Public sector innovation in the Asia-pacific trends,challenges, and opportunities

Public organizations face a multitude of challenges that force them to innovate existing processes, policies, programs, and products. Indeed, in recent years, innovation has become a core topic of study in public administration. However, the vast majority of the public sector innovation literature stems from the United States and Western Europe. The lack of Asia-Pacific studies is particularly striking given that countries like Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan consistently rank high on public sector innovation. This special issue brings together state of the art empirical research on public sector innovation in the Asia-Pacific region that examines a range of drivers and outcomes of innovation, including studies comparing Asia-Pacific countries and countries in the East and the West. The findings show that public sector employees in the studied countries all seek opportunities to innovate, whereas cultural norms and values either constrain or enable innovative behaviour and affect the extent to which employees experience leadership support for displaying such behaviour.     

Reality Shock and Public Service Motivation: A Longitudinal,Qualitative Study Among Dutch Veterinary Inspectors

To this day little is known about the mechanisms that help explain the mixed findings of longitudinal public service motivation (PSM) research. This study aims to deepen our understanding of post-entry PSM dynamics by focusing on the role of the often cited “reality shock” as a potential explanation for the decrease in PSM also found here. The results of this longitudinal, small-scale qualitative study of a specific cohort of newcomers who just started work as veterinary inspectors at the Dutch food safety authority suggest that a loss of PSM is not due to a generic shock effect, but is linked to having unclear job expectations and individual differences in coping behaviour.     

The Body Perfect Ideal and Eating Regulation Goals: Investigating the Role of Adolescents’ Identity Styles

Adolescents are exposed to images depicting the thin or muscular ideal almost on a daily basis. When the body perfect ideal is adopted, adolescents are at increased risk for developing unhealthy and disordered eating behaviors. The aim of the current 3-wave longitudinal study among adolescents (N = 418; 54 % girls) was to investigate whether different styles of identity exploration (i.e., information-oriented, normative, and diffuse-avoidant) are associated differentially with changes in adoption of the body perfect ideal, which, in turn, would relate to changes in appearance-focused and health-focused eating regulation. Results indicated that the information-oriented style predicted decreases and the normative style predicted increases in adoption of the body perfect ideal. In turn, adoption of the body perfect ideal predicted significant increases in appearance-focused eating regulation but not in health-focused eating regulation. A diffuse-avoidant style was unrelated to changes in adoption of the body perfect, yet directly predicted decreases in health-focused eating regulation. Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Is All Politics Indeed Local? A Comparative Study of Dual Mandate‐Holders’ Role Attitudes and Behaviours in Parliament

The practice of dual mandate‐holding, i.e. the simultaneous occupation of a political mandate at the (sub)national and the local level, is understudied in the comparative literature. Dual mandate‐holders embody the most direct link between local and central government, yet research has disregarded whether these actors actually feel and act as local ambassadors in parliament. In this article, we study whether councillors in parliament feel responsive for local grievances in terms of their respective role attitudes and behaviour, using the PARTIREP Comparative MP Survey. The estimated regression models demonstrate that dual mandate‐holders indeed perceive themselves as local brokers, even when controlling for various systemic‐, party‐ and individual‐level factors. On the other hand, they struggle to translate their localized attitudes into localized parliamentary behaviour, which could call one of the main arguments in favour of dual mandate‐holding into question.     

The Relationship between Maternal Overprotection,Adolescent Internalizing and Externalizing Problems,and Psychological Need Frustration: A Multi-Informant Study Using Response Surface Analysis

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Parents and adolescents may hold discrepant views about parents’ behaviors, which may be related to adolescent maladjustment. The goal of the present...     

Enhancing rural learning,linkages, and institutions: the rice videos in Africa

Africa Rice Center (WARDA) facilitated the development and translation of 11 rice videos. From 2005 to 2009, WARDA partners translated them into more than 30 African languages. Open-air video presentations enhanced learning, experimentation, confidence, trust, and group cohesion among rural people. The videos strengthened capacities of more than 500 organisations and hundreds of thousands of farmers. WARDA's integrated rural learning approach also helped women to access new markets and credit. Learning videos allow for unsupervised learning; unleash local creativity and experimentation; facilitate institutional innovations; and improve social inclusion of the poor, youth, and women.     

Verbal Aggression Among Male Alcoholic Patients and Their Wives in the Year Before and Two Years After Alcoholism Treatment

Our earlier reports on 88 male alcoholics and their wives showed that domestic violence decreased significantly in the first and second year following a behavioral marital therapy (BMT) alcoholism treatment program. The present study examined verbal aggression in this same sample. In the year before BMT, verbal aggression was significantly greater—being five to seven times more prevalent for clinically elevated aggression and substantially more frequent—for the alcoholic husbands and their wives than for a demographically matched, nonalcoholic comparison sample. In the two years after BMT, both alcoholic men and their wives showed significant and substantial reductions in verbal aggression as compared with the year before BMT. Despite these significant reductions from the year before BMT, verbal aggression in the two years after BMT remained significantly elevated relative to demographically similar nonalcoholic controls. As predicted, relapsed alcoholics and their wives showed more verbal aggression in the 2 years after BMT than both couples with a remitted alcoholic husband and demographically similar nonalcoholic controls, whereas remitted alcoholics and their wives had similar levels of verbal aggression to the nonalcoholic controls. Further, frequency of drinking was positively correlated with verbal aggression in the 2 years after BMT; verbal aggression was greater when the alcoholic husband drank more frequently.