Obstacles and Opportunities for Sustaining Performance Management Systems

Measuring performance in public organizations has been a growing trend for several decades. Designing, adopting, and implementing this style of management system have been the topic of much practitioner and academic deliberation. One struggle those determined to adopt performance measurement and management systems have faced, though, is the ability to sustain them over time and actually engrain them into their decision-making frameworks. Countless barriers to long-term success exist for public organizations and this article seeks to identify and categorize them. Using a mixed-method survey design, this research shows which factors are the most important to organizations hoping to build a performance system that can stand the test of time. Capacity, knowledge, and buy-in limitations pose serious threats to these reforms and it takes a concerted effort to cultivate not only support from employees and management to pursue performance management but the technical and conceptual capacity to design the right system for the organization.     

A Person-centered Approach to Studying the Linkages among Parent–Child Differences in Cultural Orientation,Supportive Parenting,and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms in Chinese American Families

This longitudinal study examined whether supportive parenting mediates relations between parent–child differences in cultural orientation (generational dissonance) and depressive symptoms with a sample of 451 first and second generation Chinese American parents and adolescents (12–15 years old at time 1). Using a person-centered approach, meaningful typologies of cultural orientation were derived for fathers, mothers, and adolescents. Overall, results provided support, though qualified, for the notion that generational dissonance is linked to depressive symptoms through decreased supportive parenting. In general, having a parent with a bicultural profile seemed to be most advantageous if adolescents similarly had a bicultural profile, whereas more American oriented adolescents with more Chinese oriented parents reported the least supportive parenting and most depressive symptoms. Directions for future research and the benefits of using a person-centered approach in research of acculturation and generational dissonance are discussed.

Thyroid Cartilage Ossification and Multislice Computed Tomography Examination: A Useful Tool for Age Assessment?

Abstract: Many authors have studied the thyroid cartilage ossification process using radiographic features for age estimation of individuals. Their results were various: Sugiyama reported excellent correlation coefficients between ossification rates and civil age, unlike most other authors. We hypothesized that recent advances in imaging techniques would enable more precise evaluation of the ossification of the thyroid cartilage. We retrospectively analyzed the CT scans of 312 French patients using postprocessing software to examine the pattern of thyroid cartilage ossification, calculating the ossified volume of the cartilage on 3D reconstructions. Pearson’s correlation coefficients for volume were 0.73 for men and 0.75 for women (standard error 18.02 and 17.06), indicating considerable inter‐individual variability. Although a correlation between civil age and morphological changes was found, these methods based on thyroid cartilage ossification were not accurate enough for the assessment of individual age.     

Foreign aid and terrorist groups: incidents,ideology, and survival

Public Choice - During recent decades, terrorist groups have sought refuge in weak or failed states from which to launch their attacks. Foreign aid to states harboring those groups may or may not...     

Berkeley

Abstract

CCAS now has a membership of about 65 here at Berkeley. We struggle on meeting in between National Guard search and destroy operations. Franz Schurmann and David Marr went to Stockholm to talk to the NLF and the DRV people. A press conference for them was just beginning when the helicopter swept over Sproul Plaza spraying CN gas. Several nights later they held forth at a large CCAS gathering to discuss their trip and what we as “Asian Scholars” might do about a war which obviously has not ended.     

Intra-industry trade and protectionism: the case of the buy national policy

This article examines the factors that lead governments to open up their public procurement markets to international competition with a particular emphasis on the effect of intra-industry trade. Contrary to the conventional notion that intra-industry trade entails less political pressure for protectionism than inter-industry trade, I argue that such notion does not prevail in the case of discriminatory public procurement. Firms in a market with a high degree of intra-industry trade are more likely to resist the removal of discrimination than would firms in a market with a high degree of inter-industry trade. Empirically, I find support for the argument both at sub-national and cross-national settings.