Lukacs,Ernst Bloch,and Theodor Adorno

Conclusion The avant-garde has defined itself not only by what it has opposed; it has come to show a specific content and character best shown in Poggioli's masterful portrait. Lukacs-Bloch-Adorno stood in a complex but unclarified relation to the avant-garde; their failure to clarify this relation constitutes a limitation on their sociology of music. One wishes for a new Max Weber to put their broad statements to some kind of historical test. However, the condition of music today calls for a different kind of sociology than they produced; the fragmentation of music into a multiplicity of styles and audiences, the cornucopia of choices that make available almost all musics from all eras throughout the world, the specialization and fragmentation of audiences for the classics, for avant-garde experiments, for folk music, ethnic musics, for rock, punk, and whatever else, the co-existence of more than one style of composition, all require a sociology of music that is not encompassed by a single philosophical approach.     

Water scarcity,property regimes and irrigation management in Sonjo,Tanzania

This article explores the dynamics of property rights in irrigation water in Sonjo, Tanzania. It analyses an unsuccessful attempt by the ruling political group to change the institutional arrangements of water control, to serve better their private goals. This example shows that not all internal institutional innovations in the field of utilising natural resources lead to increased efficiency of the system from the point of view of the whole community. We draw on New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Common Property Resource Management (CPRM) theory to analyse the way in which it was possible that those few within Sonjo society who are formally/nominally ‘the owners’ of water sought to privatise de facto collective use rights of all community members. We consider why this was done in some, but not all, Sonjo communities, and we describe why this process has eventually failed.     

Inequality,Economic Development,and Democratization

Although multiple theories suggest that economic development and inequality somehow affect democratization, these claims have received only limited empirical support. I contend that much of the confusion stems from the implicit assumption held by the literature that development and inequality affect democratization independently of one another. In this paper, I argue that the effect of income distribution on democratization is in fact contingent on the income level: in middle-income countries inequality fosters democratization; in rich countries, however, it harms democratization. Using a data set covering almost all autocracies between 1960 and 2007, I find evidence consistent with my hypothesis.     

Public Employment: Attractiveness,Representativeness, and Performance

The functions of the public sector penetrate almost all aspects of social life. Considering the tremendous implications that government employment holds for economic health and other aspects, it is understandable that the processes controlling entry to these jobs are subject to widespread concern. Democratic norms call for a representative bureaucracy. The large size and increasingly mono-ethnic of the Malaysian civil service have caused concern for some time. This study suggests that job characteristics, some background and personal characteristics are significant determinants of graduating students’ job choice. The study also demonstrates how representative bureaucracy would affect performance of the public sector.     

Files,Folders, and Special Folders: A Research Note on Stalinist Document Secrecy

This research note offers an outline of the origins of Stalinist secrecy policy: the conceptions behind it and the concrete practices for handling documents. It also provides an introduction to a recently declassified and still under-used set of documents, the Special Folders of the Politburo, the most secret documents of all.     

Public Organizations, Multiple Constituencies, And Governance

Public organizations vary considerably. Yet little attention has been paid to the systematic analysis of this diversity. Drawing on case studies of four public organizations and a survey on all central government organizations in Denmark, variations in tasks, environments, constituencies, and central governance are conceptualized. Public organization tasks can be analysed at three levels ranging from user-oriented outputs, general outputs which can further be divided into policy goals, scope of profile, standard setting and capital accumulation, to the normative base of the public sector. Public organizations vary with regard to the emphasis put on level of output and on how the different aspects of the tasks are interrelated. Variations in constituencies and exchange cycles with the environment are further related to different task profiles. Finally it is shown that central oversight organizations compete with other actors in the public organizations' environment in the governance of public organizations. From an organizational point of view 'the state' appears to have a humble and remote position.     

