Conduit or contributor? The role of media in policy change theory

The policy change literature is contradictory about the role the media plays in policy change: a conduit for policy participants, with media accounts transmitting multiple policy beliefs of those involved in policy debates or a contributor in the policy process, with media accounts supplying consistent policy beliefs with congruent narrative framing strategies to construct a policy story. The purpose of this study is to empirically test whether the role of the media is that of a conduit or contributor in the policy change process. This study tests whether there are differences in policy beliefs and narrative framing strategies between local and national print media coverage of two contentious policy issues in the Greater Yellowstone Area between 1986 and 2006, that of snowmobile access and wolf reintroduction. In the Greater Yellowstone Area policy arena, local media accounts are believed to be aligned with the Old West Advocacy Coalition, whereas the national media accounts are thought to be part of the New West Advocacy Coalition. With a methodology informed by narrative policy analysis, one hundred seventy five local and national print newspaper accounts were content analyzed to determine whether these media accounts were policy narratives, with embedded policy beliefs and narrative framing strategies. The results indicate that there are statistical differences between local and national media coverage for five of the seven hypotheses. Media accounts are generally policy stories, suggesting that the media’s role is more of a contributor than a conduit in the policy change process.

Prenatal diagnosis and eugenic ideology

The new techniques of prenatal diagnosis confront women with choices that are constrained by the social and economic realities of the societies in which we live. These societies take little, if any, responsibility for meeting the special needs of people with disabilities and, in fact, discriminate against them. Prejudices against people with disabilities, poor people, and immigrants during the nineteenth century generated a science of ‘race improvement’, called eugenics. In the United States, a number of eugenic measures were enacted early in this century, but it was in Nazi Germany that eugenics or ‘racial hygiene’ flourished. In the guise of furthering the health of the German people (the Volk), German scientists and physicians designed programs of ‘selection and eradication’ (Auslese und Ausmerze) that were initially implemented by sterilizing people who were judged unfit to have children. Next came euthanasia and finally mass extermination of ‘lives not worth living’ (lebensunwerte Leben). Present-day German women, looking at this history, are opposing the ideology that underlies the new technical developments in prenatal diagnosis and some feminists outside Germany share their misgivings. This paper tries to place the new technologies in the context of eugenics and to point out some of the ways in which the new,supposedly liberating, choices in fact limit women's control over our lives.     

Fairness and participation in evaluation procedures: Effects on task attitudes and performance

A laboratory study was conducted to examine the role of two components of participatory work evaluation procedures on fairness attitudes and work performance. Opportunity for influential opinion expression and knowledge of evaluation criteria were manipulated in a business simulation exercise. Thirty-eight male and 49 female undergraduates worked under a task evaluation procedure that either did or did not allow them to express their opinions to the evaluator. In addition, subjects either were or were not provided with specific information about the criteria to be used in making the performance evaluation, and they received either a favorable or an unfavorable outcome. Questionnaire responses indicated that influential opinion expression enhanced perceptions of procedural and distributive fairness independently of the outcome of the evaluation. Both knowledge of evaluation criteria and perceptions of evaluation fairness correlated with subsequent task performance. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to understanding the influence of procedural justice on attitudes and task behavior in organizational settings.