The Planets Aligned: Is Child Protection Policy Reform Good Luck or Good Management?

Abstract

Governments across Australia are struggling to address escalating child protection notifications, a marked increase in the number of children in State care, a decrease in the number of foster carers and chronic workforce shortages in child welfare services. This paper explores the reform process that culminated in the proclamation of the Victorian Children, Youth and Families Act, 2005 and represents an aspect of the response in Victoria to these wider issues. It explores the history of the reform from the perspective of key actors from government, non-government sectors and academics who participated in the process. The paper explores the “ingredients of social policy reform” and how the change process was managed in Victoria. It does not seek to evaluate the reform but rather to understand the complex processes through which a propitious moment for reform was both seized and constructed.     

Managing Meaning: the constitutive contradictions of institutional culture

Abstract

This essay seeks to defamiliarise the currently dominant sense of institutional culture in South Africa. It does so first by examining the history of the emergence of the term in U.S. business studies in the late 1970s, and second, its translation/transposition into higher educational discourse in the 1980s. A third section examines the developing scepticism around the term in the 1990s, and the essay as a whole argues that the idea of institutional culture is based on a constitutive contradiction between instrumental and constitutive understandings of social process. The essay frames the debate around the ways in which the creation of new vocabulary responds either openly or in concealed ways to larger social trends and tensions, and notes the ways in which the current emphasis on institutional culture in South Africa curiously works to marginalise the dominant elements in the neo-liberal transformation of higher education.     

Resisting the Restoration: response to Premesh Lalu

This paper questions Wassenaar's analysis of the ‘financial crisis in South Africa’. It examines the important differences which Wassenaar ignores between 1972–1974 when government revenue rose substantially relative to government expenditure and the period after that when the fiscal deficit rose so substantially. The review considers that Wassenaar has failed to provide any convincing explanation of why government has grown in South Africa. An alternative explanation is offered that draws on the emerging economic analysis of political action. The review then goes on to examine the recent South African Insurance Commission report to see how well opinion in Dr. Wassenaar's own industry accords with the principles of free enterprise. It finds that even in his own industry attachment to competitive principles is highly ambiguous.     

Capacity constraints and the dynamics of underwriting profits

The presence of an underwriting profit cycle in property/liability insurance has become a stylized fact. Models of this'underwriting cycle'imply that the insurance market is governed by two regimes, as capacity is constrained or not. We apply the smooth transition regression model to insurance industry data for 1934–1993 to test for a regime shift. We find a rapid shift between two distinct regimes with different dynamics. When capacity is not restricted, we find no evidence of a cycle. The cycle is present in periods when capacity is restricted, immediately following World War II and after 1968. The underwriting cycle appears to be a recent phenomenon.     

Reunite management and planning

In many companies the planning function has been removed from the mainstream of corporate life. Planning (and planners) have been isolated from the locus of decision- making power and insulated from information vital to the planning process. The outcome has been the generation of irrelevant plans and a proliferation of impotent planners. The author argues for a reintegration of technical expertise and managerial power, a reunion of planning and decision-making processes.     

Effect of regulatory modes on work performance: the moderating role of job familiarity and job complexity / El efecto del modo de regulación en el rendimiento laboral: el rol moderador de la familiaridad con el trabajo y la complejidad de la tarea

Prior research has shown that the combination of assessment and locomotion regulatory modes leads to the best performance-related outcomes. The aim of the current study was to analyse how familiarity and complexity moderate this relationship between the two regulatory modes and job performance. Participants’ locomotion and assessment tendencies were measured, and they were asked to rate the familiarity and complexity of their daily work tasks, as well as their job performance over the last year. Results showed that when job tasks were unfamiliar and more complex, high locomotion and high assessment were both needed for optimal performance. However, when both familiarity and job complexity were low, high locomotion alone led to the best performance. A similar result was obtained when task familiarity was high: regardless of task complexity, the best performance was shown by employees high in locomotion, no matter the assessment. In conclusion, the present study furnishes useful suggestions for employers who wish to maximize employees’ performance.     

Does Dividing the Range by Four Provide an Accurate Estimate of a Standard Deviation in Family Science Research? A Teaching Editorial

Occasionally, scientific reports have omitted information on standard deviations, making estimates of effect sizes very difficult to impossible. In such situations, several scholars have recommended obtaining an estimate of the standard deviation of distributions by dividing the range of the distribution (highest value minus lowest value) by four. However, there appears to be little evidence to confirm the validity of this approach. Articles from 2012 to 2015 in the journal Marriage & Family Review were surveyed to find instances where demographic variables (age, education, duration of relationship, number of children) were reported with both standard deviations and ranges. Ratios between range and standard deviations were calculated by several rules of thumb or more complex formulas and compared with the actual ratios obtained. Results indicated that dividing by five in general provided a more accurate estimate of actual standard deviations but accuracy in predicting the true ratio between range and standard deviation was substantially related to the position of the mean score within the range of scores with larger divisors needed as the mean approached either the minimum or the maximum values of the demographic variable (skew). Other recent formulae for estimating the standard deviation were also evaluated, but the skew-based approach appeared to be more accurate than the others. However, further investigation in other samples is needed because the skew-based approach was derived from observation of the data here, which might not replicate in different sets of data.     

Interaction Between Autocorrelation and Conditional Heteroscedasticity: A Random-Coefficient Approach

In applied econometrics, we tend to tackle specification problems one at a time rather than considering them jointly. This has serious consequences for statistical inference. One example of this is considering autocorrelation and autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) separately. In this article we consider a linear regression model with random coefficient autoregressive disturbances that provides a convenient framework to analyze autocorrelation and ARCH simultaneously. Our stationarity conditions and testing results reveal the strong interaction between ARCH and autocorrelation. An empirical example of testing the unbiasedness of experts' expectations of inflation demonstrates that neglecting conditional heteroscedasticity or misspecifying the autocorrelation structure might result in unreliable inference.