An investigative research on the status of urban residents' psychological security

The objective of this study was to investigate the status of the psychological security of 224 urban residents by using a self‐made questionnaire. The results show that the overall psychological security of urban residents is in the medium–low level. There are significant differences among residents with education background or with household per capita monthly income (F = 4.192, F = 4.545, p < 0.05). People with high psychological security scores are highly educated or come from families with high per capita monthly income. In regards to the factors of common sense of security, the results show significant differences (F = 4.98, p < 0.01) among people with different educational background and people with bachelor's degrees or above scores higher than less‐educated people (from high school or community college). In regards to the factors of certainty feeling, there are significant variations among people with genders and economic background (F = 11.28, F = 7.75, p < 0.01), males higher than females, while people with per capita monthly income of more than 2000 RMB feel more certainty than those with less than 2000 RMB. On the sense of calmness, factors such as education and family per capita income significantly affected scores (F = 4.67, p < 0.05, F = 5.20, p < 0.01). People with high school degree feel less calm than those with college degree or above; individuals with per capita monthly income of 2000 RMB feel less calm than those with income higher than 2000 RMB of above. For another dimension, the sense of relaxation, there is a significant difference among different age groups (F = 8.92, p < 0.001, groups below 40 scoring higher than groups over 40). Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Policy Implications of Limiting Immigrant Concentration in Danish Public Schools

Immigrant students in Denmark on average perform worse in lower secondary school than native Danish students. Part of the effect may not stem from the immigrant students themselves, but from the student composition at the school. From a policy perspective, the latter aspect is quite interesting since it is more feasible to change student composition in schools than the socioeconomic status of the individual students. This article describes theoretically the circumstances under which total student achievement can be increased by reallocating certain groups of students. Empirical analyses of Danish register data of more than 40,000 students suggest that the gain in total student achievement by reallocating immigrant students is minor. The educational outcome of immigrant students can however, ceteris paribus, be increased, at minimal expense to the majority of native Danish students' educational outcome, by limiting the share of immigrant students at grade level at any one school to less than 50 percent. The policy implications of this finding are discussed.     

Coproduction and Equity in Public Service Delivery

Public managers and researchers devote much attention to the benefits of coproduction, or the mixing of the productive efforts of public employees and citizens in public service design and delivery. One concern, however, is the distributional consequences of coproduction. This article proposes that disadvantaged citizens may be constrained by a lack of knowledge or other resources necessary to contribute to and benefit from the coproduction process. From this assumption, the authors develop the theoretical argument that if coproduction programs were designed to lift constraints on disadvantaged citizens, they might increase both efficiency and equity. This claim is tested using a field experiment on educational services. A coproduction program providing immigrant parents with knowledge and materials useful to their children's early educational development had a substantial positive impact on the educational outcomes of disadvantaged children, thereby diminishing inequity. Economically, the program was more efficient than later compensation of low‐performing children.     

Moral choice and dialectic failure

Robert J. Myers is President of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, a not-for-profit educational organization based in new York City. He is author of The Political Economy of the International Monetary Fund (published by Transaction).     

The Effect of Microneighborhood Conditions on Adult Educational Attainment in a Subsidized Housing Intervention

The ACHIEVEability model of affordable housing aims to promote self-sufficiency by requiring enrollment in postsecondary education in exchange for subsidized housing. In this study, we exploit the quasi random assignment of ACHIEVEability participants (N = 84) to subsidized housing units to evaluate whether microneighborhood environments moderated participants’ progress in postsecondary education. Participants progressed in their educational pursuits in line with program requirements, earning about 12 college credits per year. Neighborhood block group characteristics moderated this progress. Participants who were assigned to housing located in poorer, more violent, and less educated block groups earned credits at a significantly slower rate than participants assigned housing in more advantaged block groups. Our results suggest that the micro environments immediately surrounding residents of subsidized housing matter, even if they are situated within broader contexts of spatial and personal disadvantage.     

Politics and the Political in Castoriadis

This paper explores the distinction of politics and the political in Castoriadis’ work. Whereas the political refers to the instituted as the management of society in accordance with established laws, politics refers to the instituting as the capacity of the imaginary to constantly challenge established laws on the basis of individual and collective autonomy. The politics of autonomy identify with the regime of direct democracy, established first and foremost at the level of economy and expanding accordingly in all spheres of society. Democracy contains both a psychoanalytical and educational perspective inasmuch as it aims at the conscious self-reflective harmonisation of individual and collective autonomy by means of collective deliberation.     

