Legal Ambiguity and the Politics of Compliance: Affirmative Action Officers' Dilemma

Equal employment opportunity and affirmative action mandates, like many other laws regulating organizations, do not clearly define what constitutes compliance. Thus compliance depends largely on the initiative and agenda of those persons within organizations who are charged with managing the compliance effort: in the case of civil rights, "affirmative action officers." This paper draws on case studies of affirmative action officers to suggest that the political climate within which affirmative action officers work, together with the officers' interpretations of the law, their role conceptions, and their professional aspirations have important implications for the nature and extent of organizational compliance with law. We conclude that compliance should be understood as a process that evolves over time rather than as a discrete event or non-event.     

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND THE INFORMATION POLITY

Within the debates in Britain about changes in contemporary public administration insufficient attention has been focused to date upon the significance of new information and communication technologies. In particular, the operational importance of computer networks to government organizations, and of the information flows supported by them, have hitherto been given scant attention. A primary focus for understanding the current transformation processes in both services and organization occurring in public administration should be upon the role and significance of these new information flows. Informational capabilities are increasing throughout government organization and have considerable implications for the reforging of that set of organizations which comprise British public administration and for the relationships between and within them, as well as for the quality of publicly provided services. The shifts occurring in contemporary public administration can be usefully analysed and understood by reference to the new concept of the 'information polity'.     

Rawls's Difference Principle as Compensation for Social Immobility

Outside academia, John Rawls's theory of justice—justice as fairness—has had little impact. This article is part of a broader project to rectify this. I offer a distinctive, second‐best, argument for Rawls's difference principle. The difference principle requires that inequalities in income and wealth are justified only if they benefit society's least‐advantaged citizens. My paper argues that, slightly‐modified, the difference principle is an excellent principle of redress in light of the UK's continued failure to give all citizens fair career chances. I show how we might realize the difference principle at the level of policy through tax rate reductions or negative tax rates. I conclude that if you don't want to accept the second‐best argument for the difference principle you must get serious about giving all citizens fair career chances. As I suggest, this task is extremely difficult.