Organizational Identity,Image, and Reputation: Examining the Influence on Perceptions of Employer Attractiveness in Public Sector Organizations

The active management of an organization’s image, identity and overall reputation can result in a range of benefits including attracting larger and higher quality job applicant pools, fostering an improved overall impression of the firm in potential employees’ minds and retaining and engendering loyalty amongst current employees. How these concepts apply in the public sector remains nascent. This paper reviews the extant literature on identity, image, and reputation and identifies how and why these concepts are salient for exploring current and potential employees’ perceptions of the public sector as an employer. A conceptual model is developed through reviewing organizational characteristics of public sector entities and proposing how these may influence employees’ image, identity and reputation perceptions of the employer attractiveness of the sector.     

A Subnational Study of Insurgency: FARC Violence in the 1990s

This article examines the traditional political and economic factors that have been purported to explain the prevalence of insurgency. It tests the following hypotheses at the subnational level in Colombia: guerrilla violence is positively associated with exports; higher levels of insurgency are associated with low levels of GDP per capita or negative growth rates; guerrilla violence emerges in the context of weak state presence; and higher levels of state repression are associated with higher levels of insurgent violence. The analysis utilizes a zero-inflated negative binomial to capture dynamics of both intensity and onset of violence. The econometric analysis is supplemented with cartographic visualization and qualitative analysis.     

Assessing the Impact of Microcredit: A Zambian Case Study

Expectations are high, but evidence of the impact of microcredit remains in short supply. This article estimates the impact of an urban credit programme in Zambia on business performance and on a range of indicators of wellbeing. Borrowers who obtained a second loan experienced significantly higher average growth in business profits and household income. Inflexible group enforcement of loan obligations resulted in some borrowers, especially amongst those who had taken only one loan, being made worse off. Our methodological investigations suggest that the supply of rigorous impact studies can be increased by basing them on data collection that serves a wider range of purposes, including market research.     

Local Chairs vs International Networks: the Beginning of the Scholarly Career in a Peripheral Academic Field

Sensitive to the differences between centers and peripheries of knowledge production, this article explores how scholars in peripheral fields use knowledge from central fields to structure their academic careers. The article presents the findings of a case study of career choices of political scientists in Argentina. In order to understand the interplay between foreign knowledge and local strategies of enacting networks, this article focuses on the beginning of academic careers. At this early stage, political scientists in Argentina usually have to make a decision whether to stay in the country or go abroad for postgraduate education. Relying on positioning theory and recent developments in Science and Technology Studies, we identified two alternative positioning strategies. Those who stay in Argentina tend to hoard as many scholarly positions as possible, enacting local networks oriented towards teaching. Scholars who go abroad enact networks with international dimensions, in the process enrolling persons and objects, though not always successfully. Scholars with international experience tend to be research oriented, and they mention the working conditions abroad as particularly attractive. We show the extent to which these findings challenge some views of centers and periphery and highlight the active role of scholars in peripheral scientific fields.     

Culture and Post-Soviet Transitions: A Pilot Study in the Republic of Armenian

In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia declared its independence and thus began her abrupt journey back to democracy and a free-market economy. Using semistructured interviews, this study examined the differences in values, beliefs, and attitudes among three differnet age groups of Armenians about the post-transition world. The groups were Generation1 (those who lived under the Soviet system), Generation 2 (those who grew up under the Soviet system and have lived in the post-Soviet Armenia), and Generation 3 (those who were either still children during the Soviet Union or were born after its demise). The study found one major theme for each cohort: nostalgia, ambivalence–nostalgia, and euphoria–nostalgia, respectively. Nationalism was common to all groups, though not as prevalent as nostalgia. The study can help expand understanding of the link between micro issues (e.g., values, beliefs, and attitudes) and macro issues (e.g., history, economic systems, post-Soviet transition, and globazliation), as well as provide insight into the policy implications of micro issues.     

Global Clusters in Municipal E-Governance: A Longitudinal Study

This research focuses on the trends in municipal e-governance among large municipalities based on a worldwide survey in 2011. The study replicates previous surveys conducted every other year since 2003 and the longitudinal assessment analyzes specific features of municipal websites. This paper examines these longitudinal trends in terms of four different clusters: 1) digitally mature cities, 2) digitally moderate cities, 3) digitally minimal cities, and 4) digitally marginal cities, and identifies the best practices among them. There were significant changes in the top ranking cities, with Seoul, Toronto, Madrid, Prague, and Hong Kong representing the highest level in e-governance.     

Public Procurement Directives in the European Union: A Study of Local Authority Purchasing

Prompted by the Single European Market initiative, virtually all public procurement, except for defence equipment, is now subject to European Union rules which prohibit discriminatory (buy national) purchasing policies. This paper examines the impact of recent procurement Directives on local authority tendering and contract award behaviour (compliance), and considers whether the legislation has been successful in opening-up such public procurement to international competition. Although local authorities are making extensive use of the Official Journal to advertise their requirements, there is evidence that purchasers do not always adhere to the new legislation and it is not obvious that adherence to the legislation is improving. Moreover, an analysis of local authority contract award data for 1993 revealed that almost all contracts were won by domestic firms. However, doubts about the ultimate ownership of such firms and the sourcing of components means that there remains considerable scope for further work.     

E-Governance Approaches at the Local Level: A Case Study in Best Practice

In the fall of 2009, the city of Prague set out to conduct a critical analysis of its overall performance by closely examining the performance of the city's districts. In conjunction with the E-Governance Institute at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, and the Public Technology Institute in Washington D.C., a quantitative survey of all 22 administrative districts' e-governance and online presence was conducted. Guided by the survey results, qualitative case studies of the top five performing districts were carried out in January 2010. The underlying goal of this research project is to further improve e-governance in Prague and foster a greater understanding of successful digital government initiatives. The findings of the survey and the case studies are presented, and key findings in the case studies are highlighted.     

试论美国国会财政权的运作过程——以美国金融救市预算案为例分析

美国国会的财政权主要是国会按照宪法和法律赋予的权力和程序并依据辅助机构的技术支持对政府预算收支、特殊时期债务赤字提议进行审查决议及监督的权力,这一权力不仅是国会对总统为首的政府部门实施控制的“杀手锏”,而且它能否公正负责地履行这一权力,在很大程度上关系到作为纳税人的公众“钱袋权”能否真正实现的大问题。