Grief reactions and effective negotiation

Conclusion In the event of death, society has in place a wide range of rituals and supports designed to help mourners deal with their grief. It may be that assigning blame and seeking legal recourse has become a significant ritual for those who have sustained other types of losses and, in some situations, loss through death as well. However, unlike societal death rituals, which guide the mourners, no guidelines exist to help negotiators address the impact of grief on their clients. Thus, in this article, insights gleaned from studies of grief, loss, and separation have been examined in an effort to develop an awareness of the impact of grief reactions on the parties to negotiation.Grief reactions—ranging from denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and guilt to acceptance—serve a useful purpose for those who have sustained grievous losses. Consequently, a better understanding of grief factors may be advantageous to negotiators and, more importantly, to their clients. Such considerations may help challenge perceptions of other parties that may otherwise be prejudicial to one's client (as in the Lindy Chamberlain case) and assist negotiators in trying to anticipate, and thus protect their clients from, grief-related reactions of other parties. In the large number of cases where negotiation and settlement discussions are not only critical but also decisive, grief theory may provide negotiators with better insight into client, and other party, interests and may help them to formulate advice and intervention strategies that take the impact of various grief reactions into account. Nancy Lewis Buck is an attorney and social worker, currently completing a doctoral dissertation at Yale Law School. Her mailing address is 9 Surrey St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.     

Inhuman development? Technics as enframing or poiesis?

This paper will examine some of the ways in which development has been influenced by the body of ideas known as techne, or technics. This body of ideas focuses on a central theme that envisages technology broadly defined as developing its own impetus that removes it from the control of human agency and that begins to circumscribe and even control human agency. This can be seen as having various impacts on development, notably a subsumption of any concern for human development to issues concerning process and production of outputs. The paper focuses on the approach of Heidegger as he provides an account that places technology at the centre of human being, whilst helping to distinguish both the negative (enframing) tendencies and the emancipatory (or, as Heidegger might have it, poietic) possibilities of technics. The paper concludes by identifying some of these negative and emancipatory influences in the development context.     

James Bond,Ian Fleming and intelligence: breaking down the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’

This article looks to answer the question of why the James Bond novels and films should matter to scholars of intelligence and national security. We argue that Bond is important because, rightly or wrongly, and not without inaccuracy, it has filled a public knowledge vacuum about intelligence agencies and security threats. On another level, this article explores the unexpected yet important interactions between Bond and the actual world of intelligence. We contend that the orthodoxy dictating that Bond and spying are diametric opposites—one is the stuff of fantasy, the other is reality—is problematic, for the worlds of Bond and real intelligence collide, overlap and intermesh in fascinating and significant ways. In short, Bond is important for scholars because he is an international cultural icon that continues to operate at the borders of fiction and reality, framing and constructing not only public perceptions but also to some degree intelligence practices. Core narratives of intelligence among not only the public but also policymakers and intelligence officers are imagined, sustained, deepened, produced and reproduced through and by Bond. We conclude that Bond and intelligence should be thought of as co-constitutive; the series shapes representations and perceptions of intelligence, but it also performs a productive role, influencing the behaviours of intelligence agencies themselves.     

Complex Contracting: Management Challenges and Solutions

Governments at all levels buy mission‐critical goods and services whose attributes and performance requirements are hard to define and produce. Many governments—and the public managers who lead them—lack experience and knowledge about how to contract for complex products. The contract management counsel provided to public managers is thin. Missing is a conceptual managerial framework to guide purchasing the complex products that are often so critical to public organizations' core missions. Drawing on perspectives from across the social sciences, the framework presented in this article provides guidance on how managers can harness the upsides of complex contracting while avoiding its pitfalls. The framework helps identify conditions that increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for the purchasing government and the vendor—the win‐win. To illustrate the framework, the article provides examples of successful and failed acquisitions for complex products such as transportation projects, social service systems, and information technology systems.     

The Impact of the Unemployment Rate on Unemployment Benefits in Barbados: An Impulse Response Approach

The purpose of this article is to determine how the rate of unemployment will impact on unemployment benefits in Barbados using annual data from 1982 to 2009 with the use of an impulse response function. The results show that when a shock is applied to the rate of unemployment, which causes it to rise, unemployment benefits will contract marginally and this reaction will not stabilize until the 14th period when a new equilibrium will be attained. Since this new equilibrium will lie below the original equilibrium, rising unemployment will impact negatively on unemployment benefits although this decline will only be marginal.     

THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN REGULATORY REFORM: THE CASE OF ELS

Abstract: The effects of the Electronic Lodgment Service on relations between tax agents and the Australian Taxation Office provide evidence for both the value and limitations of integrating information technology innovation with regulatory reform strategy. IT innovations such as ELS can promote cooperative regulation. The limitations of this achievement are largely limitations of regulatory context and strategy.     

Contracting for management: Assessing management capacity under alternative service delivery arrangements

Contracting critics suggest that when governments outsource, they reduce their capacity to produce services and manage service delivery. In this paper, we decompose the service delivery decision into service production and service management components. When governments contract for service production, they may also choose to contract for a portion of service delivery management. Studies that only compare the management activities of contracting and direct service delivery governments, without examining the management activities contracted to vendors, are likely to be incomplete and biased. Drawing on a unique survey of governmental refuse collection service directors, matched with a survey of refuse collection vendors operating under municipal contracts, we show that the vendors' management activities offset the decline in management capacity that occurs when governments contract for service delivery for this particular service. Governments can “buy” management activities when contracting for service production. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Using the Delphi process to analyze social policy implementation: A post hoc case from vocational rehabilitation

This study uses a Policy Delphi to discern differences in perspective among and within groups responsible for formulating and implementing vocational rehabilitation policy. Four groups of players were chosen for our analysis: government officials, academics, directors of rehabilitation centers, and the staff who interface with program participants. Significant differences were found between the groups regarding the relative importance of possible legislative goals. This suggests that the failure of vocational rehabilitation policy to promote a work agenda may be attributed to a lack of consensus among policy implementors. The Delphi technique could help policy planners understand the different perspectives within the implementation community, and hence craft more realistic legislation.     

Searching for graves using geophysical technology: field tests with ground penetrating radar,magnetometry, and electrical resistivity

Field experiments were conducted using three types of geophysical equipment in a variety of situations. The goal of the study was to ascertain the relative utility of this technology for non-geophysical expert forensic professionals searching for buried human remains. The study concludes that the equipment should be used with caution after a critical evaluation of specific field conditions, and more refinement of technical methods and skills should be developed.