Rhetoric and Action in Regulating the Public Schools in Norway and Sweden

In the past few decades, Norway and Sweden, like the rest of the Western world, have attempted to restructure and deregulate education. In both countries, the established governing models were threatened due to lack of legitimacy and efficiency. This article discusses the extent to which the different explanations of stability and institutional change address what happened when Management by Objectives and Results (MbOR) was introduced in Norway and Sweden. However, both the content and the course of change were different in the two countries. More specifically, one can talk about processes combining lock‐in mechanism and layering in the Norwegian course of development. In Sweden, the process of change was characterized by sudden and radical decisions. A decision made in 1991 could be explained as a state of punctuated equilibrium, as strong forces produced a situation where nothing else was to be done except make a radical change, turning the centralized system into a decentralized one. The period has parallels to the concept of ‘critical juncture’, representing a moment of openness to and possibility for different and new actors to influence a new constitution. In Norway, the transformation of policy tools for education purposes has thus far dominated the process and direction of change. In Sweden, through processes of conversion, the policy tool has gained a more dominating influence over education policy. Accordingly, there was a stronger emphasis on MbOR in its original version in Sweden than in Norway, which has transformed and defined the concept in line with educational purposes. This article outlines two cases of institutional change that combine elements of lock in with new developments. In neither Norway nor Sweden was the development pushed further in the same trajectory, rather it was transformed and, in the case of Sweden, radically changed within a larger nationally specific framework of sequence of events, values, norms and traditions of policy making.     

A systems approach to higher education with special reference to the core curriculum

The general problem of interdisciplinary relations and transdisciplinary integration has its counterpart in the field of education in the problem of producing generalists rather than specialists, and at the undergraduate college level, in the problem of devising a rational core curriculum. At present, neither the student nor the faculty knows why one mixture of courses is better or worse than another.This paper advocates a solution to this problem based on the development of a computerized model of the core curriculum in which the interrelated mutually relevant concepts of various disciplines would be associated with teaching time allocations proportional to their degree of conceptual relevance. The foundation for such a development is laid by a discussion of conceptualvs. personal relevance, of acculturationvs. exculturation, of educationvs. instruction, and of immediatevs. delayed motivation.An algorithmic procedure is then outlined which would result in a dynamic model allowing the determination of educational bottlenecks or critical paths in the communication network transforming inputs into outputs. The general concepts of dynamic programming, program evaluation and review techniques, system and decision theory are used in developing the algorithm. The existence of such a model would allow a rational optimization of the curriculum and would make the present perennial trial-and-error experimentation in curriculum design unnecessary, since the computer could test various alternatives quickly and efficiently.     

Information diffusion within the electorate:: the asymmetric transmission of political–economic information

This paper examines the connection between information and expectations. Drawing upon Lazarsfeld et al.'s (Lazarsfeld, P.F., Berelson, B., Gaudet, H., 1944. The People's Choice. Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, New York) classic work on communication flows, we devise an asymmetric transmission model of expectation formation. This model assumes that the expectations of the less informed segments within the electorate are influenced by the expectations of more informed groups but that the opposite does not hold. We use educational differences as a proxy for information heterogeneity. A vector autoregression (VAR) analysis on monthly surveys of inflation expectations supports the asymmetric transmission hypothesis.     

The Slippery Slope: Struggling for Equity in the Academy in the Era of #MeToo

The complexity of the sexual harassment language of the #MeToo movement creates discontinuities that may muddy intended communications. Yet understanding this language provides a fuller picture of the experiences that women face. Gender harassment has persisted in the workplace despite long-standing antidiscrimination policies, perhaps because of a universal failure to recognize all forms of it—some of which are more pervasive and common than sexual abuse. This article considers the ability of the academy to affect sexual harassment in public administration. It discusses the implications of gender harassment, the least recognized form of sexual harassment, and makes recommendations for overcoming gender barriers in the academy and in practice. Evidence-based guidance for advancing women in the academy may create more equitable and just spaces for teaching and learning. Public administration classrooms and scholarship represent critical opportunities to recognize patterns of organizational practice and systematically redress gender harassment in the workplace.     

