This paper discusses the early implementation of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 in health and social care in England. The author examines the research evidence to date, particularly monitoring data from the Department of Health, in order to review the progress made in implementation. The extent to which the Act is achieving its overall aim of facilitating decision-making by people lacking capacit…
Dominant discourses regarding concerns with anti-social behaviour in England and Victoria, Australia, reveal counterposed perspectives; the former positioning anti-social behaviour as an issue of law and order and an extension of concerns with crime and victimization, and the latter emphasizing concerns with the vulnerability of the perpetrator. These opposing perspectives inevitably give rise …
When local government authorities began to develop criminal policies with the police in the 1980s, crime prevention was advocated as an inclusive, holistic approach to crime control that had the potential to challenge the prevailing justice paradigm. To date this new prevention paradigm has not been realized in England and Wales. The police and courts are being relied upon more than ever, and r…
Foremost amongst social policy interventions, state education has a singular and foundational role in the promotion of equality and human rights. This paper explores the way that such matters are addressed in the policy and law making programmes of the UK’s devolved administrations. It is argued that this is an appropriate locus of enquiry for the constitutional law establishing the devolved le…
This article aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarly work that critically deconstructs dominant discourse on ‘trafficking’ and to the literature that documents and theorizes the gap between states’ spoken commitment to children’s rights and the lived experience of migrant children in the contemporary world. It contrasts the intense public and policy concern with the suffering of ‘tr…
There has been a massive expansion in published information about the performance of bodies delivering public services but little research about the effects on citizens. Research on information and political participation suggests that information cues allow citizens to economize on the need for full information, influencing their perceptions and attitudes and helping them hold democratic gover…
This article uses exponential random graph models to investigate the roles of policy-relevant beliefs and social capital as drivers of network structure. The advocacy coalition framework argues that actors with similar policy beliefs are more likely to form coalitions, leading to policy subsystems fragmented into ideological groups. Social capital is defined as trust and norms of reciprocity, w…
In an era of privatization, government-nonprofit relations largely determine the face of social provision. Yet, little is known about the organizational factors that influence the receipt of government allocations by nonprofit human service organizations. This study examines how the institutional and ecological environments under which nonprofit human services operate along with the political a…
Employing intrinsically motivated individuals has been proposed as a means of improving public sector performance. In this article, we investigate whether intrinsic motivation affects the sorting of employees between the private and the public sectors, paying particular attention to whether extrinsic rewards crowd out intrinsic motivation. Using British longitudinal data, we find that individua…
This article examines the institutional motivations underlying innovation. Although attention to motivation played a role in early theorizing on innovation, the phenomenon is understudied empirically. A clearer understanding of the relative importance of differing institutional motivations can illuminate why public organizations adopting innovative strategies and programs often fail to replicat…
Public service motivation (PSM) is perceived as a multidimensional construct, as an overall, unobserved latent variable with various latent dimensions. The present study focuses on the relationships between PSM and its dimensions. The purposes in this study are to confirm a set of revised items as indicators of a rational base of PSM, to compare a four-factor model with various three-factor mod…
In the United States, housing policies focused on assisting low-income families toward homeownership have resulted in the creation of publicly subsidized affordable mortgage programs. Private lenders and their employees (loan originators) are often the key point of contact to connect low-income borrowers to public programs. But why would loan originators offer borrowers public loan programs, pa…
This article presents a theoretical assessment of how the impact of management might differ in public versus private organizations. It essentially seeks to reframe the debate from “are public organizations are different from private organizations?” to “is the impact of management action the same in both sectors?” We start with a series of assumptions based on a set of relevant variables and the…
Debates about the merits of publicness have dominated the public administration landscape since the foundation of the modern state. The extent of organizational publicness (ownership, funding, and control) has waxed and waned in developed countries: it rose following the postwar settlement and fell under the policies of New Right government and the popularity of the notions of New Public Manage…
Research comparing public and private organizations and otherwise analyzing “publicness” involves complex challenges. These include the challenge of designing and attaining adequate samples to represent the two complex categories of “public” and “private,” as well as dimensions of publicness, and subcategories and control variables needed for valid comparisons. This review of sampling alternati…
This article echoes recent calls for public management research to focus on core questions and utilize multiple methods to advance the state of knowledge in the field. In this article, we call for more experimental research on the public/private distinction, which is a core public management research topic. We then conduct a pilot experimental study that provides new insights—and what seem to b…
“Empirical publicness” explains organizations on the basis of their mix of political and economic authority, whereas “normative publicness” seeks to identify, prescribe or infuse public values. The scholarly traditions developed by these two types of publicness have tended not to overlap and for very good reason—blending empirical and normative theory and purpose is a problem of longstanding, o…
This article reviews evidence from historical crisis episodes from four geographical regions to identify patterns in how economic crises shape dimensions of child wellbeing. The analysis is motivated by a concern to identify possible policy lessons of relevance to the 2007- financial crisis and its impacts on children and their caregivers. We conclude that while broad counter-cyclical economic …
Despite the potential advantages of a closer link between planning evaluation and programme evaluation , both fields have been developed independently. This is mainly due to significant differences between them, particularly in terms of historical background, evaluation scope and contexts, the articulation between theory and practice, and the timings of evaluation. This article advocates bridgi…
This article examines current empirical approaches to group learning. It focuses on two central questions: Are these approaches really measuring group learning, and what critical issues should be resolved in future group-learning research? The rationale for this examination is threefold. First, the last 10 years have seen a substantial increase in research on group learning. As this literature …