The Capacities and Challenges of Faith-Based Human Service Organizations

This essay addresses four questions by comparing the management capacities and challenges of congregations, faith‐based organizations, and secular organizations that provide human services: (1) What role, if any, do congregations and faith‐based organizations currently play in the social service delivery system? (2) Are congregations interested in changing their role in the social service delivery system? (3) Compared to faith‐based and secular organizations, do congregations have the capacity to adapt to new roles in the social service delivery system? Finally, (4) compared to faith‐based and secular organizations, do congregations have similar service capacities and management challenges? The findings indicate that although more than half of congregations already provide some type of health or human services, they provide a narrower range of services, consider these services a lower priority, and seem to encounter more extensive management challenges than faith‐based and secular organizations.     

The Wisdom of Crowds: Learning from Administrators' Predictions of Citizen Perceptions

Public agencies use surveys to solicit feedback from citizens and targeted customer groups, but many experts question whether the results of these surveys are valuable. This paper explores how a recent innovation in citizen surveys—asking public administrators to predict how citizens will respond to survey questions—may be used to increase that value and, at the same time, provide additional data of interest on its own account. The innovation is explored through two surveys: (1) a public opinion poll of Georgia residents conducted by the authors for the Georgia Department of Transportation in January 2004, and (2) a brief survey of that agency's administrators asking for their predictions of public opinion. The prediction process appeared to increase the agency's interest in the resident survey. The findings document the frequent superiority of groups—what Surowiecki terms "the wisdom of crowds"—over individuals in predicting public opinion.     

Civil Service Reform as National Security: The Homeland Security Act of 2002

The events of 9/11 have influenced policy making in public administration. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the Department of Homeland Security, contained language that empowered the secretary of homeland security and the director of the Office of Personnel Management to establish a personnel management system outside the normal provisions of the federal civil service. Why did civil service reform succeed as part of this legislation when previous attempts at large‐scale reform had failed? A case analysis of the enactment of civil service reform in the Homeland Security Act points to theories of policy emergence and certain models of presidential and congressional policy making. In this case, civil service reform became associated with national security instead of management reform. An assessment of the rhetorical arguments used to frame this policy image offers a powerful explanation for the adoption of the personnel management reforms in the Homeland Security Act. This case has implications for understanding how policy makers might approach future management reform agendas.     

Public–Private Partnerships: An International Performance Review

Public–private partnerships are enjoying a global resurgence in popularity, but there is still much confusion around notions of partnership, what can be learned from our history with partnerships, and what is new about the partnership forms that are in vogue today. Looking at one particular family of public–private partnerships, the long-term infrastructure contract, this article argues that evaluations thus far point to contradictory results regarding their effectiveness. Despite their continuing popularity with governments, greater care is needed to strengthen future evaluations and conduct such assessments away from the policy cheerleaders.     

Putting the Resource-Based View of Strategy and Distinctive Competencies to Work in Public Organizations

A key to the success of public organizations is their ability to identify and build capacity, particularly their distinctive competencies, in order to produce the greatest value for key stakeholders. This article grounds this proposition in the resource-based view of organizations and presents a method for identifying and making use of distinctive competencies in the form of a "livelihood scheme"—a business model appropriate for the public sector—that links distinctive competencies to organizational aspirations and goals. The case of a major public sector training and consultancy unit that is part of the United Kingdom's National Health Service is used as illustration. A number of conclusions are offered in the form of a set of propositions tied to the resource-based view and related research issues. The results contribute to both public strategic management theory and practice.     

Democratization,International Knowledge Institutions,and Global Governance

The central problem of democracy has long been theorized as how to place appropriate constraints on the responsible exercise of power. Today, this problem is most acute in global governance. This article examines the rapid rise in the creation of international knowledge institutions, arguing that these institutions reflect a growing effort by nations and publics to assert democratic constraints on the on the global exercise of power through their ability to structure processes of reasoning and deliberation in global society. Specifically, the article argues for the need to attend carefully to processes of knowledge‐making in international institutions, including the roles of international institutions in setting standards for the exercise of reasoning, their contributions to the making of global kinds through their work in classifying and reclassifying the objects of international discourse, and through their roles in opening up and constraining participation in international deliberation. The article concludes that the construction and deployment of policy‐relevant knowledge are a significant source of power in their own right in global governance that need to be subject to their own democratic critique.     

Does border enforcement deter unauthorized immigration? The case of Mexican migration to the United States of America

This paper asks whether the migration decisions of unauthorized Mexican immigrants to the USA have been influenced by stronger US border enforcement efforts since 1993 that have sharply increased the physical risk and financial cost of illegal immigration. These measures were supposed to have decreased the probability of successful entry, thereby lowering the expected benefits of migration. We carried out a logistic regression analysis of data from a recent survey of 603 returned migrants and potential first‐time migrants in rural Mexico. Our findings indicate that tougher border controls have had remarkably little influence on the propensity to migrate illegally to the USA. Political restrictions on immigration are far outweighed by economic and family‐related incentives to migrate. An alternative, labor‐market approach to immigration control with higher probability of effectiveness is outlined.     

Globalization and legal change: The “Americanization” of European law?

Intensified global economic competition, economic liberalization, and the rise of EU governance have led some observers to argue that there has been a trend toward the “Americanization” of the European “way of law.” This article addresses that contention, focusing on legal change in European member states. It first describes ways in which the American legal tradition has differed most sharply from the national legal systems of Western Europe (including Great Britain) and the political and economic factors that account for this “American legal distinctiveness.” Similar political and economic factors currently are at work in Europe, the article acknowledges, creating incentives for legal convergence. But it also argues that European legal culture and the political organization of European national states generate path‐dependent forces that impede European movement toward American ways of law, and it discusses six important differences between European and American law that remain entrenched and are unlikely to disappear.     

Explaining legislators’ positions on outside income limits: Voting on honoraria ceilings in the U.S. Senate, 1981–1983

This article examines roll-call voting by members of the U.S. Senate on three proposals to limit members’ outside income in the 1980s. I find that several factors influenced legislators’ votes on outside income limits legislation (OILL). First, financial self-interest was an important constraint on members’ willingness to support OILL. Members who earned more honoraria were less likely to vote yes, but this opposition was neutralized when limits were attached to the compensating mechanism of a pay raise. Senators from poorer states were generally more likely to support honoraria limits alone but less likely to support limits linked to a pay raise, suggesting a responsiveness to constituent interests in both cases. Finally, when OILL was linked to a pay raise, electoral considerations became prominent in legislators’ vote decisions, with electorally vulnerable members less likely to vote yes.