Office and Policy at the Expense of Votes: Plaid Cymru and the One Wales Government

This paper will examine Plaid Cymru's experience in government from 2007 to 2011. Drawing on literature on autonomist parties, parties in government for the first time, and Strøm and Müller's policy/office/votes framework, the paper examines where strategic 'trade-offs’ were made and what the consequences of such trade-offs were. The paper takes a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interview and documentary data. The paper finds that Plaid Cymru valued the policy-seeking potential of office at the expense of vote-seeking ones because of the importance of 'autonomist' goals, namely the 2011 referendum which saw primary law-making powers granted to the Welsh Assembly. Furthermore, the experience of governmental office exposed organizational vulnerabilities in the party's leadership structures which undermined the ability to construct an effective vote-winning strategy at the 2011 Welsh election, where the party lost four seats.     

Management knowledge and the organization of team science in university research centers

Increasingly, principal investigators are tasked by funding agencies not only to expand knowledge in a particular field of inquiry, but also to manage and coordinate sets of diverse actors, including researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds and with different institutional affiliations. This paper addresses how principal investigators organize and manage sets of diverse researchers in university research centers. The premise of the paper is that centers possessing “management knowledge”—as embodied in principal investigators themselves and in colleagues and subordinates (e.g. past experiences in centers, industry, formal management training and professional experience)—will demonstrate different structural and managerial characteristics when compared to centers without management knowledge. Based on interviews and documents for a purposive sample of centers established by the US National Science Foundation, the study investigates the organization and management of centers as a function of the presence and type of management knowledge of the center directors across multiple cases. Implications for addressing common challenges to team science in university research centers and comparable arrangements are discussed.     

Correction to: A Two-Way Street? Reciprocal Associations Between Parental Warmth and Hostility with Substance Use Among Justice-Involved Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence -     

A Two-Way Street? Reciprocal Associations Between Parental Warmth and Hostility with Substance Use Among Justice-Involved Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Transactional developmental theories propose that poor parenting behaviors contribute to youth substance use, and youth substance use contributes to poor...     

Monitoring the Peace?: Northern Ireland's 1975 Ceasefire Incident Centres and the Politicisation of Sinn Féin

During the Provisional IRA's (PIRA) 1975 ceasefire, two different sets of incident centres were established across Northern Ireland in order to monitor and avert escalation of violence between Republicans and Security Forces. While one group of offices was run by the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) and administered by clerks in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, very quickly Sinn Féin (taking advantage of their decriminalisation in 1974) established their own incident centres to coordinate their communication with the government. This article argues that the establishment of the Sinn Féin incident centres set a precedent for the future political activity of the Provisional Republican Movement; that their activity during the 1975 ceasefire played an important formative role in the evolution of the group's political strategy; and that this experience, acquired from the work done during the 1975 truce, was of far greater influence than is appreciated in current accounts.     

Toward managerial artistry: Appreciating and designing organizations for the future

This article suggest that change be taken seriously; that we accept environmental change as ubiquitous, as more differentially defined perceptually. A classification of contextual changes is offered which, since it includes discontinuous change, goes beyond conventional thinking. For each type of contextual change the associated archetypical organizational forms and thematic managerial concerns and competencies are outlined. We suggest that organizations in the future should be configurations of forms because of multiple contextual circumstances, and that such configurations will require a mix of managerial competencies and the meta-competency be termed managerial artistry.

In general, the human mind is conservative. Long after an assumption is outmoded, people tend to apply it to novel situations. ---Daniel J. Isenberg

One should never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity. ---Neil Simon, Biloxi Blues

Change is thematic in the contemporary literature on organizing and management. This literature is anything if not prolific about the management of change. Until quite recently, research and advice about the management of organizations has reflected an ideology of gradualism. Effective organizational change was seen to proceed by small, incremental adjustments. The environments of organizations was presumed to be stable or growing. Lately, supposedly having entered what Drucker⁽¹⁾ termed the “age of discontinuity,” organizational change is seen as requiring managers to choose between organizational extinction or immediate and radical transformation.⁽²⁾ These two theses, incrementalism and transformation, however, no doubt oversimplify the circumstances facing contemporary and future managers. A somewhat more refined and encompassing model of change and its concomitants is surely needed so that more appropriate organizations are created and more responsive managerial competencies are developed.

