Public Sector Priority Setting Using Decision Support Tools

The public sector is in transition in many countries, including New Zealand, and many government departments have been restructured so as to increase transparency and accountability in their decision‐making by implementing fundamental changes to governance, accountability regimes and information systems. New frameworks are also needed for tasks such as priority setting, and this paper describes the framework developed to assist the then NZ Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) in setting priorities for the allocation of research funds. This comprised a participative process including a series of workshops using both GroupSystems software for electronic meeting support and Visual Interactive Sensitivity Analysis (VISA) software to facilitate a multi‐criteria decision analysis.     

The Myth of the Bureaucratic Paradigm: What Traditional Public Administration Really Stood For

For a decade, public administration and management literature has featured a riveting story: the transformation of the field's orientation from an old paradigm to a new one. While many doubt claims concerning a new paradigm—a New Public Management—few question that there was an old one. An ingrained and narrowly focused pattern of thought, a bureaucratic paradigm, is routinely attributed to public administration's traditional literature. A careful reading of that literature reveals, however, that the bureaucratic paradigm is, at best, a caricature and, at worst, a demonstrable distortion of traditional thought that exhibited far more respect for law, politics, citizens, and values than the new, customer-oriented managerialism and its variants. Public administration as a profession, having let lapse the moral and intellectual authority conferred by its own traditions, mounts an unduly weak challenge to the superficial thinking and easy answers of the many new paradigms of governance and public service. As a result, literature and discourse too often lack the recognition that reformers of institutions and civic philosophies must show how the capacity to effect public purposes and accountability to the polity will be enhanced in a manner that comports with our Constitution and our republican institutions.     

Middle East

The author argues that military rule has never been good for Pakistan. Historically it has not helped the fight against extremism, On the contrary, the generals’ search for some sort of legitimacy has tended to give encouragement to militant Islam. Certainly, the democratic road has been difficult in many countries, but there is no alternative. It is the only road for Pakistan. The West should not give support to anti-democratic forces under the mistaken belief that they can provide firm government.     

From Collectivism to Capitalism: Neoliberalism and Rural Mobilization in Nicaragua

This article draws on longitudinal, ethnographic data gathered in rural Nicaragua over a two‐decade period to examine the ideological and political implications of neoliberalism in the prefigurative, grassroots stages of social mobilization. It contrasts divergent path‐dependent processes of accommodation and resistance to neoliberalism as Nicaraguan peasants have moved from collectivism to individual farming, with an emphasis on interpretive processes. This study explores how market processes both serve as an external grievance and operate internally in rural communities to reconfigure rural social relations and individual and collective identities. It also seeks to develop concepts and interpretations that may be applied more broadly to analyze links between deepening market processes and the forms and content of social movement responses to deteriorating economic conditions.     

Social theory and social action

Modern social thought identifies social science with the conception of (1) ‘social action’ and (2) the ‘rationality’ of social action. This identification is central to the specificity of modern social thought as opposed, in particular, to Marxian social theory. In this paper we present a critical appraisal of these fundamental categories of current social science and trace out the contradictions which they entail for the theoretical comprehension of social phenomena. The contradictions intrinsic to the social action methodology, once made explicit, provide the necessary starting point for the critique of modern sociology and economics.     

Estimates of Repeat Victimization Using the National Crime Victimization Survey

Many crime victims experience multiple victimizations over time. Estimating the rate of repeat victimization from a longitudinal survey, however, is difficult because individuals often have missing data for some of the interviews. We use data from the 1996–98 U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey to explore potential effects of missing data on estimated rates of repeat violent victimizations in individuals. We introduce two algorithms for estimating repeat victimization rates, using logistic models to impute values for individuals who have partial data. These models are applied to estimate rates of repeat victimization for all violent crimes, and separately for crimes of domestic violence. Estimates show substantial sensitivity to the form of the model used.