Search

Many government responses to the coronavirus-pandemic have been marked by attempts at expertization and scientization. Particularly, politico-epistemological authority is being given to the behavioural science community consulting government. This article critically scrutinizes this most recent wave of behavioural expertization. Taking developments in the UK and the Netherlands as our case-studies, we shed light on the disparate ways in which behavioural expertise is being (re)shaped during COVID-19. Some of these ways point at processes of behavioural expertise ‘drift’, in which the applicability and robustness of this knowledge source gets overstated. Other ways instead point at processes of behavioural expertise ‘thrift’ or ‘shift’, where the knowledge is used only minimally or taken in wholly new and norm-breaking directions. Doing so, we seek to demonstrate the importance of institutional context in understanding how behavioural expertise is currently shaping public policy: underpinning institutional configurations determine whether the expertise is gauged and applied effectively.

In this paper we present a Multimodal Echoborg interface to explore the effect of different embodiments of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) in an interaction. We compared an interaction where the ECA was embodied as a virtual human (VH) with one where it was embodied as an Echoborg, i.e, a person whose actions are covertly controlled by a dialogue system. The Echoborg in our study not only shadowed the speech output of the dialogue system but also its non-verbal actions. The interactions were structured as a debate between three participants on an ethical dilemma. First, we collected a corpus of debate sessions with three humans debaters. This we used as baseline to design and implement our ECAs. For the experiment, we designed two debate conditions. In one the participant interacted with two ECAs both embodied by virtual humans). In the other the participant interacted with one ECA embodied by a VH and the other by an Echoborg. Our results show that a human embodiment of the ECA overall scores better on perceived social attributes of the ECA. In many other respects the Echoborg scores as poorly as the VH except copresence.

This article reflects on the contributions to the Special Issue on evidence-based legislation. It argues that both normative questions about how evidence should be used and factual questions about how evidence actually is used in legislation require a reflection on the nature of ‘evidence’ and its role in the crafting and application of legislation. Based on the understanding that the answers to these questions are intimately linked with the ideas, values and interests that underpin legislation, the article explores three specific issues: the burden of evidence in legislation and lawmaking (who needs to produce evidence about what), the criteria for determining what counts as ‘good’ evidence, and the various purposes for which evidence is used in legislation and legislative processes. Reflecting on these issues may help to reach a more balanced and nuanced view on the role of evidence in evidence-based legislation and the ways in which the law and legal analysis can facilitate the fruitful use of evidence.

Our study focuses on myths about older people’s smartphone use. Self-reported data, from Eurostat for example, report access rather than actual usage and are of limited use. What respondents report does not necessarily correspond with their actual smartphone usage behaviour in everyday life. We therefore conducted a tracking study to gain insight into smartphone usage among older adults. Smartphone activity logs were collected from individuals aged 60–79 (N = 303) throughout a period of 28 days between February and May 2019 in Canada, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. The data thus obtained on actual smartphone use were critically examined in the light of seven myths related to the smart phone usage of older people in everyday life. We also analysed the data in the context of empirical studies in the field of older people’s digital behaviour. Finally, after drawing our conclusions, we present limitations and sketch implications for future research.

Since 2015 Dutch street-level bureaucrats have ample discretionary space to determine how to help clients. Simultaneously, resources were reduced. According to Zacka SLBs should avoid three pathological positions: indifference, caregiving, and enforcing. At the individual level SLBs supposedly accomplish that by a gymnastics of the self. We observed SLBs. They avoided the pathological positions by (1) reframing the reigning policy for clients (enforcing caringly) and (2) managing clients’ self-image, bolstering their confidence, or tempering their expectations (caring forcefully). SLBs practice a gymnastics of the client alongside a gymnastics of the self. SLBs thus make the reigning policy palatable for clients.

De kritiek dat ambtelijke managers inwisselbaar zouden zijn, met name procesvaardigheden maar weinig inhoudelijke expertise hebben, is niet nieuw. Er wordt vaak verwezen naar de vele en vooral snelle loopbaanstappen van topambtenaren. De ontwikkeling lijkt mede te worden veroorzaakt door Management Development-beleid van overheidsorganisaties waarin het streven naar employability, kort gezegd brede inzetbaarheid en flexibiliteit, centraal staat. Dit artikel analyseert de meerwaarde en risico’s van een dergelijk beleidsstreven naar employability . Aan de hand van recente Nederlandse onderzoeksgegevens wordt duidelijk dat de feitelijke mobiliteit van managers bij de rijksoverheid hoog is en dat dit risico’s als kennisverlies en ongeloofwaardigheid in de hand werkt. Daarnaast zijn er voorzichtige aanwijzingen dat employability op gespannen voet kan staan met de vervulling van menselijke basisbehoeften die ten grondslag liggen aan motivatie.

