Law Enforcement Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina

Major disasters represent infrequent events that often require response organizations to vicariously learn from the experiences of others in order to improve their operations. A primary mechanism for such knowledge diffusion is the different practitioner and empirical journals for the organizational fields that comprise disaster response. A review of the literature for the law enforcement field, however, reveals that little attention is given to how these organizations manage actual disasters. In particular, the presentation of organizational experiences, whether through case studies or other methodologies, is very limited in the practitioner and empirical literature of this field. This represents a considerable problem for improvements of disaster response operations given that law enforcement agencies represent a key component in such efforts. The research presented in this article is an effort to fill this knowledge gap and thereby facilitate organizational learning to improve future law enforcement disaster response activities. The authors traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina to examine the response efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies to the storm. The findings from this research are reported here in a lessons‐learned format to inform law enforcement disaster response policy.     

Globalization and institutional competitiveness

Only dead institutions do not change and only rarely do institutions change by themselves. To maintain performing institutions takes institutional entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks and who possess the capacity and the talent to innovate. A regulation discourse, in contrast to a marketization discourse, would not picture the relationship between globalization and institutional change as a deterministic one. Rather, it would expect that all kinds of actors play a large number of different roles in the course of ongoing institutional change. The result of such complex institutional change, at the level of welfare states, multinational businesses, public administration, and training systems, to mention just a few of the empirical areas covered in this special issue, cannot be fully understood by applying an overly rigid, static, and dualistic approach to modern capitalist economies. The concept of institutional competitiveness, on the contrary, allows for institutional entrepreneurship and institutional hybrids constituting pulsating polities.     

To fight or not to fight?

Public Choice - This paper considers the players' behaviour in an asymmetric two-player contest. When do they decide to “struggle” and when to “subjugate”? Analysing...     

ROAD GRANTS, INTERGOVERNMENTAL COMPETITION AND THE BENEFITS OF DUPLICATION

Abstract: This article argues that direct commonwealth involvement in road funding and road policy has benefited the states and local government. Although inefficiencies and friction are evident as a result of joint funding, the benefits of multiple accountability outweigh the costs. A competitive dynamic underlies the involvement of all three levels of government, producing outcomes that no single government dominates, but which reflect in part the responses of each to their respective constituencies. The commonwealth has been driven to more intrusive forms of intervention as existing controls failed to achieve the commonwealth's objectives, and to expanding its financial contributions to counter the diversion of funds by state governments. Its commitment to funding the road program is likely to be highest when its specific purpose grants can be identified closely with the provision of roads in particular regions and localities. In sum, joint funding of the road program produces a system that is responsive to competing conceptions and interests, and the commonwealth's "voluntary vacancy" from all but "national" roads is on balance likely to be detrimental to the program.     

Medicaid's Role in Moves Toward Universal Health Care

This paper considers the problems currently facing the Medical Assistance (Medicaid) program in light of the major problems confronting the American health care system. Actual and proposed Medicaid reforms are reviewed, their merits noted and their shortcomings detailed. It is argued that substantial Medicaid reform can take place only in the context of radical reform of the entire U.S. health care system. Similarly, Medicaid should be incorporated into any plan aimed at providing universal health care coverage.     

More on moral hazard in organizations: Reply

The paper by Thomas Hammond and Gary Miller is an insightful comment on the relevance of budget-breaking incentive schemes to real world organizations. They have made a valuable contribution in considering this line of research within a broader context. Nonetheless, they have not established the invalidity of my theoretical arguments. Therefore, my basic point still holds: that is, theoretically it is possible to show that a bonus-penalty incentive scheme of the sort proposed by Holmström is feasible, despite the principal's incentive to cheat. Regardless, all of this debate may beg the question, since compensation arrangements observed in the real world are rarely of the bonus-penalty type. Linear incentives are far more common, and many compensation schemes do not appear to incorporate optimal incentives. At this point we need more empirical research on the determinants of incentives in organizations. In order to make further advances in this area, a better understanding of the incentive mechanisms actually used in organizations is required.Thanks are due to Richard Frank for helpful comments. The usual caveat applies.