Ford Motor Company and the Firestone tyre recall

This paper was prepared as the basis for a class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. It may be appropriate for public affairs, business and public policy, and/or crisis management courses at the undergraduate or graduate level. In conjunction with this case, it may be useful to use the framework for crisis management developed by Dr Ian I. Mitroff, the Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. This best practice model is discussed in ‘Managing Crises Before They Happen’, which Mitroff published in 2001 with Gus Anagnos, Vice President of Comprehensive Crisis Management. This case leads the audience through the Ford–Firestone tyre crisis from 1997—when Ford began to learn of a problem with Firestone tyres on its popular Explorer sport‐utility vehicle—up until the summer of 2001, just after Ford recalled 13 million Firestone tyres and the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration cleared Ford of further investigation into potential defects in the Explorer. The case addresses potential causes of the tyre problem, how Ford handled the crisis from a corporate public affairs perspective and, tangentially, how Firestone handled the issue. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Similar Ends, Differing Means: Contractualism and Civil Service Reform in Denmark and New Zealand

State sector reform was an integral component of the radical economic and social policy changes enacted by New Zealand governments between 1984 and 1991. This reform replaced the traditional tenured public service with a contractual regime. Through a comparison with Denmark, it is shown that New Zealand's reforms were not unique. Similar reforms were enacted in Denmark. But contrary to what occurred in New Zealand, the Danish reforms had already begun in the 1960s, and have since been gradually expanded. The parallel contractual regimes introduced in the two countries are accounted for by an increasing demand among politicians to secure a civil service that is responsive to political executive demands. However, because of institutional differences and diverging regulatory regimes, the strategic approaches in the two countries have been different. Whereas the New Zealand approach was dominated by an appeal to a coherent and sophisticated body of theoretical knowledge, combined with strict formalization, the Danish strategy has been based on political bargaining with the civil service unions. In both cases the reforms rest on critical assumptions regarding their positive and negative implications.     

Terrorism and Transportation Policy and Administration: Balancing the Model and Equations for Optimal Security

September 11 was the catalytic event that clearly demonstrated that transportation security was a virtual myth. We had obviously overinvested in efficiency-based mechanisms and procedures while the security and safety standards provided by effectiveness considerations were being increasingly ignored. This article analyzes the increasingly dangerous situation as it unfolded and provides an Emerging Entrepreneurial Management and Public Policy Model designed to provide insights towards rebalancing our transportation security and public policy considerations as we attempt to design, implement, and pay for optimal security systems to deal with the terrorism threats we face in the early twenty-first century. Rebalancing the model and the equations will require increased focus, will, and skills. It will also be a lot more expensive . . . in both the private and the public sectors.     

Continuity and change: the administration of George W. Bush and US policy toward Taiwan

This paper examines recent modifications in American policy toward the Republic of China (ROC or Taiwan). It contends that, while the George W. Bush Administration may have carried out a significant readjustment of US policy, available evidence suggests that it will not endorse any major upgrades in ties with Taipei during the foreseeable future. Like previous administrations, the Bush Administration now recognizes the value of engaging the People's Republic of China (PRC). This development holds important implications for the future trajectory of America's relations with Taiwan and the PRC and for peace and stability in the Western Pacific.     

Policy and power: A conceptual framework between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ policy idioms

During the last few decades, both policy practices and policy idioms have drastically changed. Concepts such as interactive planning, network management, stakeholder dialogue, deliberative democracy, policy discourses, governance, etc. have replaced older ones such as public administration, policy programmes, interest groups, institutions, power, and the like. Although we recognise the relevance and importance of this shift in vocabulary, we also regret related ‘losses’. We particularly regret that the concept of power has – in our view – become an ‘endangered species’ in the field of public policy analysis. We therefore will develop a framework to analyse power – being a multi-layered concept – in policy practices in this article. We will do so on the basis of the so-called policy arrangement approach, which combines elements of the old and new policy vocabularies. In addition, we draw upon different power theories in developing our argument and model. As a result, we hope to combine the best of two worlds, of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ idioms in policy studies, and to achieve our two aims: to bring back in the concept of power in current policy analysis and to expand the policy arrangement approach from a power perspective.     

Bargaining and Learning While Fighting

Much of the existing formal work on war models the decision to go to war as a game-ending, costly lottery. This article relaxes this assumption by treating war as a costly process during which the states run the risk of military collapse. The model also allows for uncertainty over either the cost of fighting or the distribution of power. The analysis makes four contributions to the growing costly-process literature: (i) the present model provides a more general treatment of the learning process that occurs when states are uncertain about the distribution of power, (ii) it explicitly compares the bargaining and learning processes for the two different sources of uncertainty, (iii) it suggests a way to empirically distinguish wars arising from these two sources, and (iv) it shows that the equilibrium dynamics of informational accounts of war may be quite sensitive to the underlying bargaining environment through which information is conveyed .     

Moving from national to international environmental policy

Environmental problems will increasingly spill over national boundaries. An effective and efficient response to these problems will require international solutions; relying purely on national regulatory mechanisms to address global issues will not suffice. To meet this need, better international environmental programs must be developed that maximize collective gain, enforce property rights, address the range of environmental values present in different countries, and fairly determine who should pay for global-scale pollution control.