Informal networks are crucial for the functioning of public organizations and the quality of government service. Because of this, public administration scholars increasingly theorize on what drives informal network behavior, particularly in terms of whom public officials contact for information or advice. However, existing studies provide a rather rational and strategic account of how such networking occurs, pointing to factors, such as preference similarity, resource availability, and social capital as its main drivers. This article critiques the microfoundations of existing theoretical models, arguing that they (a) potentially require too extensive information-processing capabilities on behalf of individual decision-makers and (b) discount the role that affect and emotive responses are likely to play in the social activity of networked interaction. In response, this article proposes three lines of theorizing on how (interpersonal) affect can be incorporated into theorizing about the network behavior of public officials: (1) affect as a fallback strategy; (2) affect in the driver’s seat; and (3) affect as a decision distorter. Several methods are discussed to empirically pursue the presented lines of theorizing.

Higher education institutions (HEI) are maneuvering the competing institutional logics of academia and commerce, which provide widely conflicting bases for legitimacy ascriptions. HEI that try to internalize both competing institutional logics become hybrids, addressing the resulting internal tensions and conflicts through efforts of structural separation or blending. Whereas these generic approaches have been well described, also for HEI, their underlying, constituting organizational design remains unclear. We refer to the general organization design literature to suggest templates for hybrid HEI. Dependent on the relative strength attributed to the two competing logics, respectively, we specify typical organizational designs reflecting separation as well as blending solutions. We embed these hybrid organizational design types with the pure archetypes of both logics and offer implications for research and practice in the HE field.

This article analyses the extent to which European Union (EU) directives allow for variation in domestic implementation. Such flexibility in implementation may be used to deal with heterogeneity among member states. Based on an original dataset of 164 directives adopted between 2006 and 2015, we find that the use of flexibility is associated more with efforts to accommodate differences between national policies (substantive use of discretion) than with attempts to facilitate the decision-making process in and between EU legislative institutions (strategic use of discretion). Although flexibility may be used to address some of the same concerns that drive differentiated integration (DI), the situations in which each is most likely to be used are distinct because they approach the divergences between member states differently.

This study examines Lean—conceptualized as Involvement in Continuous Improvement and Lean Techniques—in hospitals. Specifically, we aim to determine the extent to which hospital workers’ perceptions of Lean are related to perceptions of their performance and wellbeing, and to what extent these relationships are explained by autonomy. Our data (n = 754) come from a Lean implementation study in a Dutch hospital, and are analysed using structural equation modelling. First, our results indicate that Involvement in Continuous Improvement positively relates to hospital workers’ perceptions of several dimensions of hospital performance (quality, service, efficiency, and predictability) and their own wellbeing (burnout and engagement)—a mutual benefit for both employer and employees. However, we also show that the Lean Techniques do not significantly relate to wellbeing. Second, our study reveals that it is essential to distinguish between responsible autonomy and choice autonomy, as we found differing mediating effects. Based on these findings, we recommend HR executives to move away from approaches that focus on happy few and to move away from approaches that focus on techniques.

How citizens behave toward public sector workers is crucial for the well-being and performance of workers. Scholars have mainly focused on understanding negative citizen behaviors, such as aggression. We study a positive behavior, namely compassionate behavior. We study real compassionate behavior in the form of writing positive encouragement messages that are distributed to social workers in the field. We test if showing difficulties faced by public sector workers results in citizens writing more encouragement messages. We also test if bureaucrat bashing results in less encouragement messages. Using a preregistered experiment among a representative sample of Canadian citizens (n = 1,264), we find that showing public sector workers' struggles and imperfections makes citizens almost twice as likely to write an encouragement message. Hence, showing your weakness can be a strength. Bureaucrat bashing, however, has no effect. Results show that citizens can be stimulated to act more positively toward public sector workers.

