Robert Blake and the Barbary Company 1636--1641

This interesting contribution to European and African historyis made by a member of the Historical Section of the MoroccanArchives, and is extracted by permission from the review Hespéris.The translation is by Mary Hicks.     

WHAT’S VALUED MOST? SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES OF THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR

In recent administrative and organizational literature much attention has been paid to values that guide organizational and managerial behaviour in the public and private domain. Comparative empirical research efforts, however, are sparse. This article reports the results of a comparative empirical survey of 382 managers from a variety of public and private sector organizations in The Netherlands. Contrary to much recent literature that presupposes the intermixing or convergence of value systems guiding governance in different kinds of organizations, the results of this study show two distinct and relatively classical value systems for government and business as well as a ‘common core’ of important organizational qualities. These are accountability, expertise, reliability, efficiency and effectiveness, all of which are considered crucial in both public and private sector organizations. Additional analysis shows that value preferences are primarily attached to sector rather than to age, gender, working experience, or previous employment in the other sector.     

IMPLEMENTING PERFORMANCE-BASED MANAGEMENT IN THE TRADITIONAL BUREAUCRACY OF PORTUGAL

The influence of the New Public Management (NPM) movement in Portuguese administrative reform has been one of the country's noticeable trends in recent decades ( Araújo 2001, 2002a ; Rocha 2001 ). Many governments have aimed to introduce a new managerial rationality in public services. The literature about administrative reform shows that institutional bureaucracies resist change, particularly when it challenges prevailing practices and procedures ( Bjur and Caiden 1978 ; Olsen 1991 ). Thus, the influence of NPM in administrative reform has found different expressions and, in several countries, the introduction of NPM ideas is a limited and superficial phenomenon ( Pollitt 2000 ). This paper contributes to these debates. It examines the influence of New Public Management ideas in Portuguese administrative reform and discusses improvements in the way public services are implementing change using new managerial tools in Portugal: the Activity Plan (AP) and the Activity Report (AR). The data collected from official reports and a questionnaire show that the juridical-administrative model persists and transforms both Activity Plan and Activity Report into little more than a formality, another routine to be followed.     

China＇s Top Coaches and Their Nicknames

MARKSMAN Xu Haifeng became China＇s first ever Olympic gold medalist in Los Angeles in 1984, and over the years, China has won 112 additional gold medals at the summer Games. Ever since Liu Changchun became the first Chinese athlete to participate in the Games, also in Los Angeles, in 1932, China＇s Olympic sportsmen have been national heroes,     

The selection of party presidents in Belgium

Abstract. Judged by their statutory arrangement the selection procedures of the seven main governmental Belgian parties in the 1944–1992 period suggest that party presidents are recruited in a fully democratic way, anticipating a contest between several candidates which is ultimately decided by a secret vote of the members' representatives at the national congress or council or, as in the PSC and recently the PRL, by a membership vote. In practice, competition only occurs in the PSC and the VU. In the other parties, the party elites usually propose a consensus candidate to the party's congress, who is then legitimated by a near-unanimous vote or by acclamation. The elite legitimates this method by referring to the devastating effects of an open competition for the party's unity, as well as the belief that the elite can better assess the party needs and the prospective candidates' skills than the more uninvolved and inexperienced congress delegate or party member.     

Output of the Spanish Cortes (1979–2000): A case of adaptation to party government

Abstract.  This article considers the activity of the Spanish Cortes in law production and the control of the executive during the six parliaments of the democratic government. It mainly examines the output of the lower chamber due to the asymmetrical bicameralism and weak status of the Senate. In Spain, the legislative output has been dependent on different situations of party government. In general terms, the Cortes have been always very active in controlling the executive and its participation in law-making was highly relevant when there was a minority government. Because parties are central actors in parliament and due to the strong party discipline in the Spanish case, the author mainly studied parliament output from the viewpoint of strategies of opposition parties. Sometimes parties behaved in parliament procedures in a competitive way, while in others they behave cooperatively. There was a great variety of patterns of strategic behaviour on account of the different situations of party government and the diverse opposition parties. Half of the parliaments had minority governments in which minority parties played a very important role by supporting the government in parliament; however, the main opposition party was never the same since there were two changes of government.     

News matters: Influences on the vote in the Danish 2000 euro referendum campaign

Abstract.  This study investigates how the information environment in the Danish 2000 euro referendum campaign served to crystallize opinion on the issue within the context of a number of other hypothesized influences on the vote, based on previous studies of referendum voting. Our data include a nationally representative two-wave panel survey and a content analysis of news coverage during the referendum campaign. We develop a weighted measure of exposure to news on public and private television channels, that takes into account the volume and tone of the coverage towards the YES and NO campaigns, and using this we find that exposure to public television news significantly influences vote choice when controlling for other predictors. We also find varied levels of support for hypotheses concerning the influence of other key variables such as ideology, economic evaluations, government approval and issue-specific contextual variables. The findings emphasize the importance of considering the information environment during referendum campaigns.