Implementing sunshine and the public records laws in dade county,florida: problems and prescriptions for reform

Open meetings and public records laws are designed to make the process and product of governmental decision making more accessible to the general public. The objective of this study is to identify problems that are associated with Florida's open meetings (sunshine) and public records laws in relation to the administrative and decision making processes of local governments. The results indicate that smaller municipalities are adversely effected by advertising costs for open meetings and for unreimbursed research costs related to public records requests. A number of suggestions are proposed to remedy the identified deficiencies.     

Gender Equality as Smart Economics? A critique of the 2012 World Development Report

Business now plays an increasingly prominent role in development. While the implicit links between private actors and international development institutions have been widely debated, the explicit role of financial corporations in shaping official development policy has been less well documented. We employ a feminist Marxian analysis to examine the material and discursive landscape of the 2012 World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development. Its exclusive focus on gender equality as ‘smart economics’, and the central role accorded to leading financial corporations like Goldman Sachs in the formulation of the key World Bank recommendations enable us to explore the changing landscape of the neoliberal corporatisation of development. We argue, first, that the apolitical and ahistorical representation of gender and gender equality in the wdr serves to normalise spaces of informality and insecurity, thereby expunging neoliberal-led capitalist relations of exploitation and domination, which characterise the social context in which many women in the global South live. Second, the wdr represents the interest of corporations in transforming the formerly excluded segments of the South (women) into consumers and entrepreneurs. The wdr thus represents an attempt by the World Bank and its ‘partners’ to deepen and consolidate the fundamental values and tenets of capitalist interests.     

Collaborative Innovation: A Viable Alternative to Market Competition and Organizational Entrepreneurship

There are growing pressures for the public sector to be more innovative but considerable disagreement about how to achieve it. This article uses institutional and organizational analysis to compare three major public innovation strategies. The article confronts the myth that the market‐driven private sector is more innovative than the public sector by showing that both sectors have a number of drivers of as well as barriers to innovation, some of which are similar, while others are sector specific. The article then systematically analyzes three strategies for innovation: New Public Management, which emphasizes market competition; the neo‐Weberian state, which emphasizes organizational entrepreneurship; and collaborative governance, which emphasizes multiactor engagement across organizations in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. The authors conclude that the choice of strategies for enhancing public innovation is contingent rather than absolute. Some contingencies for each strategy are outlined.     

German reunification

The Unification Process in Germany. From Dictatorship to Democracy. By Gert‐Joachim Glaessner. London: Pinter, 1992. Pp.viii + 248, index. £37.50. ISBN 1–85567–015–1.

German Unification. Process and Outcomes. Edited by M. Donald Hancock and Helga A. Walsh. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1994. Pp.x + 393, biblio, index. £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–8133–1965‐X.

Die Gestaltung der Deutschen Einheit. Edited by Eckhard Jesse and Armin Mitter. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1992. Pp.447, chronology, biblio. DM 30. ISBN 3–416–02364–1.

United Germany and the New Europe. Edited by Heinz D. Hurz. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993. Pp.xviii + 333, index. £49.95. ISBN 1–85278–584–5.

German Reunification. A Reference Guide and Commentary By Jonathan Osmond et al. Harlow: Longman, 1992. Pp.xiii + 311, 3 maps, chronologies, biblio, index. £55. ISBN 0–582–09650–2.

The Diplomacy of German Unification. By Stephen F. Szabo. New York: St Martin's Press, 1992. Pp.xiv + 162, chronology, biblio, index. £22.95. ISBN 0–312–08057–3.

Handworterbuch zur deutschen Einheit. Edited by Werner Weidenfeld and Karl‐Rudolf Korte. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 1992. Pp.800, index. DM. 8 (paperback). ISBN 3–593–34583–8.     

Parliaments in Disguise? How German Councillors perceive Local Councils

Dominant narratives of neighbourhood working in the United Kingdom accentuate the diversity and ‘messiness’ of practices across local authorities. This paper questions such narratives. Drawing upon a study of 15 local authorities, we first argue that neighbourhood working is increasingly oriented towards neighbourhood management, privileging the ‘joining up’ of mainstream service delivery over the enhanced community engagement and political accountability more associated with the practices of neighbourhood governance. Deploying Lowndes and Sullivan's four rationales of neighbourhood working (2008), in combination with Mintzberg's metaphor of organisation as ‘structure in fives’ (1983), we suggest that the practices of neighbourhood working are currently best understood in terms of Mintzberg's decentralised divisional authority as a form of constrained decentralisation in which semi-autonomous divisions are brought together under a central administration and given limited control over service delivery in order to address the social and economic rationales for neighbourhood working. We then draw upon recent neo-liberal critiques of local governance to offer a critical evaluation of both the appeal for local officers and politicians of neighbourhood management and the potential tensions and contradictions of such a move for future policy and practice. We conclude that neighbourhood management as a neo-liberal ‘roll-out’ strategy may be self-defeating, surfacing the incapacity of local authorities to respond to local community expectations and grievances, whilst exposing the organisational constraints of partnership working, managerialism and outsourcing.     

The First World War as Catalyst and Epiphany: The Case of Henry P. Davison

The experience of the First World War was central to the emergence of a trans-Atlantic elite committed to close collaboration and an international alliance, either formal or de facto, between Great Britain and the United States. The reactions to the conflict of Henry P. Davison, dominant partner in J. P. Morgan and Company, illustrate the manner in which the First World War was catalytic in the creation of an Atlanticist elite. Davison, moreover, experienced something like a personal epiphany during the war, metamorphosing from a hard-driving businessman into an international philanthropist who developed ambitious schemes to remake the world. For seven years, Davison energetically sought to affect the course, outcome, and consequences of the First World War. Fundamental to Davison's worldview were the desirability and necessity of Anglo–American collaboration, on which all his other plans were predicated. When the war ended, Davison proposed almost visionary schemes, on the one hand to provide massive American governmental and private economic assistance to finance European postwar relief and reconstruction efforts and, on the other, to establish an international Red Cross organization that would mount a massive campaign to eradicate global public health problems. Although abortive in the short term, in the longer run his plans proved prophetic, anticipating the post–Second World War Marshall Plan and World Health Organization.     

Paradoxes of Urban Housing Informality in the Developing World

This article addresses a series of paradoxes regarding informal settlements in cities in the developing world and their relation with the legal system. The first paradox regards the penalization of illegal land occupations on the one hand versus the legalization of that same practice on the other. Second, it looks at the relationship between land occupations as systematic violations of property rights, but with the goal of forming new property rights and thus paradoxically supporting private property as a substantive principle. Third, the reasoning behind the fact that the same system that denies legal access to housing for poor sectors simultaneously attempts to incorporate informal settlements in an ad hoc manner through legalization schemes is examined. It is shown that there is a logic to these paradoxes, which, although contradictory from standard legal perspectives, can be accommodated within a theoretical framework that distinguishes an internal normative order operating within informal settlements, from the state legal system, operative outside it. The proposed framework not only settles the paradoxes, but, this article concludes, can also guide attempts to deal with the enormous anticipated growth of informality in the developing world.