Performance Implications of Public Managers’ Goal Prioritization: An Empirical Test of the Link between Internal Management and Organizational Performance

Most studies on the goals-performance nexus focus on the implications of goal design. In public organizations with multiple goals, managerial goal prioritization can, however, in itself play a decisive role for performance. This study examines the effects of managerial goal prioritization and employee commitment on organizational performance. Analyses of parallel surveys of principals and teachers in higher secondary education and archival data on school performance show that principals’ goal prioritization is positively related to high school performance. The findings thus indicate that public managers should concentrate not only on how they design goals, but also on how they prioritize them.     

Expo afterlife: corporate performance and capitalist futurity in the Carousel of Progress

This article discusses a theatrical spectacle created by Walt Disney and General Electric for the 1964 New York World’s Fair that has run for the last five decades: the Carousel of Progress, a history pageant that stages the evolution of domestic technology in the twentieth century. As a spectacle dedicated to celebrating tools that bolster women’s participation in the social reproduction of capitalism, the author argues, the Carousel shows how expos utilize theatricality in order to inscribe industrial technologies within corporate ideologies. By apprehending the Carousel of Progress as a site of corporate performance, the author demonstrates how the Carousel’s afterlife in theme park entertainment has enabled Disney to theatricalize disparate modes of capitalist futurity in response to shifting cultural sensibilities. The author situates the Carousel within an economy that has consistently presented female domestic labor as subordinate to corporate capital, culminating with its late-1990s staging of an illusory prefeminism, which fantasizes a twentieth century in which no feminist movement took place. Engaging with theories of corporate performance, this article takes up the Carousel of Progress’s production history as an indication of theatricality’s longstanding utility to corporate capitalism.     

The nonarrival of black freedom (c. 12.6.84)

This article seeks to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America through a series of meditations on questions of time, embodied performance, the political concept of emancipation, and Oliver L. Jackson’s painting, Untitled 12.6.84, which graces the cover of this seminal work. This effort to recall Hartman’s argument regarding the nonevent of emancipation moves in the service of developing an understanding of the nonarrival of black freedom as a conceptual frame for addressing the recursive and untimely dimensions of black self-making. Ultimately, this article argues that Scenes of Subjection allows us to glimpse the making of worlds within the historical archive that fall outside of the normative horizons and expectations of political emancipation. Neither durable nor everlasting, neither verifiable nor guaranteed, such worlds take shape and dissolve within the mysterious rapport between the “could be” and the “not yet” and leave traces on the broken flesh of the black body.     

This is your afterlife: gender,slavery, and televisual subjection

In 1957 Arries Ann Ward, who was formerly enslaved, appeared on the classic television interview-entertainment program, This Is Your Life. Despite Ward’s practices of refusal, the rare interview enacts an idealization of black female servitude and indebted obligation through performances of affection and racial benevolence. Ward’s appearance effectively works to resolve national crisis produced by widespread images of civil-rights protest and counterinsurgent violence, reifying discourses of American exceptionalism in Cold War context.     

Is Public Service Motivation Changeable? Integrative Modeling with Goal-Setting Theory

This study proposes that Public Service Motivation (PSM) can be changeable by unique characteristics of public organization. The proposition is applied for the integration between PSM theory and goal-setting theory that is inevitable to better understand the motivation phenomena for the organization. The integration model consists of two sub-mechanisms: 1) the moderating role of goal characteristics on the relationship between Public Service Motivation and work motivation, and 2) the mediating role of PSM on the relationship between goal characteristics and performance. The model suggests empirically testable five theoretical propositions with methodological strategies. Finally, theoretical implications and future study are discussed.     

