Public sector creativity as the origin of public sector innovation: A taxonomy and future research agenda

This systematic literature review analyses how public servants apply workplace creativity to come up with ideas for public sector innovations, defining public sector creativity and analyzing its practices, features, trends, and hiatuses in knowledge for which we provide a future research agenda. Creativity is the origin of innovation. Public sector creativity, however, is theoretically undefined and underexamined, resulting in unclarity on what constitutes public sector creativity. We define public sector creativity as “public servants coming up with novel and useful ideas through various practices.” Our findings indicate that public servants apply at least six taxonomically distinctive creative practices, and although they are involved to different extent in generating the initial idea and thus do not always generate ideas autonomously, they are creative in finding alternative ways to come up with ideas. However, our review indicates hiatuses in knowledge on public sector creativity, for which we provide a future research agenda.     

Real Lives and Lost Lives: Making Sense of ‘Locked in’ Responses to Intimate Partner Homicide

The problem of intimate partner homicide is featuring increasingly on national and international policy agendas. Over the last 40 years, responses to this issue have been characterised by preventive strategies (including ‘positive’ policing; the proliferation of risk assessment tools, and multi-agency working) and post-event analyses (including police inquiries and domestic homicide reviews). In different ways, each of these responses has become ‘locked in’ to policies. Drawing on an analysis of police inquiries into domestic homicides in England and Wales over a 10-year period, this paper will explore the nature of these ‘locked in’ responses and will suggest that complexity theory offers a useful lens through which to make sense of them and the ongoing consistent patterning of intimate partner homicide more generally. The paper will suggest this lens in embracing what is known and unknown affords a different way of thinking about and responding to this problem.

     

Impact of public seed-funding on academic spin-offs

In the entrepreneurial economy of today, it is not the multinational firms which are the predominant driver in the creation of new knowledge, but the individual entrepreneur. Correspondingly, new ventures of small size are leading in commercializing new knowledge and transferring it to the market. This economic shift has been reflected by broad entrepreneurship policies, which aim at supporting the individual on the challenge of a high-growth start-up. However, prior experience shows that uniform entrepreneurship policies do not address the individual needs in different countries and ecosystems adequately. In this paper, we study the performance of academic spin-offs that received public funding from the German EXIST Business Start-Up Grant, a support program which aims at increasing the number of innovative start-ups from academia. Using a control group matching approach, we provide evidence that these start-ups are smaller by two full time equivalent employees, generate 1.7 times higher losses and have a nearly three times lower return on capital than science-based entrepreneurial firms with comparable characteristics in the first 5 years after foundation. We interpret these results to be primarily caused by the inferior financial contracting structure of the program compared to private venture capital funding and by the resulting adverse selection and incentive effects on the entrepreneurs. The evidence calls for rethinking public interventions in a national system of entrepreneurship.     

Characteristics of young children exposed to violence: the safe start demonstration project

The Safe Start demonstration projects, funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) under the first phase of the Safe Start initiative, are primarily designed to influence change at the systems or macrolevels to reduce the incidence of and impact of exposure to violence for children aged birth to 6 years; direct services are also provided to young children and their families who were exposed to violence. The data presented in this article come from 10 communities that submitted data regarding the characteristics of young children exposed to violence to OJJDP. These data represent families who are typically not represented in the databases of state child protective services programs but instead have been identified by domestic violence advocates, early care and education providers, family members, court personnel, police, and other social service personnel as families with young children in need of intervention due to violence exposure.The purpose of this article is to describe the characteristics of young children and their parents who seek help for psychosocial problems related to exposure to family and community violence. Results indicate that one quarter of the children and nearly half of their parents evidenced clinical levels of stress, suggesting the need to intervene at the family level as well as at the individual level when working with young children exposed to violence. The information presented, including the extent of exposure to violence, the multiple types of violence to which children are exposed, the impact of this exposure on young children and their families, and the multiple ways in which families exposed to violence come to the attention of service providers is useful for policy makers and service providers who are interested in breaking the cycle of violence by meeting the needs of the children exposed to violence and their families.     

