Quality Management in Public-Sector Organizations: Evidence from Six EU Countries

Although there is considerable evidence for the hypothesis that an efficient use of management techniques is the key to a good public service delivery, a lot of studies come to the conclusion that there is only partial, reluctant implementation or even a general lack of the use of such techniques by public managers. This paper examines the determinants for the use of quality management techniques in public sector organizations from six EU countries. It turns out that especially more organizational autonomy and result control appear to be of importance while, surprisingly, the combination of these variables leads to negative results.     

The Interplay of Adolescents’ Aggression and Victimization with Friendship and Antipathy Networks within an Educational Prosocial Intervention

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - How the interplay between peer relationships and behaviors unfolds and how this differs between classrooms is an understudied topic. This study examined whether...     

Relationships Between Family Connectedness and Body Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Girls and Boys

The present study examined the longitudinal links between perceptions of family connectedness and body satisfaction in 1,774 (52% female) adolescents. Participants (10–15 years of age at Time 1) completed self-report measures at three measurement occasions separated by 1 year each. Mean group difference results showed that both body satisfaction levels and perceived levels of family connectedness decreased over 2 years for the whole sample. As expected, girls were generally less satisfied with their bodies than boys, particularly in the older cohort. Structural equation modelling was used to assess stability coefficients and cross-lagged effects, and longitudinal bidirectional effects between perceptions of family connectedness and body satisfaction were found for girls, but not for boys. This result suggests that adolescent girls’ body satisfaction is both affected by and a predictor of perceived family connectedness.     

Governance and accountability in community policing

Community policing presents its own distinct governance and accountability challenges. Local community police officers, for example, can find themselves stretched between the accountability demands of the local community and those flowing from professional, managerial and central government sources. Drawing on the results of a recent ethnographic study on neighbourhood police officers in rural and urban areas in the Netherlands, this article probes the nature and extent of these tensions and the coping strategies deployed by the officers in question and the police organisation as a whole. It finds that a regular strategy is to neutralise or marginalise the voice of the local community in shaping police priorities and strategies. Local democratic control of the police is often smothered by the competing professional, managerial, cultural and central government forces. This, in turn, has the effect of putting distance between police offices and citizens, and even creating a demand for the engagement of private sector patrol officers who are more responsive to the needs and wishes of the local community.