Today's leaders: Career trends of Canada's private- and public-sector executives

Abstract: Today, a great deal of attention is focused on the need to change the management of the public service in order to improve customer service and increase efficiency. In many cases, unfavourable comparisons are made to the private sector. But little comparative analysis has actually been undertaken with reference to the career profiles of senior managers in Canada's public and private sectors. The Public Management Research Centre undertook a study comparing the backgrounds and management experiences of Canada's most senior executives in the public and private sectors. Information was gathered from seventy current heads of federal departments and agencies (deputy ministers - dms ) and from sixty-three chief executive officers (ceos ) of private companies of comparable size and importance. The results of this study, published in a document entitled Today's Leaders, indicate that it is likely that the top job in public-sector organizations will never be identical to that in the private sector. However, if improving the management of the public sector means adopting some elements of private-sector management techniques (e.g., alternative service delivery, increased customer service, greater attention to cost recovery and bottom-line), the thrust for these changes must come from senior management. In addition, current criteria for recruitment, development and promotion of future public-sector leaders must be re-evaluated. Sommaire: Le Centre de recherche en gestion dans le secteur public a effectué une étude comparant l'historique personnel et l'expérience de gestion des plus hauts cadres des secteurs public et privé au Canada. Les renseignements ont été recueillis auprès de 70 chefs titulaires de ministères et d'organismes fédéraux (sous-ministres) et de 63 présidents-directeurs généraux (pdg ) de compagnies privées d'envergure comparable. Publiés dans un document intituléLeaders d'aujourd'hui, les résultats de l'étude révèlent que le poste suprême des organismes publics ne sera probablement jamais identique à celui des organismes privés. D'autre part, s'il s'agit d'améliorer la gestion du secteur public en adoptant certains éléments de gestion du secteur privé (modes-alternatif de prestation de servies, meilleur service à la clientèle, recouvre-ment des coûts et rentabilité), ce sont les cadres supérieurs qui doivent en prendre l'initiative. Par ailleurs, il faut réévaluer les critères actuels de recrutement, de développement et de promotion des futurs du chefs de file secteur public.     

Advancing the study of political cleavages through experimentation: Revisiting regionalism and redistributive preferences in Canada

The maintenance of welfare state policies requires citizen support for the provision of a social safety net through taxation and redistribution. Research has shown that a diverse political polity presents a risk to the welfare state; however, Canada bucks the trend and does not see citizen support for economic redistribution decline in response to immigration-based population diversity. Using Canada as our case, we argue that scholars of welfare state politics and redistribution should turn their attention to other sources of population heterogeneity in an effort to better understand how different political cleavages affect citizens’ redistributive preferences. We use an online experimental survey to manipulate the in-group identity of 500 Canadians. The survey enables respondents to identify with other in-group identities along regional, linguistic, income-group, and urban/rural characteristics. Our results find that while Canadians do have a strong baseline preference for redistributive behaviour, regional and linguistic cleavages moderate this outcome.     

Abba Eban and the Development of American–Israeli Relations, 1950–1959

Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador in Washington and representative at the United Nations from 1950 to 1959, had a central role in the transformation of American–Israeli relations during a period of frequent discord over key strategic issues. This analysis examines the influence of one prominent actor upon bilateral ties that would eventually become the American–Israeli “special relationship.” Eban’s oratory talent, linguistic skills, and effective style of diplomacy augmented both Israel’s image in the view of the American public and relations with official Washington. The article explores several critical elements of these relations during the 1950s, re-examining both Eban’s involvement in events such as Israel’s approach toward the problem of borders, its policy of military retaliation, and the response to severe American pressure following the 1956 Sinai campaign. Whilst not attributing the development of close relations between the two Powers solely to the works of a single individual, evidence suggests that Eban was the right man in the right place and time to provide the necessary foundations for the elevation of American–Israeli relations to “special” in the following decade.     

Power, Impartiality and Timing: Three Hypotheses on Third Party Mediation in the Middle East

Despite the upsurge in the literature on third party intervention in recent years, particularly that relating to mediation, there is still a significant gap in the field. While some theoretical accounts content themselves with describing the qualities of an ideal mediator, other studies borrow examples from a variety of case studies to emphasise the wide range of the mediator's functions or the tactics it can use. What is missing is a systematic, case study-driven analysis that draws on the theoretical literature while generating some fresh propositions about the conditions that are propitious for successful mediation. The article aims to achieve this by proposing three hypotheses about the impact of power, impartiality and timing on the mediation process: (1) The more power (leverage) the mediator has over the disputants, the more likely it is to succeed. (2) The more impartial the mediator is, the more likely it is to succeed. (3) Mediation is more likely to succeed when the conflict has reached an escalatory stage. These hypotheses will be tested against the experience of four successful cases of third party intervention in the Arab–Israeli conflict, which over the past six decades has experienced a multitude of mediators of different types.     

Anti-Intellectualism and Israeli Politics

Anti-intellectualism is a discrete social phenomenon which eschews spatial or temporal boundaries. While it defies a restrictive definition, it is commonly understood as a populist disdain of individuals who speak of certain universal values and engage in the pursuit of knowledge from reason; conversely, an anti-intellectual is a person who is not a ‘dealer in ideas’ and is not committed to the ‘life of the mind’. This article focuses on anti-intellectualism as a defining characteristic of the Israeli ethos which predates the establishment of the Jewish state. The article begins with a terminological discussion and a brief historical survey of the prevalence of anti-intellectualism in contemporary societies. It then traces the roots of Israeli anti-intellectualism and examines their manifestations in the case of Abba Eban, Israel’s most quintessential diplomat, an orientalist scholar, a Cambridge don, a polyglot and a public intellectual. The article concludes by pointing to the uneasy fit between the political and intellectual spheres in Israeli politics and the challenges posed by the former to the latter.