From Crisis to Opportunity: Human Resource Challenges for the Public Sector in the Twenty-First Century

A great deal of attention has been focused on the human capital crisis in the public sector since the mid-1990s. Experts and practitioners give many reasons why the current crisis emerged. This article examines the important factors that led to the crisis, what is being done about them through presidential agendas, legislators, oversight agencies, professional societies, and public policy think tanks. Concerns are many in terms of a large number of upcoming retirements, early retirements, unplanned downsizing, difficulty in attracting new generations to public service, and the changing nature of public service. However, the human resource crisis also presents an opportunity to fundamentally change those features of public sector human resource management practices that have become outdated for contemporary organizations and position government agencies for the twenty-first century by meaningfully reforming the civil service. This transformation would require public sector organizations to take a more strategic view of human resource management and to give greater policy attention to human capital issues.     

The Imprisonment Crisis in America: Introduction

This article provides an overview of recent trends in imprisonment rates in America and introduces the articles in this issue of The Review of Policy Research. Incarceration rates have increased by more than 500 percent since the early 1970s and have now reached a rate of almost 700, higher than anywhere else in the world. The impact has been particularly hard on racial minorities, especially women (whose incarceration rate went from around 8 in 1975 to 59 in 2001). The “war on drugs” has been one of the main reasons behind the increases in imprisonment, along with the more general “get tough on crime” movement that began in the late 1970s. The articles in this issue center around how this recent trend in incarceration impacts the entire society, but especially poor communities. Several of the articles focus on race, age and gender as important variables, in addition to the tendency of the parole system to sort of “recycle” released prisoners back into the prison system.     

Crisis and employment: The case of Korea

This paper examines Korea's employment dynamics and analyzes how adverse impacts could be mitigated during the recent economic crisis in comparison with the 1997 to 1998 Asian crisis. A clear lesson is that policies to mitigate adverse impacts of financial crisis on the macroeconomic level should be given priority for preserving employment. In this regard, expansionary monetary and fiscal policies to keep aggregate demand from collapsing need to be emphasized once a crisis breaks out. However, equally crucial is the maintenance of sound pre‐crisis fundamentals to help keep negative impacts from proliferating, even when a crisis is triggered. In addition, flexible labor market structures and temporary employment‐boosting policies appear to be necessary to reduce the negative impacts of a crisis on workers. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

From Vlaams Blok to Vlaams Belang: The Belgian Far-Right Renames Itself

On 14 November 2004, the Belgian far-right party Vlaams Blok changed its name to Vlaams Belang and instituted a number of changes in its programme. This was a response to the earlier decision of the Court of Cassation which had found Vlaams Blok to be in violation of the law against racism. As a result, some of the more extreme positions of Vlaams Blok have been dropped from the new statute of Vlaams Belang. Opinion is divided concerning whether or not the law against racism has worked by effectively setting the parameters for legally acceptable propaganda, or whether the recent changes would help the far-right expand its voter base by making it more mainstream. This article seeks to contrast these two points of view.     

The Executive Divided Against Itself: Cohabitation in France, 1986–1988

From March 1986 to May 1988 France was headed by a leftist President and a rightist Prime Minister. The background to this unusual situation is presented, and the experience itself — referred to as cohabitation — is discussed in detail.
The complex game that the two executive leaders played during the period was regulated by the constitutional rules, conditioned by the electoral calendar and the narrowness of the prime minister's coalition majority, and moderated by public approval and the existence of a bipartisan foreign and defense policy.
The 1986–1988 experience did not overtax the constitutional system, but cohabitation under different conditions could be destabilizing. Cohabitation is like the possibility of the US president being selected by the House of Representatives: not highly probable but possible, not necessarily dangerous but possibly so, and something that arouses little enthusiasm.     

Minorities and Modernity: The Crisis of Liberal Secularism

The Enlightenment as the origin of modernity and as the foundation of moral universalism has been much invoked by social theory in recent years especially by writers influenced by Michel Foucault's essay on the subject. Postmodernism and cultural anthropology have made the question about Enlightenment universalism ever more pressing. At one level the issue is very simple. By its emphasis on universalism in knowledge and ethics, the Enlightenment made particularity a problem and it resulted in a stigmatization of those social groups that patently departed from its magisterial interpretation of rationality appear to be irrational, premodern and dangerous. Aamir Mufti claims uncontroversially that the Enlightenment idea of universalism set up a series of contrasts between the universalism of the bourgeois world of civility, civilization and citizenship on the one hand and local practices and customs on the other. The result was to construct a classification of social minorities who were deemed to be in need of education, moral reform, modernization and assimilation. Enlightenment in the Colony involves a comparison between “the Jewish Question” and the Partition of India. The particularity of Jews and Muslims is examined in the context of modern assumptions about universalism, especially the notion of universal citizenship.     

The Financial Crisis: A Retrospective

Government efforts to manage the financial crisis and to promote economic recovery have been extensive over the past three years. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been distributed—and much of it now repaid—from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The Federal Reserve holds more than $2 trillion in mortgage‐backed securities, collateralized loans to financial institutions, and other assets and liabilities to maintain liquidity in the financial markets. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act injected more than $600 billion into the economy through tax breaks, loans, contracts, grants, and entitlements. Congress also passed the Dodd‐Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010. Yet economic recovery remains flat. The author examines the reform effort to date, key points of its primary focus, and the politics of implementing the reform as a factor in eventual economic recovery. One component of the reform, the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, holds the greatest potential for changing the way consumers participate in the financial markets, but also has drawn the greatest debate and opposition. While regulatory reform alone will not revive the economy, a newly conceived and broadly participatory Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could simplify and streamline the complex linkages that contribute to the supply of credit.     

Combining Structural Forms in the Search for Policy Tools: Incident Command Systems in U.S. Crisis Management

As governments search for policy tools to deliver public services, two choices—hierarchy or network—are portrayed as stark alternatives. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has adopted a practitioner‐based innovation known as the Incident Command System (ICS) that assumes that crises require a network of responders, but that these networks should be managed by a hierarchy. While the ICS illustrates the potential for mixing hierarchies and networks, it was mandated by policymakers willing to make broad assumptions about the applicability of the ICS on limited evidence. An overdependence on practitioner claims displaced careful analysis of the underlying logics vital to understanding the operation of the policy tool. A case study of the ICS in managing an exotic animal disease outbreak points to the importance of crisis characteristics and management factors as contingencies affecting the operation of the ICS.     

论当代资本主义的两难困局:从“滞胀”危机到“次贷”危机

当代资本主义在坚守资本主义根本制度的前提下进行了多次自我调整.凯恩斯主义挽救了资本主义,也给资本主义带来滞胀危机;新自由主义克服了滞胀危机,却加剧了贫富两极分化,引发了社会危机和次贷危机.当代资本主义两难困局表明,资本主义的自我调整不可能医治资本主义的病症,社会根本制度的变革是解决问题的唯一路径;调整不是在强化正统资本主义的元素,而是在为新社会因素的产生发挥着催生作用.