Conclusion: Is competency management a passing fad?

Is competency management a passing fad; is it a catch‐all term to cover diverse national patterns of development or a symptom of wider changes within bureaucracies? As the papers published here suggest, it is more likely to be a passing fad in Europe than the USA. Competency management addresses rather different agendas in different countries and while it does not embrace as diverse a collection of activities as ‘new public management’, there is substantial range in the issues it does address. European experience suggests competency is more likely to be ephemeral and concerned with repackaging rather than bringing something substantially new to personnel management in the upper reaches of civil services. Without taking too rosy a view of US experience, there may be a stronger case for arguing that contemporary competency management approaches there have brought something new to a longer standing debate in public and private management.     

Dangerousness

Saleem Shah played a major role in the development of both policy and research concerning the prediction of dangerousness to others over two decades. During that period his commitment to the welfare of people with mental illness led him first to challenge the legitimacy of such predictions and later to support research to improve them. His ideas were central to most of the research that has been done in this area. This article suggests a direction for future research concerning the prediction of dangerousness to others that elaborates and extends his thinking by focusing on the research necessary to help individuals with mental illnesses to minimize their involvement in violence.     

The Preference for Indirect Harm

We presented subjects pairs of hypothetical scenarios. The action in each scenario harmed some people in order to aid others. In one member of the pair, the harm was a direct result of the action. In the other member, it was an indirect byproduct. Subjects preferred the indirect harm to the direct harm. This result could not be fully explained in terms of differences in judgments about which option was more active, more intentional, more likely to cause harm, or more subject to the disapproval of others. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for a new bias in judgment, a tendency to favor indirectly harmful options over directly harmful alternatives, irrespective of the associated outcomes, intentions, or self-presentational concerns. We speculate that this bias could originate from the use of a typical but somewhat unreliable property of harmful acts, their directness, as a cue to moral evaluation. We discuss the implications of the bias for a range of social issues, including the distinction between passive and active euthanasia, legal deterrence, and the rhetoric of affirmative action.     

Précis of The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science,Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation

Law and Philosophy -     

Reply to Martha Nussbaum and Ian Hacking

Law and Philosophy -     

Cognitive factors and classification issues in adolescent depression

A review and critique of the cognitive research among adolescent depressives are presented. It is concluded that the cognitive data and other research indicate a cooccurrence of depression, anxiety and conduct disorders among adolescents. Implications for clinical classification and gender differences among these diagnoses are discussed. Suggestions are offered for how these diagnoses among adolescents relate to diagnoses during young adulthood. It is argued that the cooccurrence of disorders must be taken into account in the study of adolescent depression both as a continuous personality construct and as a diagnosed conduct disorder.This paper was prepared for the SRCD Conference on Development and Adolescent Depression, ETS and Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, June 3–6, 1987.Received Ph.D. from University of Illinois at urbana-Champaign. Research interests are in life-span factors and treatments of mood disorders.