Not Seeing Eye to Eye on Frontline Work: Manager‐Employee Disagreement and Its Effects on Employees

The author uses nationally representative data on matched pairs of public school principals and teachers to test whether principal–teacher disagreement about the severity of school problems is associated with teacher turnover. More specifically, the author tests a managerial efficacy hypothesis that proposes that employees will be less likely to leave their jobs when their managers perceive problems to be severe, holding employees’ perceptions of the same problems constant. The author also tests a managerial buffering hypothesis that proposes that employees’ perceptions of problem severity will be more weakly related to their turnover probability when managers perceive problems to be severe. Little evidence is found for either hypothesis, raising questions about public school principals’ ability to translate problem recognition into problem remediation. More generally, the findings suggest a reexamination of the generic claim that “management matters,” which implies that public managers have the power to do things that can help employees perform their jobs well.     

Castlereagh and France

As Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh had to cope with the reality of France as an enemy as well as with France as a potential ally. This article examines the pragmatic evolution of Castlereagh's diplomacy from 1812, when an international coalition had to be brought and then kept together that could defeat Napoleon, to the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna, where France emerged as a vital part of the new European equilibrium. In settling Europe after nearly two decades of war the fate of France was central.     

Theoretical practice and the sociology of knowledge a reply to Paul Q. Hirst: Recent tendencies in sociological theory

This article is a consideration of the viability of an aesthetically oriented social theory. After a discussion of some aspects of Michel Maffesoli's writings, the paper goes on to argue for three: 1. that we might take an interest in the aesthetic sphere not from the perspective of a critique of ideology or from that of critical philosophy but throguh a concern for something like Problematics of freedom: 2 that, against the understandable temptations of a sociological reduction of art, we need to treat aesthetic autonomy with a certain benign seriousness, that is to say, as a (moral, ethical, aesthetic) problem; and 3. That, in contrast to the aestheticizing tendencies of much of what goes by the name of cultural sociology, the question of the aestheticization of culture needs to be analysed in terms, above all, of its ascetic properties, aspirations and directions.     

Public capital stock and interstate variations in manufacturing efficiency

This study focuses on the role of public capital stock in contributing to interstate differences in productive efficiency in manufacturing. Our motivation is to assess the role of public capital as a source of persistent regional variations in efficiency, and thus determine if public infrastructure policies might reasonably be expected to alter the competitive environment of a state's manufacturing sector. We use a stochastic frontier production function model, explicitly incorporating infrastructure capital, to examine the relative performance of the aggregate manufacturing sector across states and over time. We calculate an index of productive efficiency and estimate the determinants of statewide variations in it. These results show that variations in per capita infrastructure stocks significantly affect manufacturing efficiency. Considering the behavior of public capital as both a direct and an indirect input furthers our understanding of the role of infrastructure and its implications for regional economic development policies.