Domestic violence and sexual assault service goal priorities

We investigated agency directors' perspectives about how service goals should be prioritized for domestic violence and sexual assault service subtypes, including crisis, legal advocacy, medical advocacy, counseling, support group, and shelter services. A sample of 97 (94% response rate) North Carolina domestic violence and/or sexual assault agency directors completed a survey asking participants to rank the importance of service goals. Overall, participants considered emotional support provision to be a critical service goal priority across all service types. Social support and self-care service strategies were deemed less important. However, prioritization of other service goals varied depending on the service type. Statistically significant differences on service goal prioritization based on key agency characteristics were also examined, and agency characteristics were found to relate to differences in service goal prioritization.     

Effects of Hurricane Katrina and Other Adverse Life Events on Adolescent Female Offenders: A Test of General Strain Theory

This study tested Agnew's General Strain Theory (GST) by examining the roles of anger, anxiety, and maladaptive coping in mediating the relationship between strain and three outcomes (serious delinquency, minor delinquency, and continued involvement in the juvenile justice system) among adolescent female offenders (N = 261). Strains consisted of adverse life events and exposure to Hurricane Katrina. Greater exposure to Hurricane Katrina was directly related to serious delinquency and maladaptive coping. Hurricane Katrina also had an indirect effect on minor delinquency and Post-Katrina juvenile justice involvement mediated through maladaptive coping. Adverse life events were associated with increased anger, anxiety, and maladaptive coping. Anger mediated the relationship between adverse life events and serious delinquency. Anxiety mediated the relationship between adverse life events and minor delinquency. Maladaptive coping strategies were associated with minor delinquency and juvenile justice involvement. Findings lend support to GST.     

Research note: The founders and survivors project

This paper describes the multidisciplinary project Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context. Individual life courses, families and generations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being reconstituted from a wide range of data including convict records; birth, death and marriage registrations; and World War I service records. The project will result in a longitudinal study of Australian settlement, the long-run effects of forced labour and emigration on health and survival, family formation, intergenerational morbidity and mortality, and social and geographic mobility.     

Exploring gender differences in dating violence/harassment prevention programming in middle schools: results from a randomized experiment

In this study, we randomly assigned 123 sixth and seventh grade classrooms from seven middle schools in the greater Cleveland area to one of two five-session curricula addressing gender violence/sexual harassment (GV/SH) or to a no-treatment control group. A baseline survey and two follow-up surveys were administered immediately after the treatment (Wave 2) and about six months post-treatment (Wave 3). In an earlier paper, we demonstrated the effectiveness of two approaches to youth GV/SH prevention programming (a fact-based, law and justice curriculum and an interaction-based curriculum). In this paper, we explored whether these largely positive findings remain for both girls and boys, including whether girls experience higher levels of GV/SH than boys. Most of our statistical models proved to be non-statistically significant. However, in 2 of our 48 victimization/perpetration (any violence, sexual violence and non-sexual violence) models (across two post-intervention follow-up points), we observed that the interventions reduced peer (male or female, non-dating partner) sexual violence victimization and reduced peer perpetration, but another outcome model indicated that the interventions increased dating perpetration. These mixed findings will need to be explored further in future research. Regarding our primary research question, we observed no statistically significant differences for the treatment multiplied by gender interaction terms for any of the perpetration or victimization outcome models, suggesting that the treatment had similar effects on girls and boys. However, we did observe that boys are more involved in violence than girls: both as victims and perpetrators. Boys experienced significantly more of three types of victimization from peers and dating partners compared to what girls experienced at the hands of their peers and dating partners. As perpetrators, boys committed more sexual victimization against peers (immediately post-intervention only) and more sexual victimization against dating partners than girls. The implications of these results are discussed.     

Law and the Building Blocks of the Familiar

This article draws on the insights offered by Francesca Polletta, Calvin Morrill, and Elizabeth Chiarello in their comments on my book, Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights ( 2014 ) to further specify the conditions that unleash the emancipatory potential of law. I argue that much of law's emancipatory power lies in its capacity to “construct anew”—to demonstrate new solutions to social problems by connecting the familiar with the strange. Drawing on the case of child care, I find that laws do not automatically provide the cultural resources to construct new claims for state intervention, but that existing laws—and the symbols, narratives, and norms that we associate with them—serve as grist for the political imagination and can be transposed to new contexts or institutions. In the absence of cultural resources in one institution (such as work), advocates can use legal discourse to strategically shift responsibility for a social problem to a new institution (such as education), opening up possibilities for new models, organizational actors, constituencies, and frames.