DEVELOPING A FRAMEWORK FOR MANAGEMENT EDUCATION IN THE VICTORIAN PUBLIC SERVICE

Abstract: The Public Service Board of Victoria initiated a project in March 1989 to plan a framework for the development of competent managers. The methodology involved an examination of the current practices of 23 organisations, together with a worldwide literature search. The major findings were that the managerial task is similar across sectors, but the manager level and the environment are qualifying variables; that training, management education and development in private sector organisations and statutory bodies has total commitment from the chief executive, is closely linked to the business plan, forms part of an integrated human resource management system, and is continually reinforced by the organisation's culture and values; and that there is no strategic and focused approach to developing managers across the Victorian Public Service. The 21 recommendations covered the areas of investment and commitment, the development of a systematic approach by providing quality management programs based on core managerial competencies and the integration of training, education and development with performance management processes.
The implementation plan calls for pump-priming funds for resourcing and delivering high quality programs, a change in the culture, the adoption of a set of principles, the establishment of a management education unit, acceptance of a common language of competence for managers, and an integration of education and development needs with corporate plans through the performance improvement system. Commitment to implementation should result in a systematic approach to the formation of competent managers with the benefits flowing to the community through improved services, the government gaining by increased performance of the agencies, and public servants being able to reach their full potential.     

“Girl talk”: gender, equity, and identity discourses in a school-based computer culture

This article describes how a feminist intervention project in Canada focused on girls' more equitable access to and use of computers created significant opportunities for girls to develop and experience new identities as technology ‘experts’ within their school. In addition to a significant increase in participants' own technological expertise, there was a marked shift in the ways in which they talked about and negotiated their own gender identities with teachers and other students. Most significantly, the participants in the project became increasingly vocal about what they saw as inequitable practices in the daily operation of the school as well as those they were subject to by their teachers. This created, within the otherwise resilient macro-culture of the school, a more supportive climate for the advancement of gender equity well beyond the confines of its computer labs. We suggest that while equity-oriented school-level change is notoriously difficult to sustain, its most enduring impact might rather be participants' initiation into a discourse to which they had not previously experienced school-sanctioned access: a discourse in which to give voice to gender-specific inequities too long quieted by complacent discourses of “equality for all.”     

Procedural Change in the UK House of Commons, 1811–2015

Recent research has shown an increasing interest in the historical evolution of legislative institutions. The development of the UK Parliament has received particularly extensive attention. In this article, we contribute to this literature in three important ways. First, we introduce a complete, machine-readable data set of all the Standing Orders of the UK House of Commons between 1811 and 2015. Second, we demonstrate how this data set can be used to construct innovative measures of procedural change. Third, we illustrate a potential empirical application of the data set, offering an exploratory test of several expectations drawn from recent theories of formal rule change in parliamentary democracies. We conclude that the new data set has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of legislative reforms in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

‘she found a way,left the child’: ‘child-shifting’ as the plantation's affects and love's paradox in Donna Hemans’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">River Woman</Emphasis>

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean.     

Reviews

From Mad Max to Sane Elaine

Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, £16.39; Picador, 1998, £6.99

But Words Can Never Hurt Me

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London: Routledge, 1997, £40.

Women in Theatre: Practitioners’ Voices

Lizbeth Goodman, Feminist Stages: Interviews with ‘Women in Contemporary British Theatre, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996, £18. Joanne Tompkins and Julie Holledge (eds), Performing Women/Performing Feminisms: Interviews with International Women Playwrights, Australasian Drama Studies Association Academic Publications 2, University of Queensland, 1997. Elaine Aston (ed.), Feminist Theatre Voices, Loughborough Theatre Texts, University of Loughborough, 1997, £7.99.

Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, (eds), Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting, London: Methuen, 1997, £9.99.

Life and Death in the Next World

Christine Brook‐Rose, Next, Manchester: Carcanet, 1998, £9.95 pbk.     

Relationships Between Level and Change in Family,School, and Peer Factors During Two Periods of Adolescence and Problem Behavior at Age 19

While prior research has examined family, school, and peer factors as potential predictors of problem behavior, less attention has been given to studying when these factors are most predictive of problems and if and when changes in these factors signal risk. Using annual data on a community sample of 1,040 individuals (47% female; 81% White), this study models growth in risk and protective factors during two developmental periods (Grades 5–8 and Grades 9–12) in order to predict substance misuse and crime at age 19. For protective factors of positive relationships with family and positive bonds to school, both the levels of these factors at Grade 5 and change between Grade 5 and Grade 8 predicted substance misuse and crime in early adulthood. Higher likelihoods of both forms of problem behavior also were predicted by increases in the risk factor of exposure to negative peers between 5th and 8th grade. In the late adolescent period, levels at 9th grade of all risk and protective factors examined predicted both substance misuse and crime. Also, increases in exposure to negative peers in late adolescence predicted greater likelihoods of both forms of problem behavior, while greater risk of substance misuse was predicted by decreases in school bonding and academic achievement, and greater risk of crime was predicted by worsening relationships with family. The results add to prior research by indicating that in addition to the level, change in risk and protective factors during these two stages of development can be signals of risk and are promising targets for intervention.     

Parental Support and Knowledge and Adolescents’ Sexual Health: Testing Two Mediational Models in a National Dutch Sample

This study investigated age- and gender-specific associations between parental support and parental knowledge of the child’s whereabouts, on the one hand, and sexual experience and sexual health (the ability to have safe and pleasurable sexual experiences) on the other hand. A representative Dutch sample of 1,263 males and 1,353 females (aged 12–25 years), who had previously engaged in sexual intercourse, completed a questionnaire that included measures of these constructs. Both parental support and knowledge were positively associated with contraceptive use, social skills in sexual interactions, sexual satisfaction, and delay of sexual debut. Findings also revealed that the majority of correlations between parental support and sexual experience and sexual health are attributable to the relationship between a supportive family environment and parental knowledge of the child’s whereabouts. Parental knowledge thus appeared to be more important for healthy sexual development than parental support.     

Earning through learning in legislatures

This inquiry applies Gary Becker’s theoretical notions of general and specific training to the experiential learning that occurs within political institutions, in particular the U.S. Congress. In the process, we isolate economic facets of these legislative experiences that influence the rental-value of human capital derived from congressional training. We identify four factors that structure legislators’ post-elective wages: pre-congressional salary, year of entry, tenure, and variables closely related to general training in Congress—specifically, assignment to powerful legislative committees, acquisition of broad skill packages, investment in expanding skill-set proficiencies, and to a lesser extent, life-cycle driven declines in such investments.