Learning to Mediate? The Mediation Support Unit and the Production of Expertise by the UN

The UN Mediation Support Unit (MSU) was created to support peace processes and enable organizational learning. This article analyses the unit through a sociological lens with the aim to understand its present configuration, and what this reveals about the production of knowledge about mediation at the UN. It argues that, because of the constraints imposed by intrastate wars and the existing institutional setting within the Secretariat, the MSU emphasizes generic and depoliticized expertise, by contrast with mediation's traditional reliance on non-transferable skills. This approach, in spite of its pitfalls, enables the unit to justify its own existence and to claim a position of authority within the organization and beyond.     

Public sector leadership‐subordinate ethical diffusion conundrum: perspectives from developing African countries

The interaction between organizational superiors and their subordinates has a practical implication on the entire organizational life cycle in terms of ethical conduct. This study explores how ethics among public leadership could trickle down on the conduct of public employees by using two empirical cases from developing African countries context. Using the attraction–selection–attrition and social learning models, the study assesses how superiors influence street level bureaucrats' interaction with clients or customers. Drawing from existing cases and other secondary data, we propose a leadership‐ethical diffusion model that argues that subordinates' perception and experience of superiors' behavior tend to create a kind of organizational ‘ethical groupthink’, which spans the rank and file of the organization. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intermediary roles in regulatory programs: Toward a role‐based framework

This paper develops a role‐based framework of intermediaries in regulatory programs. In examining the types of roles that organizations adopt in regulation and governance, we argue that roles have important implications for understanding organizational and program level dynamism and outcomes. We use the Regulator–Intermediary–rule‐Taker framework to describe how organizational roles can be adopted through assignment, appropriation, or promotion. We then go deeper into how intermediaries adopt a variety of different roles in key regulatory programs. We examine generic intermediary roles across programs that involve four main groups of activities: creating and/or organizing, coordinating between programs, supporting implementation, and voicing an opinion. All in all, our role‐based framework allows for a novel relational way to understand interorganizational and institutional dynamism in complex, interactive, and ever‐changing regulatory regimes.     

设立科研工作组织奖提高院校科研管理水平

文章提出了设立科研工作组织奖的意义,分析了科研工作组织奖与以往各种奖励措施的不同,它可进一步加强科研工作的科学化管理、促进学校的学科建设,使传统学科研究和教学内容的改进、新兴学科和交叉学科的发展出现一批新的学术增长点。同时,也可促进学科学术带头人的培养及结构合理的高素质的学术队伍的形成、促进学术研究水平的提高,并为进一步加强科研组织管理工作,奠定基础。     

新生代农民工社会资本的重构

为了能够融入城市,新生代农民工努力构建私人型社会资本,这种构建既包括对原初社会关系网络的维护,也包括新型社会关系网络的拓展。但这种私人型社会资本缺乏人力资本的支撑,也缺乏组织型资本和制度型资本的支持,显得力量单薄。现代社会健康的社会资本应该是以制度型资本和组织型资本为主导,实现制度型资本、组织型资本和私人型社会资本的合一。     

法治政府目标体系——中国法治政府建设十大成就之一

法治政府建设是中国特色社会主义法治国家建设的基础性环节。根据《法治政府建设实施纲要(2015—2020年)》的要求,到2020年基本建成以“职能科学、权责法定、执法严明、公开公正、廉洁高效、诚实守信”为目标体系的法治政府。经过多年的不懈努力,通过深化“放管服”改革和建立权力清单制度,有力地推动了政府职能科学、权责法定的组织性目标的实现;通过行政执法体制改革,构建行政执法三项制度,切实地完成了执法严明、公开公正的过程性目标;通过完善行政监督体系,深入政务诚信建设,有效推进了廉洁高效、诚实守信的伦理性目标的制度化。以此为标志,中国法治政府建设已经达成了预期目标。     

How does organizational task matter for the reputation of public agencies?

The study of organizational task for understanding how organizations behave and evolve has been one of the classic topics in organization theory and public administration. Reputation scholarship has appeared as a promising perspective to understand internal and external organizational dynamics. Reputation scholars, too, emphasize the critical importance of task. Despite this recognition, the literature is characterized by a lack of theorization, and large-scale comparative analyses on how task characteristics are related to reputational dynamics. This study aims to address these concerns, relying on an extensive longitudinal dataset on the media reputation of 40 agencies in two countries to explain organizations' likelihood of attracting reputational threats (both in general and targeting specific reputational dimensions) through different task characteristics. Our main finding is that as agencies perform tasks of a more coercive and authoritative nature (regulatory tasks and, to a lesser extent, redistributive tasks), they are more likely to attract reputational threats (both in general and to all dimensions).