We will not detail either the nature or the extent of change in the modern world for this has been done by so many others.^(3,4,5,6,7) Everything is supposedly changing more or less--globally, nationally, industries and organizations, people, everything! And as if that weren’t enough, we also hear repeatedly that the absolute rate of change in our world is likewise increasing. Of course, reflecting all of this change, the tasks and responsibilities of managers everywhere are also changing. For many of us, the constant drum beat of change, change, change has a numbing quality and it becomes difficult to retain the idea of change in our minds. For others of us the change refrain proves overwhelming and we retreat to the relative comfort of simplifying images and slogans. A certain amount of loose metaphorical talk prevails about “catching and riding the wave of change”⁽⁸⁾ or about having to cope with conditions of “permanent whitewater”⁽⁹⁾ or even “thriving on chaos” .⁽¹⁰⁾ Somehow the presumptions of stability has jump-shifted to quantum, revolutionary change.

What if we took change seriously? What if we believed that managing change really was at the core of management? These are the aims of this essay. We will argue that the simple, bipolar conceptions of environmental change are inadequate; that the environmental conditions in which organizations find themselves discontinuous change, and that they are neither homogenous nor absolutely objectively real. We will also argue that management's proclivity to believe there is a one best way to manage, once we know what we are up against, is even more fallacious than before, and that there are new as well as old ways of bundling managing. To take change seriously thus promotes managerial artistry, those competencies of appreciation and design and facilitation of appropriately refined organizational forms. Managerial artistry thus brings proactive choice to the forefront as executive become more aware of the possibilities in organizational environments and their associated structures and competencies.

This essay will proceed in four sections. In the first we will sketch the range and nature of four alternative organizational environments. Second, we will outline the organizational designs associated with each type of environmental circumstance. The third section then examines designs and the managerial competencies and concerns that seem to be needed for each environmental alternative. Last we will comment on the implications of what has been outlined for the managerial artistry of the future.     

Evaluation of police recruit training involving psychology

Abstract

Claims have been made that critical thinking is a necessary skill for constructing accurate offender profiles. However, in studies purporting to demonstrate this, critical thinking ability amongst participants has never been adequately assessed, making it impossible to draw any valid conclusions about the importance of this skill for profiling. In order to empirically examine the relationship between critical thinking ability and profile accuracy, participants (n=36) in the current study completed a mock profiling exercise and the Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal – Form S (WGCTA-S). Profile accuracy scores were calculated for each participant and correlated with his or her scores on the WGCTA-S. Although the majority of participants were found to be adequate critical thinkers, no significant relationship was found between critical thinking ability and profile accuracy. Potential explanations for this finding are discussed.     

When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?

Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus‐building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings. Contentious and partisan activities of male lawmakers may help them outperform women when in a polarized majority party. However, in the minority party, while men may choose to obstruct and delay, women continue to strive to build coalitions and bring about new policies. We find strong evidence that minority party women in the U.S. House of Representatives are better able to keep their sponsored bills alive through later stages of the legislative process than are minority party men, across the 93^rd–110^th Congresses (1973–2008). The opposite is true for majority party women, however, who counterbalance this lack of later success by introducing more legislation. Moreover, while the legislative style of minority party women has served them well consistently across the past four decades, majority party women have become less effective as Congress has become more polarized.     

Potential Use of Hydrocarbons for Aging Lucilia sericata Blowfly Larvae to Establish the Postmortem Interval

Previous studies on Diptera have shown the potential for the use of cuticular hydrocarbons' analysis in the determination of larval age and hence the postmortem interval (PMI) for an associated cadaver. In this work, hydrocarbon compounds, extracted daily until pupation from the cuticle of the blowfly Lucilia sericata (Diptera: Calliphoridae), have been analyzed using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS). The results show distinguishing features within the hydrocarbon profile over the period of the larvae life cycle, with significant chemical changes occurring from the younger larvae to the postfeeding larvae. Further interpretation of the chromatograms using principal component analysis revealed a strong correlation between the magnitudes of particular principal components and time. This outcome suggests that, under the conditions of this study, the cuticular hydrocarbons evolve in a systematic fashion with time, thus supporting the potential for GC–MS analysis as a tool for establishing PMI where such a species is present.