Within and beyond citizenship: alternative educational initiatives in the Arab society in Israel

In recent years, Arab-Palestinian citizens in Israel are in search of ‘a new vocabulary of citizenship’, among other ways, by resorting to ‘alternative educational initiatives’. We investigate and compare three alternative schools, each challenging the contested conception of Israeli citizenship. Our findings reveal different educational strategies to become ‘claimants of rights’, yet all initiatives demonstrate the constraints Arab citizens face while trying to become ‘activist citizens’ (E.F. Isin, 2009. Citizenship in flux: the figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity, 29 (1), 367–388.).     

Education and support for representative,direct and stealth democracy

Using data collected within the scope of a Dutch internet panel survey (LISS) in 2011, this study tracks public support for direct, stealth and representative democracy according to educational level. Our findings indicate that, in terms of overall support for each specific type of democracy, lower educated citizens are significantly more supportive of stealth and direct democracy than highly educated citizens. While the mean levels of support for representative democracy do not differ significantly between levels of education, multivariate OLS regression analyses show that lower educated citizens are noticeably more supportive of representative democracy once political efficacy, trust and satisfaction are introduced. When contrasting the different types of democracy directly with one another, we find that lower educated citizens have a greater tendency to prefer direct and (to a lesser extent) stealth democracy over representative democracy than higher educated citizens. Multivariate OLS regression analyses indicate that most of these educational gaps cease to be significant once the lower levels of political efficacy, trust and satisfaction of lower educated citizens are taken into account. Implications of these results for the debate on the functioning of democracy are discussed.     

The status stratification of radical right support: Reconsidering the occupational profile of UKIP’s electorate

Drawing on Weber’s conceptualisation of class and status as distinct principles of social order, this article argues that support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is better understood as a status-based phenomenon than a class-based one. Operationalising status as a function of social distance between occupational groups, we show that whilst class was a poor predictor of UKIP support in 2015, status scores were strongly and negatively correlated to the likelihood of supporting UKIP. The opposite is true for the Conservatives’ and the Labour Party’s electorates, which were still much more strongly aligned on class lines. The effect of status on UKIP preference remains strong after controlling for educational qualifications, suggesting that the status scale taps into a deeper divide than simply an educational cleavage. Moreover, we find that status plays a similar role in predicting the likelihood of voting for right-wing populist parties (RPPs) in other Western European countries as well.     

On social position and political achievement

He is author and coauthor of more than 70 books and 150 articles including Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War; Three Centuries of Social Mobility in America;and “Social Structure and Politics in American History” in the 1982 American Historical Review.     

Do Partners in PPPs view Public and Private Management Differently?

Differences between public and private management have been studied extensively by comparing sectors, but not within cross‐sectoral collaborative arrangements. As participants in such arrangements have actually experienced both management styles, examining their perceptions of how these styles differ may contribute innovatively to existing literature. This paper compares such perceptions between public and private sector project members (N = 63) involved in four PPPs in the Netherlands. We assess (1) to what extent and under which conditions these project members view public and private management differently and (2) how they evaluate these differences. By triangulating quantitative and qualitative interview data, we examine Boyne's classical hypotheses and find that more than two‐thirds of the statements making reference to these hypotheses offer support for them; more so, the vast majority of such statements evaluate sectoral differences negatively. Intriguingly, type of PPP is a stronger determinant of perceived differences than the manager's sector of origin.     

Citizen (Dis)satisfaction: An Experimental Equivalence Framing Study

This article introduces the importance of equivalence framing for understanding how satisfaction measures affect citizens’ evaluation of public services. Does a 90 percent satisfaction rate have a different effect than a logically equivalent 10 percent dissatisfaction rate? Two experiments were conducted on citizens’ evaluations of hospital services in a large, nationally representative sample of Danish citizens. Both experiments found that exposing citizens to a patient dissatisfaction measure led to more negative views of public service than exposing them to a logically equivalent satisfaction metric. There is some support for part of the shift in evaluations being caused by a negativity bias: dissatisfaction has a larger negative impact than satisfaction has a positive impact. Both professional experience at a hospital and prior exposure to satisfaction rates reduced the negative response to dissatisfaction rates. The results call for further study of equivalence framing of performance information.

