Change leadership and change embeddedness in public organizations: Connecting macrolevel reform to microlevel implementation

Governments initiate major public sector reforms for various reasons. Although change leadership appears crucial, its role in implementing reforms in public organizations receives scant attention. Insights from public administration and change management literature help to bridge the gap between these macrolevel and microlevel perspectives. Our multilevel study of two youth care organizations addressing public sector reform explores how leadership behavior—and in interaction between top and middle managers—contributes to the concept of what we call change embeddedness among front-line employees. The use of leadership behaviors during the reform that are leader centric (shaping) appear to be associated with greater ambiguity and worse change embeddedness. However, leadership focused on engaging employees and boundary spanning with external organizations seems to support the embeddedness of the reform, especially when these behaviors are connected to a clear sense of purpose around the change.     

A Dominant SNP in a Unionist Scotland? The 2019 UK General Election in Scotland

The UK general election in December 2019 produced a resounding victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, returning a majority government and the mandate for Brexit that he had campaigned for. The picture was less rosy for the Conservatives in Scotland, where his party lost half its seats to the SNP. This article reviews the election outcome in Scotland, considering the fortunes of each of the main parties, and projects forward to the devolved election in 2021, when the parties will once again debate the key constitutional question in Scotland.     

The United Kingdom’s Economic Relations with New Zealand and Australia after Brexit

This article examines the current state of economic relations that the United Kingdom has with New Zealand and Australia, in light of the former’s decision to leave the European Union. Although there are prospects for future trade between these countries post-Brexit based on the three countries’ current comparative advantages, perhaps the greatest scope is for greater trade in services along with greater investment flows. Trade in food produce would be affected by changes in trade policy post-Brexit but other goods such as forestry, mineral and manufacturing products would be more affected by changes in general economic conditions and the relative competiveness of the industries in international markets. Already these aspects of trade are important and are expected to grow and develop over time. Much of the future negotiations between the three countries will take up a range of issues associated with investment and the trade in services and much of the future prospects for growth in trade might depend on the success of these negotiations.     

THE DEMOGRAPHIC AND SPATIAL PATTERNS OF RECORDED RAPE IN A LARGE UK METROPOLITAN AREA

The present study details a social contextual analysis of 172 rapes and attempted rapes that occurred in a large metropolitan area in the UK. The main focus of the present study concerns the demographic characteristics of rape victims and offenders, including their age and ethnicity, vis-à-vis their relationship. The study also considers the geographic distribution of offences and their relationship to ethnicity and socio-economic status. Our data clearly indicate that the age of offenders is significantly associated with the nature of the victim–offender relationship, and that rape tends to be intra-racial. The data also provide unique comparisons to be made with contextual data on rapes in rural settings. The implications of these findings for the prevention and deterrence of rape, the recording of rape by the police, and the impact of such findings on public education are considered.     

Confidentiality and public protection: Ethical dilemmas in qualitative research with adult male sex offenders

This paper considers the ethical tensions present when engaging in in-depth interviews with convicted sex offenders. Many of the issues described below are similar to those found in other sensitive areas of research. However, confidentiality and public protection are matters that require detailed consideration when the desire to know more about men who have committed serious and harmful offences is set against the possibility of a researcher not disclosing previously unknown sensitive information that relates to the risk of someone being harmed.     

Capturing the Moment? Crisis,Market Accountability,and the Limits of Legitimation

This article extends the concept of regulatory capture to a prominent element of responses to the 2007–2008 global financial crisis overlooked in political science: the out-of-court settlements undertaken between regulators and financial firms. In outsourcing accountability to markets and diverging from previous crisis responses, these billion dollar agreements have remained highly controversial. How have financial regulators sought to legitimate this novel approach to post-crisis accountability? Contrasting material and cognitive conceptions of regulatory capture, I illustrate how American financial regulators have persistently prioritized market values in self-legitimating post-crisis financial accountability. Inconsistencies in the stress on transparency and growth, however, are shown to undermine the wider legitimation of this market-based approach. These limits underpin the scepticism with which post-crisis settlements have been received, as well as to the broader sense that accountability for the most severe period of volatility since the Great Depression has remained lacking.