Innovating Government-Wide Public Management Practices to Implement Development Policy: The Case of “Brazil in Action”

This article examines analytical and historical relationships between the topics of state capacity building and public management policy change. It does so by presenting an instrumental case study of Brazil in Action, a program that became the hallmark of the first presidential term of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The development of the program is explained on the basis of institutional processual meta-theories of policy and organizational change. The operation of the program is considered in terms of the clinical analysis of organizational practices. Implications for research on innovative administrative practice, public management policy change, and state capacity building are considered.     

Client Orientation as a Form of Spiritual Needs of Personnel in Labor

The paper considers some grounds of the inside organization marketing concept as a management system that is aimed at meeting the needs of the company＇s personnel in labor. These needs are based on three levels [physiological （highest）, social （middle）, and spiritual （lowest）] and each level has its own revolutionizing forms of the development of needs in labor （abstract, wants, and demand）. Having analyzed a great deal of research materials concerning employees＇ motivation at Russian enterprises, a native higher educational establishment Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin was one of them, it can be concluded that this research does not reflect an estimation degree of meeting employees＇ needs in labor. Moreover, there is no motivation of client orientation in them that is considered as a form of spiritual needs of employees in labor. The essence of this form is determined by some objective and subjective factors.     

Paśyantī, Pratibhā, Sphoţa and Jāti: Ontology and Epistemology in the Vākyapadīya

Eli Franco has recently suggested to distinguish the two main periods in the history of Indian philosophy, i.e. the older ontological and the new epistemological. In the Vākyapadīya, however, ontology and epistemology are evidently intertwined and interrelated. In this paper ontological and epistemological features of the concepts of pa?yantī, pratibhā, spho?a and jāti are analyzed in order to demonstrate that all these concepts, while being ontologically different, are engaged in similar epistemological processes, i.e. the cognition of a verbal utterance. Thus the identification of spho?a and jāti as well as of pa?yantī and pratibhā met with in some passages of VP and the commentaries implies not the absolute identity of these concepts, but only their overlapping in the sphere of epistemology. Considering concepts of different origin in one epistemological perspective enables to escape controversies in interpretation and provides a kind of consistency in a bit but amorphous work of Bhart?hari.     

Conflict Over Peace? The United States’ and Russia’s Diverging Conceptual Approaches to Peace and Conflict Settlement

Abstract

Peace remains a highly contested analytical and political concept. Yet scholarly engagement with the empirical diversity of how states understand peace is strikingly rare. Following the constructivist view of peace as a subjective ontology, we investigate the peace conceptualisations of Russia and the United States as reflected in the contentious discourses at the United Nations Security Council. We seek to reveal whether the political debates reflect the plurality of analytical approaches to peace and study the conflict potentials that arise from clashes between conceptual subject positions. We find substantive divergence in the states’ basic understandings of peace and argue that the investigation of their respective conceptions opens an additional and much-needed perspective on the political discord between the two veto powers.     

Russian Educational Reform and the Introduction of the Unified State Exam. A View from the Provinces

The introduction of the Unified State Examination (USE) in Russian higher education has been the subject of much debate. One of the primary factors hindering the transition has been ambivalent public and professional perceptions of the effectiveness of the USE in addressing the problems associated with inequalities of access to higher education. This essay contributes to research in this area through a case study analysing the introduction of the USE in Ul'yanovsk Oblast’. It draws on survey data collected from pupils and parents of final year high school students about the USE reforms and explores the reasons why the transition to USE did not proceed as smoothly as its creators might have envisaged. Here the negative perceptions of the high-school graduates and parents reveal that the reforms have been judged to be largely ineffective with regard to reducing the role of material and regional inequalities in determining access to higher education, and in addressing how the differing institutional status of ordinary ‘comprehensive’ and elite, specialised schools continues to create inequalities in access to higher education in Russia.