Gender,Financial Deepening and the Production of Embodied Finance: Towards a Critical Feminist Analysis

This article critically interrogates the ways in which gender equality has been linked to processes of financial deepening, partly via a global coalition of public and private institutions that have come together in recent years to promote an instrumentalist gender equality agenda. Corporations, banks and financial firms are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the contours of the global gender equality agenda and reproducing narratives regarding the need to (1) financially “empower” women, (2) uphold women as the “saviours” of national economies post-2008 and (3) “tap in” to the productive (i.e. profitable) potential of women's bodily capacities. Drawing on Marxist and feminist theory, I develop an approach to theorising the inherently embodied and gendered nature of finance that reveals the ways in which these tropes obscure the labour associated with social reproduction, promote the commodification of women's bodily capacities to produce, and support the differential production of bodies while simultaneously masking embodied forms of difference.     

Controlling Internal Controls

Two recent examinations of management practices in three federal departments provide contemporary evidence of the need to incorporate procedures like those of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the public sector. Although each department established what appeared to be well-designed internal controls, all lacked sufficient monitoring and assessment of the efficacy of those controls. By requiring senior management to attest to the strength of their control mechanisms, as required by the newly revised OMB Circular A-123, the quality of this monitoring should improve. Findings from a recent study of private-sector implementation of these reforms are described, along with suggestions for public administration research and practice at all levels of government.     

Procedural Justice in Negotiation: Procedural Fairness, Outcome Acceptance, and Integrative Potential

Two correlational studies test the hypothesis that procedural justice, or fairness of process, plays a role in acceptance of agreements reached through bilateral negotiation. Both studies test the relationship between the fairness of the process used to resolve a dispute, objective monetary outcomes, subjective assessments of outcome favorability, and subjective assessments of outcome fairness. Additionally, the second study tests the hypothesis that negotiations characterized by greater procedural justice result in more potential for integrative bargaining. The results suggest that procedural justice encourages the acceptance of negotiated agreements, as well as leading to the opportunity for increased integrative bargaining.     

“Civic discovery” as a rhetorical strategy

Much research in the field of public management is distinguished by its rejection of the politics-administration dichotomy and its emphasis on the public manager's responsibility for political management. By rejecting the dichotomy, however, scholars in public management have reopened debate over an old question: Why is it right for public managers to exercise political power in the policymaking process? It is argued that the dichotomy served as a rhetorical strategy for allaying public concern about bureaucratic power, and that public management scholars must now invent a new strategy to take its place. This article evaluates one strategy, proposed by Moore and Reich, which is premised on the idea that managers may legitimize the exercise of discretion by showing it to be consistent with a mandate that is produced through a fair process of deliberation. It is argued that the new strategy may overestimate the ability to build mandates, the ability to build deliberative processes that are manifestly fair, and the willingness of dissentient citizens to defer to such mandates. The new strategy will also bind public managers to a demonstration of neutrality not unlike that imposed by the politics-administration dichotomy.