Popular Sexual Knowledges and Women's Agency in 1920s England: Marie Stopes's Married Love and E.M. Hull's The Sheik

This article examines popular discourses of women's sexuality in 1920s England and argues that sex manuals like Marie Stopes's Married Life and sex novels like E.M. Hull's The Sheik, despite their adherence to status quo values, were liberating for women through their affirmation of women's sexual subjectivity. Stopes's enormously popular book contributed strongly to a new understanding of women's sexual drives as natural and autonomous. The changing attitudes were reflected in the numbers of postwar women who actively participated in the creation and consumption of popular sex-novels and films, exercising both economic and sexual freedoms at once. This article focusses on the film version of The Sheik, which experienced great success as part of this growing leisure market catering specifically to women's desire, and in particular on the figure of Rudolph Valentino as a “woman-made” man. The film's “crossed” representations of sexuality (the emancipated “flapper” and the effeminate yet virile “sheik”) challenged traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, and in doing so, were liberating for women consumers at the same time that they threatened the sexual identities of men.     

Caring, Controlling, Contracting and Counting: Governments and Non-profits in Community Services

Performance measurement and contracting out are central elements of new public management systems. At first sight these elements seem necessarily connected for reasons of accountability. However, for some kinds of services, implementation of conventional performance measurement systems may exacerbate tensions in contracting out. Using a case study of child and family welfare services in NSW, this paper shows that differences in the missions and operating modes of public and non-government community service providers are thrown into sharp relief by performance measurement, when observed from the perspective of practitioners in service-providing agencies. Practitioners perceive that their priorities in service provision differ sharply from those of the department funding their activities — and seeking to measure their performance. These findings pose challenges for the 'partnership' model now prevalent in community services provision.     

'Managing for Outcomes': Accountability and Thrust

Central agencies in New Zealand are now defining public management performance to include both the quality of a manager's 'account' of output-outcome links and the manager's record of delivering efficient outputs. This article: (1) argues that the hard edge of accountability for deliverables must be dulled somewhat in order to pursue outcomes more vigorously; (2) shows how managers can use evaluation tools known as theories-in-action or logic models to give accounts of policy and management thrust; (3) proposes preliminary performance criteria for outcomes-focused management; and (4) attempts to sketch a new 'managing for outcomes' accountability bargain. The conclusions apply broadly to any jurisdiction interested in holding managers accountable for outcomes-focused management.     

Public Sector Priority Setting Using Decision Support Tools

The public sector is in transition in many countries, including New Zealand, and many government departments have been restructured so as to increase transparency and accountability in their decision‐making by implementing fundamental changes to governance, accountability regimes and information systems. New frameworks are also needed for tasks such as priority setting, and this paper describes the framework developed to assist the then NZ Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) in setting priorities for the allocation of research funds. This comprised a participative process including a series of workshops using both GroupSystems software for electronic meeting support and Visual Interactive Sensitivity Analysis (VISA) software to facilitate a multi‐criteria decision analysis.     

Cultivating Character: John Stuart Mill and the Subject of Rights

The antidemocratic tendencies of rights appear to be numerous. As trumps, rights are denounced for shutting down political debate and undermining the common good. As disciplinary, rights are attacked for reinforcing a politics of exclusion. I argue that an appreciation of the democratic potential of rights requires conceiving of them as political claims, as claims that represent a perspective that we seek to persuade others to adopt and through which we can create and contest community and identity. I cull a political conception of rights from the work of John Stuart Mill by rethinking the meaning of and connection between his ontological commitments and his politics. Paying careful attention to his notion of "character" and its cultivation, I argue that Mill embraces a conception of the socially constituted subject who is both disciplined and enabled by rights.