Quality, cost, and clinical decisions

Clinical decisions require determining the objectives of care as well as selecting and implementing a strategy of care. At the very least the optimal strategy balances the expected benefit and harm from technical interventions. Health care practitioners tend to specify optimal strategies based on what they consider to be best for patients, without regard to monetary cost. This is an absolutist definition of quality. Individuals may place different valuations on the outcomes, are concerned with the monetary costs to themselves, and are particularly sensitive to the attributes of the interpersonal relationship with the practitioners. Including all of these leads to an individualized definition of the quality of care. But this specification of quality may be in conflict with a social definition of quality, which takes into account social as well as individual monetary costs, externalities, and the social distribution of quality. The health care professions may respond to the conflict in several ways, which are described in this article as evasion, rejection and confrontation, anticipation, advocacy, active complicity, passive complicity, and ambiguous adaptations.     

Gulick and the american presidency: vision,reality, and consequences

One of Luther Gulick's most significant legacies was his conception of the executive. This chapter explores the nature and origins of that conception and shows how it coincided with President Franklin Roosevelt's notions for altering the powers of the presidency. These two conceptions came together in the Brownlow Committee's recommendations and their subsequent promulgation in the Executive Reorganization Act of 1939.

Gulick's notions of an executive were derived from the city manager, a different executive than any with which the authors of the Constitution were familiar. It thus contributed to one of the most profound changes in our Constitution, reshaped our notion of the presidency, crystallized a new public philosophy about how we govern ourselves, and entrenched a conventional wisdom that underlies the practice of public administration. These results spawned an alliance between presidents, who found it useful to portray themselves as powerful chief executive officers buttressed by the potent symbols of science and efficiency and the nascent field of public administration which gained legitimacy as the obedient scientific managers of the president. An alliance, however, which could not survive the changes of constituencies that began to emerge in the late 1960s.

The presidency has evolved from managerial to plebiscitary and finally to highly politicized with a variety of potentialities not all of which can be viewed as benign, but all of which leave public administration without a role that is simultaneously legitimate and which encompasses the complexity and discretion dictated by our circumstances. The chapter closes with lessons we might draw from Luther Gulick's life and apply to our efforts to fashion a new role for public administration in a government of shared powers.     

Democracy,confusion, or chaos: Political conditionality in Kenya

We argue that the policy of conditioning all economic development aid on a process of democratization is a mistake. Good economic policy should be rewarded for its own sake. The process of democratization is costly to participants, and forcing it prematurely can lead to institutional collapse rather than development. Unclear definition of political conditionality has made donor policies inconsistent and capricious. We make these arguments conceptually and then review the experience of one of the most explicit cases of conditionality-induced “democratization”—Kenya. An aid cutoff stimulated the government to hold multiparty elections for the first time in many years. Despite the apparent success, the human and economic costs have been high, and the political changes less than donors hoped.     

The Things They Learned: Aspiration,Uncertainty, and Schooling in Rwanda’s Developmental State

The role of formal education in the reproduction of inequalities is well documented. Less clear is how this lens can be applied to a study of post-conflict state-building. The present study pairs policy analysis with student-centred ethnographic fieldwork to examine education policy in Rwanda. Since the end of the genocide, the government has staked its claim to legitimacy in delivering inclusive development. Its basic education policy is an entitlement programme with broad public support and designed to allow all children to attend primary and secondary school. Students found themselves caught up in a web of contradictions with important symbolic and material dimensions. They went to schools designed to improve access for the poor. But they were also poor schools, lacking in quality and associated with failure. The country’s switch from French to English was bound up in alliances of domestic power that further undermined effective teaching and learning. The basic education policy intended to highlight the government’s commitment to deliver development to all. But in absence of a sustained and effective strategy to improve quality, young people felt excluded from meaningful engagement in the education system. Whether the basic education policy constitutes inclusive development is therefore debatable.     

