A Modernization Myth: Public Management Reform and Leadership Behavior in the Irish Public Service

To assess whether public service modernisation in Ireland is a ‘useful myth’, we examine aggregate indicators of leadership behaviours and the interview responses of recognised ‘change agents’ to assess whether there is a gap between the rhetoric and reality of follower engagement in pursuit of a transformative vision that official rhetoric highlights as a potentiality in this sector. The persistence of such a gap can be explained in terms of the usefulness of this potentiality myth in legitimising the leading role top-level public servants play in reform processes in this country although this may have declined during the current recession.     

Chav-spotting in Britain: the representation of social class as private choice

The word chav is a relatively new one in British English, used to describe a supposed social group defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a young person of a type characterised by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes … usually with connotations of a low social status”. Discourse on chavs in contemporary Britain has been widely implicated in the reinforcement of social inequalities. This article argues that a central element of such discourse is the representation of “everyday” British public experience as a practice of chav-spotting, of reading materials as signs of the private characteristics of those with which they are associated. This means reading class as a privately motivated phenomenon, as the product of the “choice incompetence” of chavs. This chav-spotting practice is viewed from two perspectives: (1) as a recontextualisation of class as the result of private choice; and (2) as a practice of sign-making by which meanings are articulated for publicly observable materials in accordance with (1).     

Building for the Future: Where Should We Build Houses to Stimulate the Economy?

The UK's housing problem has become an economic one. Finding ways to boost the supply of housing across the UK is currently near the top of the Government's economic growth and jobs agenda. As a result of failed policies over the past 60 years ‐ policymakers’ unwillingness to tackle NIMBY interests, a complex national planning system, developers’ unwillingness and inability to build housing at the volume required to maintain stable prices, changing preferences amongst the population ‐ the scale of the problem is vast. However, for any hope of success for the Government's housing strategy, it is vital to understand the extent to which the housing landscape varies significantly across different parts of the country.     

Bureaucratic justice: the incarceration of mainland Chinese women working in Hong Kong's sex industry

Since Hong Kong's return to the People's Republic of China (PRC) there has been a significant rise in the number of Chinese visitors to Hong Kong, including women crossing the border to engage in sex work. Sex work itself is not a crime in Hong Kong, but related activities, like soliciting, are prohibited. Sex work is treated as work for immigration purposes, and visitors who engage in work without an employment visa are breaching their conditions of stay. More than 10,000 mainland Chinese women have been arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced in recent years, causing the correctional population to expand beyond capacity. The authors examine the experiences of 58 incarcerated women in their encounters with the Hong Kong criminal justice system and find that women are processed in a highly routinized bureaucratic manner. They consider the purpose served by the largely bureaucratic form of justice that has emerged in response to migrant sex workers in Hong Kong.     

An Evaluation of Leadership as a Response to Agency Failure in the Public Sector

An alternative to contractual solutions to agency problems is suggested in the literature on leadership in which leaders are often claimed to be able to steer historical processes in the direction they intend through the distinctive influence they have on the intrinsic motivation of their followers. We evaluate Casson's (1991) agency–theoretic model of leadership as 'moral manipulation' which under certain conditions can be exercised at lower agency cost than monitoring. We then make a case for conceiving leadership as the development of culture of passion to advance the leader's quest through the engagement of followers in 'interaction rituals' in which their passion is either recharged or their lack of passion exposed. The impact the emergence of such cultures can have on the policy–making community is examined using the British and New Zealand experiences and a case is made for the preservation of a counter–culture of 'public interest' in the policy advisory ranks of the civil service.