How a demanding employment relationship relates to affective commitment in public organizations: A multilevel analysis

It has recently been recognized in the public administration literature that multiple reforms coexist in public organizations, ranging from the Weberian bureaucracy to New Public Management and, more recently, new public governance. This study develops a typology of the employment relationship with features of these macro‐level changes and tests their impact on the civil servant's affective commitment by including the individual‐level social exchange relationship. This multilevel model is tested with data from 936 employees in a public organization. The findings confirm the existence of different approaches to the employment relationship: overdemanding, mutual investment and moderately demanding. Civil servants in a mutual investment employment relationship are most affectively committed, and civil servants in a moderately demanding employment relationship benefit most from a positive social exchange relationship. Implications for public management theory and practice are discussed.     

Mixing Communities? Riots,Regeneration and Renewal on Problem Estates in France and England

Riots, social exclusion, and endless improvement programmes have been a feature of the poorest neighbourhoods in France and England for the last thirty‐five years or more—particularly focused on large social housing estates. Programmes of improvement have followed similar paths in each country, with mixed success. This article sets out a short overview of these programmes in each country, then contrasts and compares the objectives, approaches, and outcomes. Each country has key elements of inter‐agency working, local and resident participation and planning, large‐scale building rehabilitation and demolition programmes, though the French system is more often based on specific local contracts between cities and the central departments. Similar evaluation outcome indicators and frameworks of ‘floor’ and ‘gap’ targets have been set, although evidence of success is limited and, particularly in France, there has been considerable criticism of the approach and framework. In parallel, however, the concept of ‘mixed communities’ has emerged as an alternative strategic approach—intuitively reasonable, politically popular, but lacking an evidence base and often ineffective in dealing with poverty.     

Network of Networks: Preliminary Lessons from the Antwerp Port Authority on Crisis Management and Network Governance to Deal with the COVID-19 Pandemic

In this article, the authors describe and illustrate what they call a “network of networks” perspective and map the development of a lead network for the Antwerp Port Authority that governed organizations and networks in the port community before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. They find that setting a collective focus and selective integration are crucial in the creation and reproduction of an effective system to adequately deal with a wicked problem like the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings on crisis management and network governance are used to engage practitioners and public policy planners to revisit the current design and governance of organizational networks within organizational fields that have been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.     

Truth,Discourse and the Subject

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

Kelsen,Authority and Competence: An Introduction

Law and Philosophy -     

How do interest groups legitimate their policy advocacy? Reconsidering linkage and internal democracy in times of digital disruption

The ongoing embrace of interest groups as agents capable of addressing democratic deficits in governing institutions is in large part because they are assumed to contribute democratic legitimacy to policy processes. Nonetheless, they face the challenge of legitimating their policy advocacy in democratic terms, clarifying what makes them legitimate partners in governance. In this article we suggest that digital innovations have disrupted the established mechanisms of legitimation. While the impact of this disruption is most easily demonstrated in the rise of a small number of ‘digital natives’, we argue that the most substantive impact has been on more conventional groups, which typically follow legitimation logics of either representation or solidarity. While several legacy groups are experimenting with new legitimation approaches, the opportunities provided by technology seem to offer more organizational benefits to groups employing the logic of solidarity, and appear less compatible with the more traditional logic of representation.     

‘Communication’ in the era of ‘Empire’ and ‘multitude’

SUMMARY

Politics has been described as “an aggregate of persons in a power perspective of elaborated demands and expectations”. From this the collective nature of politics can be clearly seen. Without communication, however, no collective action is possible and consequently no political action. Based on this politics can be seen as the continuous defining of collective action in the context of mutual power relations in which there are differences (inter alia of objectives and methods) and consequently conflict over the allocation of scarce resources. Even though there has been an early interest in the relationship between politics and communication, e.g. Aristoteles and Julius Caesar with his Acta Diurna, systematic study of the relationship between communication and politics and the generation and regulation of conflict is of recent nature. A review of the literature on the theory and research in the field of political communication indicates it to be of original interest to researchers from fields such as journalism, mass communication, political science and speech communication. Recently, however, political communication emerged as a field on its own worthy of its recognition as a subdiscipline of communication science: it is recognized by professional bodies like the International Communication Association it is a separate area for research, teaching and for publication of journals devoted to it.