Search

Value co‐creation as a research topic has been a critical proposition of interest to a wide range of disciplines. In recent years, the field of cultural heritage has also developed a range of information practices to promote different forms of value co‐creation. While the body of literature has begun to accumulate, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of conceptual foundations and how value co‐creation is implemented in cultural heritage information practices. This paper conducted a hermeneutic literature review to understand and conceptualize the core aspects of value co‐creation in various cultural heritage information works. In particular, this paper provides a research mapping of the genres of co‐creation in cultural heritage information practices, the actors, and the roles played by the stakeholders. Further, this review provides an overview of the dominant value co‐creation models in the cultural heritage field. It distills the drivers of value co‐creation and the core value consequences that arise from a process perspective. Finally, this paper puts forward a thematic, theoretical, and methodological agenda for future work based on these findings. The review contributes to the literature by proposing an integrated conceptual framework that summarizes the core elements of value co‐creation in cultural heritage information practices. The framework also serves as a call for action, providing a general understanding of the conceptual foundation for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a remarkable gap in research regarding principal‐centred analyses of control means towards—in a formal sense—rather weak independent administrative actors as agents. Therefore, the paper develops a theoretical notion to link means of ex ante and ex post control and applies it to the (re‐)actions of ministries vis à vis hardship commissions in the German Länder by asking: How does the super‐ordinated ministry (principal) try to control the hardship commission (agent) and with what effect? The theoretical framework is based on principal‐agent theory and argues that the respective relationship is best understood by a notion of control pliers which interlinks the principal's preferences, its means of ex ante and ex post control and the agent's output. We hereby draw on partisan and organization theory. The overall research design of the paper is confirmatory and the focus on the federal states allows to control most of the external variance. We use descriptive statistics and structural equation modelling for path analysis to investigate the ex ante and ex post elements of the control pliers. Our empirical analysis is based on the output of 12 hardship commissions for the period of 2005–2017. Our results show that ex post control seems to matter more than ex ante control, but also that the effects of both may be characterized as interdependent. Furthermore, we show that partisan influence seems to matter more than organizational factors considering the output of the agent but that most can be won by combining the two approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Background Sources of evidence Discussion Conclusion Implications for nursing practice Implications for nursing and health policy To provide insight into the process of developing health and nursing policy and how that process can be influenced by both researchers and nursing leaders.Nurses care for people across the life course from birth to death, in our communities, hospitals, care homes and schools. They have unique insight into how people live their lives and how this affects their health. Despite being well placed to influence health policy, nurses often fail to capitalise on this. At the same time, academics often struggle to identify the policy implications of their research resulting in further missed opportunities to use policy influence.Classical policy theory, which is predominantly drawn from economics and public administration together with a range of contemporary nursing and health policy studies, is used in this paper to discuss the policy process and opportunities to influence.Researchers need to focus on realistic policy suggestions that aim to raise awareness, highlight policy problems or set the agenda. In turn, nursing leaders, from National Nursing Associations, need to harness evidence to support their efforts to influence policy. In terms of influence, a range of approaches exist, and each lends itself to different parts of the policy cycle.The role nurses can play in health policy is not well developed in many countries. Nursing researchers and leaders are well placed to influence policy but must do so in a clear and pragmatic way recognising that policymakers make decisions despite being faced with conflicting evidence, competing demands and economic imperatives.Recognising that nurses can offer much in terms of policy development, the paper argues that a pragmatic approach based on different forms of influence at different stages is likely to be most successful.The evidence reviewed in this paper suggests that nursing academics and leaders need to identify realistic policy interventions when examining their own empirical work or identifying ways to individually or collectively influence policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financing human service delivery through social impact bonds (SIBs) is the subject of some critical commentary in the academic literature, but this tends to be largely theoretical rather than empirically based. This paper presents empirical evidence of how SIB financing can promote positive social and economic outcomes for governments, not‐for‐profit providers, individual service beneficiaries and society more broadly. The paper presents some of the results of an evaluation of the Aspire SIB, which financed an innovative intensive case management program providing housing and wraparound supports over a 3‐year period for people experiencing chronic homelessness. Aspire participants experienced significantly improved outcomes and decreased service needs, delivering downstream cost savings across several areas of government service delivery. This paper describes how the SIB financing mechanism underpinned the success of Aspire by promoting flexible, collaborative, outcome‐focussed and data‐informed responses to a challenging, multi‐faceted social problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure children's homes are locked institutions that deprive children of their liberty. The government are investing significantly in these homes, yet there remains a lack of clarity about their nature and purpose. Drawing on data generated through a substantial ethnography in one secure children's home in England, this paper uses Goffman's (1961) theorising as a conceptual lens to view the institution. It concludes that ambiguity and confusion about what these institutions are, and what they seek to achieve, impacts negatively on the experience of everyday life within. Clarity is needed urgently to improve experiences and to enable the assessment of outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a systematic review of some of the research streams characterizing the body of leadership literature on public sector leadership as informed by traditional leadership journals. It notes that the public sector is extensively studied by leadership scholars. Among the research streams found in that scholarship are administrative leadership, political leadership, and reforms/innovations. It also proposes directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does anxiety affect how public officials process policy information? It is often argued that the increasing number of policy failures can be explained by a lack of policy learning by decision makers. While previous studies show that socioeconomic and partisan variables are related to the perception of policy information, little attention has been paid to the role of emotions, such as anxiety, in the policymaking process. In this paper, we investigate the impact of anxiety on the policy learning of local office holders at the individual level in Switzerland. We introduce the Marcus' Affective Intelligence Model—which examines how emotions affect individuals' information processing—to the policy learning literature. To test the expectations of the model, we draw on novel experimental data collected among local elected officials from the 26 Swiss cantons. In the experiment, we randomly display anxiety‐inducing images along with policy information. We provide evidence that anxiety has a positive causal effect on learning. Considering potential moderators of this effect, we show that the relationship is not conditioned by the strength of priors or the perceived complexity of public policies. However, these variables are substantially correlated with policy learning. Our findings have important implications for better understanding how information influences policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates an automated workflow for extracting network data from policy documents. We use natural language processing tools, part‐of‐speech tagging, and syntactic dependency parsing, to represent relationships between real‐world entities based on how they are described in text. Using a corpus of regional groundwater management plans, we demonstrate unique graph motifs created through parsing syntactic relationships and how document‐level syntax can be aggregated to develop large‐scale graphs. This approach complements and extends existing methods in public management and governance research by (1) expanding the feasible geographic and temporal scope of data collection and (2) allowing for customized representations of governance systems to fit different research applications, particularly by creating graphs with many different node and edge types. We conclude by reflecting on the challenges, limitations, and future directions of automated, text‐based methods for governance research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global COVID‐19 pandemic challenged the world—how it functions, how people move in the social worlds and how government/government services and people interact. Health services, operating under the principles of new public management, have undertaken rapid changes to service delivery and models of care. What has become apparent is the mechanisms within which contemporary health services operate and how services are not prioritising the person at the centre of care. Person‐centred care (PCC) is the philosophical premise upon which models of health care are developed and implemented. Given the strain that COVID‐19 has placed on the health services and the people who deliver the care, it is essential to explore the tensions that exist in this space. This article suggests that before the pandemic, PCC was largely rhetoric, and rendered invisible during the pandemic. The paper presents an investigation into the role of PCC in these challenging times, adopting a Foucauldian lens, specifically governmentality and biopolitics, to examine the policies, priorities and practical implications as health services pivoted and adapted to changing and acute demands. Specifically, this paper draws on the Australian experience, including shifting nursing workforce priorities and additional challenges resulting from public health directives such as lockdowns and limitations. The findings from this exploration open a space for discussion around the rhetoric of PCC, the status of nurses and that which has been lost to the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports the results of registered conceptual replications of the indirect effect of institutional trust in the relationship between precarity and the endorsement of conspiracy beliefs (CB). The original study of Adam‐Troian et al. (2023; British Journal of Social Psychology, 62(S1), 136‐159) indicated that subjective appraisals of economic hardship are associated with lower trust in governments and institutions, which in turn is associated with stronger endorsement of CB. Our Studies 1 to 3 report a series of replications using Slovak panel data. Study 4 reports a replication of the mediation model using data from the European Social Survey Round 10 collected in 17 countries. To provide a quantitative synthesis of these and previous results, we conducted mini meta‐analysis (N = 50,340). Although the strength of the observed relationships differed across the studies to some degree, the original patterns of relations remained robust, supporting the original model. The study corroborates the view that to curb the spread of CB, it is necessary to address structural issues, such as growing financial insecurity, socioeconomic inequalities, and the deficit of institutional trust. Finally, we discuss the role of cultural and political settings in conditioning the mechanisms through which precarity enhances the endorsement of CB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since participatory budgeting (PB) has been advocated by both theorists and practitioners of public administration, its adoption has become a global phenomenon. As of 2017, all local governments in South Korea are legally mandated to operate a PB system as a policy for inviting citizen participation in local budget decision‐making. Using an impact assessment tool completed by PB managers in local governments, this research tested two sets of independent variables—citizens' participatory capacity and the diversification of communication in the PB process—that could be associated with the dependent variables "citizens' trust in government (CTG)" and "government officials' trust in citizens (GTC)." The paper presents the three major findings on the common drivers behind CTG and GTC: (1) citizen participants' knowledge on budget and budgeting process; (2) local government's efforts in gathering citizens' inputs for PB; and (3) the mutual efforts to understand the needs and limitations of both citizens and the local government. The paper concludes by exploring the implications for the design and delivery of effective PB implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Books reviewed in this article: Eliminating World Poverty: Making Governance Work for the Poor – A White Paper on International Development. By the Secretary of State for International Development [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the participation of children and young people within government consultation processes. It considers the recent Department for Education consultation on its statutory guidance for schools for Relationships and Sex Education in England. The paper is based on a Freedom of Information request for the consultation responses categorised as from 'young people'. We identify two issues in our interrogation of the data. First, there is evidence that a substantial proportion of responses were not submitted by young people. Second, the consultation approach did not include all the features necessary for meaningful consultation. We consider the implications for