SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS IN CHINA

ABSTRACT This article examines a neglected area of reform in China: service organizations. It discusses the structural features of service organizations and the institutional constraints on eflorts to reform them.     

Do Leadership Training and Development Make a Difference in the Public Sector? A Panel Study

Although significant progress has been made in developing leadership theory and understanding the traits, skills, behaviors, and styles that make a good leader, progress in bridging the gap between theory and practice using models of leadership training and development has been slow. This research attempts to answer the question of whether leadership training and development programs in the public sector improve leader and organizational performance. The findings indicate that a combination of coaching, classroom instruction, feedback, and experiential training has a significant impact on leader performance. In addition, organizational effectiveness improves for organizations whose leaders received the intervention. This article enhances our understanding of the impact that training and development can have on leader and organizational outcomes.     

Innovation attributes,policy intervention,and the diffusion of computer applications among local governments

Several shortcomings of traditional diffusion research create major impediments to our understanding of the diffusion of innovations as well as to the development of effective strategies of policy intervention to facilitate diffusion. Among the criticisms of diffusion research are the selection bias of many diffusion studies and the futility of curve fitting as an adequate test of theoretical relevance. These shortcomings can be avoided by substantive and methodological changes in diffusion research. We argue that innovation attributes, together with policies associated with the diffusion of an innovation, account for significant differences in diffusion patterns. An empirical analysis of this thesis focuses on the diffusion of computer applications software in local government.This paper is part of a research project entitled Diffusion and Adoption of Computer Applications Software in Local Governments. This project is supported by a grant to the Public Policy Research Organization and the Graduate School of Administration from the Division of Policy Research and Analysis of the National Science Foundation (PRA-76-15549). The views expressed herein are those of the researchers and should not be ascribed to the National Science Foundation. The full report of this research is forthcoming in Technological Innovation in American Local Governments: The Case of Computing (New York: Pergamon).The authors wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of Robert Eyestone, Joseph Matthews, and Kenneth Warner.Authors are listed randomly to denote equal contribution.     

Plainly Wrong

English law and wider common law jurisprudence have endorsed the condition that an appellate court should reject a trial judge's finding of fact which it believes is ‘plainly wrong’. Courts have not explained what makes a finding plainly wrong, however. Scholars have largely ignored the issue. This article draws on recent work in epistemology to provide a new analysis of the plainly wrong standard. Rationally, a court should not believe both (1) that a judge is a better fact finder and (2) that the judge was wrong to find some fact. If it does believe both, it should abandon the belief it is less confident of. So, a court should reject a judge's finding if it is more confident that it is wrong than that the judge is a better fact finder. This analysis has implications for review of administrative fact finding and for judicial deference generally.     

Ensuring an Inventor's Patent Rights: Recent Supreme Court Case Clarifies Timing of Application

Patent law encourages the development and transfer of technology by making the information regarding new inventions public knowledge, while providing the inventor with the right to exclude others from making, using or selling the invention for 20 years. Because the exclusive rights to the invention are limited in time, and to prevent the inventor from gaining additional time, the application for a patent must be filed within a statutorily prescribed time. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Pfaff v. Wells Electronics, Inc. clarified one aspect related to the timing of the patent application. This article specifically examines the Pfaff case and the question of when an invention subject to a contract to sell exists as it relates to the timing of patent applications.     

Empire,Gender and the ‘Home Front’ in Fascist Italy

This article considers the ways in which Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the subsequent League of Nations sanctions shaped the tasks assigned to women within the Fascist Party. During the period of sanctions and, indeed, after their ending, right up until the Second World War, empire and women’s contribution to it became a core theme in Fascist propaganda. Female party members were mobilised for the imperial cause both as producers and as consumers and this led to a new emphasis on their importance to the nation. The activities of the Fascist women’s groups expanded considerably to include a range of new tasks such as running training courses on how to fight waste in housework, ‘autarkic cookery’ and so on. This article also discusses how young Italian women were prepared for a role in Italy’s ‘place in the sun’ through special courses created to train them for a future as colonial wives.