THE ANALYSIS OF DESIGN OR THE DESIGN OF ANALYSIS?

The policy sciences have advanced in the past by introspection, and there appears to be a need for a return to such self-conscious examination of the field of inquiry. A design orientation offers a useful framework for such an examination. It requires reconsideration of some of the fundamental premises of policy inquiry. This article explores what impact design might have on the conventional process framework and then proceeds to discuss the development of a design perspective.     

The Roles a “Civil Society” Can Play in International Dispute Resolution

Since its very inception, the United Nations has worked with NGOs (non-governmental organizations) or, to use the contemporary term, a "civil society." In fact, every single U.N. department now has an NGO liaison. As the world becomes increasingly smaller, the role and influence of NGOs will continue to be significant in international negotiations.     

Intracranial stab injuries: case report and case study

Non-missile penetrating brain injuries are rare events in western countries. We report a case with lethal stab injury of the brain and identification of the weapon used in the assault by digital superimposition on CT scans taken at admission of the victim to a hospital. Furthermore, all cases with knife stab wounds of the skull between 1971 and 2000 were analyzed and compared with literature reports. Results of this study show that there is no region preference despite of differences in bone thickness, that stab wounds of the brain are almost invariably associated with multiple stab wounds to the trunk and that the wound tract may correspond to the dimensions of the blade allowing the identification of the weapon by digital image analysis.     

Coming to Terms with Intramural Differences Over Policy Frameworks: How Policy Researchers Accommodate Rival Claims Among their Peers

Although we readily scrutinize conflicts among political stakeholders, similar attention is seldom paid to how we deal with contestable understandings within our own field of inquiry. Debates over competing scholarly perspectives and contested models are rarely subject to any systematic postmortem or attempts to account for differential survival. Given the indeterminacy of many of our conceptual schemes, empirical data seldom carry the day to a resolution all can accept. Accordingly, there are eventually many different versions of any given dispute, each offering a different path to resolution or equanimity. Disputants retire and conflicts fade, providing a demographic resolution of sorts, but not a scientific or a conceptual one. The work presented here claims that there is much to be gained from systematic scrutiny of our conceptual disputes, especially as a means to access the different perspectives we assume to handle them. We argue that there is an internal logic to the different perspectives on any given dispute. It is not the dispute per se that draws our interest; but rather, how any given dispute generates multiple interpretations and reconstructed versions. We propose and illustrate an approach to analyzing disputes that makes their internal logic more transparent and attends to the pathways that emerge for resolution. We will find, in the process, that there are some reliable routes to conciliation and some fault lines that remain unstable.     

Between EU Requirements, Competitive Politics, and National Traditions: Re–creating Regions in the Accession Countries of Central and Eastern Europe

The article studies the impact of the European Union (EU) on the reforms of regional administration in Central and East European (CEE) accession countries. It analyzes the motives, process and outcomes of regional– or mesolevel administrative reforms in five countries—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia—considering whether the EU has shaped these reforms to a higher degree than in relation to its incumbent member states. The article finds that the EU Commission's interest in regional self–governments with a substantial fiscal and legal autonomy has provided an additional rationale and an incentive to re–create regional self–governments. Advocates of regional self–government and an institutionalization of regions in the accession countries have referred to European trends and (perceived) EU expectations of regionalization. Thus, the Commission and the preaccession framework have become catalysts for a process in which most CEE regions have already enhanced and will further increase their political salience. However, the trajectories and outcomes of regional–level reforms can be better explained by a combination of domestic institutional legacies, policy approaches of reformers and their adversaries, and the influence of ethnic/historical regionalism.     

New Labour and Government in Britain: Change or Continuity?

The 1997 British election marks a major change in British government. Eighteen years of Conservative rule had brought about growing inequality and social division and have generated powerful demands for new directions in public policy, especially in the areas of welfare and public administration. On welfare state reform Labour is constrained by election promises to restrain taxation and public expenditure. New Labour ministers influenced by the New Right have in any case largely rejected traditional social democratic redistributive strategies and are seeking instead new ways of reducing welfare dependency.
The virulent spread of quangos at all levels of government and a marked increase in the centralisation of power in Whitehall have given a new impetus to demands for constitutional reform. Labour's response to these demands is a major program of regional devolution, House of Lords reform and open government measures.
This article explains what 'New Labour' means and discusses New Labour policies on welfare and constitutional reform and their implications for the future of public administration in Britain.