Work Values of Public,Nonprofit, and Business Employees: A Cross-Cultural Evidence

Employees’ work values, or beliefs about desirability of certain work attributes and outcomes, are believed to drive their motivation to work and stay in certain settings. This article compares work values of business, government, and nonprofit employees in a sample of nations with different cultural orientations—Germany, India, South Korea, Russia, South Africa, and the US. Results showed significant relationship between a country and work values variables, suggesting that a country's culture may have a potential to influence what individuals value in work. Additionally, employees of government, business, and nonprofit sectors differed in their work values in all six countries.     

Microdisarmament and Compliance Costs: An Analysis of Disarmament,Demobilization, and Reintegration Programs

Focusing on disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs, this article considers why some armed groups disarm and demobilize, while others refuse to do so. Previous research focused on intergroup rivalries and identified enforcement as a critical barrier. This study considers the effect of (1) war benefits and (2) intragroup dynamics and argues that distribution problems obstruct conflict resolution. Using a simple game-theoretic model, the article demonstrates that optimal programs (1) consider that combatants' cost of supporting peace varies and (2) require a mix of positive and negative incentives to motivate all ex-combatants to participate and comply with program requirements.     

Patronage,Service Delivery,and Social Justice in Indonesia

This article examines how patronage networks operate in subnational governments in Indonesia paying particular attention to how they have affected human resource management (HRM) practices in education and health services. Corrupt practices were found in varying degrees in all the provincial public services studied. They were associated with patronage systems and involved illegal payments for entrance exam results, recruitment and selection, placement, promotion, and transfer. These practices had an adverse effect on the quantity and quality of service delivery and represented a challenge to social justice.

This article is related to the special issue “Contemporary Challenges for Public Sector Human Resource Management” of the International Journal of Public Administration, Volume 35, Issue 8, 2012.     

Obama, Look East

America is more a creed than a nation. Our promise has always been that all individuals, despite race, religion or gender, have the equal chance to make it. The election of Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States is thus a “soft power” coup for America's global image, which had lost its luster during the Bush years. Obama is the anti‐Bush who will lead by the power of example instead of the example of power. Yet, there are real limits. Can the power of example stop the North Korean or Iranian nuclear programs? Can it stop jihadists bent on establishing a new Caliphate across South Asia? Can it limit China's ambitions as the new power in Asia? In this section commentators from across the world offer their views.     

MANAGING GOVERNMENT-THIRD SECTOR COLLABORATION: ACCOUNTABILITY,AMBIGUITY, AND POLITICS

Recent years have witnessed increased revelations by watchdog agents of mismanagement and abuse in third sector organizations that collaborate with government resulting in a decline in public trust and signs of a portending legitimacy crisis. Strengthening accountability mechanisms seems an obvious response to this trend. Yet, Israeli attempts to improve accountability of government-third sector collaborations have largely failed. Politics of accountability theory provides an explanation as to why. The findings demonstrate that political, bureaucratic and third sector stakeholders have a mutual interest in maintaining a cloak of ambiguity over government-third sector collaborations. The effects of four alternative accountability types on accountability, ambiguity, flexibility and politics are examined in an attempt to identify feasible and effective accountability strategies. There is no one ideal accountability type for all situations. Attention to the pitfalls of each accountability type may alert accountability decision-makers to appropriate combinations of accountability types for particular circumstances. However, the actual choice of accountability types has more to do with the politics of accountability than with scientific analysis of what is most appropriate.     

Contractual Conditions,Organizational Level,Dimension of Organization,and Work Conflict as Potential Predictors of Job Stress in Public Administration

Job stress is a pervasive problem for employers in the 21st century economy, making it a timely and important topic in organizational settings. The variables influencing job stress are numerous and consequently it may be analyzed from different perspectives, but the root is primarily physical and psychosocial. This study specifically explores three physical sources of job stress—contractual condition of work, organizational position, and dimension of organization—and of one psychosocial source—work conflict. A survey instrument was used to collect information from regional Public Administration employees of South Italy. Data from 1,130 respondents were analyzed. Statistical correlations and hierarchical regression showed that contractual condition of work, organizational position, organizational dimension, and work conflict were all predictive aspects of job stress.