Regulatory Capitalism and the UK Labour Government's Reregulation of Commissioning in the English National Health Service

Today, policy analysts and regulatory governance scholars are sceptical about the capacity of the regulatory state hypothesis to describe change at the institutional level. For many, the hypothesis is a convenient oversimplification that fails to account for the hybridity of institutional arrangements within individual policy sectors and also for the divergence of reform trajectories across different national and sector‐based policy contexts. This article assesses the influence of the key themes of the regulatory state on the UK Labour government's reregulation of National Health Service (NHS) commissioning organizations. Following the critics, it argues that these themes are only partially evident in the programme. While the government has codified previously informal relationships with policies like Patient Choice and has also subjected commissioning organizations to metaregulatory techniques, its reforms have neither displaced public ownership and the direct supply of commissioning services with markets and new mechanisms for rule making and standard setting, nor have the reforms divided labour within the state by creating an independent agency to regulate NHS commissioning organizations via technocratic means. Under the reforms, NHS commissioning continues to take place within a structure of bureaucratic relationships. However, the article suggests that the hybridity of regulatory techniques at work within the UK Labour government's reregulation of NHS commissioning lends weight to the claim that the current era is one of regulatory capitalism. It concludes with a discussion of the consequences of this finding for the public policy and regulatory governance literatures.     

Reassessing Power

<正>Fukushima accident increases global concern over nuclear safety The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan has had an immediate impact on resurgent interest in nuclear power worldwide.Numerous governments have announced plans to re-examine nuclear energy policy and review the safety of their reactors and the adequacy of their regulatory frameworks.     

Double Bind: Governing the Economy in an ICT Era

The recent financial debacle was preceded by a long complex evolution in the way firms created value and organized. The fragmentation of production, intense global competition, and the information and communication technology (ICT)‐enabled transformation of services are all part of a story that was framed by, and in turn further framed, ideologies of deregulation and self‐regulation. In the aftermath of the crisis political leaders worldwide find themselves in a heightened double bind. On one side, the demands for rules allowing experimentation and innovation are sharpened as growth and job creation are needed; on the other side, the demands are heightened for the state to act and regulate markets to prevent future crisis. The article focuses on the development of ICT, the main general‐purpose technology of our time, and how the the ways it allows value to be created interacted with the politics regulating uses and defining the winners and losers.     

Europe Needs to Learn from China

FOUR years into the international financial crisis,it’s clear that the economic policies followed in Europe to deal with the crisis have failed.Realization of this has now led to major political changes in Europe,epitomized by the outcome of the French and Greek elections.The Financial Times,one of the world’s leading newspapers,considered these events so significant that it headlined its lengthy review of them "Seven Days Which Shook Europe."A key reason Europe’s policies have failed to solve the economic problems that arose from the financial crisis is that there has been a consistent     

PAROLEE RECIDIVISM IN CALIFORNIA: THE EFFECT OF NEIGHBORHOOD CONTEXT AND SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCY CHARACTERISTICS*

We studied a sample of reentering parolees in California in 2005–2006 to examine whether the social structural context of the census tract, as well as nearby tracts, along with the relative physical closeness of social service providers affects serious recidivism resulting in imprisonment. We found that a 1 standard deviation increase in the presence of nearby social service providers (within 2 miles) decreases the likelihood of recidivating 41 percent and that this protective effect was particularly strong for African American parolees. This protective effect was diminished by overtaxed services (as proxied by potential demand). We found that higher concentrated disadvantage and social disorder (as measured by bar and liquor store capacity) in the tract increases recidivism and that higher levels of disadvantage and disorder in nearby tracts increase recidivism. A 1 standard deviation increase in the concentrated disadvantage of the focal neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods increases the likelihood of recidivating by 26 percent. The findings suggest that the social context to which parolees return (both in their own neighborhood and in nearby neighborhoods), as well as the geographic accessibility of social service agencies, play important roles in their successful reintegration.     

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF GUIDELINES CIRCUMVENTION: THE CASE OF FEDERAL DISTRICT COURTS*

Recent scholarship on criminal punishments increasingly highlights the importance of courtroom social contexts. Combining recent data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (FY1997–2000) with aggregate data on federal districts, the current study examines interdistrict variations in the application of downward departures from the federal sentencing guidelines. Findings indicate that substantial variation exists in the probability of both prosecutor‐initiated substantial assistance departures and judge‐initiated downward departures. This variation is accounted for, in part, by organizational court contexts, such as caseload pressures, and by environmental considerations, such as the racial composition of the district. Additional evidence suggests that individual trial penalties and race disparities are conditioned by aggregate court contexts. Drawing on interviews with federal justice personnel, this article concludes with a discussion of future directions for research on federal guidelines departures. Part of the glory of the federal system…is that you've got this one big organization, but it can be molded to different needs…
‐ An assistant U.S. attorney ‐