the youth consultation on policy matters that affect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consultants are increasingly a part of public policy formulation, and their policy involvement draws extensive interest in research and public debate. However, there is a gap in how we think about their formulation role: they are often conceptualized as a type of expert, while their actual interaction with and contribution to policy formulation is much more varied. This paper develops a conceptualization of consultants' formulation roles. It demonstrates that rather than just informing policy formulation, consultants take multiple roles and interact with policymaking and makers in multiple ways. Using a policy network/subsystem distinction and a substance/process distinction as the main axes for analysis, the paper develops four role categories: (1) experts and knowledge brokers, in which consultants provide policy advice and analysis; (2) seeing for the government, in which they construct a picture of the policy field; (3) legitimizers and validators, in which they provide symbolic capital to policy; and (4) channels for stakeholders' policy preferences, in which they manage deliberation and synthesize actors' policy preferences. The paper provides much‐needed clarity on how consultants engage with policy formulation and policymakers and forwards our understanding of how consultants exert their policy influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study that explored children's and families' experiences of alternative care in Thailand. The study used arts‐based methods to engage 160 children living in a range of care settings. This included government and NGO‐run residential care settings (RCS), children's villages, Buddhist temples, migrant learning centres and foster care homes. Interviews were also conducted with 20 parents/guardians who had placed their children in care. Findings show that despite the alternative care system presenting significant challenges, the participants revealed how they strived to preserve their family connections, and how they are 'doing family' in adversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Bank has prioritised and implemented the Citizen Charter National Priority Program (CCNPP) – a community‐driven development program aiming to broadly engage local communities in planning and implementation of the community‐driven development projects in Afghanistan. This paper has utilised Arnstein's model of citizen's participation – the eight stages of citizen participation ladder – to assess the major barriers affecting citizen engagement in community‐driven development projects in Afghanistan. Employing a qualitative approach, we have conducted semi‐structured interviews and focus group discussions with local communities, elders of the community development councils, community development experts and practitioners. The paper has found out that poverty, deinstitutionalised Community Development Councils (CDCs), low level of literacy, lack of volunteering culture, male‐dominance in decision‐making processes, defects in CCNPP operational processes including limited time frame, predefined services, power‐seeking facilitating partners, area selection, and weak CDCs are among the major barriers affecting citizen participation in community‐driven projects in Afghanistan. This paper concluded that citizen's participation in community‐driven development projects in Afghanistan is placed at informing and consultation stages and, in some projects, could be placed at the placation stage of Arnstein's model of citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives organizational commitment in local government? Despite the growth of decentralization initiatives in many developing countries and concurrent investments by international donors to build public sector capacity, there thus far has been little consideration of what drives bureaucrats to stay committed to local government service. This paper addresses this question by drawing on original survey data with more than 150 bureaucrats across 16 district councils in Zambia. The findings show that along with education, key factors that shape commitment include alignment with the mission of local government service, clear job objectives provided by supervisors, and placement in a city council. By contrast, extrinsic rewards and political interference play a more important role when examining drivers of job satisfaction. The results underscore the need for nuanced and multi‐modal policy interventions in developing country contexts to retain skilled staff in local government and improve the delivery of services to local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power outages in urban area carry heavy social and economic costs. Although social cost, especially public sentiment, is concerned by engineers and managers, it has been only qualitatively investigated without a rigorous model in the state‐of‐the‐art research and practice of service restoration (SR) for a long time. To fill this gap, this paper investigates a hybrid model which takes public sentiment into consideration by quantifying public sentiment triggered by power outage. Furthermore, conventional SR method focused on the optimization model with ideal conditions, which leaves a large room for improvement in complex environment. To improve the robustness of the model, the authors propose a reinforcement learning framework to analyze emergency management process without prior rules. At each time step, the optimal decision can be made automatically by a learned model. The numerical simulations with modified IEEE 33‐bus and IEEE 123‐bus systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how public support affects interest groups' advocacy success across three distinct stages in the legislative process. We hypothesize that public support is vital for advocacy success when coalition agreements are negotiated, and it has a weaker effect when legislation is introduced in parliament by the governing majority but becomes stronger again when legislation is adopted. We assess these expectations for 55 Belgian policy issues. We combine evidence on legislative outcomes with public opinion data and a mapping of interest groups' positions in the news. The results indicate that public support is key for advocacy success in the coalition agreement. However, the positive effect of public support weakens when legislation is introduced in parliament – the effect only materializes for initiatives by the opposition – and public support has no significant effect on advocacy success in adopted legislation. Instead, aligning with other groups and political parties becomes more consequential for advocacy success in later legislative stages. Still, on average, interest groups attaining their preferences in adopted legislation enjoy considerable public support. Our results thus underscore the relevance of distinguishing between legislative stages when analyzing interest groups' advocacy success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Current research works are majorly focused on the security importance and prevention measures in wireless sensor network (WSN). The survey of existing papers states that there are no efficient protocols for achieving secure and reliable peer authentication that ensures trust and confidentiality of the end‐users, as public administration worldwide invokes many maximized resources demanding transparency with security. Nowadays, a number of nations have started implementing