This article links primary research into the way subjective well-being among poor people can be defined and measured to the growing literature on poverty as a failure of capacity to aspire. Data from Bangladesh, Thailand and Peru are used to illustrate a measurement strategy based on defining well-being as a function of the gap between individuals’ diverse and multiple aspirations, and their sa…
In plural societies, social welfare can be a terrain of political contestation, particularly when public welfare functions are underdeveloped and ethnic or religious groups provide basic social services. It is well established that such organizations favor in-group members, but under what conditions do they serve out-group communities? To address this question, the authors compare the welfare…
Well-governed countries are more likely to make use of foreign aid for the purposes of economic development and poverty alleviation. Therefore, if aid agencies are providing funds for the sake of development, these countries should receive more aid and categorically different types of aid as compared with poorly governed countries. In poorly governed countries aid should be given in forms that …
Recent explanations of transformations of macroeconomic policy under crisis conditions spotlight the intrinsic properties of ideas and the persuasiveness with which they are marketed. Bridging the divide between power and discourse approaches, this article reveals the causal role played by the power resources of expert ideational entrepreneurs, conditional on the political conjuncture in which …
How do crises lead to change? Rationalist approaches to the question that emphasize inexorable structural responses and the pursuit of distributive preferences by newly dominant coalitions, are inadequate because they obscure the social mediation of material events and the pervasive uncertainty that follows destabilization of the precrisis status quo, which constrains actors from fully graspin…
In this article, the author describes sweeping changes in the gender system and offers explanations for why change has been uneven. Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have had little incentive to take on female activities or jobs. The gender egalitarianism that gained traction was the notion that wo…
This study examines how occupational sex segregation affects women’s and men’s perceptions of the availability of workplace support. Drawing on theories of gender and empirical studies of workplace tokenism, the author develops the concept of an occupational minority. Although the notion of tokenism was developed to describe processes at the level of the workplace, the author explores how being…
This article highlights the extent to which finding a job without actively searching (“nonsearching”) sustains workplace sex segregation. We suspect that unsolicited information from job informants that prompts fortuitous job changes is susceptible to bias about gender “fit” and segregates workers. Results from analyses of 1,119 respondents to the 1996 and 1998 waves of the National Longitudina…
Based on anthropological fieldwork in Yemen, this article examines the relationship between gender, mobility, and il/legality in the lives of Ethiopian domestic workers. Studies about migrant domestic workers in the Middle East often focus on abuse and exploitation, making a plea for the regulation of women’s legal status. Yet legal migration does not automatically mean that women gain more rig…
Many doubts have been expressed about the capacity of states to administer federally supported social service programs. This article relies on institutional theory, punctuated equilibrium theory, and evidence from two states to analyze the way states administer the programs in times of fiscal crisis. The particular context is the fiscal crisis of the early 2000s in substance abuse programs. The…
This article aims to explain cross-country variations in a paradigmatic element of the new public management reforms: the shift from low-powered incentives (i.e., flat salaries) to high-powered ones (i.e., performance-related pay [PRP] systems). It presents a theoretical model based on insights developed for understanding the success of performance-related incentives in the private sector. Econ…
This article examines the influence of extrinsic and intrinsic factors on decision-making conflict on governing boards in public organizations. Using survey data from more than 700 school board members in California, I investigate the degree to which various characteristics of the environment in which the board operates, processes the board implements, and traits of board members themselves pre…
Current research in public management reports a positive effect of agency network activity in the interorganizational network on its performance (degree centrality hypothesis). This study presents a different hypothesis: The embeddedness of agency network relations in cohesive subgroups in the interorganizational network positively affects its performance (“cohesive subgroup” hypothesis). The d…
Both formal rules and informal norms guide government operations; formal rules often function through informal norms. Balanced budget requirements (BBRs) are formal rules, but they are implemented via the intermediary of informal norms—interpretation of BBRs by state officials. This article examines the fiscal implications of informal norms that govern budgetary balance. We propose that informa…
Cross-sectoral partnerships are increasingly seen as a solution to the most pressing social problems facing contemporary societies. Sectoral rationales for partnership suggest that public, private, and nonprofit organizations each possess distinctive advantages that can enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of public agencies’ efforts to address social issues. We present an explorat…
This article provides a comprehensive analysis of stability and punctuations in public spending within and across two different countries—Denmark and the United States. The theoretical starting point is the classic model of budget incrementalism and Jones and Baumgartner's model of disproportionate information processing. First, despite the clear differences in institutional setup, we show that…
Competition is often prescribed as an efficiency-enhancing tonic for ailing health systems. However, critics claim that competition exacerbates socioeconomic inequality in health care. This claim is tested in relation to the “internal market” reforms of the English National Health Service (NHS) from 1991 to 97, which injected a small dose of hospital competition into a state-funded, state-owned…
How can independent physician contractors be motivated to contribute to public service health care? We consider evidence, derived from a natural experiment in the UK publicly funded dental care system, concerning the efficacy of using a contractual mechanism that provides explicit rewards for increased service provision against the alternative of offering an employment-like relationship. We fin…