Toward Improved Legal Service Delivery: A Look at Four Mechanisms

A legal service delivery system intended to facilitate the providing of services by private practitioners should, to be complete, include among its functions three that are of special importance. First, it should diagnose legal problems. Second, it should make available to a person with a legal problem the information needed for informed selection of a lawyer. And third, it should, when necessary, help the prospective client to make the initial contact with a lawyer. Lawyer advertising, specialty certification, lawyer directories, and lawyer referral services perform some of these functions, but no one mechanism performs all three adequately. A system combining the lawyer directory with an expanded lawyer referral service might do so and thus might be a more complete answer to the problem of delivery of legal services.     

Experiments in the combustibility of the human body

This paper provides possible explanations for two previously misunderstood circumstances surrounding cases of so-called "spontaneous human combustion"--the nearly complete cremation of human bone, and the failure of such fires to spread to nearby combustibles. Two experiments were conducted. The first involved the cremation of "healthy" and "osteoporotic" human bone and observing the resulting fragmentation and color change. Osteoporotic elements consistently displayed more discoloration and a greater degree of fragmentation than healthy ones. The second experiment involved the combustion of a sample of human tissue and observation of the flame height and burning area in order to calculate the effective heat of combustion. The resulting heat was 17kJ/g indicating a fire that is unlikely to spread. These results, which are among the first obtained for human samples, lend further support and credence to previous scientific explanations for "spontaneous human combustion."     

Performance Management and Public Sector Reform: The Norwegian Hospital Reform

This article addresses the development of new performance management systems related to public sector reforms. One such system is Management by Objectives and Results (MBOR), based on an official OECD model. Such a system tries to establish unambiguous goals, objectivity, and incentive elements into often traditionally trust-based systems embedded in a complex political-administrative context. To analyze such performance management systems and how they work in practice, we focus on a recent reform of the hospital structure in Norway. Using a broad institutional perspective, we argue that the MBOR-system in Norway is a mixed and complex system encompassing different kinds of logic. These include instrumental elements from the new performance management systems combined with ad hoc preventive efforts by the political leadership, the influence of cultural constraints, elements of rather inappropriate self-interested action, and pressure from the environment. The study reveals that the hospital reform in Norway in practice can be seen as an integrated model, combining informal trust-based approaches and formal performance management measures. It also shows that negative side effects and dysfunctions might occur.     

Same Bed,Different Dreams? Structural Factors and Leadership Characteristics of Central Government Agency Reform in China

ABSTRACT

The reorganization of government agencies can be studied as a pre-reform process in terms of the structural changes made, or as a post-reform process in terms of the effects of the reorganization. In this study of two mergers of agencies in China’s central administration, we focus on structural features and the post-merger process, paying special attention to structural and cultural integration. Our qualitative analyses reveal that the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) is considered to have been more successful in merging agencies and integrating functions than the State Administration for Press, Publications, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT). We found that using physical arrangements and leadership features as explanatory variables generated helpful theoretical and policy implications for organizational architecture and public sector reforms.     

Worse Than a Monolith: Disorganization and Rivalry within Asian Communist Alliances and U.S. Containment Challenges, 1949–69

Abstract

This article makes the counterintuitive argument that in the first two decades of the Cold War the communist alliance in East Asia was easiest for the United States and its allies to contain through coercive diplomacy during the period in which the communist alliance was most cohesive and unified under Soviet leadership (1954–57). With a focus on the Korean War and two Indochina Wars, this article shows how internal problems in the communist alliance significantly complicated the containment of communism. In the formative years of the East Asian communist alliances (1950–53), the alliance’s lack of organization and cohesion made it more difficult for anti-communist forces in the region to deter communist expansion and to control escalation of wars once they started. Between 1958–69, internal rivalry for leadership in the communist alliance made containment of the alliance particularly difficult for the United States and its allies. Until the Chinese and Soviet communists actually turned their guns on each other in early 1969, the Sino-Soviet rivalry for leadership of the international communist movement in the 1960s only served to increase the expansionist fervor of the communist movement as a whole, make peace agreements with anti-communist forces in the region more difficult, and maximize the amount of military assistance local revolutionaries, like Ho Chi Minh, received from both Moscow and Beijing.     

Motivated to Adapt? The Role of Public Service Motivation as Employees Face Organizational Change

Researchers concerned with organizational change have consistently emphasized the role that the work environment plays in employee acceptance of change. Underexamined in the public management literature, however, is the role that employee values, particularly public service motivation (PSM), may play in employee acceptance of change. Some scholars have noted a positive correlation between employee PSM and organizational change efforts; this article extends this work by attempting to isolate the mechanisms that explain this relationship. Using data from a survey of employees in a city undergoing a reorganization and reduction in workforce, the authors find that only employees who scored high on a single dimension of PSM—self‐sacrifice—were more likely than others to support organizational change. Rather than support changes for their potential to improve public service, this finding suggests that employees with higher PSM may simply be less likely to resist changes that might disadvantage them personally.     

When trust matters—a multilevel analysis of the effect of generalized trust on political participation in 25 European democracies

Generalized social trust has been argued to have positive effects for both individuals and society, but despite solid theoretical arguments in favour of different contextual effects, the empirical evidence remains scant. We here examine whether and how the effect of generalized trust on the propensity to become politically active is moderated by the level of generalized trust in society. We inspect two different causal mechanisms: The rainmaker effect, which entails that the effect of generalized trust is weaker at the individual level when there is a high level of generalized trust in society; and the sunmaker effect, which entails that the effect of generalized trust is strengthened by a high level of generalized trust in society. We examine the links for three forms of political participation: voting, institutionalized participation, and non-institutionalized participation. The data come from the fourth round of the European Social Survey from 2008 [European Social Survey. (2008 European Social Survey. (2008). Data file edition 4.0. Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Norway – Data Archive and distributor of ESS data. [Google Scholar]). Data file edition 4.0. Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Norway—Data Archive and distributor of ESS data], and we include 47,489 respondents in 25 democratic countries. The results from a series of multilevel logistic regressions suggest that the effect of generalized trust varies depending on the level of generalized trust in the surrounding community but the causal mechanisms differ for different kinds of political participation.     

Deliberation and Opinion Change: Evidence from a Deliberative Mini‐public in Finland

A number of studies examining the effects of deliberative citizen forums have found that citizens taking part in deliberative processes experience changes in their policy attitudes. However, it remains unclear why these opinion changes occur, since most studies pay little attention to the communicative exchange that is expected to cause the observed changes. Within deliberative theory, there is an expectation that reasonable individuals should be amenable to changing their preferences as a result of the reflection induced by the deliberative process. However, apart from a few recent studies, there has been little empirical research that directly examines how the quality of the communication affects opinion change. This article fills this gap by examining what factors help explain the opinion changes that occur in citizen deliberation. To do this, the article uses data from a mini‐public organized in Turku, Finland, concerning the use of nuclear power. First, the extent and nature of the opinion changes that occurred as a result of the deliberation are established. Following this, the article examines the explanatory powers of a number of potential explanations: deliberative reasoning, sociodemographic inequalities and issue awareness. The results suggest that both deliberative reasoning and issue awareness are significant predictors, meaning there is no single explanation for opinion changes.