smart city ideas; new technology should be used to safeguard various public administration services against corruption, intruders rendering an active part, and public transparency. By integrating blockchain (BC) technology with wireless‐based public administration process (WBPAP), the challenge of gaining trust, and eliminating corruption can be attained. Auto‐metric graph neural network (AGNN) approach is proposed for eliminating data tampering and malicious attack in the peer network. Trust, confidentiality, and integrity can be achieved using the proposed BC‐AGNN‐WBPAP‐WSN approach. The simulation of this model is activated in MATLAB, and its performance is examined using some performance metrics. Finally, the attained outcomes prove that the proposed method is the first wireless‐based public blockchain experimental method for public administration analyzed with theoretical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID‐19 has revealed the policy capacity of some governance institutions, both resilience and vulnerability. Hence, this circumstance has demanded public administration scholars and practitioners to rethink the existing governance practices, particularly in making effective crisis‐related policies. This paper reviewed primary and secondary studies exploring the application of policy capacity competencies in facilitating COVID‐19 handling in Asia. In achieving so, we did a systematic literature review of relevant studies published between January and October 2020. Applying the agreed search term to several databases, we found 2541 studies, while merely 30 were included for review. Findings from the studies are predominantly closely linked to operational capacity (n = 21). Other studies are related to political and analytical capacity (n = 14 and 7, retrospectively). We found that there are some dilemmas and inadequacy of understanding concerning the role of features in certain capacities (such as technology use versus individual privacy, the paradox of trust and legitimacy, or centralisation versus decentralisation), particularly in the time of crisis, which is a calling for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspiracy Beliefs (CB) are a key vector of violent extremism, radicalism and unconventional political events. So far, social‐psychological research has extensively documented how cognitive, emotional and intergroup factors can promote CB. Evidence also suggests that adherence to CB moves along social class lines: low‐income and low‐education are among the most robust predictors of CB. Yet, the potential role of precarity—the subjective experience of permanent insecurity stemming from objective material strain—in shaping CB remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose for the first time a socio‐functional model of CB. We test the hypothesis that precarity could foster increased CB because it undermines trust in government and the broader political 'elites'. Data from the World Value Survey (n = 21,650; Study 1, electoral CB) and from representative samples from polls conducted in France (n = 1760, Study 2a, conspiracy mentality) and Italy (n = 2196, Study 2b, COVID‐19 CB), corroborate a mediation model whereby precarity is directly and indirectly associated with lower trust in authorities and higher CB. In addition, these links are robust to adjustment on income, self‐reported SES and education. Considering precarity allows for a truly social‐psychological understanding of CB as the by‐product of structural issues (e.g. growing inequalities). Results from our socio‐functional model suggest that implementing solutions at the socio‐economic level could prove efficient in fighting CB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments across the globe have made repeated attempts to reform their health systems in recent decades with the purpose of improving access while containing costs. What is the role of government in contemporary health policy in achieving these somewhat contradictory goals? This paper conceptualises this role as one of "active stewardship" wherein the government is a central actor steering and coordinating the sector through a portfolio of diverse policy tools. In this conceptualisation, the government is not a passive participant—in merely financing, delivering, or regulating the sector—but a steersman at the helm that sets policy objectives and actively pursues them. We argue that active stewardship is central to achieving contemporary health policy priorities of universal healthcare. We apply this conceptualisation to China's recent healthcare forms and show that the role of the government in governing the sector has changed substantially over time, particularly since 2009, and the changes are showing promising results. China's experience suggests that governments need to more actively guide and shape the behaviour of both public and private players in order to achieve the goals of universal health coverage. It also suggests that a high degree of policy capacity is essential if active stewardship is to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to analyse the current political and social situation in Brazil and show how this context has influenced the management of the public health crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the authors conducted an investigation into Brazil's historical roots, which have not only engendered deep class differences but, also, social psychopathologies such as dissociation and perversion. Finally, this paper presents a symbolic analysis of social exclusion and how the mythical figure of Sophia can inspire a renewed movement of inclusion and tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a profound irony in how public administration and political science splintered at the very pinnacle of their interconnection, intellectual power, and practical impact. Much of public administration has gradually separated from political science. Then public administration broke into pieces, with public administration and public management going in different directions. The central question is this: Are these tensions the product of diverging intellectual trends, or of fundamental organizational changes in higher education? B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre, Eva Sorensen, and Jacob Torfing argue that political science and public administration have reached a "bifurcation" that is nothing less than a "divorce." As I note in this paper, the wedges in this division are deep, and the basic theoretical and practical challenges are forcing it wider. It is time to ask: Can this marriage be saved? Is this a marriage that should be allowed to wither away? If the divorce becomes final, what might we lose in the split? