The county administrator and productivity improvement: An examination of contrasting styles

The study examines productivity improvement efforts among a sample of United States County Administrators. Administrators' actions were divided into “tough” and “soft” approaches which were then examined in light of external and internal environment, governmental actors, duties of the office, management and policy actions and roles, and personal and demographic characteristics. Strong correlates were found in the areas of external environment, managerial role, and personal characteristics.     

Information technology and education for the public service

Nation-wide surveys of graduate programs in public administration/affairs support assertions by critics that most programs do not provide students with adequate preparation for coping with information technology. This paper identifies the computer-related knowledge and skills demanded by the contemporary administrative workplace and, after analyzing the sufficiency of current curricula offerings, proposes three goals for education in the use and management of information technology and suggests curriculum revisions necessary to reach these goals. Finally, implementation problems associated with curricula revisions are identified and discussed.     

Factors Associated with Physician Discussion of Health Behaviors with Adolescents

Behaviors developed in adolescence influence health later in life. The purpose of this study was to investigate the frequency of health care provider's discussion of health behaviors with overweight and non-overweight adolescents and identify demographic and health behaviors related to exercise, hours of television viewing, and weight issues associated with these discussions. A Cross sectional survey of urban adolescents was conducted. Trained interviewers administered surveys over a three month period in 2001 at an urban academic pediatric and adolescent clinic. The 252 adolescents surveyed had a mean age of 15 with 49% categorized as being at risk for overweight/overweight and 51% as normal weight using the CDC percentiles for BMI. While 16% of the adolescents reported that their physician or nurse discussed the amount of television they watched, rates of discussion related to exercise (58%), and weight (54%) were much higher. In multivariate analyses, health care provider discussions with adolescents regarding exercise were more common for overweight (O.R.=2.42, 95% C.I. [1.28–4.57]) and at risk for overweight (O.R.=1.98, 95% C.I. [1.03–3.81]) adolescents, whereas physician discussion of television viewing was not associated with weight. Discussions of weight were more common for female (O.R.=2.18, 95% C.I. [1.21–3.95]), African-American (O.R.=2.53, 95% C.I. [1.40–4.57]), and overweight (O.R.=3.92, 95% C.I. [1.97–7.81]) adolescents. Even after adjusting for weight, race and gender strongly influenced the frequency of discussions about weight in physician offices. Although health care providers frequently address weight and exercise with adolescents, more discussions related to sedentary behaviors such as television viewing may be warranted to address adolescent obesity.Received PhD in Epidemiology from University of California, San Diego. Research interests include smoking prevention and cessation among adolescents and health promotion interventions.Received MD from University of Missouri-Kansas City and MPH from Johns Hopkins University. Research interests include health services research and research in support of measurable, systematic improvements in the quality of medical care.Received medical degree from Christian Medical College, Punjab, India and Master of Public Health from University of Kansas School of Medicine. Research interests include diet and physical activity behaviors, role of the environment in obesity and obesity prevention, especially among children and adolescents.Received MBBS from Allama Iqbal Medical College, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan and MPH from University of Kansas Medical Center. Research interests include smoking cessation, database design, implementation, data management and analysis, and use of information technology in health care settings.Director, Cancer Prevention, Control, and Population Sciences, Kansas Cancer Institute. Received MD/MPH from Tulane University and MS from Harvard School of Public Health. Research interests include disparities in healthcare; smoking cessation among underserved populations, specifically African Americans; diet, nutrition, obesity, and physical activity.     

Improvisation and Negotiation: Expecting the Unexpected

Negotiators must improvise. As the negotiations process unfolds, they work with new information, continually making decisions along the way to achieve favorable results. Skilled improvisational jazz musicians and actors perform in similar ways: they repeatedly practice song chord progressions and notes or scene guidelines before a performance; then, during the performance, they work with the information or the music they hear in order to react and respond, making decisions along the way to produce dazzling music or a compelling scene. In this article, two experts in negotiation, a jazz-improvisation scholar, a former member of an improvisational theater troupe, and a psychotherapist versed in therapeutic improvisational techniques explore the improvisational nature of negotiation.
Several aspects of negotiation are similar to improvisation. Both negotiators and improvisational performers need to have a similar mind-set to be successful, both need to recognize and/or change that mind-set at times, and both must craft creative solutions. But there are some significant differences between improvisational performance and negotiation practice, which this article also notes. For example, personal charisma ("star quality") is a common attribute of successful performers, but not something negotiators may always rely on. Similarly, improvisational artists usually work as a team, while a negotiator is often on his or her own. Nonetheless, the incorporation of improvisation techniques into the negotiation skills repertoire holds great promise for practicing negotiators and is a worthy topic of future negotiation research and teaching.     

Between Marxism and Nationalism: Chinese historiography and the Soviet influence, 1949-1963

The Chinese practice of Marxist historical writing represents a dynamic interaction between nationalism and transnationalism. On the one hand, Chinese Marxists were attracted to the Soviet experience in applying Marxism to historical study, especially during the 1950s and the early 1960s, for the latter provided a seemingly much needed theoretical guidance. On the other hand, they attempted to circumscribe the Soviet influence in order to strike a balance between history and theory, the foreign and the indigenous, and the national and the transnational. In so doing, they turned their practice of Marxism into an interpretive, hermeneutic process, in which the temporal distance between the Marxist text and China's historical experience became recognized.     

Measuring performance at the army research laboratory: The performance evaluation construct

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is the only R&D organization to be designated a Pilot Project for Performance Measurement under the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA). As such, managers at ARL were required to develop a system for measuring progress towards meeting strategic and annual performance goals, as specified in the required planning documents. The measurement system developed at ARL to comply with the GPRA, which we call the Performance Evaluation Construct, is presented herein.     

A comparison between the Intercept Oral Fluid Collection Device® and urinalysis among Baltimore City probationers

Few studies compared oral fluid (OF) analysis to laboratory urinalysis (UA) in real-world criminal justice environments, and no studies had collected survey data, from either specimen providers or specimen collectors, about the overall OF collection experience. In the most comprehensive toxicological comparison study conducted to date, urine and OF specimens were collected from a sample of 223 adult probationers in Baltimore City, Maryland, between March and May 2004. In addition, probationers and probation staff were surveyed about the OF collection experience. With confirmed UA as the reference standard, the Intercept Oral Specimen Collection Device® (Intercept) was 100 percent sensitive and 99 percent specific for benzodiazepines, 92 percent sensitive and 96 percent specific for cocaine, 77 percent sensitive and 96 percent specific for opiates, 39 percent sensitive and 98 percent specific for marijuana, and 75 percent sensitive and 91 percent specific for the detection of at least one drug. Seventy-two percent of the probationers and 88 percent of the probation staff rated the Intercept experience better than the collection of urine specimens. Implications for criminal justice policy and research are discussed.