ADOPTING PERSONNEL PRODUCTIVITY INNOVATIONS IN AMERICAN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

Improving the productivity of public employees has increasingly attracted the attention of urban policymakers and administrators concerned about the quality, cost, and efficiency of governmental service delivery. A national survey of local personnel managers was undertaken to ascertain the degree of jurisdictional receptivity to personnel-based management tools, preferred approaches, and the most serious policy and institutional barriers to the implementation of these changes. Research findings concerning the adoption of personnel reforms are generally consistent with those reported in prior studies except for an increase in the utilization of job enrichment techniques by local administrators. The reluctance of labor organizations to accept productivity bargaining and the unwillingness of local authorities to consider financial incentive plans for governmental executives are cited b y our respondents as the chief obstacles to greater managerial effectiveness.     

Knowledge transfer to emerging markets via consulting projects

In recent years, development agencies (DAs) have focused their activities on consulting projects rather than on financing turnkey projects when assisting emerging markets. The main reason is that the implementation of consulting projects is likely to be connected with an intensive knowledge transfer from developed to emerging markets. Training of local employees and cooperation with local firms are necessary elements to make the transfer effective. The empirical statistics shows training and cooperation to be more frequent in consulting projects financed by DAs as compared to commercial projects. According to theory and experience, training should be included in projects in the least developed host countries, whereas local cooperation should be more frequent, the higher is the development level of the host country. However, DAs do not follow these rules of thumb in a convincing way. A policy implication of the paper is therefore that DAs should better organize and plan the contents of their consulting projects.

The influence of length of marriage and fidelity status on perception of marital rape

To what extent does the length of the marriage or the wife's faithfulness to the husband influence the perception of responsibility or trauma in marital rape? In the current study, each participant was presented with one of four marital rape vignettes. The vignettes varied only in the length of the marriage (3 years or 15 years) and the fidelity status of the wife (continuously faithful or involved in an ongoing sexual affair with another man). Results indicate that both length of marriage and fidelity status significantly influence perceptions of marital rape. Specifically, participants assigned greater responsibility for the rape to unfaithful wives than to faithful wives. This finding is particularly salient for wives in long-term marriages as compared to wives in short-term marriages. Additionally, participants perceived rapes within long-term marriages as more traumatic than rapes within short-term marriages.     

Effects on academia-industry collaboration of extending university property rights

Several recent studies show European university scientists contributing far more frequently to company-owned patented inventions than they do to patents owned by universities or by the academic scientists themselves. Recognising the significance of this channel for direct commercialisation of European academic research makes it important to understand its response to current Bayh-Dole inspired reforms of university patenting rights. This paper studies the contribution from university scientists to inventions patented by dedicated biotech firms (DBFs) specialised in drug discovery in Denmark and Sweden, which in this respect share a number of structural and historic characteristics. It examines effects of the Danish Law on University Patenting (LUP) effective January 2000, which transferred to the employer university rights to patents on inventions made by Danish university scientists alone or as participants in collaborative research with industry. Sweden so far has left property rights with academic scientists, as they also were in Denmark prior to the reform. Consequently, comparison of Danish and Swedish research collaboration before and after LUP offers a quasi-controlled experiment, bringing out effects on joint research of university IPR reform. In original data on all 3,640 inventor contributions behind the 1,087 patents filed by Danish and Swedish DBFs 1990–2004, Difference-in-Difference regressions uncover notable LUP-induced effects in the form of significant reductions in contributions from Danish domestic academic inventors, combined with a simultaneous substitutive increase of non-Danish academic inventors. A moderate increase in academic inventions channelled into university owned-patents does appear after LUP. But the larger part of the inventive potential of academia, previously mobilised into company-owned patents, seems to have been rendered inactive as a result of the reform. As a likely explanation of these effects the paper suggests that exploratory research, the typical target of joint university-DBF projects in drug discovery, fits poorly into LUP’s requirement for ex ante allocation of IPR. The Pre-LUP convention of IPR allocated to the industrial partner in return for research funding and publication rights to the academic partner may have offered more effective contracting for this type of research. There are indications that LUP, outside the exploratory agenda of drug discovery, offers a more productive framework for inventions requiring less complicated and uncertain post-discovery R&D.

Strong life sciences in innovative weak contexts: a “developmental” approach to a tantalizing mismatch

Life sciences are the best developed area of academic research throughout Latin America. Biomedical research has been particularly successful. However, generally speaking, excellence in research has not been accompanied by commercially successful innovations, a pattern that differs from what has happened in many highly industrialized countries, even small ones. The paper explores some causes of such disappointing outcome, stressing in particular the historical lack of political and social legitimacy exhibited by innovation policies in underdevelopment. From a developmental point of view it is of great importance the building of such legitimacy. One way of doing so is to link more tightly innovation policies to social concerns; bio-innovation is suggested as a productive path towards that aim.

Coparenting Conflict and Parenting Behavior in Economically Disadvantaged Single Parent African American Families: The Role of Maternal Psychological Distress

Substantial research has focused on the negative associations between coparenting conflict, parental psychological functioning, and parenting behavior in European American, middle-income, families. However, less attention has been given to ethnic minority families and to families that are nontraditionally structured. In an effort to address this gap, the current longitudinal study examines the relation between conflict with the mother-identified primary co-caregiver and parenting practices in single parent, economically disadvantaged African American families. Participants included 234 mother–child dyads. It was hypothesized that conflict would relate to less utilization of positive parenting practices and that this association would be mediated, at least in part, by maternal psychological distress. Hypotheses were examined using structural equation modeling (Lisrel 8.3): Conflict with a co-caregiver was significantly related to parenting both directly and indirectly through maternal psychological distress. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Terrorism and relative justice

Terrorist violence and violent justice responses have much in common. While contextually dependant, both forms of violence lay claim to contestred legitimacies. The relationships between terrorism and justice responses require both theoretical and empirical examination if the prospects for controlling the violence they perpetrate is to be sharpened.

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