The INSPIRE Framework: How Public Administrators Can Increase Compliance with Written Requests Using Behavioral Techniques

Public administrators rely on written communications to send information to citizens and stakeholders, and they are among the heaviest users of the postal service. Behavioral science research has identified several techniques that public administrators can use to increase compliance with written requests and, in turn, increase effectiveness. Currently, however, many written communications from government bodies are not written in a manner that utilizes these techniques. It remains an ongoing challenge for public administrators to identify, understand, and use these techniques in the written communications sent by their organizations. This article presents a framework capturing seven prominent techniques in a simple mnemonic—INSPIRE—that is already being used by several government bodies in Australia. It also provides practical examples of how to use each technique and demonstrates that using these techniques could result in large aggregate improvements in effectiveness and socially desirable outcomes of public administrators' written communications.     

Organization character -construct of barnardian scholars

Early scholars, inspired by Chester I. Barnard's insights, saw clearly the tribal nature of human organizations. The idea of organization character emerged as the understructure for the uniqueness of the behavior of the organization. The theoretical basis for deriving the character of an enterprise was drawn, together with the powerful implications of such subtle sensibilities. Indeed, the entire idea of organization character - of necessity -preceded later thinking on culture since the character of an organization dictates its culture. These concepts are the substance and spirit of the article that follows.     

International comparisons of income levels and growth rates

Development literature contains the hypothesis that middle income countries grow faster than other countries. This proposition has been related to a second hypothesis of stages and rates of growth, as well as to an ‘automatic mechanism’ for the reduction of international income disparities. This article examines the relevant evidence and finds the propositions unsupported by either theory or empirical data.