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper critically reviews the consequences of a bifurcation of Political Science and Public Administration. This divorce of two closely related academic fields has removed political explanations to key developments in the public service from Public Administration research and thus it tends to provide a partial view of the reality that it seeks to capture. There are several developments underway in the public sector, which underscore the political nature of public administration. These developments include the rise of administration politics; a growing emphasis on strategic management; governance‐driven democratization and administrative micro‐politics; the increasing significance of interactive and collaborative forms of governance; the rise of multilevel governance; and the development toward a more active citizenship. We find that in all of these areas, public administration research would benefit from incorporating a political science understanding of power, democracy, governance and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Screening is a useful tool for identifying potential health issues; however, it can also lead to overtreatment. Consequently, patients are sometimes harmed by unnecessary treatments and there are cost implications. Overtreatment can also occur in other areas of medicine besides screening and sometimes medical interventions are used to improve performance rather than to treat disease. In this paper, a distinction is made between the perspectives of the patient and the government. For patients, autonomy is important, and they can refuse life‐saving treatments, assuming they have decision‐making capacity. They can also choose to be treated to avoid a very small risk or to improve their performance. For a government with limited funds, it is important to focus on outcomes and fund those screening programmes and other medical interventions that can potentially save the most lives or prevent severe disability. Governments also have the power to legislate to enable a level playing field by prohibiting medications that improve performance, but there is no general consensus about this, and regulations can only be applied to specific, well‐defined activities. The problem with overtreatment results from the different interests involved: autonomy is the guiding idea for patients and outcome is the guiding measure for societies. A general solution will not be possible because of these inherent conflicting interests. However, medical research may improve the identification and predictions surrounding any anomalies detected during scans and reduce the problem in practice for specific conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New public management (NPM) was introduced in the western world with a sole purpose of reforming the public sector and its approaches in managing affairs of the state. These reforms were later adopted in some parts of the African continent including in the sub‐Saharan Africa trying to emulate the successes of the developed economies of the world. South Africa as one of the countries in Africa also sought to shift from its apartheid bureaucratic, inefficient and rule driven management of public affairs. To this end, the democratic South Africa aligned its constitutional provisions with the principles of NPM which include but are not limited to participatory planning, decentralisation, performance management, effectiveness and efficiency. These principles were introduced precisely to better manage the state and its resources including at the local sphere of government. Local government in South Africa is underpinned by its own sets of policy frameworks. This conceptual paper seeks to evaluate the application of NPM principles in the South African municipalities. The said evaluation was undertaken through a review of existing literature. The paper concludes that the application of the said principles in the South African municipalities is confronted by some challenges including lack of political will, corruption as well as lack of skills and capacities. Necessary recommendations have been developed to enhance the performance of municipalities so as to achieve the otherwise good intended provisions of the NPM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the invitation of "Polar" magazine for anthropologists to submit articles and essays regarding issues of state administration and bureaucracies. It explores the important roles of the anthropologists and social scientists in investigating the implications of a bureaucratic administration and its effects of to the state. Moreover, the magazine invites scholars to express their views on how citizens should represent the state and about the functions of states agencies.

Background: In 2006, the United Nations agreed the Convention On the Rights Of Persons With Disabilities. Article 19, 'Living independently and being included in the community' sets out the 'equal rights of all persons with disabilities to live in the community, with choices equal to others...' A generation earlier, a small group of activists had come together at the invitation of the King's Fund—a major United Kingdom charity—to produce (in February 1980) the first pamphlet in an extensive series of contributions to improving the lives of people with learning disabilities. This became the An Ordinary Life initiative. I choose the generic word 'initiative'. This was not a government policy change—in England we had to wait until 2001 for the White Paper Valuing People to catch up with progressive practice. It was not a project as usually understood, although it inspired many local projects across the country. Rather this first pamphlet became the common currency for the emergence of a social movement aspiring to end the institutionalisation of disabled people (in 1980 there were still more than 50,000 people with learning disabilities living their lives in British institutions and many more at risk of this when no longer able to rely on parental support) and ensure their right to live like others in the community. The Narrative: My narrative here, writing as a participant, focuses on the period 1980–2001. It tells the story of how these activists—energised by scandal, international innovation and most importantly by personal experience—created a compelling vision of this better future, communicated this vision and helped to mobilise widespread action to deliver progress. It describes how good people were inventive in finding better ways of listening to people with learning disabilities and arranging ordinary housing and support to meet their aspirations. It considers how regional and national agencies created mutually‐reinforcing elements in the infrastructure necessary to strengthen the local capacities required for success. Lessons: My account also offers an interpretive commentary on how transformative change was achieved. There was no grand plan. Emerging leaders, who appreciated the urgent need for change, inspired and learned from each other in ever‐expanding networks. Serendipity often played a part, strategy developed through experience and change proceeded by what has been called 'scaling across'. Effectively the King's Fund and its allies created a system for continuous learning to support vision‐driven innovation. There are lessons here for meeting the unfinished business of achieving An Ordinary Life in the 2020s. Accessible summary: When this Journal started 50 years ago, very many people still lived in large and isolated places called institutions. My sister was one of these people.In 1980, a major British charity said that everyone has the right to live An Ordinary Life.This article tells the story of how this idea made a big difference in many people's lives.The story suggests lessons for how more people can get the lives they want in the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID‐19 has created significant uncertainty and disruption among governments and people across the globe. Policy studies present various theoretical frameworks that allow scholars and practitioners to make sense of these developments in a structured and systematic fashion. In this paper, we combined the collective learning framework with documentary data and process tracing analysis to describe, first, the features of the COVID‐19 collective