Practitioner Points

• The valence (positive/negative) of performance information can have substantial effects on citizens’ perception of public services—even if the underlying performance is exactly the same.
• Presenting citizens with a dissatisfaction rate of 10 percent induces a much more negative evaluation of public services than presenting them with a logically equivalent satisfaction rate of 90 percent.
• Policy makers must carefully consider how minor equivalent changes in the presentation of performance information can induce large shifts in citizens’ perceptions of public service performance.

     

Harnessing Market Competition in PPP Procurement: The Importance of Periodically Taking a Strategic View

Public‐Private Partnerships (PPP) procurement is routinely portrayed as offering greater scope for harnessing competitive market forces to secure Value for Money (VfM) than traditional procurement approaches ( OECD 2008 ). The aim of this article is (a) to demonstrate the importance of periodically taking a more systematic and strategic view when assessing VfM in PPP procurement ( OGC 2003 ), and (b) to develop an analytical framework for such an analysis. Road infrastructure procurement in South East Queensland is used as a case study to test the usefulness of the proposed framework, and to show how a narrow focus on individual contracts increases the risk of overlooking overdependence on one supplier ( OGC 2003 ). Discussion focuses on the need to combine detailed analysis of individual contracts with longitudinal analyses of market competitiveness when assessing best VfM.     

How pre‐ and postrecruitment factors shape role perceptions of European Commission officials

Individuals' role perceptions are central guides to their behavior and choices as members of an organization. Understanding organizational dynamics thus requires knowledge about the determinants of such role perceptions, as well as whether—and when—organizations can influence them. This article brings forward a theoretical framework allowing for both prerecruitment (extraorganizational) and post‐recruitment (intraorganizational) determinants of individuals' role perceptions, and examines its empirical implications using a large‐N data set of temporary officials in the European Commission. We find that intergovernmental and epistemic role perceptions are strongly linked to pre‐recruitment factors (such as educational and professional background), whereas postrecruitment factors (such as length of affiliation and embeddedness within the Commission) are the main driving force behind supranational and departmental role perceptions. This heterogeneity in the importance of pre‐ and postrecruitment factors for distinct role perceptions has important consequences for conceptualizing organizational change.     

Gender Congruence and Work Effort in Manager–Employee Relationships

This article uses data on public school teachers and principals to examine whether teachers who share the gender of their principal work more overtime hours than teachers who do not. Findings show that gender congruence is associated with overtime hours for female teachers but not for male teachers. This result holds between schools and within schools: female teachers with female principals work more overtime hours than female teachers with male principals, and female teachers with female principals work more overtime hours than male teachers who work in the same school, for the same female principal. In light of multiple competing explanations for this finding, the author explores why gender congruence matters for female teachers but not for male teachers.

Practitioner Points

• Female teachers with female principals work more overtime hours than female teachers with male principals.
• Female teachers with female principals work more overtime hours than male teachers who work in the same schools, for the same female principals.
• Gender congruence is not associated with overtime hours among male teachers.
• Female teachers’ overtime hours are associated with female principals’ overtime hours, suggesting that female teachers emulate female principals’ work behavior.

     

The Political Economy of Public Reform Adoption: Patterns in Twenty Indonesian Districts

ABSTRACT

New Public Management (NPM) reforms are often perceived as technical, with little attention to political and institutional factors. Comparing choices in 20 Indonesian districts, we explore which of four political economic factors influence uptake of NPM-based service delivery reforms. We find that democratic political competition laid the groundwork for political alliances, patterns of patronage, and party provision of benefits that condition reform choices. State-led policy entrepreneurship was evident from education agency technocrats. Public sector modernization may have increased orientation towards performance, with education reforms adopted by districts already achieving relatively good sectoral results. Health reforms were more common in districts providing greater opportunities for citizen participation. The complex interactions among the factors argue for working within these realities, rather than seeing them as impediments to be avoided in a drive for reforms. Education technocrats’ dominance, bolstered by central policy priorities, argues for more nuanced mechanisms for meeting national goals to avoid crowding out responsiveness to local citizens.