Growing Grassroots Democracy: Dynamic Outcomes in Building New York City’s Participatory Budgeting Program

Within five years of its launch, Participatory Budgeting in New York City (PBNYC) spread from four to thirty-one of New York’s fifty-one council districts, enabling city residents to directly allocate thirty-eight million dollars in public funds. During this period, PBNYC’s neighborhood-level forums remained largely unchanged, but, in order to sustain growth, administrative shifts altered the institution’s basic design. This article examines how and why this transition affected the degree of popular control afforded by PBNYC, specifically within its cross-district Steering Committee. Analysis of original interviews and organizational documents indicates that the transition brought important, if modest, gains but impeded aspects of community empowerment through bureaucratic resistance and imbalanced governmental-civil society roles. Key players responded by reforming PBNYC’s internal governance. This case sheds light on the factors that shape participatory institutions and their impacts, emphasizing the dynamic interactions between actors and the resulting gains and losses that aggregate toward longer term outcomes.     

Al-Shabaab,Social Identity Group,Human (In)Security,and Counterterrorism

This article examines the link between human security, social identity, and al-Shabaab. The first section explores how social identity group theory can help explain al-Shabaab's recruitment. The second part focuses on the counterterrorism campaign against al-Shabaab, which involves decapitation, aggressive peacekeeping through a proxy in the shape of the African Union Mission in Somalia, and the role of a domestic de-radicalization program. The article concludes that al-Shabaab's allure is in decline and the group is facing internal turmoil, which makes its overtures toward the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant very dangerous, as al-Shabaab could act as an effective conduit between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa.     

Predictors of Electronic Government Services Adoption: The African Students’ Perspective in China

This study investigated the willingness of African students in China to adopt and use e-government services. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) was used as the theoretical framework for this study while the data were analyzed with SPSS. The results indicate that performance expectancy, social influence, culture, and facilitating conditions were significant in determining the willingness to use e-government services. Contrarily to our expectations, effort expectancy, trust in the internet and perceived service quality were not significant in influencing the willingness to use e-government services. Also, while social influence had a significant influence on the trust in the internet, it was, however, demonstrated that social influence does not have a significant impact on both the effort expectancy and performance expectancy of e-government services. The implications of these and other result findings of this study are thoroughly discussed.     

Generalizability of a theory of job attitudes: a cross–cultuural view: research note

This study reports the result of a test of applicability of the two-factor theory of job attitudes. The theory assumes two independent sets of variables (motivator and hygiene) important to job satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It is also claimed that the two- factor theory is appropriate for all working populations of differing nationalities. Most of the previous attempts to test the applicability of this theory in different cultures were criticised for examining job attitudes in other cultures from an American point of view as they translate and administer questionnaires either developed in the United States or based on the findings of the original study. The applicability of the assumption of two-factor theory to the job attitudes of Turkish-Cypriot employees (N=62) was determined through content analysis of critical incident stories. Factors associated with the job attitudes of Turkish-Cypriot employees could be separated into two relatively independent sets of' variables comparable to motivator-hygiene dichotomy. It was also found that both sets of variables were found to be associated with job satisfaction, Thus, the results of the present study only partially support the assumption of the two-factor theory and imply that blanket application of American administrative theories, without considerable tailoring by cultural group, is hazardous.     

An analysis of DRM from a consumer protection perspective

The use of digital rights management (DRM) software by mediacompanies is controversial. In recent months, Steve Job at AppleComputers has challenged music companies to stop using the technologybecause, he says, it is stifling the development of online musicsales. Others are more cynical, claiming that his comments aremerely part of a negotiating ploy with EMI, whose music fileshe is hoping to