learning setting in Ghana. Next, we explored the linkages among learning processes, learning products, and COVID‐19 mitigation. We found that diverse policy actors operated at distinct levels of government and performed different functions in managing the pandemic. Furthermore, we confirmed all three phases of learning (acquisition, translation, and dissemination) in Ghana's context. Lastly, policies, such as public gathering management, mandatory mask‐wearing, partial lockdown, and fiscal and tax reliefs enabled the government to mitigate the pandemic's impact on people. We conclude by highlighting the implications of these findings for policy learning scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Australia's approach to telecommunications infrastructure from the perspectives of the policy official and the public administration scholar. From the official's perspective, the approach has been successful in stimulating private sector investment in many markets. This has been achieved by promoting open competition and where necessary establishing a government business enterprise as a transitional measure to build and operate a next‐generation National Broadband Network (NBN) to provide high‐speed fixed‐line broadband to all Australian premises by 2020. From the academic perspective, however, the approach reveals the shifting balances between political objectives and market challenges. This paper consists of three main parts. The first is an introduction by a former senior public servant turned public administration scholar. The second is from a policy official and provides an overview of the Australian telecommunications market, starting with some historical context, the deregulation in the 1990s and the privatisation of the former government‐owned telecommunications incumbent, Telstra. The third is from a public administration scholar and provides a short complementary critique of Australia's communications policy. The paper discusses, from different perspectives, the policy settings that have been adopted to support infrastructure competition and investment in the Australian telecommunications market, including the development of the NBN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a qualitative analysis, based on the principles of action research in education, of three teaching sequences taught during Geography classes in Southern Switzerland. Each sequence included a controversy on a management project of a public space located in the daily life space of the pupils involved. Different studies have analysed the advantages of a teaching method based on the introduction of controversies into teaching sequences. They stress, for example, the role of this method in the following areas: furthering collective and cooperative learning; enabling pupils to construct personal informed opinions and reinforced statements; developing pupils' autonomy and responsibility. The research underlying this paper aims to measure the impact of this method in terms of strengthening critical thinking competencies, and educating pupils as spatial actors and dynamic citizens. The Geography teaching sequences were planned, under my supervision, by three students of the Teaching Education Institution of Southern Switzerland, where I work as a lower secondary school teacher trainer, as part of their teacher‐training programme. Each student taught the planned teaching sequence in one of their classes. Altogether, three classes were therefore involved in this research study. The analysis was conducted on material produced by the pupils of the three classes during the teaching sequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within public administration, coproduction is a ubiquitous policy discourse, and increasingly an analytic lens through which public relationships with public services are viewed. This article reports an interpretive qualitative study of community practices around three changing hospitals in the Scottish NHS, comprising semi‐structured qualitative interviews with citizens, NHS staff, politicians and journalists, as well as non‐participant observation of community and NHS events. Initially focused on community opposition to top‐down hospital change, the study identified a surprising range of supportive community actions for their local hospitals, including volunteering, fundraising and innovative co‐delivered service models. Building on these examples, the paper presents a model of 'fugitive coproduction,' where individuals and groups within communities collaborate with local staff in ways which significantly shape the provision of local services, without permission or authorisation from relevant authorities, and in modes that are centrally concerned with immediate perceived need not strategic change. I argue that these forms of public action can make valuable contributions to public services, and that they hold lessons for the wider reform of public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study aims at demonstrating how social communication has changed in terms of flows and content in the different phases of the COVID‐19 pandemic to get to the fact that public administrations have embarked on a path of rapprochement with the citizen that starts from the methods of communication and interaction. This article presents an exploratory and multidisciplinary study conducted through the analysis of the Facebook page of the Italian municipalities with the highest Covid19‐induced mortality rates (Piacenza, Bergamo, Lodi, Cremona, Brescia, Pavia, Parma, Mantova, Alessandria, Lecco and Sondrio). Fanpage Karma has been used to conduct the investigation and get the analytics. Local governments are implementing a process of gradual approach to the needs of the citizen and learning new ways of communication. In the conclusion of our study – conducted at the time of the pandemic – we can affirm that local governments are in an early stage of the process both for the acquisition of skills for social communication and for the definition of a communication strategy to strengthen their social identity aware of the fact that the agile and lean communication makes the citizen much more informed and involved in city life than traditional communication. This paper analyses a social network like Facebook as a not common tool for local government's communication in a period of severe emergency. A multidisciplinary approach is adopted as a distinctive factor. The focus is on the contribution of social communication on citizens' engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The article analyzes the existence of bilateral travel restrictions between European countries during the second wave of the Sars‐CoV‐2 pandemic. The paper tests three sets of theoretically derived predictions, which follow epidemiological, economic, and political logics. Method: We analyze a sample of directed bilateral travel restrictions between 27 European countries: 27.26 = 702 country dyads over a period of 6 months during the second wave of the pandemic. Results: We find robust and relevant results for the difference in incidence rates, for income from tourism, for trust in government and public administration and for political inclusiveness. Conclusion: Our analyses demonstrates that economic and political logics exert a strong influence on containment measures and thus stress the relevance of forming a large societal and political coalition against the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper places a critical spotlight on the ways in which governance