The place of law in the leadership and management of schools

Change is a feature of life in all communities and results in heightened demands being made of individuals and organizations alike. In the school setting administrators and classroom teachers have to respond to a great variety of demands that change has brought. Accountability, in various guises, is one area where changes in societal attitudes have resulted in greater demands being exacted of all professions including that of teaching. In this regard legal accountability is of considerable concern to schools as legal matters increasingly impact on school policies, practices and procedures. In this article research into the relationship between the law and school leadership and management is explored. A brief overview of research into school management and principals as leaders is followed by a discussion of the need for knowledge of areas of law impacting on schools. The article concludes that in order to ensure a school's legal safety, a preventive legal risk management culture is needed.     

Threatening and otherwise inappropriate letters to members of the United States Congress

The authors examine the characteristics of threatening and otherwise inappropriate communications sent to members of the U.S. Congress by a sample of 86 subjects, 20 of whom threatened assassination. We quote excerpts from these letters and provide quantitative data on such variables as the volume, duration, form, and appearance of such communications; the enclosures; the subjects' perceived relationships to the recipients; the thematic content of the communications; and the messages and threats communicated. Comparisons between 43 subjects who pursued encounters with members of Congress and 43 who did not revealed 17 factors associated with such pursuit. In this population, threateners were significantly less likely to pursue an encounter than inappropriate letter writers who did not threaten, regardless of the type of threat or the harm threatened. Inappropriate letters to members of Congress are compared with those directed to Hollywood celebrities. Mentally disordered persons writing to public figures often mention and sometimes threaten public figures other than those to whom the letters are addressed, which raises important issues regarding notification of endangered third parties and the sharing of information among protective agencies.     

Randomized experiments in criminology: What have we learned in the last two decades?

This paper aims to review randomized experiments in criminology with offending outcomes and reasonably large numbers that were published between 1982 and 2004. A total of 83 experiments are summarized, compared with only 35 published between 1957 and 1981: 12 on policing, 13 on prevention, 14 on corrections, 22 on courts, and 22 on community interventions. Randomized experiments are still relatively uncommon, but there have been more large-scale multi-site experiments and replication programs. There have also been several experiments in which 100 or more places were randomly assigned. Relatively few experiments (only 10 out of 83) were conducted outside the United States. Meta-analyses suggest that prevention methods, correctional therapy, batterer programs, drug courts, juvenile restitution and deterrent policing were effective in reducing offending, while Scared Straight and boot camp programs caused a significant increase in offending.     

Decision Making in Autocratic Regimes: A Poliheuristic Perspective

This paper applies the poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision making to non-democratic states. Poliheuristic theory asserts that state leaders assign primary importance to their political survival; however, the meaning of "the political" varies dramatically from country to country. Furthermore, the types of actors who hold leaders politically accountable also vary between countries. Consequently, leaders often pursue vastly different means of ensuring their political survival. The author uses the common distinction between single-party, military, and personalist autocracies to show that apparently arbitrary differences in autocratic leaders' political concerns actually vary in systematic and potentially predictable ways. Because this argument is generalized to non-democratic states as a whole, it has important implications for the ways in which democratic states craft their policies toward autocracies.     

The relation between technology import and domestic R&D

The relation between domestic R&D and imports of technology is examined for 10 countries. Simple regressions revealed strong complementarity for each of the countries. Multiple regressions including GNP per capita and number of scientists and engineers were performed for the five countries with time series for all the variables. Strong complementarity was found between technology imports and domestic R&D and other variables for Japan and South Korea, weak for France, none for Germany and the US. Excluding government-financed R&D in the US resulted in a substitutive relation. Japan revealed a sharp decline in the ratio of technology payments to R&D spending; Korea is following in its steps. Complementarity appears to weaken in later stages as technology development strategies shift from dependent to imitative to autonomous or offensive technology development.     

Rational choice theory,public policy and the liberal state

Liberalism requires a high order of responsible behaviour from its citizens in order to be sustainable. Yet when the modern liberal state makes policy, it is the stereotyped economic man, driven by self-interest and influenced only by carrots and sticks, who occupies center stage. This regulatory approach to public policy can be shown theoretically to give rise to a paradox — the greater the need for regulation, the less likely, because of compliance problems, it is to succeed. It is contended that an alternative approach which explicitly focuses on a broader behavioral understanding of citizens' attitudes and motivations provides a rationale for the use of a much wider range of policy instruments than does the regulatory framework, and is also more in keeping with those values necessary to the sustainability of the liberal state.     

Change Management—Strategy and Values in Six Agencies from the Australian Public Service

Change is a ubiquitous theme in management literature, but empirical studies that seek to draw lessons from the experience of managing change are rare. By investigating patterns of change management in six Australian federal agencies, we elicit a number of factors contributing to success—though "success" is itself not a clear-cut concept in this area. We found support for a number of broad themes already apparent in the literature and suggest that change processes that have the support of the workforce require good leadership, an appropriate model of change, some room for negotiation and compromise, and well-planned communication.     

Rivaling the PRI: The Image Management of Vicente Fox and the Use of Public Opinion Polling in the 2000 Mexican Election

This research examines the data from private polls conducted during Vicente Fox's presidential campaign through the lenses of the "modernization" of campaigning, the creation of image in the modern Mexican presidency, and the survey tools used by the campaign to achieve a historic presidential victory in 2000. Fox's campaign team used polling to determine the potential of the Mexican public to be persuaded by an opposition candidate, to provide a continuous update on how the campaign strategy was working, to assist in solidifying Fox's image and message of change (rather than promoting his policy agenda), and to target demographic groups that were perceived to be important electoral partners. These findings suggest that public opinion polling is a useful tool in Mexico to combat longstanding corporatist structures used to favor the PRI. Presidential campaigns in Mexico are beginning to resemble modern campaigns in other mature democracies in their use of private polling data; future Mexican campaigns will become more image- and personality-based.