Inside chinese bureaucracy: Civil service reform in the ministry of light industry

Since 1987, mainland Chinese ministries have been experimenting with a western style civil service system. The provisional guidelines published in that year called for the creation of a professional administrative class to be hired by open recruitment at the central and provisional levels of leading state ministries. The article is a micro-analysis of civil service reform in the Ministry of Light Industry and evaluates the first two years of reform in this ministry, which is responsible for supervising roughly twenty percent of China's production of durable consumer goods. The reform process has been gradual and incremental. The reforms were stimulated by the need to modernize China's state-run ministries in order to make them economically competitive with the mainland's growing private market sector. However, the article concludes that the reforms are too limited to make a substantial contribution to this goal.     

Od interventions in urban settings. II: Public-sector success with planned change

The realization that a multitude of case studies indicate a set of unique public-sector constraints that do, generally speaking, work against OD interventions need not defeat continued efforts in urban governments and agencies. A first indication that these constraints are not all-powerful is the growing number and range of OD applications in the public sector. Further, the success ratio takes on significance when the difficulty of task and hard - to - achieve goals are considered. Approximately 90 percent of the 44 case reports studied here show atleast a definite balance of positive effects. Despite this cause for some optimism, OD intervenors must anticipate numerous and real constraints, e.g., the relatively shorttime-frame and political nature of efforts in the public sector. Certainly, these constraints often redefine the intervenor's role and measures of success, and advise against direct and unreflective adaptation of private - sector intervention design stopublic agencies.     

Talking to "Terrorists": Towards an Independent Analytical Framework for the Study of Violent Substate Activism

"Terrorism Studies" as a specific discipline is a comparatively recent addition to the social sciences and is still grappling with questions relating to a proper or appropriate methodology. This article argues that research within the field is often based neither on primary sources nor set within an independent analytical framework. Rather, it is characterized by an "aligned" position dependent on a research hermeneutic of crisis management, which perpetuates the "received view." Talking to "terrorists" and the use of social identity theory, applied in a context of cultural difference, are here proposed as a methodology enabling independent analysis.     

Challenges of Evaluating Democracy Assistance: Perspectives from the Donor Side

A large number of multilateral and bilateral donors have become engaged in the area of democracy and governance (DG) assistance over the last 15 years, stimulated by a series of trends and events. Despite the maturation of DG assistance as an important development area and the high profile of democracy promotion as a key foreign policy goal, research on the impact of this assistance and the effectiveness of different types of programming has been limited. Donors are constantly in need of feedback on the effectiveness and impact of their programming in order to revise programme designs, re-strategize aid portfolios, or address new DG issues. Moreover, legislatures increasingly require government aid agencies to be able to measure the results of their programmes, thereby demonstrating a ‘return on investment’ that would guide future assistance. Quality research is hampered by a daunting political, logistical, and methodological context, however. In 2005 a donor-sponsored workshop was organized to discuss challenges facing the evaluation and assessment of DG programming and assistance. The purpose of this article is to share insights from the workshop with a wider audience of scholars, practitioners and other policy-makers in the hope that this will stimulate additional research and thinking in this area.     

Dynamics of peace and democratization. The Aceh lessons

The viability of the thesis that liberalization and democracy foster peace, security and development is at stake. The main critique is that more liberties and elections lead to more conflict and abuses of power. There are three principal responses to this critique. The liberal argument calls for improving the democratic institutions; the institutions first thesis prioritizes strengthening the rule of law and state capacity over democracy; whilst the transformation argument proposes using fledgling democracy to foster gradually more favourable relations of power and popular capacity towards more substantial democracy. This article analyses the relevance of these theses to the remarkable dynamics of peace-building in Aceh, from the introduction of Indonesian democracy in 1998, the impact of the tsunami in 2004 and the Helsinki peace agreement in 2005 to the general elections in 2009. The study concludes that the liberal argument is congruous with the democratic opportunities for peace, while the institutions first and the transformation arguments give prominence to the dynamics that made peace-building possible but also difficult. While the institutions first argument responds to these difficulties by resorting to power sharing, the transformation thesis proposes more citizen participation coupled with interest and issue group representation.     

Perceived Legitimacy of Judicial Authorities in Relation to Degree of Value Discrepancy with Public Citizens

In this study of perceived legitimacy, Australian citizens from a randomly selected national sample first responded to information about how judicial authorities responded to two crimes (green protest, date rape) in terms of seriousness and recommended punishment. They also provided ratings of the importance of a set of values for judicial authorities compared with self, and measures of global value discrepancy, procedural fairness, expertise, and legitimacy. Results showed that perceived legitimacy was negatively related to global value discrepancy and that the information provided to participants about judge’s position primed differences in value discrepancy only for the date rape crime. Other findings also implied that the nature of the offense moderated legitimacy/value discrepancy relations. Perceived legitimacy was also positively related to procedural fairness and the expertise of the authority, and higher when the judicial authority was perceived to assign specific values as even more important than participants did themselves.     

Does Spending Time in Public Settings Contribute to the Adolescent Risk of Violent Victimization?

Objectives

Using data from a nationally representative survey of adolescents in Finland this research examined the influence of spending time in public settings on the risk of physical assault and robbery victimization.

Methods

Binary and multinomial regression models were estimated to disaggregate associations between hours spent in public settings and characteristics of the victimization incident. The amount of causality/spuriousness in the association was examined using a method of situational decomposition.

Results

Our findings indicate that: (1) an active night life (any time after 6 pm) has a strong effect on victimization for boys, whereas much of the association between night life and victimization is spurious for girls; (2) after-school activity is not a risk factor; (3) adolescents who frequent public places at night increase their risk of victimization by people they know as well as strangers; and (4) much of the risk of night time activity in public settings is alcohol-related.

Conclusions

Our research suggests that a good deal of the risk associated with spending time in public settings is a function of the victim’s own risky behavior rather than inadvertent physical contact with motivated offenders in the absence of capable guardians. In addition, this lifestyle is significantly more victimogenic for males.     

Sibling Proactive and Reactive Aggression in Adolescence

We describe sibling proactive and reactive aggression in middle and late adolescence. Participants were 8th (n?=?303, M _age?=?13.74 years, SD?=?.59) and 12th (n?=?300, M _age?=?17.73 years, SD?=?.56) grade adolescents who completed an in-school survey. Findings revealed that these adolescents were significantly more likely to engage in reactive than proactive aggression with their closest-aged sibling. However, 8th grade adolescents reported greater aggression toward their closest-aged sibling than did 12th grade adolescents. In addition, sex composition of the sibling dyad moderated the association between sibling relationship quality (i.e., warmth and rivalry) and both proactive and reactive aggression indicating unique links for brother-brother and older sister-younger brother pairs.     

Two Ecological Models of Academic Achievement Among Diverse Students With and Without Disabilities in Transition

School experiences can have positive effects on student academic achievement, yet less is known about intermediary processes that contribute to these positive effects. We examined pathways between school experiences and academic achievement among 117 low-income urban students of color, many with disabilities, who transitioned to other schools following a school closure. Using structural equation modeling, we tested two ecological models that examined the relationships among self-reported school experiences, school support, academic self-efficacy, and school-reported academic achievement. The model in which the relationship between school experiences and academic achievement is mediated by both school support and academic self-efficacy, and that takes previous academic achievement into account, was an excellent fit with the data. The roles of contextual and individual factors as they relate to academic achievement, and the implications of these findings, are discussed.