Do social policy reforms have different impacts on employment and welfare use as economic conditions change?

This paper uses March Current Population Survey data from 1985 to 2004 to explore whether social policy reforms implemented throughout the 1990s have different impacts on employment and welfare use depending on economic conditions, a topic with important policy implications but which has received little attention from researchers. I find evidence that many reforms operate differently as labor market conditions fluctuate. Although social policies increase employment during economic slowdowns, the largest effects are generated in favorable labor market conditions. The impact of time limits, mandatory job search, and cash diversion programs are particularly sensitive to the macroeconomy, while the earned income tax credit is associated with similar employment effects in most environments. The results vary substantially across policy “carrots” and “sticks,” levels of work intensity, and subsamples of single mothers, but a tentative conclusion is that a strong economy reinforces the positive incentives created by social policy reforms. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Strategic change,leadership and accounting: A triptych of organizational reform

Strategic change in public sector organizations has been well documented. This article suggests that public management research would benefit from a greater appreciation of how calculative practices are deeply imbricated with, and constitutive of, organizational life. In turn, the article argues that the field of interdisciplinary accounting has much to learn from public administration, especially in terms of leadership. The overarching argument is that understanding strategic change in public organizations can be enhanced by bringing together insights from the academic fields of public administration and interdisciplinary accounting. In this respect, organizational reform can be understood as a triptych, involving strategic change, leadership and accounting practices. We illustrate this thesis through a case study of strategic change in the world's largest public service broadcaster—the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It is shown how, during the tenure of one organizational leader—John Birt—accounting became pivotal to his leadership.     

A Comparative Analysis of Social Impact Bond and Conventional Financing Approaches to Health Service Commissioning in England: The Case of Social Prescribing

Abstract

The article compares two social prescribing interventions in Northern England. One was financed through a Social Impact Bond (SIB) and the other was financed in a more conventional way. It utilises a comparative approach to understand the extent to which different methods of financing social prescribing conform to key features of the New Public Management (NPM) or New Public Governance (NPG) in their design and implementation. It finds that a SIB approach tends towards NPM during programme design and implementation and that this creates challenges for social prescribing programmes, the complexity of which appear better suited to an NPG-based relational approach.     

A Choice-Based Measure of Issue Importance in the Electorate

Measuring how much citizens care about different policy issues is critical for political scientists, yet existing measurement approaches have significant limitations. We provide a new survey-experimental, choice-based approach for measuring the importance voters attach to different positional issues, including issues not currently contested by political elites. We combine information from (a) direct questions eliciting respondents' positions on different issues with (b) a conjoint experiment asking respondents to trade off departures from their preferred positions on those issues. Applying this method to study the relative importance of 34 issues in the United Kingdom, we show that British voters attach significant importance to issues like the death penalty that are not presently the subject of political debate and attach more importance to those issues associated with social liberal–conservative rather than economic left–right divisions.     

Janina Scarlet: Therapy Quest: An Interactive Journey Through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Journal of Youth and Adolescence -     

Nāgārjuna’s Negation

Journal of Indian Philosophy - The logical analysis of Nāgārjuna’s (c. 200 CE) catu?ko?i (tetralemma or four-corners) has remained a heated topic for logicians in...     

Psychometric Evaluation of the Healing After Gender-Based Violence Scale: An Instrument for Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Assessment of Recovery Progress for Women-Identifying Survivors

Journal of Family Violence - The Healing after Gender-based Violence Scale (GBV-Heal) was developed to measure the holistic recovery processes of woman-identifying survivors of gender-based...     

Feature reviews

Nelson Mandela is free

Higher than Hope: the authorised biography of Nelson Mandela. Fatima Meer, London: Hamish Hamilton. 1990. 288pp. £15.99hb

Pre‐Tiananmen perspectives

Reforming the Revolution? China in transition. Edited by Robert Benewick and Paul Wingrove, London: Macmillan. 1988. 264pp. £30.00hb/£8.99pb

Transforming China's Economy in the Eighties. Edited by Stephen Feuchtwang, Athar Hussain and Thierry Pairault, London: Zed. 1988. Vol 1: 256pp. £29.95hb/£9.95pb. Vol 2: 256pp. £27.95hb

China's Regional Development. Edited by David S Goodman, London: Routledge for the Institute of International Affairs. 1989. 208pp. £35.00hb

China at Forty: mid‐life crisis. Edited by David S Goodman and Gerald Segal, Oxford: Clarendon. 1989. 178pp. £9.95pb

The Political Economy of Chinese Socialism. Mark Selden, New York: M E Sharpe. 1989. 224pp. S15.95pb

One Step Ahead in China: Guandong under reform. Ezra F Vogel, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1989. 244pp. £23.95hb

Gender, development and modernity

Woman's Role in Economic Development. Ester Boserup, London: Earthscan. 1989. 283pp. £6.95pb

Staying Alive: women, ecology and development. Vandana Shiva, London: Zed. 1988. 224pp. £29.95pb/£8.95pb

Women's Asia. Yayori Matsui, Translated from the Japanese by Mizuko Matsuda, London: Zed. 1989. 172pp. £26.95hb/£7.95pb

Structures of Patriarchy: the state, the community and the household. Edited by Bina Agarwal, London: Zed. 1988. 254pp. £28.95hb/£8.95pb

We Were Making History: women and the Telangana Uprising. Edited by Stree Shakti Sanghatana, London: Zed. 1989. 290pp. £29.95hb/£8.95pb

Natural Rebels: a social history of enslaved black women in Barbados. Hilary McD Beckles, London: Zed. 1989. 197pp. £29.95hb/£8.95pb

You Can't Drown the Fire: Latin American women writing in exile. Edited by Alicia Partnoy, London: Virago. 1988. 258pp. £6.50pb

Plotting Women: gender and representation in Mexico. Jean Franco, London: Verso. 1989. 235pp. £19.95hb

Peru and the informal economy

The Other Path: the invisible revolution in the Third World. Hernando de Soto, London: I B Tauris. 1989. 271pp. £14.95hb     

Legal academics,our creativity and why we do it: insights from Foucault

We, as researchers and lecturers, produce new knowledge that attracts copyright, but standard understandings of intellectual property (IP) – the right as an incentive to create – do not appear to fit our circumstances. Expressed differently, the individual is at the centre of the justifications for IP law though there is little engagement, in the literature, with how the law operates on individual creators. This article addresses the problem by adopting a Foucaultian approach to explore the interaction of the (constrained) decisions of individuals and the societal policy of innovation. Foucault’s work is ideal for this endeavour as much of it focuses on the practices of the individual. For us as legal academics, and most likely for the many other innovators in society, the practices around creativity are the result of, to use Foucault’s term, the governmental rationalities that we have all been inculcated with. More specifically, the understanding of the role of “proper conduct” and the norms of behaviour provides greater insight into the previous simplistic understanding that some individuals are intrinsically motivated to create. The argument concludes with the assessment that copyright may not be important to the creativity of academics; instead, the IP right is of greater relevance to the publishers of our work – given the alternative role for copyright to facilitate the exchange of new creations.