Workers' compensation: 1980-84 benchmark revisions

The first workers' compensation program was introduced 80 years ago. Its purpose was to compensate occupationally injured workers and their families for lost wages and medical expenses from job-related injury, regardless of fault. Today, each of the State and Federal programs that provides coverage to more than 86 percent of the work force uses a combination of private insurance, State or Federal funds, and self-insurance to meet its benefit obligations. The workers' compensation program is of continuing interest to the Social Security Administration (SSA) for several reasons. Since 1965, Social Security Disability Insurance benefits have been subject to reduction if such benefits, when combined with those provided under workers' compensation laws, exceed 80 percent of the worker's earnings. Because the two programs have gaps in protection as well as duplication in coverage, a periodic review of the workers' compensation program is necessary. In addition, SSA administers Part B of the Black Lung program--established to provide income-maintenance protection to coal miners disabled by pneumoconiosis--to about 1 million beneficiaries whose claims were filed before July 1973. This article provides revised benchmark data on the workers' compensation programs and presents a review of program operations during the early 1980's.     

Board Diversity,Stakeholder Representation,and Collaborative Performance in Community Mediation Centers

Does board diversity or representativeness influence organizational performance? Though it is understudied in both the public and the nonprofit sectors, learning more about this critical subject can enhance organizational performance within highly collaborative settings. Community mediation centers, which rely on multiple public and private resources to meet their programmatic objectives, provide excellent case studies for analyzing the impact of different kinds of interorganizational linkages on organizational performance. A multitheoretic view incorporating agency, resource dependence, and stakeholder perspectives is employed through a national sample and a two‐stage analysis using a logic model to test the cumulative impact of board characteristics and interorganizational relationships on organizational outcomes. Organizations’ collaborative capacity depends on several kinds of boundary‐spanning activities, including network ties, revenue sources, and the number of stakeholder groups represented on the board.     

Rawls on agreeing to disagree: How democracies differ from non-democracies in justifying war

We use Rawls’s account of public reason and the Law of Peoples to test two hypotheses: democracies are more likely to invoke self-defense in justifications than non-democracies, and democracies are more likely to invoke human rights in justifications than non-democracies. Through an analysis of war justifications since 1875, we find that although democracies and non-democracies are similarly likely to use self-defense as a justification, democracies are more likely to justify war through human rights. Institutions and values centering on rights that promote domestic public justification also promote justifications compatible with those values and institutions at the international level.     

Shaping participation: an international NGO implementing a government participation policy

This article reports on a case study of how one NGO utilised a government participation policy to establish ostensibly participatory spaces in the Cambodian health sector. The ethnographic field study revealed how the NGO exerted influence in establishing and facilitating participative committees by controlling membership, resources, and meeting agendas. This resulted in limited citizen participation, with committees used to educate, lobby, and mobilise community leaders to work towards the NGO’s priorities rather than community identified needs. This case contributes to our understanding of insisted spaces and the role of third parties implementing government participation policies.     

Beyond the Contract: The Scope and Nature of Informal Government–Nonprofit Partnerships

Privatization research lacks an understanding of the scope and nature of informal service delivery relationships between nonprofits and local government. This article reports on a study of local service delivery partnerships in Georgia using survey and interview data. In addition to assessing the frequency of noncontractual partnerships, this study builds on B. Guy Peters's definition of public–private partnerships to delineate the control–formality dimensions of these partnerships more clearly. The agency theory notion that a trade-off occurs between formality and control is also tested. The findings show that most public–private partnerships involving nonprofits are led by government agencies, and they are only weakly collaborative in the sense of shared authority or resources. Often, community norms substitute for formal service agreements. The study concludes with suggestions for further research regarding trust and behavioral norms in public–private partnerships.     

Capacity for public administration: analysis of meaning and measurement

Public administration researchers and practitioners have placed a heavy emphasis on the theme of programme performance. More recently, there has been a growing sentiment in the literature about the integral role of organisational capacity in achieving performance. While this is often expressed in the (re)iteration of a ‘management matters’ mantra, we see some disarray in the broader capacity literature both in definition and application. As scholars call for more integrated models of governance that link, for example, capacity and performance, we see a growing need for an analysis of the concept of capacity. Using bibliometric and content analyses to explore scholarly treatment of capacity constructs, this article assesses whether the perceived disarray is real, and if so what consequences it might have. We do so by reporting on capacity's meaning and measurement through an analysis of four decades of the private, public and nonprofit management literatures. While specific definitions of capacity are, by nature, context dependent, we conclude by distilling a general, conceptual framework of capacity for public management researchers and practitioners. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.