"Adventuring" Arts Entrepreneurship Curricula in Higher Education: An Examination of Present Efforts,Obstacles, and Best Practices

As arts entrepreneurship programs emerge in higher education, many remain idiosyncratic because of a lack of oversight by accreditation organizations. This diversity has spawned a number of philosophical and curricular trajectories in these programs; these different programs reflect the unique microcultures of theater, art, and music units. What has been lacking is a broad understanding of curricular and program development practices and techniques.

This article is the result of a national study funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and aims to outline best practices in arts entrepreneurship education and to gain some understanding about the curricular structure, interest in, and growth of these efforts. After interviewing decision makers and students about the topic, it is clear the interest in arts entrepreneurship education is strong, widespread, and rapidly growing.     

The Public University's Performance in State Arts Policy: Lessons from Virginia

This article investigates the extent to which public higher education institutions participate in state-level arts policy through a history of selected budgets and a textual analysis of performing arts presenting centers at public higher education institutions in Virginia. Evidence from this research suggests that the arts policy field is altered by the emergence of public higher education institutions as policy actors. The findings have financial and decision-making implications for arts policy makers, university administrators, and arts agencies as the participation of public higher education institutions affords new opportunities and challenges for the state encouragement of the arts.     

Outsourcing,Discretion, and Administrative Justice: Exploring the Acceptability of Privatized Decision Making

This study explores what happens to administrative justice and to the acceptability of frontline decisions in privatized and marketized models of service. Through the case study of privatized welfare‐to‐work in Israel, it shows the fundamental tension between outsourced discretion and traditional conceptions of administrative justice in which the trustworthiness of decisions relies on the idea that decision makers have no personal interest in the outcome of their decisions. It finds that in the Israeli case, contractors' financial interests were widely perceived as putting their professionals into a conflict of interest, thereby undermining trust in their decisions. At the same time, the study finds the program's managerial performance mechanisms did not provide an alternative legitimacy argument for the acceptability of decisions. The study also analyzes the ways policy makers reconstructed the decision‐making systems to regain public acceptance of frontline decisions, while discussing both the potential and the limits of legitimizing outsourced discretion in such complex public services.     

Integrating Environmental Protection and EU Competition Law: Why Competition Isn't Special

One of the biggest challenges facing environmental policy makers at present is that of integrating environmental protection goals into economic policy areas. Unless this is genuinely achieved, it is clear that environmental degradation will continue apace. Though one of the EU's most important areas of economic competence is competition policy, many policy makers and commentators reject the notion that environmental concerns should play a significant role in EU competition analysis. In that light, this article addresses two key questions. First, should this approach apply? Second, if not, what are the principles that govern how environmental protection requirements should be taken into account by decision makers applying EU competition law? In answering these questions, the article puts forward three theoretical arguments as to why, and how, the environmental benefits and damage flowing from goods and services should be taken into account by EU competition decision makers, based, respectively, on legal systematic, governance and economic reasoning.     

Government Redistribution in the Shadow of Legislative Elections: A Study of the Illinois Member Initiative Grants Program

We study an Illinois state government program called “member initiative spending” and examine the extent to which three competing theories can explain the program's allocations among Illinois's 118 House districts. We show that member initiative monies distributed before the 2000 general election were disproportionately allocated to districts that were politically competitive, represented by legislative leaders, or represented by moderate legislators. Our analysis supports theories that claim budgetary decisions made by elected officials are tactical, and it shows that the Illinois decision makers who allocated member initiative funds sought to distribute them in a way that would be most beneficial in the sense of vote buying.     

Thoughtfully Reflective Decision Making and the Accumulation of Capital: Bringing Choice Back In

In this paper we relate a particular type of decision making, thoughtfully reflective decision making (TRDM) in adolescence, to successful and unsuccessful life outcomes in young adulthood. Those who are thoughtfully reflective in their decision making are more likely to consider possible alternative routes to goal attainment, weigh the costs and benefits of those alternatives, and critically revisit the decision once made to examine what went well and what went wrong. We also argue that what mediates the effect of TRDM on later life outcomes is the accumulation of capital. Those who use better decision making practices are more likely to recognize the resources provided by and make the necessary investments to accumulate human, social and cultural capital. These notions are theoretically linked to conceptions of criminal offenders as both rational planners and decision makers and as fully human agents. Using data from the Add Health data set, our hypotheses are largely confirmed. Those who are higher in TRDM as adolescents were more likely to have enrolled in or graduated from college, to be in better physical health, are more involved in civic and community affairs, less likely to commit criminal acts, use illegal drugs and be involved in heavy drinking as adults. TRDM is also positively related to the accumulation of human, social and cultural capital. Finally, a substantial part of the effect of TRDM on young adult outcomes was mediated by capital accumulation. The implications of these findings for future theory and research are discussed.     

