Moving to the Gulf: an empirical analysis of the patterns and drivers of migration to the GCC countries, 1960–2013

The migration system in the Persian (Arabian) Gulf is among the largest such systems in the world. This article identifies the major interacting elements of this system, which primarily includes countries in South Asia and the Middle East, and discusses its generating forces and developments over the past five and a half decades. Departing from panel data from the World Bank and the UN’s population database, which hitherto have been largely under-analysed, we investigate the dynamics of migrations in the period 1960–2013. The panel data are combined with cross-sectional outlooks of contemporary trends and are related to political and economic developments in the region. It is suggested that the patterns of migrations in the Gulf may be explained with reference to the economic, political and demographic idiosyncrasies of the system, and to the migration policies of the GCC countries. In short, the key drivers of GCC migration patterns include: (1) socio-economic realities, in particular income differentials between migrant senders and migrant receivers as well as impressive growth rates in the Gulf region; (2) historical, cultural and institutional proximity among the constituent states in the system; and (3) the particularities of the Gulf states’ liberal labour-migrant regimes, which contrast starkly with their restrictive refugee and naturalisation policies.     

Inter-Municipal Cooperation and Satisfaction with Services: Evidence from the Norwegian Citizen Study

We investigate the effects of inter-municipal cooperation on citizen satisfaction with fire services and refuse handling. While there is a growing interest in cooperation as a way of providing municipal services, little is known of the effect on citizen satisfaction. Through a multilevel analysis combining individual and municipal data, we find that inter-municipal cooperation has a negative effect on satisfaction with fire services, no effect on refuse collection but a positive effect on satisfaction with source separation. The results, we argue, show how the organizational form may affect satisfaction in different ways depending on service characteristics.     

Nexus of armed conflicts and migrations to the Gulf: migrations to the GCC from war-torn source countries in Asia,Africa and the Arab neighbourhood

Majority of temporary labour migrants in the Gulf originate in countries that are not involved in devastating armed conflicts. Migrations from conflict-ridden countries to the Gulf are not negligible, however, and they have been growing in the last decades. The overview of migrations from the major refugee-producing countries suggests that we may distinguish between different categories of mixed migrations; inter alia, migrants who migrated to the Gulf prior to, during and after the armed conflicts in their home countries. We argue that these migrations happened in parallel with the tremendous economic growth that the Gulf countries have experienced in the last decades. Of note, however, is that they also coincide with escalations of armed conflicts in several sending countries, which may indicate that some of these migrations are also the result of war- or security-related push forces. We also contend that the dynamics of migrations from countries in conflict may in addition be related to the foreign policies of the Gulf countries, which are often closely related to their treatment of different migrant groups.     

Intensifying Social Exchange Relationships in Public Organizations: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

In accordance with social exchange theory, prominent streams of management research emphasize the importance of reciprocal exchange relationships between organizations and their employees. When employees perceive themselves as supported by the organization, they reciprocate with increased work motivation. However, we do not know how this knowledge can be developed into management initiatives that increase public employees’ perceived support, because severe endogeneity problems make it difficult to estimate the effect of organizational support on employee commitment outside the laboratory. We use a randomized field experiment involving more than 800 public employees to estimate the effect. We find no average effect of the organizational support treatment on the employees’ perceived organizational support. Yet, a subgroup analysis shows a positive treatment effect when the employees’ local front‐line managers felt less supported prior to the intervention. We discuss the implications for theory and management practice. ©2012 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Coproduction and Equity in Public Service Delivery

Public managers and researchers devote much attention to the benefits of coproduction, or the mixing of the productive efforts of public employees and citizens in public service design and delivery. One concern, however, is the distributional consequences of coproduction. This article proposes that disadvantaged citizens may be constrained by a lack of knowledge or other resources necessary to contribute to and benefit from the coproduction process. From this assumption, the authors develop the theoretical argument that if coproduction programs were designed to lift constraints on disadvantaged citizens, they might increase both efficiency and equity. This claim is tested using a field experiment on educational services. A coproduction program providing immigrant parents with knowledge and materials useful to their children's early educational development had a substantial positive impact on the educational outcomes of disadvantaged children, thereby diminishing inequity. Economically, the program was more efficient than later compensation of low‐performing children.     

How Politics Shapes the Growth of Rules

This article examines the impact of politics on governmental rule production. Traditionally, explanations of rule dynamics have focused on nonpolitical factors such as the self‐evolvement of rules, environmental factors, and decision maker attributes. This article develops a set of hypotheses about when, why, and how political factors shape changes in the stock of rules. Furthermore, we test these hypotheses on a unique, new data set based on all Danish primary legislation and administrative rules from 1989 to 2011 categorized into 20 different policy domains. The analysis shows that the traditional Weberian “rules breed rules” explanations must be supplemented with political explanations that take party ideology and changes in the political agenda into account. Moreover, the effect of political factors is indistinguishable across changes in primary laws and changes in administrative rules, a result that challenges the depiction of the latter rule‐making process as more or less disconnected from the political domain.     

Trauma-exposed young victims: possibilities and constraints for providing trauma support within the investigative interview

For police, the aim of an investigative interview is to obtain a detailed and reliable account from the interviewee while remaining objective and impartial. This study explores the challenges involved in interviewing traumatised young victims and providing trauma support within the legal framework. The study is based on 19 videotaped investigative interviews of highly traumatised young victims of the 2011 Utøya terror attack in Norway and research interviews with the 17 detectives who conducted the police interviews. We analysed the research interviews that comprise the main data using qualitative inductive methods. We used the videotaped investigative interviews as a framework for the research interviews. We identified various types of constraint and support that the detectives perceived and found that objectivity is critical to the interviewers’ understanding of their professional role, which results in phase-bound support. At the beginning and end of the interview, they perceive opportunities to be supportive that are in accordance with recommended trauma care. However, the interviewing detectives become more passive when the conversation is about the criminal offence and seem less confident about being supportive. This study provides relevant new insights into how police experience interviewing traumatised young victims.     

Distributed leadership and performance-related employee outcomes in public sector organizations

Distributed leadership is the sharing of leadership tasks between managers and employees. This article demonstrates how a distributed leadership perspective adds to the public administration literature by including an important sensitivity to planned and nonplanned leadership. We propose a theoretical model that explains the impact of distributed leadership on employee outcomes which have a direct or indirect impact on organizational performance in public organizations contingent on alignment with individual leadership capacity and organizational goals. Our empirical analysis in the Danish hospital sector shows initial support for the expected relationships between distributed leadership and performance-related employee outcomes such as job satisfaction and innovative behavior. This indicates that the distributed leadership perspective holds the potential to strengthen service delivery in complex public service organizations while there is weaker support for the notion that the positive impact of distributed leadership depends on individual leadership capacity and their support for organizational goals.