Local-level law enforcement: Muscovites and their uchastkovyy

The uchastkovyy, or beat officer, is at the front lines of Russian police work. This article investigates the general environment in which the uchastkovyy functions, using Moscow as an example. More specifically, this article examines the institutional structure within which the beat cop operates, his/her duties and resources, the quota system used to evaluate his/her performance, and the nature of the interaction between the uchastkovyy and the public. In so doing, the study disaggregates the monolith that is the Russian police, focusing on that component of the force (uchastkovyy) that interacts most directly with the citizenry. It relies on data from a survey of 1500 Muscovites and four focus group encounters organized by the author to elicit a broad range of public attitudes regarding the performance and conduct of uchastkovyy, exploring particularly what measures might be taken to enhance the level of public trust in their local beat officers.     

How representative are brics?

The five countries known as brics, while not homogeneous in interests, values, and policy preferences, do have a common interest in checking US/Western power and influence through collaboration with non-Western powers. They vary considerably but all are ahead of other developing countries on population, military power, economic weight, geopolitical clout, and global reach and engagement. They are unrepresentative of the typical developing country in terms of interest, capacity, and resources, but they can represent the interests and goals of developing countries as a group on those issues for which the North–South division is salient. The diversity within brics, their differences from other developing countries, and their potential to reflect and represent the global South are explored with respect to climate change, finance, trade, aid, human rights and intervention, and development. It remains unclear whether brics can morph from a countervailing economic grouping to a powerful political alternative.     

“Making It”: Understanding Adolescent Resilience in Two Informal Settlements (Slums) in Nairobi,Kenya

Many adolescents living in contexts characterized by adversity achieve positive outcomes. We adopt a protection–risk conceptual framework to examine resilience (academic achievement, civic participation, and avoidance of risk behaviors) among 1,722 never-married 12–19 year olds living in two Kenyan urban slums. We find stronger associations between explanatory factors and resilience among older (15–19 years) than younger (12–14 years) adolescents. Models for prosocial behavior and models for antisocial behavior emerge as key predictors of resilience. Further accumulation of evidence on risk and protective factors is needed to inform interventions to promote positive outcomes among youth situated in an ecology of adversity.     

Black geographies of struggle and pleasure in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes

In Nona Faustine’s photo series of self-portraits, White Shoes, the artist’s body becomes the agent in exposing the instability of racialized historical geography. Faustine revisits New York City’s landmarks to address what is missing or made invisible: a slave ship, a fugitive woman’s rebirth, or African burial grounds. Making herself visible where she is supposed to remain invisible, she highlights the unacknowledged connection between national wealth, nationalism, geography, and black labor. She discloses the topography of her travels as a changeable terrain, where one slips from the national iconic to ambiguous and finally, to the sacred. I suggest that Faustine doesn’t seek to democratize the extant historical maps, but to shift the terms of reading the city’s geography. She lifts the boundaries between the polarized pathways of knowing – the secularized and the sacred, the living and the dead, the verifiable and the missing. This shift is also made possible by the medium of photography and a feminist turn towards pleasures in one’s body. As Faustine comes to terms with the psychic and cultural inheritance of the diaspora, she moves from the collective body of pain towards black women’s pleasure in their own bodies without purging the history of sexual trauma.     

Calling Local/Talking Global: the cosmo-politics of the call-center industry

In 2015, pioneering Saudi vlogger Juju Sajer revealed her face on YouTube after three years of performing in relative invisibility. She used her beauty vlog for small family dramas as well as beauty advice, translating the global genre to stage Saudi womanhood in modest and modern ways. This article analyses Juju’s use of digital frames as material for building a representational apparatus for young Saudi women. It takes a posthumanist approach to media roles as materially entangled with apparatuses of production, attending to the performer’s construction of networks and her onscreen performances. Juju’s evolving role from beauty vlogger to proto-talk show host, accompanied her increasing control over means of digital production after she gained corporate sponsorship and put her face on her brand. In contrast to theorists of communicative capitalism, I examine Juju’s self-branding as a networked performance of self, which enlivened and extended representational repertoires for young Saudi women. As a niche YouTube channel, it shows the potential of digital performance repertoires to develop within a framework of gendered modesty.