STATEWIDE SPECIAL EDUCATION SURROGATE PARENT PROGRAMS: ENSURING QUALITY ADVOCACY TO ALL FOSTER CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL EDUCATION NEEDS

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) protects foster children's rights to have a special education decision maker. For foster children who do not have a natural or adoptive parent or a responsible adult in their life to take on this role, IDEIA requires that a special education surrogate parent be appointed by appropriate procedures. Under IDEIA, these procedures are delegated to the states. Each state must ensure that local education agencies (LEAs) delineate methods for recruiting and maintaining a pool of available special education surrogate parents. Due to differing state laws and LEA procedures, there are many discrepancies in the quality and availability of special education surrogate parents. To combat these problems, this Note proposes principles for administrative regulations establishing statewide special education surrogate parent programs by examining existing statewide programs. Administered through a state's Department of Education in collaboration with child welfare agencies, statewide special education surrogate parent programs guarantee well‐qualified decision makers who will advocate for all children eligible for special education services.     

The Institutionalization of Risk

The centrality of risk assessment and risk management to complex organizations testifies to the institutionalization of risk in modern society. Much of the writing on risk assessment and management deals with how decision makers struggle with uncertainty rather than calculable risk. The conceptualization of risk and uncertainty depends in part upon whether one focuses upon decision makers and their decisions or upon outcomes of decisions. Focusing on decision makers leads to concern with risk management whereas focusing on the decision or outcomes draws attention to risk analysis. The papers examined in this paper are primarily concerned with decision makers and risk management. In doing so, we examine the social construction of risks and their control, how intelligence gathering and processing affects risk analysis and management, and the latent functions of risk regulation.     

Using psychology to control law

Legal decision makers often fail to make use of relevant psychological research. In two areas, deceptive advertising and criminal sentencing, legal decision makershave welcomed social science research. In each, the research provided has been substantially flawed. Using a commercial that several courts evaluated for deception, I illustrate how the typical study that purports to measure deception produces results that are unnecessarily ambibuous. Then, based on research that looks closely at public responses to criminal cases, I show that the frequently cited survey measures of public preference reflect sentencing preferences for unrepresentative stereotypic criminal offenders. The weaknesses demonstated in these examples suggest that psychologists can present legal decision makers with a more accurate picture of human perceptions and preferences. If researchers present legal decision makers with informative research when the relevance of research is acknowledged, legal decision makers are likely to become more receptive and more knowledgeable when a new question warrants the application of social science evidence.An earlier version of this paper was delivered as the presidential address for Division 41, the American Psychology—Law Society, at the 1988 American Psychological Association meetings in Atlanta, Georgia.     

THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE CHILD

Despite heavy use of the concept of the "best interests" of the child, there is little consensus about what criteria constitute a child's best interests or how these criteria should be applied. This article explores some of the problems of the best interest concept, from the developmental and psychological perspective, and suggests that the concept is a worthwhile one if decision makers are able to go beyond cliches and superficial definitions.     

Conducting Cost Benefit Analyses in Criminal Justice Evaluations: Do We Dare?

The last decade has witnessed a demand for evidence-based programs in virtually every field of social research. Presumably evidence will help inform officials as to which programs are likely to yield successful outcomes as well as help practitioners operate programs with best practices. But program effectiveness is only half the answer. The other half is affordability. Policy makers make budget-constrained decisions. A decision to implement a program in one area means cuts in programs in some other area. Evaluations that report only effectiveness findings cannot contribute much toward social program decision making. Evaluators must start to provide information on both costs and effectiveness or costs and benefits. This paper presents some of the challenges of incorporating cost benefit analysis into traditional criminal justice program evaluations. It presents illustrations of the conceptual and measurement issues to be faced evaluating programs in such areas as private security, juvenile delinquency, police interventions, and correctional rehabilitation when researchers attempt to add cost analysis to program inputs and try to convert outcomes into monetary units. It raises issues regarding availability, program externalities, hidden resources, and inadequacies of outcome measures. It concludes with some general guidance for evaluators on conducting such analyses and a checklist of questions to consider when deciding between cost effectiveness analysis and cost benefit analysis.     

A normality bias in legal decision making

It is important to understand how legal fact finders determine causation and assign blame. However, this process is poorly understood. Among the psychological factors that affect decision makers are an omission bias (a tendency to blame actions more than inactions [omissions] for bad results), and a normality bias (a tendency to react more strongly to bad outcomes that spring from abnormal rather than normal circumstances). The omission and normality biases often reinforce one another when inaction preserves the normal state and when action creates an abnormal state. But what happens when these biases push in opposite directions as they would when inaction promotes an abnormal state or when action promotes a normal state? Which bias exerts the stronger influence on the judgments and behaviors of legal decision makers? The authors address this issue in two controlled experiments. One experiment involves medical malpractice and the other involves stockbroker negligence. They find that jurors pay much more attention to the normality of conditions than to whether those conditions arose through acts or omissions. Defendants who followed a nontraditional medical treatment regime or who chose a nontraditional stock portfolio received more blame and more punishment for bad outcomes than did defendants who obtained equally poor results after recommending a traditional medical regime or a traditional stock portfolio. Whether these recommendations entailed an action or an omission was essentially irrelevant. The Article concludes with a discussion of the implications of a robust normality bias for American jurisprudence.     

