Testing How Management Matters in an Era of Government by Performance Management

Public administration finds itself in an era of government byperformance management, which is reflected in the widespreadassumption that management is a key determinant of performance,and that it is reasonable to expect managers to measurably improveorganizational effectiveness. This article joins a growing literaturein seeking to conceptualize and empirically test how externalenvironmental influences and internal management factors combineto create performance, relying on data from the 2002–2003National Administrative Studies Project (NASP-II) survey ofstate government health and human services officials. We categorizemanagerial efforts to facilitate organizational performanceas determined either through their interactions with the organizationalenvironment, or through employing workable levers to changeinternal organizational culture, structure, and technology.Among the external environmental variables we find that thesupport of elected officials and the influence of the publicand media have a positive impact on effectiveness. Among internalmanagement choices, the ability to create a developmental organizationalculture, establish a focus on results through goal clarity,and decentralize decision-making authority are all positivelyassociated with organizational effectiveness.     

Sources of drug information among adolescent students

A sample of 1023 eighth and tenth grade students in small to medium-sized central Texas school districts was assessed to determine the amount of information they receive from ten sources about six categories of drugs. The amount of information males reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what females reported, and the amount of information that eighth graders reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what tenth graders reported. Television was the primary source of drug information for all categories of drugs except inhalants, for which friends and television were equally important sources. Parents and printed media (magazines or newspapers) were of secondary importance, followed by friends and teachers. Adolescents were less likely to receive drug-related information from experience, siblings, church, doctors, and police. The reliance on the mass media for drug information in smaller school districts is a pattern which has been previously observed in larger urban districts. This consistency suggests that mass media approaches to drug education are likely to be as effective in rural areas and smaller towns as they are among urban adolescents. Implications for television programming are discussed.     

Trait Expressiveness and Marital Satisfaction: The Role of Idealization Processes

This study examined the processes that underlie the association between trait expressiveness and marital satisfaction. A total of 168 newlywed couples participated in a four‐wave, 13‐year longitudinal study of marriage. Cross‐sectional and longitudinal path analyses suggested that expressiveness promotes satisfaction by leading spouses to engage in affectionate behavior and by leading them to idealize their partner. Expressive people formed idealized images of their partner because they brought out the best in their partner's behavior and because they interpreted their partner's behavior in a favorable light. The study extends previous research by showing that the benefits of trait expressiveness extend into the second decade of marriage and by providing a plausible explanation of the connections between trait expressiveness and marital satisfaction.     

African Americans and municipal employment: A test of two perspectives

A survey of the extant literature addressing the factors that drive African American municipal employment offers two broad types of explanations: (1) Black political power and (2) institutional. A comparative assessment of the performance of each of these explanations fills a gap in the literature by illuminating the differences of these distinct perspectives when it comes to employment of Blacks in the public sector. Focusing on six Florida cities from 1960 to 2000, this study tests the predictive power of each of these explanations comparatively for four city departments. The findings indicate that the Black political power explanation performs better than the institutional explanation as a predictor of Black employment.     

Accuracy of the College Majors Finder for Three Majors

The Self-Directed Search was administered to 68 university seniors who were majoring in Chemistry/Chemical Engineering, Elementary Education, and Office Administration. Their resulting three-letter summary codes were compared with three-letter college major codes obtained from the College Majors Finder. A high degree of agreement between the two sets of codes was found for each of the three majors. Effective methods for matching people to jobs have held the interest and occupied much time for career counselors and vocational theorists since the inception of the trait-factor approach to career counseling. More recently, Holland (1985a) broadened and clarified matching procedures through the development of his typological theory of vocational choice. Just as personality types and occupational environments have been organized using Holland's framework to foster an understanding of occupational choice, Holland's theory can also be used to explain other types of choices, such as choice of a college major.     

Poverty and social trends in Russia

The article describes the socioeconomic situation of the Russian population and its dynamics in 1992. The analysis is based on series of regional sociological surveys led by the All-Russian Living Standards Research Center and on official Russian statistical data. The basic unit of analysis is the family, and hence family typology approbated both in research and in practical social work is introduced. Besides describing and discussing the growing poverty tendencies in contemporary Russia, the article also contains methodological recommendations for social policy bodies and social workers on the strategy of work in social maintenance and social support of the least secure population strata.     

Female Labor Force Participation in Urban and Rural China1

Abstract The objective of this study is to examine female labor force participation and its determinants in rural and urban China. The sociological literature has demonstrated that participation tends to increase in urban and industrialized places where women have higher levels of education and fewer children, where more workers are engaged in service pursuits, and where family structure is less traditional. With the use of data on counties and cities (N = 2,377) from the I-percent sample of the 1982 census of the People's Republic of China, it was found that female labor force participation is likely to rise in areas with increased agricultural employment, educational levels, proportion of female-headed households, and higher male-to-female sex ratios. Both the size of the service sector and the fertility rate had negligible effects on female labor force participation. Although, on average, rural places have slightly higher levels of female labor force participation, when other variables are controlled, urban places have a higher rate of female participation. In addition, the findings suggest that market factors (i.e., education) are more likely to determine the rate of female labor force participation in urban areas; whereas demographic and social factors (i.e., sex ratio and household structure) play a more important role in explaining the female labor force participation in rural counties.