and social responsibility concerning labour standards work in the context of public sector procurement. Supply chains provisioning the public sector, incorporating a vast array of materials used in public services such as education, health, social housing and transportation, have been under‐researched and under‐theorised in the geographical and wider social science literature on Global Production Networks, Global Value Chains and consumption ethics. Against this backdrop, the paper evaluates the emergence of ethical trading programmes involving labour standards in UK public sector sourcing, drawing on examples from the health, higher education, construction and transportation sectors and a methodology combining interviews with participant observation. Findings show that ethical public procurement is shaped, and often constrained, by: the relatively low profile of many materials used in public services, which challenge effective campaigning and advocacy work; the consequent limits to reputational risk for state departments and first‐tier suppliers if labour issues are encountered in their supply chains; and the significant role of EU and UK procurement law, which until 2014 rendered social responsibility in public sector sourcing a legal risk to specify. Through a practice‐orientated approach and adopting the notion of responsibilisation inspired by governmentality perspectives, the paper grasps how these challenges for ethical public procurement are encountered and negotiated by procurement managers and those influencing them in a neoliberal environment. It is shown that ethical sourcing is significantly less advanced in the UK public sector than it is in consumer goods sectors, with implications for social justice in a whole realm of under‐researched global supply chains. This paper places a critical spotlight on the ways in which governance and social responsibility concerning labour standards work in the context of public sector procurement. Through a practice‐orientated approach and adopting the notion of responsibilisation inspired by governmentality perspectives, the paper grasps how challenges of ethical public procurement are encountered and negotiated by procurement managers and those influencing them in a neoliberal environment. It is shown that ethical sourcing is significantly less advanced in the UK public sector than it is in consumer goods sectors, with implications for social justice in a whole realm of under‐researched global supply chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how public employees at two Chilean government offices constructed their occupational identities. In contrast to the vast majority of previous work, which took the 1920s as its starting point, this study focuses on the period between 1880 and 1920. Additionally, the construction of identity is analysed in direct relation to performance in the workplace. The paper asserts that public criticism of their performance prompted public employees to develop an image of themselves based on the concept of their honourability as competent and honest workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special section on rapid societal change, we highlight the challenges posed by rapid societal changes for social psychology and introduce the seven papers brought together in this special section. Rapid societal changes are qualitative transformations within a society that alter the prevailing societal state. Recent such changes include the election of right‐wing populist governments, the Arab Spring revolutions, and devastating civil wars in the Middle East. Conceptually, such events require consideration of how societal‐level events relate to more proximal psychological processes to bring about the often abrupt, non‐linear (as opposed to incremental and linear) nature of rapid societal change. They also require empirical approaches that allow such qualitative transformations to be captured and studied. This is true both in terms of directly addressing rapidly unfolding societal events in research, and in terms of how rapid, discontinuous change can be analysed. The papers in the special section help to address these issues through introducing novel theoretical and methodological approaches to studying rapid societal change, offering multiple perspectives on how macro‐level changes can both create, and be created by, micro‐level social psychological phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the impact of regulatory complexity, a measure of institutional quality, on the GDP, on per capita income and on the growth rate of the Italian regions. For comparative reasons we also use the duration of civil disputes as a further indicator of institutional quality used in the regressions as an alternative to the indicator of regulatory complexity. From the theoretical point of view, we use the approach of negative co‐ordination externalities, among the four sources of regulatory production that are at work at the same time. Our approach may be applied in all the countries with a multi‐level government system. Using the random effects and quantile regressions models we are able to quantify the effects of an improvement in institutional quality on the GDP and the growth rate, making a comparison between the results obtained using regulatory complexity or the duration of civil disputes as covariates. We also check for spatial dependence among variables. Econometric analysis supports the theoretical assumption that regulatory complexity is an impediment to the growth of regional GDP and per capita income. The main finding of our analysis is that a reduction in regulatory complexity would be more effective than a reduction in the duration of civil disputes in increasing the income and growth rate. This result could be useful for the policy‐maker because by reducing regulatory complexity we may obtain a considerable by‐product in the shorter duration of civil disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year the UK government spends billions of pounds purchasing goods, works and services that are vital to growth, development, health and social welfare. Performed well, public procurement helps a government to nurture competition, save money, and provide better public services. These benefits will not be reaped, however, if the system is not protected adequately from distortion by corruption and/or supplier collusion. This paper concludes that additional measures are required to protect the integrity of procurement processes in England & Wales through improving the distinct public procurement, anti‐corruption and competition regimes and uniting them around a cohesive strategy. It advocates policy coordination and enhancements designed to yield major benefits to public procurement as the UK seeks to develop its own policies post‐Brexit and to grapple with the demands that the Covid‐19 pandemic has placed on public purchasing and the public purse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper investigates the intertwined relation among transparency, civic capital and political accountability in a large sample of Italian municipalities using a new indicator of institutional transparency. Firstly, we test the hypothesis that civic capital affects transparency of public administrations; secondly, we verify whether in municipalities where civic capital is high, citizens' attention toward government accountability is also high, making it politically unfeasible to disregard the demand for transparency. We find that civic capital positively affects transparency