Rediscovering Implementation: Public Sector Contracting and Human Services

There is vast literature on how to implement public policies, with endless case studies emphasising a few key lessons. The drive to contracting in the public sector raises familiar threats to coherent program implementation, and adds those of control and incentives. Contracting fragments program responsibility among multiple contractors, and separates policy agencies from service delivery contractors. It raises questions about political control and accountability, and the prospect of gaps between intention and outcome. This paper 'rediscovers implementation' by reviewing the practical difficulties of constructing public-private relationships which can deliver quality human services. After considering broad arguments about the efficacy of contracting, the paper turns to the provision of human services by examining the contracting out of welfare services and the Job Network. Our argument is modest: that public sector contracting fails if the challenges of implementation are not addressed explicitly, since service delivery through the private sector can falter for exactly the same reasons as traditional public bureaucracies.     

An Investigation of Biographical Information as a Predictor of Employment Termination among Law Enforcement Officers

An important service that police psychology can offer law enforcement administrators is assistance in the selection of future officers. Police psychologists have traditionally focused on the identification of psychopathology and exclusion of applicants who were found to be mentally ill. The introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) has changed what had been considered appropriate exclusion criteria because of the introduction of increased civil rights protections for persons with disabilities. At the same time, increasing civil liability for law enforcement departments in regard to officer misconduct has compelled police psychologist to evaluate potential for future misconduct by non-clinical means. The scientific examination of biographical data may be one method of establishing the relationship between officer candidate variables and future misconduct. This paper examined the predictive validity of biographical information for a sample of 2965 police officer candidates. Results indicated that several biographical variables were significantly correlated with later termination. However, results of regression analyses indicated that biographical variables alone accounted for limited variance in the prediction of police officer termination. The use of biographical information as a sole determinant of police candidate suitability was not supported and the use of additional sources of data would be required for effectual forecasting purposes.     

The Application of the Polyvagal Theory to High Conflict Co‐Parenting Cases

Families, litigants, lawyers, advisors embroiled in cases of complex divorce with child contact issues, manage many stressors at once. Participants involved with these types of cases are often exhausted and burned‐out from the long‐term battles of prolonged litigation. The inability to problem‐solve or even communicate effectively reflects the chaos and traumatic stress of the experience and can be seen as a hallmark of this population. When people are consistently stressed, there is a breakdown of communication skills that can create an immunity to receiving help from any direction. Often all parties involved appear to be both hyper‐alert to potential threat, and hyper‐reactive to one another: no one feels safe. Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory is premised on the idea that neuroception plays a key role in the nervous system's ability to assess danger in the environment. Neuroception is a neurophysiological response that does not involve cognitive processing. When cognitive processing is not involved, the result may lead to misinterpretation of, and an inability to accurately assess situations: executive functioning including rational thinking and communication skills are lost to physiological response. Rather than evaluating families and individuals involved in the aforementioned complex divorce cases through the lens of pathology, Polyvagal Theory explains their behavior as an adaptive stress reaction. Utilizing Polyvagal Theory offers a promising path to treatment with these families and diminishing the poor communication and the heightened emotion, assisting practitioners in understanding the impact of neurobiological response in managing stress and trauma. Applying Polyvagal Theory to court involved populations can help both litigants and practitioners recognize the role of the autonomic nervous system, providing the opportunity to understand, to self‐regulate, and to improve communication and decision making.     

Identifying Critical Points of Trajectories of Depressive Symptoms from Childhood to Young Adulthood

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Depression is a common mental illness and research has focused on late childhood and adolescence in an attempt to prevent or reduce later psychopathology and/or...     

Reflections on “The Politics of Informality”: What We Know,How We Got There,and Where We Might Head Next

Building on the methodological and empirical contributions of the various authors in this special symposium, this concluding reflection acknowledges the important role that informality plays in urban and national politics in the global South, even as it proposes a range of alternative ways, this critical topic could and should be inserted into contemporary scholarship in comparative politics. It begins with a discussion of two decades of research on urbanization and economic globalization, thus introducing a wider set of disciplinary concerns than merely urban servicing into the study of informality, ranging from the transformation of property rights regimes in the context of ascendant neo-liberalization to the recent emergence of more decentralized political structures for claim-making and governance. The essay then suggests that greater historical and contextual specificity in the study of informality, along with the methodological innovations highlighted in the papers, will further help reveal the range of responses to informality seen across the different case studies. Specifically, it proposes that closer attention to divergent urban and national pathways of democratization, attention to institutional variations within and across democratic regimes, political party dynamics at the local and national level, and the existence of urban violence, among other factors, will help explain how and why bureaucrats and elected officials may choose to deal differently with the existence of informality. The essay concludes by arguing that informality should be considered as both a form of governance and a means of enacting citizenship. It thus asks scholars to question the longstanding conceptual dichotomies that permeate much of the literature on informality, including the stark conceptual divide between the formal and informal, and instead to recognize that complex, interactive, and iterative relationships between citizens and the state in the arena of informality are what drive urban servicing and sociopolitical change.     

Heirloom rice in Ifugao: an ‘anti-commodity’ in the process of commodification

We analyse the marketing of ‘heirloom rices’ produced in the Cordillera mountains of northern Luzon, the Philippines, as the commodification of a historical ‘anti-commodity’. We contend that, historically, rice was produced for social, cultural and spiritual purposes but not primarily for sale or trade. The Ifugaos were able to sustain terraced wet-rice cultivation within a system of ‘escape agriculture’ because they were protected from Spanish interference by the friction of terrain and distance. ‘Heirloom rice’ is a boundary concept that enables social entrepreneurs to commodify traditional landraces. We analyse the implications for local rice production and conservation efforts.     

Constructing an “Iron” Unity: The Statue of Unity and India’s Nationalist Historiography

In October 2018, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi inaugurated a pet project, the “Statue of Unity”, in Gujarat, India. The world’s tallest statue, the Statue of Unity cost USD416.67 million to construct, and depicts India’s first deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as the “Iron Man of India”, staring resolutely out over the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam. This article examines the meanings of the statue as a political project of memorialisation. We argue that the statue is an attempt to reimagine India’s nationalist historiography around Patel, taking the emphasis off the secular, socialist first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In doing so, the statue constructs a hyper-masculine idea of India centred on an assimilatory idea of “unity”. The statue’s construction materially enforced this symbolism by pushing aside the site’s previous Adivasi owners, and presents an ordered, majoritarian, business-led vision of public space in Modi’s India. Within this space, the statue materialises Patel as the image of Indian identity. He is made from the stuff of progress, concrete and reinforced steel, and coated in bronze, which links his image with India’s long history of religious statue-making. The project then circulates these ideas through tourist marketing and visitor experience.