The Ethical Implications of Altering Public Sector Accountability Models: The Case of the Atlanta Cheating Scandal

ABSTRACT

Outcome based policies promote the use performance accountability models. However, the impact these policies have on the ethical culture of public sector organizations has not been adequately assessed. This research examines performance accountability reforms by examining the City of Atlanta’s implementation of federal and state performance policies. The analysis reveals the use of performance models in vulnerable organizations negatively impact employees’ ethical behavior. Teachers and administrators altered test results, delivered threats, misled parents and students about performance outcomes, and were dishonest with state investigators to give the illusion that performance goals had been met or exceeded.     

Engagement,Disengagement, or Exit: A Theory of Equilibrium Associations

This article considers the possibility of mutually beneficial communication among groups when any group may choose to unilaterally join or exit an alliance. My main concern is the trade‐off groups face between the informational benefits of associating with others in a large society versus the costs imposed by power sharing and preference diversity. When these costs are sufficiently high, groups may prefer exit to association. The results of this article characterize the associations of groups that can be sustained in equilibrium, and within those associations, the types of groups that choose to meaningfully communicate with others. The results demonstrate that there can be benefits or costs associated with the inclusion of preference extremists in a diverse society, whether or not those extremists choose to actively communicate with outgroups. The results also speak to institutional mechanisms for fostering communication across diverse groups.     

Looking for the state and finding god: conceptions of security among low-income Cairenes

This article analyses how low-income individuals in Cairo, Egypt interpret the aspects of security and insecurity that affect their daily lives. Particular attention is paid to crime and failing transportation infrastructure during Mohammed Morsi’s presidency, 2012–2013. Primarily, I show how religion is both a tool and coping mechanism to help combat chronic periods of insecurity. Participants invoke religion to force officials to perform their duties and to perform them honestly. Secondly, religion is called upon as a final form of mental and spiritual relief against injustice and the trials of daily urban life. This paper seeks to make an intervention into security studies by showing how Egyptians defend themselves through personal and communal understandings of religion in distinction to security practices enacted by the state and other national and international organizations.     

The De Rossetti Affair: Legal Pluralism and Levantine Identity at the Crossroads of Empires

In the nineteenth century, changes to Ottoman legal and financial structures upset the familial interests of the large Levantine clans that were an integral part of the Ottoman Empire from its centre in Constantinople to its peripheries. Many legal and political disputes involved influential individuals who were not strictly ‘European’ or ‘foreign’; rather they were long-term residents of the empire with strong ties to the Mediterranean basin. A forgotten part of Egyptian history, the De Rossetti family presented here exemplifies those families and individuals who transcended the ‘imperialist’ tag as part of a wider Levantine network. This article argues that extraterritorial legal claims had the direct, and generally unintended, effect of an imposed legal order that ensnared both Ottomans and non-Ottomans in disputes over juridical pre-eminence, a creeping institutional imperialism which case by case sought to undermine the Egyptian regime’s capacity to govern.     

The Two Language Problem: Sélim Abou,Lebanon and the Ethnolinguistic Nation

Abstract

In 1961, Sélim Abou, then a young doctoral student and now chair of cultural anthropology at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut, published his thesis. It argued that Lebanon's most formative national characteristic is its French-Arabic bilingualism. Moreover, he proposes that Lebanese communities should be defined not by confession but by language. Abou’s work raised red flags for partisans of Arabic in Lebanon who argued that bilingualism was nothing more than a conceptual 'fig leaf' for maintaining French and an established cultural and political status quo that worked in favour of Lebanon’s Maronites. Critics suggested that his design was nothing more than a thinly veiled promotion of sectarian politics. Through an examination of his work, and of the critical response it provoked, this article examines the possibilities of language as an alternative category of analysis in Lebanon. While Abou’s bilingualism most certainly served as an apology for French colonialism and for Maronite interests, his work nonetheless illustrates alternative local categories of use other than “confession.” Instead of focusing on the criticism of Abou and his category, we must examine how language can provide possibilities that might crack open the hermetic and fragile structure of confessionalism, highlighting the types of moveable communities in the post-colony.     

The compleat advocate

Recognizing and analyzing a public policy problem is an important first step in impacting on its resolution. However, the more crucial and subtle steps are the subsequent ones of selection of means, implementation, evaluation and termination addressing the multi-phased policy decision process. The translation of knowledge created during the estimation phase of possible policy alternatives is a not very well appreciated activity, and this article sheds clear light on the essentials of how one might go about making this translation. Considered are some practical, hard-won lessons learned about becoming and being a public policy advocate. While the specific focus is on children's legislation, the principles invoked have more widespread applicability.