Feeding Mothers’ Love: Stories of Breastfeeding and Mothering in Urban China

ABSTRACT

By analysing narratives of infant feeding, this article explores how emotions are involved in the making of maternal subjectivity. The article is based on interviews with 21 Chinese middle-class mothers of small infants living in Beijing and their stories of how breastfeeding connects to intimacy and love. By merging post-structural approaches of subjectivity with affect theory, the article shows how the emotional dimension of breastfeeding promotes an ideal of mothers as primary caregivers. It finds that this ideal is challenged by practices of multiple caregiving in the mothers’ everyday lives. By exploring the performativity of emotions, the article adds another sociological perspective beyond those concerned with medical discourses of feeding infants. Also, as emotions have been neglected in much social research on Chinese mothering, it contributes to new sociological knowledge about mothering in China.     

Does Gender Equality Affect Municipal Transparency: The Case of Spain

The influence of women in organizational transparency is an understudied vein of representative bureaucracy. Literature claims that the increase of women in formal political representation opened the opportunity to bring to public organizations gender diversity, experiences, and values different from those of men. It highlights the beneficial leadership styles and the legitimacy of public bureaucracies. Since gender equality in Spanish local government has increased in recent years, it was the trigger and the aim for this study: to understand the influence of women’s political representation on the level of Spanish municipalities’ transparency. The analysis draws on panel data econometric techniques. The results reinforce the discussion that the representation of women in local political life will increase information transparency and reduce information asymmetry in municipalities.     

External Pressures and Internal Dynamics in the Institutionalization of Performance-Based Budgeting: An Endless Process?

The well-known practice of performance-based budgeting (PBB) is a relevant component of the New Public Management (NPM) reform agenda and has become widespread, with varying approaches and results across countries. However, its variation within specific countries has remained largely unexplored. This study analyzes three organizations operating within the same context—three ministries in Italy—to contribute to a new understanding of PBB variation by illustrating why the same PBB practice can or cannot be implemented and internalized similarly across these organizations and thus become (or not) fully institutionalized. The study adopts and enriches the institutional approach by extending beyond isomorphic convergence toward PBB and explaining practice variation, linking the interactions between external pressures and internal dynamics at the organizational level to PBB institutionalization. The empirical analysis shows how a lack of alignment between external pressures and internal dynamics contributes to an unfinished and apparently endless process of institutionalization.     

Speaking Like Statesmen or Scientists: Differentiating Congressional and Administrative Views on Data

ABSTRACT

Do legislators and executives speak of data the same way when speaking about public sector data? Public management scholarship and public performance policies often emphasize data-driven decision making as the path to making government efficient and effective. Whether the public policy makers mean the same thing when they speak about data in discussions of data-driven performance and decision making is unknown. In this article, the authors present an analysis of the language of data in conversations about government performance. Two frameworks are identified for the role of data in public performance—the statesman’s and the scientist’s. A corpus-level analysis of over 30 years of government documents is used to demonstrate the differences between these two approaches. This research builds consciously on the work of previous scholars seeking to map the nuances of data-driven performance management policies in the U.S. federal government.     

Opening up to OERs: Electronic Original Sourcebook Versus Traditional Textbook in the Introduction to American Government Course

Traditional American Government textbooks are expensive and often unpopular with students. New technologies and Open Educational Resources (OERs) open up the potential for change, but questions of quality are ever present: can OERs really help students learn better, or are they just cheaper? I developed an OER based on original sources and compared student learning outcomes with the OER section to those in a free digital textbook section. While the OER I created did not work as well as I had hoped, I nonetheless developed a redesign of my course and my approach to teaching, which is the true benefit of adopting OERs.     

Intergovernmental Agreements in Contemporary Russia

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the evolution and current forms of agreements between federal, regional and municipal governments, as well as between the constituent units of the Russian Federation and municipalities. It analyses the problems and prospects of using these regulatory instruments. The purposes of this paper are to examine the current context of making intergovernmental agreements in Russia, to provide a comprehensive vision of contemporary state of this instrument of shaping intergovernmental relations, and to assess the prospects for their further practical use in the Russian Federation.     

If territorial fragmentation is a problem,is amalgamation a solution? – Ten years later

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, municipal territorial amalgamation has occurred in 15 European countries. The same period has seen spectacular progress in research on the relationship between municipal size and the functioning of local governments, as well as the impacts of territorial reforms on economic performance and local democracy. Quasi-experimental designs treating territorial reforms as specific “research laboratories” have constituted an important part of that trend. However, there are still important gaps in the knowledge and the study results are often inconclusive. These observations call for a research agenda for the future.     

Russian Public Sector Employees’ Reasoning of Ethical Behavior: An Empirical Study

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine the ethical reasoning of Russian public sector employees based on age, gender, management experience, specialization by the area of activity, and tenure with the current employer. Using t-test and one-way ANOVA statistical analyses, this study analyzed the ethical reasoning of 199 Russian public sector employees. Significant differences in ethical reasoning were observed among public sector employees based on age and specialization by the area of activity, but no significant differences in ethical reasoning were found among respondents based on gender, management experience and tenure with current employer.     

Cooperation,not cost savings: explaining duration of shared service agreements

Among local governments, inter-municipal cooperation is the growing reform; but the literature is silent regarding the determinants of longer-term shared service agreements. We conducted a survey of all local governments in New York State in 2013 to assess the level of sharing across 29 public services. The duration of shared service agreements varies from 1 to 80 years. What explains this difference? Our hierarchical linear model shows that service sharing agreements fall along a cooperation continuum, where cost savings are a determinant of shorter agreements, while the public values of service quality and cross-jurisdictional coordination explain longer-term agreements. We also find that positive past experience with sharing partners increases the duration of sharing agreements. Our analysis lays the foundation for new theories of shared services that build directly from the benefits of improved regional coordination, inter-municipal reciprocity and service quality, not from theories based solely on competition and costs.     

Sustainability reporting by Australian local government authorities

This qualitative study investigates the Western Australian (WA) local government authorities’ sustainability reporting practices, in the absence of mandatory reporting guidelines, through content analysis of their websites. Calculations from comparing the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)’s disclosures with those of 140 local council websites were used to develop a sustainability reporting disclosure index. The findings indicate that sustainability reporting remains moderately practised by local government authorities, despite stakeholder demand for proactive disclosures. The discourse analysis shows that Western Australia’s strategic planning for sustainable development is the key force propelling councils towards sustainability reporting practices. The findings also suggest that WA local government authorities are increasing sustainability disclosures to legitimate their social and environmental initiatives. The findings have policy implications for regulators and/or government in Western Australia, with practical implications for local council authorities and/or managers in developing awareness of sustainable operations. The study also contributes to local government authorities’ growing awareness of sustainable service operations.