Eager to learn from private sector trends, practitioners in (semi)public organizations across the world have recently turned their eyes to the concept of work engagement to improve employee performance. Studies in the private sector show that work engagement is a more robust predictor of performance than, for example, satisfaction. The goal of this study is to find out whether the effects of work engagement on attitudinal, behavioral, and performance outcomes within the semipublic and public sector are also as high as expected and whether these relationships differ between the public, semipublic, and private sector. The results of the cross-sectoral meta-analysis of 130 studies showed that the most noticeable significant sectoral differences can be found in the mean work engagement and the effects of work engagement on the level of attitudinal outcomes (job satisfaction and commitment) and behavioral outcomes (workaholism and turnover intention).

The quality of judgment by regulatory professionals is key to good regulatory governance yet also a potential problem. Psychological studies have shown that individuals easily make judgment errors and that feeling accountable—expecting to have to explain and justify oneself—improves one’s judgments. This paper explores to what extent felt accountability improves regulatory judgment processes in more realistic settings than the traditional laboratory study. It does so in an experimental design inspired by a classic study. Samples of professional regulators and students were given a judgment task with conflicting and incomplete information under varying conditions of accountability and in a context of ambiguity. Results confirm that accountability improves professional regulators’ judgment processes in terms of decision time, accurate recall of information and absence of recency bias. However, professional regulators were significantly more accurate in their judgments than students. Our results suggest that it is important to devise appropriate forms of operational accountability for regulatory professionals that stimulate their cognitive efforts and guard against biases.

What views do people have of public sector workers? Public sector workers are often portrayed negatively. It is unclear, however, to what extent such negative perceptions are shared among different groups in society. Using a large representative survey in the Netherlands, we study whether people's socioeconomic status is related to having more negative stereotypes about public sector workers. Contrary to expectations, education and income are unrelated to stereotypes. We do find a relation with subjective income: People with low subjective income have more negative stereotypes. Moreover, the sector people work in is highly relevant. People working in core governmental sectors such as central and local government have positive stereotypes. Other groups—such as private sector and non-profit workers—have a far more negative image of public sector workers. These findings help us to understand people's perceptions of public sector workers and the problems various groups have with the state.

PurposePA scholars argue that two gaps are present in the stress literature: (1) “stress” is too simply treated as deleterious and (2) insufficient efforts are made to capture public servants' stress appraisal, i.e. the degree to which stressors are appraised as hindering or challenging. Overcoming Gap 1, this study aims to study stress as a continuum; from distress to eustress. Overcoming Gap 2, stress appraisal is studied through testing the interaction of PsyCap with the two most common clusters of public servants' job stressors: emotional and psychological stressors.Design/methodology/approachHypotheses are tested through structural equation modeling. A sample is used in this study of 1,853 Dutch public servants.FindingsThe results show that emotional and psychological stressors are high, but public servants often appraise them as challenging or as “part of the job”, with consequently no increased distress or decreased eustress. Moreover, psychological capital helps public servants to appraise some of the negative effects of emotional, but not psychological, stressors as less deleterious.Originality/valueBy approaching stress as a continuum, the authors bring in a more complete picture of public servants' stress in PA literature. Moreover, this research shows that the ambiguous results in the existing stress literature about the consequences of emotional and psychological stressors on distress/eustress can partially be explained by sector differences as well as personality differences (i.e. PsyCap). Finally, this study criticizes the one-sided attention to PsyCap as purely positive. PsyCap is not only unhelpful in coping with psychological stressors, it also drains the challenging properties of psychological stressors for dedication.

Organising effective policy coordination has become a key principle of EU policymaking in recent decades. Within the European Commission, interservice consultations (ISCs) play an important role to coordinate between the different directorate-generals. In spite of this importance, ISCs have so far not been analysed in a systematic way. This paper addresses this gap by systematically analysing the numbers, types and content of comments made in ISCs around climate change adaptation. Our analysis shows that ISCs were primarily used to provide substantive comments, related to problem analyses, objectives or instruments, as well as to strengthen or weaken connections with policy efforts in adjacent domains. Institutional comments, related to mandates or resources, proved rare. Moreover, we find that the types of comments given in ISCs are mediated by institutional factors that shape the temporal dynamics of policy processes. Rather than reflecting the ideal types of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ coordination, the overall pattern of policy coordination in the ISCs typifies an in-between form of ‘incremental policy coordination.’.