Modeling the Evolution of Legal Discretion.An Artificial Intelligence Approach

Abstract. Much legal research focuses on understanding how judicial decision‐makers exercise their discretion. In this paper we examine the notion of legal or judicial discretion, and weaker and stronger forms of discretion. At all times our goal is to build cognitive models of the exercise of discretion, with a view to building computer software to model and primarily support decision‐making. We observe that discretionary decision‐making can best be modeled using three independent axes: bounded and unbounded, defined and undefined, and binary and continuous. Examples of legal tasks are given from each of the eight ensuing octants and we conclude by saying what this model shows about current legal trends. We should stress that our taxonomy has been based on our observations of how discretionary legal decisions are made. No claim is made that our model is either complete (providing advice in every domain) or exact, but it does help knowledge engineers construct legal decision support systems in discretionary domains.     

A computerized aid for international crisis management

Among the problems facing decision makers are those of receiving reliable warnings of nascent crises and of having relevant information which can be brought to bear on unforseen decision problems. This paper describes how computer technology is being used to address both of these problems in a real-time environment. Specifically, computers are being used to manage and analyze the relations among nations in order to forewarn decision makers withad hoc information retrieval and data analysis capabilities. Using computers in this fashion in the foreign policy arena is a recent innovation which may have application in other arenas where decision makers must continually anticipate and adapt to unfolding world situations.     

论行政案卷排他原则的运作原理——听证者与决定者的统一机制

行政主体内部的管理体制,使得听证者和决定者在形式上必然是分离的。由决定者必须听证发展到听证者必须决定,再发展到案卷排他,才使得听证者和决定者达到完美的统一。而且案卷排他,通过案卷这个"隔音空间",使得机关决定和行政首长的个人决定也达到了完美的统一。最后,案卷排他,通过政策、经验和专业考量等裁量因素的入卷,使得行政首长最后的决定程序也变成了看得见的程序。     

Public Higher Education Institutions' Investment in Performing Arts Centers

Although commonplace in academic settings, performing arts centers are multifaceted and remain unexplored. Framed by resource dependency theory, this research sheds light on the motivations of higher education institutions in a resource-scarce environment. Specifically, why do these institutions—with limited resources—prioritize the co-curricular arts? This study employs process research to understand the origination, funding sources, and purposes of performing arts centers at higher education institutions in Virginia. Evidence suggests that these institutions invest in the co-curricular arts to not only fulfill their public service missions, but also to capitalize on and acquire resources.     

Adjudicating Fear of Witchcraft Claims in Refugee Law

In refugee applications involving witchcraft‐related violence (WRV), those accused of witchcraft are largely women, and those fearing witchcraft are more often men. This is one of two interrelated articles reporting on cases where claimants feared harm from witchcraft or occult practices. It argues that WRV is a manifestation of gender‐related harm, one which exposes major failings in the application of refugee jurisprudence. Systemic inattention to the meaning and application of the Convention ground of religion, combined with gender insensitivity in analysis, meant that claims were frequently reconfigured by decision makers as personal grudges. The fear of witchcraft cases pose an acute ontological challenge to refugee status determination, as the claimed harm falls outside what is understood to be objective, verifiable, or Convention‐related. Male applicants struggled to make their claims comprehensible as a result of the feminized and ‘irrational’ characterization of witchcraft fears and beliefs.     

Assessing the Credibility of Refugee Applicants: A Judicial Perspective

The principal responsibility of refugee decision makers is todetermine those to whom refugee protection is owed. The mannerin which these decisions are to be made in Australia is thesubject of ongoing debate. However, that debate is not the subjectof this paper. The focus of this paper is on the credibilityassessment of refugee applicants and its principal purpose isinstructive. It is my hope that it will enhance the credibilityof credibility assessment within existing processes. Its secondarypurpose is to provide a basis from which policy makers may considerlegislative and other procedural change. It has been suggested that the ‘devil is in the detail’in refugee decision making. Working in a common law country,Australian refugee decision makers are afforded the (often binding)benefit of extensive judicial review of the refugee determinationprocess.¹ Thus, for Australian decision makers, the ‘devilin the detail’ is often to be found in a plethora of bindinglegal precedent. Accordingly, while the first part of this paperdiscusses selected matters which have facilitated the assessmentof the credibility of refugee applicants in Australia, as oneof the most authoritative domestic sources available, the secondpart of this paper principally focuses on the expressed viewsof Australian courts after examining credibility findings indecisions of the Refugee Review Tribunal.²