Why Is the Intelligence Community So Difficult to Redesign? Smart Practices,Conflicting Goals,and the Creation of Purpose‐Based Organizations

The adoption of “smart practices” requires that smart practices can actually be identified for the areas of public policy in which we are interested. For the problem of designing structures for public agencies, however, identifying smart practices is not easy. This article explores the reasons for the substantial conservativism, lasting over 50 years, regarding the structural design of the U.S. intelligence community. One central argument is simply that it was very difficult to discover a clearly superior structure; in fact, the long‐standing structure may have had some unrecognized virtues. But the other central argument is that one smart practice may have emerged since the 9/11 attacks: It involves the creation of problem‐focused interagency centers that are intended to enhance the sharing and integration of information within the intelligence community. These conclusions about redesigning the structure of the intelligence community are based on the arguments of Luther Gulick on methods of departmentalization and Martin Landau on redundancy and system reliability.     

DOES PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY WORK? AN ASSESSMENT TOOL

In recent years, there has been a drive to strengthen existing public accountability arrangements and to design new ones. This prompts the question whether accountability arrangements actually work. In the existing literature, both accountability ‘deficits’ and ‘overloads’ are alleged to exist. However, owing to the lack of a cogent yardstick, the debate tends to be impressionistic and event‐driven. In this article we develop an instrument for systematically assessing public accountability arrangements, drawing on three different normative perspectives. In the democratic perspective, accountability arrangements should effectively link government actions to the ‘democratic chain of delegation’. In the constitutional perspective, it is essential that accountability arrangements prevent or uncover abuses of public authority. In the learning perspective, accountability is a tool to make governments effective in delivering on their promises. We demonstrate the use of our multicriteria assessment tool in an analysis of a new accountability arrangement: the boards of oversight of agencies.     

DIFFUSION OF FRAUD: INTERMEDIATE ECONOMIC CRIME AND INVESTOR DYNAMICS*

Criminologists have studied the spread of fraudulent practices and techniques among perpetrators. This article attempts to contribute to the field by looking at the other side of diffusion, examining the spread of fraud among investors in a case of “intermediate fraud.” Intermediate fraud occurs when fraudulent acts are committed in or by a legitimate business. Using comprehensive archival, interview, and survey data, we analyze a business that exhibited a two‐stage pattern of intermediate fraud: It was created and operated as a legitimate business in the first stage, and then economic crimes were increasingly committed in the second stage. We use diffusion theory to guide our analysis, investigating the ways in which five factors—product attributes, buyer attributes and behavior, seller attributes and behavior, structure of the social network, and method of propagation—influence the adoption and diffusion of investments in oil and gas wells among a population of investors. The case of intermediate fraud is interesting because the factors that contributed to the success of the business in its legitimate stage are the same factors that contributed to the success of the fraud in its illegitimate stage.     

Child Abuse,Neglect, and Dependency Mediation Pilot Project

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) established a goal of one year from removal to permanence for all children taken into protective custody. When the Family Court of Mecklenburg County (Charlotte), N.C., opened its doors in 1999, more than half of the children in the protective custody of the Department of Social Services had been in custody for 12 months or more. Innovative approaches were needed to provide children in Mecklenburg County with a safe and permanent home in a more timely manner. The Child Abuse, Neglect, and Dependency Mediation Pilot Project was one approach selected by the Mecklenburg County Family Court to help achieve ASFA's goal of one year to permanence. This article details the court's two‐year journey to make dependency mediation a reality.