Values in international development organisations: negotiating non-negotiables

Values are an important theme in discussions in international NGOs, helping to create the conditions for solidarity among staff. But at the same time they are also frequently a source of demoralisation and destructive conflict. This is because the prevailing perceptions of values as instruments of management or as elements in some inchoate mystical whole render the power relationship between staff and managers undiscussable. Values need not be thought of as an instrument of management, and they are above all idealisations. An alternative theory of values is that they are emergent and intensely social phenomena that arise daily between people engaged in a collective enterprise. They are idealisations, but they must be discussed in the everyday context. Conflict is inevitable, but the exploration of the nature of this conflict in daily practice is the only way of ensuring that the discussion about values is an enlivening process.     

The Managerial Ombudsman

This article identifies a major development in the role and practice of the ombudsman. It argues that the New Public Management practices that have transformed public administration in the last 30 years have led to a more managerial approach to the ombudsman's work. The article's argument is developed through analysis of an empirical case study of the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman, which illustrates how the aims and techniques of managerialism have been deployed in the ombudsman context. The article evaluates the significance of these developments for the ombudsman institution and for the wider justice system. It examines the risks and opportunities inherent in this turn to managerialism and whether it represents a departure from the ombudsman's mission or a necessary adaptation to a changed world of public administration. In identifying the rise of the ‘managerial ombudsman’, the article provides a new framework for conceptualising developments in the modern ombudsman institution.     

Law Schools and Paper Jams

The intranet as a tool for institutional integration has the potential to change Universities and their structures. The means to not only think the unthinkable but actually do it. The Intranet College Information System (ICIS) project at the Law School, Queen's University of Belfast, has demonstrated this to be both possible and acceptable to staff and to students. Technological innovation can be done within a non-technical environment, it can be achieved on a low budget and it can stimulate a new culture, above all it can and should happen now.