Complex Contracting: Management Challenges and Solutions

Governments at all levels buy mission‐critical goods and services whose attributes and performance requirements are hard to define and produce. Many governments—and the public managers who lead them—lack experience and knowledge about how to contract for complex products. The contract management counsel provided to public managers is thin. Missing is a conceptual managerial framework to guide purchasing the complex products that are often so critical to public organizations' core missions. Drawing on perspectives from across the social sciences, the framework presented in this article provides guidance on how managers can harness the upsides of complex contracting while avoiding its pitfalls. The framework helps identify conditions that increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for the purchasing government and the vendor—the win‐win. To illustrate the framework, the article provides examples of successful and failed acquisitions for complex products such as transportation projects, social service systems, and information technology systems.     

Taxing Times: Taxation,Divided Societies and the Informal Economy in Northern Nigeria

This paper challenges the notion that taxing the informal economy provides a mechanism for increasing popular political voice and rebuilding the social contract. It contends that current arguments for taxing the informal economy suffer from a Eurocentric understanding of taxation and state formation, and a fiscally essentialist and undifferentiated notion of the informal economy. Drawing on fieldwork in northern Nigeria, this paper shows that history, gender, wealth and ethno-religious identity influence how taxing the informal economy shapes governance outcomes. Evidence from Nigeria suggests an inverse relationship between informal economy taxation and political voice, posing the risk that increased taxation will exacerbate social divisions rather than rebuild the social contract.     

Hooking Workers and Hooking Votes: Enganche,Suffrage, and Labor Market Dualism in Latin America

Labor market dualism—the segmentation of workers between formal, legally protected employment and informal, unprotected status—has long drawn attention from scholars and policymakers in Latin America. This article argues that lasting patterns of economic and political segmentation of workers arose earlier in the region's history than has previously been understood, well before the classic “incorporation” period. Late‐nineteenth‐century practices for the recruitment and retention of workers shaped Latin America's first sets of labor laws, most notably those governing union organization and individual worker job stability. Subsequently, these first laws served as important templates for development, constraining and conditioning the labor codes adopted under mass‐based politics. Using historical data drawn from Chile, Peru, and Argentina, this article shows how differing recruitment practices and variation in the extension of effective suffrage rights and electoral participation shaped early legal labor market segmentation and inequality in Latin America.     

Sabina Berman: Brief overview

Privilege, by Yvonne Rainer, 1991.¹

Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! Parti. (The Sex Show). Createdand performed by Penny Arcade. Presented by Theater for the New City, New York, October 13, 1990.

Daytrips. The Women's Project. Voyage to Lesbos. WOW Cafe. Hamlet. Barnard College. November, 1990.

Excerpts from the Attorney General's Report on Pornography ‐A Hard Place Theatre production. The Playground Theatre, New York City, January 10–20, 1990.

We Keep Our Victims Ready. Written, performed, and directed by Karen Finley. The Joyce Theater, New York City. September 18–22, 1990.

“Find Out Who Killed Laura Palmer” Episode of TwinPeaks, television series, directed by David Lynch. ABC.

World Without End. By Holly Hughes. P.S. 122, New York City, October, 1990.     

Inequality and Support for Political Engagement in New Democracies

Existing studies of income inequality and political participation—including related literature, for example, on preferences for redistribution—leave us with the question of whether citizens see political democracy as offering ways to challenge market inequalities. Using original surveys in 13 Central and Eastern European countries, I find that those who see high and undesirable levels of income inequality have stronger demands for popular democratic participation than those who do not. In addition, neither the aggregate levels of support for political engagement nor individuals’ perceptions of inequality are coordinated with either national-level indicators of income inequality or democratic performance.     

The Effect of Music Video Clips on Adolescent Boys’ Body Image, Mood, and Schema Activation

There is limited research that has examined experimentally the effects of muscular images on adolescent boys’ body image, with no research specifically examining the effects of music television. The aim of the current study was to examine the effects of viewing muscular and attractive singers in music video clips on early, mid, and late adolescent boys’ body image, mood, and schema activation. Participants were 180 boys in grade 7 (mean age = 12.73 years), grade 9 (mean age = 14.40 years) or grade 11 (mean age = 16.15 years) who completed pre- and post-test measures of mood and body satisfaction after viewing music videos containing male singers of muscular or average appearance. They also completed measures of schema activation and social comparison after viewing the clips. The results showed that the boys who viewed the muscular clips reported poorer upper body satisfaction, lower appearance satisfaction, lower happiness, and more depressive feelings compared to boys who viewed the clips depicting singers of average appearance. There was no evidence of increased appearance schema activation but the boys who viewed the muscular clips did report higher levels of social comparison to the singers. The results suggest that music video clips are a powerful form of media in conveying information about the male ideal body shape and that negative effects are found in boys as young as 12 years.     

A critique of some recent victim-centered theories of nonconsequentialism

Law and Philosophy - Recently, Gerhard Øverland and Alec Walen have developed novel and interesting theories of nonconsequentialism. Unlike other nonconsequentialist theories such as the...     

The use of mindfulness to promote ethical decision making and behavior: Empirical evidence from the public sector in Thailand

The study has two main purposes. First, the study explores core ethical values and behaviors from the perspective of Thai public service organizational leaders. Second, the study investigates the extent to which public sector leaders in Thailand consider Buddhist-based mindfulness practice to be a potentially effective mechanism for reinforcing core ethical values and behaviors in the public sector in Thailand. Using interview data derived from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 senior public sector officials in Thailand, the analysis elicits four dimensions of core ethical values and behaviors that are perceived by Thai public service organizational leaders as central to ethical behavior in the public sector. The study also sheds light on the interviewees' positive perceptions towards mindfulness and the role its associated practices can play in promoting ethical decision making and behavior in the public sector in Thailand.     

Paradigmatic policy change or unintended subordination of rural autonomy: the case of source water protection in Ontario,Canada

Policy Sciences - In May 2000, E. coli originating from nearby agricultural lands contaminated the municipal water supply of Walkerton, Ontario. As a result, over two thousand people became...