Personnel Management: Politics, Administration, and a Passion for Anonymity

Personnel management is vitally important to the maintenance and preservation of the administrative state and its democratic institutions. This reaction critically examines the personnel recommendations made by Floyd W. Reeves and Paul T. David in their study Personnel Administration in the Federal Service. It questions the degree to which there is a coherent set of political and constitutional expectations marking the progress of personnel policy that might enable us to forecast the future, both theoretically and practically. The authors highlight how and why the field should pay greater attention to the political ends that our personnel theories serve.     

Introduction: Jewish Conditions,Theories of Nationalism

Thinkers with Jewish backgrounds, whether ascribed, embraced or even denied, created the central grammar used in modern attempts to understand nationalism. This introduction first describes the central dilemma faced by those with Jewish conditions when confronted by the rise of ethnonationalism. The responses to the dilemma were varied, so the bulk of this introduction describes some of the most important intellectual boundaries—doing so in such a manner as to introduce the specialist studies that then follow.     

The consequences of a pragmatic turn for semiotics

Clara H. Stewardson Professor of Philosophy.     

Hindsight bias and third-party consentors to warrantless police searches

Research on hindsight bias indicates that awareness of event outcome influences how individuals interpret information and form judgments. We extend this earlier work to suggest that the effect of this bias on lay perceptions of third-party consent to warrantless searchers of residences may be contingent upon the presence verus absence of the search target(the suspect). A study using random assignment to experimental conditions in a between-subjects design explored this possibility. The experiment indicated that hindsight bias in perceived rights of the third-party consentor is influenced, not only by search outcome, but also by a web of overlapping and potentially competing social obligations and personal prerogatives, the salience of which is influenced by situational dynamics.Portions of this research were reported in a panel session at the 1989 meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Reno.