and the latter, in turn, is politically rewarding for the local administrators only conditional to the level of civic capital. Our findings are robust to different samples and endogeneity concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, which is authored by members of the Japanese Association of Family Therapy (JAFT), describes the COVID‐19 pandemic in Japan from a family systems perspective. The authors are active members of JAFT and include current and past presidents and officers. We describe the course of the pandemic and the ways in which government policies to mitigate the pandemic have affected Japanese families. Challenges that affect Japanese families include the inability to participate in family and social rituals, prescribed gender roles that specifically affect women, high suicide rates, and prejudice against those who are at risk of spreading the infection. The need to shelter in place has also forced family homes to function as a workplace for parents, classrooms for children, and day care services for frail elders, which has resulted in psychological distress among individuals and conflicts among families. We discuss ways that therapists have worked with Japanese families using online therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Previous studies on the determinants of corruption have seldom addressed cross‐border spillovers of corruption in a panel data setting. In this paper, we first propose a theoretical model of spatial corruption spillover based on network analysis. Then, we analyse spatial spillovers in corruption using a dynamic spatial panel approach. The results indicate that corruption not only exhibits spatial spillovers but also a persistent effect over time. More importantly, increase of income per capita, economic freedom, and percentage of women in the parliaments have a long‐term effect on the perceived levels of corruption. Policies and programmes aiming at abating corruption must take into consideration those results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In the past decades, the demand for remote mutual authentication and key agreement (MAKA) scheme with privacy preserving grows rapidly with the rise of the right to privacy and the development of wireless networks and Internet of Things (IoT). Numerous remote MAKA schemes are proposed for various purposes, and they have different properties. In this paper, we survey 49 three‐factor–based remote MAKA schemes with privacy preserving from 2013 to 2019. None of them can simultaneously achieve security, suitability for multiserver environments, user anonymity, user untraceability, table free, public key management free, and independent authentication. Therefore, we propose an efficient three‐factor MAKA scheme, which achieves all the properties. We propose a security model of a three‐factor–based MAKA scheme with user anonymity for multiserver environments and formally prove that our scheme is secure under the elliptic curve computational Diffie‐Hellman problem assumption, decisional bilinear Diffie‐Hellman problem assumption, and hash function assumption. We compare the proposed scheme to relevant schemes to show our contribution and also show that our scheme is sufficiently efficient for low‐power portable mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance of innovation systems depends, to a great extent, on the degree of public–private collaboration they involve. Thus, innovation policies often aim to enhance this collaboration through public–private partnerships. These partnerships are a multidimensional phenomenon whose success depends on factors related to each of their dimensions. This paper proposes the use of an analytical model that reflects the multidimensional nature of public–private partnerships and analyses to what extent they are applied in a specific innovation system in order to identify the territorial and sectorial factors that act as barriers or drivers to use them. This model aims to help policy makers design appropriate public–private partnerships in each context. The case under review is the Spanish innovation system, given that this system has been suffering from a structural lack of collaboration for several decades, despite the implementation of policies aimed to foster this. Thus, if the model works, it should be able to identify key factors that influence greater or more restricted use of the different PPP formulas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the call of papers for the 2007 SOG conference depicting the notion of good governance in comparative perspective. Deadline for the submission of paper proposal through electronic mail is announced. Coverage responsibility for the selected paper presenters is listed in addition to on-site costs.

This paper reviews illustrative aspects of the introduction of artificial intelligence into Australian social security's (Centrelink) original decision making and merits review. The review highlights the complexity and nuanced character of evaluating greater reliance on artifical intellignce over human decision‐making systems. It argues that technological change is inevitable, and is not necessarily either an unadulterated boon or bane, but calls for careful planning and a comparative assessment of the benefits and limitations of artificial intelligence versus human systems. In social security, it is concluded that particular attention should be given to avoiding discrimination against citizens who are technology poor or otherwise vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the development of the field of public affairs (PA) through the observations, research and experiences of two of its most cited scholars, deputy editors, and longtime contributors to the Journal of Public Affairs. We examine how PA and its practitioners have moved non‐linearly from 2000+ PA, to Public Affairs 2.0, toward a still evolving model of practice. Three areas of practice are explored in depth, including (a) how the function is managed, (b) its communication activity, and (c) how it supports organizations in interacting and engaging with stakeholders and issues. Finally, four alternative futures are laid out as possible paths along which the function may evolve as it moves forward to its next decade's end in 2030. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technologies have been important in the emergence of new forms of control and surveillance of welfare recipients and of those who administer labour market programmes. These technologies have often appeared at the margins of accounts of welfare reform, for example as means of increasing the efficiency or consistency of services, or as constraining frontline discretion. Henman has argued, however, that information technologies need to be analysed not just as administrative tools, but as "non‐human actors," shaping policy development and implementation in ways beyond the intentions of their human creators (Henman, Governing Electronically: E‐government and the Reconfiguration of Public Administration, Policy and Power, Palgrave MacMillan). This paper explores the way that the use of government information systems has shaped employment services in remote Australia where over 80 per cent of those included are Indigenous people. The article describes how the production and use of administrative data within employment services have supported and extended the framing of Indigenous people in remote communities as non‐compliant and as needing external direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]