EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS: PROBLEMS OF ASSESSMENT

Abstract: The paper focuses on the Coombs Commission's recommendations on efficiency and effectiveness in the Commonwealth Public Service. The recommendations involve the allocation of organizational responsibility for efficiency and effectiveness to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Public Service Board, Treasury and the Auditor-General and individual responsibility to the departmental manager through the establishment of a "Forward Estimating Budgetary" process. However the Commission has given little guidance in the matter of the technological tools which must be developed in order to secure its implementation.
The Commonwealth Public Service Board has developed over the last two years a program of Staff Utilization Reviews (S. U. Rs) as one of its management improvement programs. The paper canvases the technological aspects of efficiency and effectiveness drawing upon the development and operational experience of the S.U.R. program. It concludes that much resource-intensive work must be done before the Commission's recommendations can be implemented but Australian and overseas experience confirms the potential fruitfulness of that work.     

From Criminal Law to Legal Theory: The Mysterious Case of the Reasonable Glue Sniffer

The modern idea of criminal justice is organised around a series of antinomies which include the formal and the substantive, the universal and the particular, the individual and the social. This paper examines the place of these antinomies in four different but connected settings: the plight of the humane judge, the classical enlightenment theory of retributive punishment, the judgment of provoked killing, and the critique of orthodox subjectivism in the Anglo–American law. The play of the universal and the particular and the formal and substantive within law reflects and embodies the underlying antinomy of the individual and the social – even where it does not mention it.
The qualitative moment is preserved in all quantification, as the substrate of that which is to be quantified.     

A shortened child behavior checklist for delinquency studies

This study examines the reduction of the number of items in the scales of the Child Behavior Checklist, while maintaining the reliability and predictability of its original scales. For that purpose, the original scales were replicated with data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study. New, abbreviated scales were constructed using the most potent items. This process yielded trimmed scales that were highly correlated with the full scales and that still reflect the original meanings of the scales. Further, there was no loss of reliability or predictability with the trimmed as opposed to the full scales. The results were replicated in an analysis with identical variables from the Rochester Youth Development Study. This replication produced equally high reliabilities with similar levels of prediction of delinquent behavior.We would like to thank Terence P. Thornberry for helpful comments and advice on early drafts of this paper.     

The effects of fiscal contraction on innovation in the public sector

Beginning in the mid-1970s, fiscal limitation laws, shrinking revenue bases in older cities, and reductions in state and federal grants all have reduced the resources available to carry out the functions of local government. What do these changes portend for the amount of innovation in local government, the types of innovations that are introduced, and the processes of introduction? This paper examines these questions by reviewing the literature on factors related to innovation in public service agencies and reorienting its implications in the new fiscal environment. We conclude that on the whole the innovative process in the public sector has fallen on hard times. Yet, we identify those factors that a creative, innovative administrator can use to advantage in a period of fiscal constraints to bring about innovation. We also identify types of innovations that are likely to succeed.     

Transferring technology transfer into an Air Force unit

This article describes barriers to technology transfer and changes that occurred when a technology—artificial intelligence—was introduced in an applied high-technology setting at the Deputate of Communications-Computers. Electronic Security Command, US Air Force, San Antonio, TX. The authors, who were responsible for transferring the technology, based their method on an accepted model that focuses on the ability of individuals to bring about change. They regard technology transfer as the introduction and communication of a technology for practical application. Transfer into an organization entails an appreciation by the transfer agent and the recipient of how the technology will be received, used, and applied; how it will affect the recipient's management style; and how the transfer process is designed to meet the needs of the organization. Identifying, infusing, and marketing technologies often causes hostile reactions by the targeted receiver, partly because it is a challenge to the status quo and partly because the organization's technical and non-technical people don't see eye-to-eye. This has been true in our setting. Specialists have been too adamant to accept contrary views and management has not taken the need for specialists and their new technologies seriously enough. He is Chief, Rapid Prototyping Section, and he heads artificial-intelligence development.