Performance Standards and Evaluation

The benefits of performance monitoring for public services are identified as greater transparency of objectives and accountability for results. This article considers recent experience in developing standards to evaluate efficiency and effectiveness of public services. In broad terms this is being done through performance information which is a much more encompassing concept than standards or indicators. Such information is an element of an accountability framework that provides greater management autonomy and flexibility and extends to the private sector which is increasingly providing, or involved with the provision of, public services.     

Do the elderly “vote with their feet?”

This research explores whether the elderly vote with their feet by migrating to states with government policies that treat them favorably. A theoretical model is presented that clarifies the effects of cost-of-living, amenities and the public sector on migration decisions and that informs our empirical analysis. Using state-level migration data from the 1990 Census, we estimate out-migration and in-migration equations that suggest that the public sector is an important determinant of elderly migration, but in sometimes unexpected ways. Our results lend some support for the Tiebout hypothesis, but they also raise serious questions about the nature of the elderly's preferences for government policy.     

Re-reading ELIZA: Human–machine Interaction as Cognitive Sense-ability

ABSTRACT

This article re-reads ELIZA, the famous computer program of early artificial intelligence created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 to test the possibility of intelligent interaction between humans and machines through language. Given newly emerging intelligent gadgets such as smart-home assistants that operate through natural language, I argue firstly for the timeliness of this program and explore the ways in which ELIZA stimulated debates concerning whether it could be considered an interlocutor for humans or a failure in exactly this regard. Secondly, I develop a feminist technoecological account of interaction at the ELIZA/user interface. In so doing, I seek to challenge the dualisms between body/mind, rationality/affectivity, and subject/object, thereby avoiding a reductionist perspective that calls into question the human subject as an autonomous agent.