Exploring the Potential of Shadow Controls in the Evaluation of Children’s Services

This article describes and presents a framework for an under‐used evaluation technique in the context of an evaluation of a programme for disaffected young people. Shadow controls—the use of expert judgement to estimate the success of a programme—are often dismissed in research design as an unreliable form of comparison, but can be useful in situations where there is limited scope for a control group or to enhance the causal inference attributable to non‐experimental evaluations. The exercise described uses a practice tool as a structure for making predictions about the situations of the young people on the programme, assuming they do not receive an intervention. These predictions (shadow controls) are then compared to outcome data for the young people at the end of the programme. The results of the exercise provide some important messages about the programme’s effectiveness and the potential for strengthening non‐experimental evaluation methods. The article also discusses how the method can usefully inform evaluations of social programmes and encourage agency and user collaboration.     

Clarifying the merits of argument in evaluation practice

In prior writings, we have explored alternative means of justifying claims in evaluation practice. After a brief review of these previous investigations, we provide an analysis employing Toulmin's (1958) jurisprudence metaphor in the assessment of evaluative arguments. Applications and implications for evaluation practice are discussed.     

Achieving impact in ergonomic research

People are central to system functioning and this role has been dramatically extended by new information technology. This makes possible the fundamental transformation of processes across systems of systems. Can Ergonomics research play an effective role in systems integration innovation? To have real world impact on such problems the system of R and D needs to sustain strong designs that address the functionality of socio-technical systems and support the implementation of innovations, taking into account the complexity of change, the importance of values of dignity and trust, and creating a common understanding amongst all stakeholders to enable design for operations. Strong research designs are more expensive, difficult, risky and prolonged than more commonly practiced weaker designs. They require active engagement with the industrial or service provider and involve overcoming cultural and other barriers to effective implementation and change. To create a virtuous cycle of research-generated impact it is necessary for strong designs to be well supported in the research community and for real world impact to be central to performance criteria of research excellence. Unfortunately neither of these criteria appear to be fulfilled. To ameliorate this, deficiencies in the full cycle of systems integration innovation need to be addressed.     

Organizational Form,Ownership Structure and Corporate Performance: A Contextual Empirical Analysis of UK Companies1

This paper contributes to the literature on organizational form and performance (the performance-conduct paradigm) by examining the impact of two sets of variables that have not been examined previously: measures of environmental uncertainty and alternative forms of controlling separation of ownership from control. The paper first examines the extent to which contextual variables such as perceived environmental uncertainty and age of the organizational form moderate the relationship between organizational form and corporate performance. Next, the paper extends the analysis by examining the possible effects of ownership and control structures on performance. Measures suggested by agency theory, such as conventional ownership proxies (i.e. proportion of shares held by identifiable, homogenous groups), the proportion of non-executive board members and Fama and Jensen's concept of separation of decision management from decision control are used in the analysis. The results indicate that these measures have direct impact on corporate performance in their own right, though the main impact is indirect through interactions with organizational form variables.     

OLIGOPOLY CAPITALISM, LABOR ORGANIZATION, AND WAGES OF WORKERS IN AMERICAN MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES

This article investigates the interaction between oligopoly power, labor unionization, and worker wages. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for workers in manufacturing industries little evidence is found that workers are exploited by oligopolistic employers, but rather wages for production workers increase with both unionization and employer's market power. There is evidence, however, that unionization reduces variation in wages due to increased oligopoly power.     

Social networks and student activism: on the politicising effect of campus connections

In the first part of this paper I present original survey data which suggests that the transition from further to higher education, or more specifically the process of becoming a university student, has a politicising effect upon some students. In particular, university students are more likely that their 6th form counter‐parts to have engaged in some of the forms of protest activity associated with social movements. This holds even during periods when levels of social movement mobilisation are low both on and off campus. In the second part of the paper I review several of the key theoretical explanations of student politicisation to be found in the social movements literature. Having criticised these theories and noted that they are challenged by my survey findings, I outline an alternative which focuses upon campus‐based social networks. University campuses, I suggest, facilitate the formation of a critical and connected mass of previously politicised actors who then use their further networks to recruit political novices into activism. It is this recruitment activity, which is greatly enhanced by the network structure of campus life, which explains the politicising effect of campus life. Moreover, insofar as new recruits go on to become recruiters this forms part of a self‐perpetuating dynamic of politicisation.     

Children's Career Development: Metaphorical Images of Theory,Research, and Practice

This summative article discusses 5 invited contributions on children's career development. The authors of these articles were asked to consider the status quo of children's career development, issues facing this field, and future directions. Several emergent themes focused on theory, research, and practice and their interactive potential in children's career development. Suggestions for future direction in the study of children's career development include the need for greater contextualization and interdisciplinary collaboration, the revision and innovation of theory, and the need for organizing frameworks for theory, research, and practice.     

Catch,class and bureaucracy: the meaning of Joseph Heller's Catch 22

The expression‘Catch 22’has become part of the language, routinely employed without further explanation in newspapers, television programmes and everyday speech, and invoked without further reference in the learned papers of both British and American authors.¹ A related, but less common tendency, which serves to identify admirers of the novel, is the predisposition to see particular incidents and characters as exemplars of the world beyond its pages.² Ransacking the text for such Goffmanesque parallels can, at a minimum, contribute to a kind of world weary higher gossip and a repertoire of novel epithets for characterising faculty committees. This is clearly not what so perceptive a political theorist as John Schaar had in mind when he located Catch 22 between Horatio Alger and Goodman's Growing Up Absurd as one of those books which, for Americans at least, has ‘had important effects on our political life’.³ Indeed one critic has even suggested that Yossarian, the central character, was a role model for those Vietnam war draft resisters, evaders and AWOL veterans who chose exile in Sweden and elsewhere.⁴ Whatever the status of this and similar contentions (and prescience seems a more plausible claim than influence) my intention is not to establish the precise impact of Catch 22 on attitudes and action. I am, however, concerned to explain the basis of its popularity. Hence my tactics are to reconstruct how the novel works on its reader and to suggest the ways in which this connects with, and selects for, a public which occupies a distinctive social and cultural situation. That public, it is argued, is all but coextensive with Gouldner's ‘New Class’,⁵ and the form style and structure of Catch 22 dramatises the sociolinguistic implications of the contradiction which characterises the New Class's social position. Moreover the book provides a symbolic solution to that contradiction. For Heller, method, ideas and sensibility are linked in a strategy which both uncovers the use of language as a bureaucratic resource and uses the resources of language to uncover bureaucracy.⁶     

Lest power be forgotten: networks, division and difference in the city

Over the last decade we have seen a notable shift in the urban Society literature from discourses of division to discourses of difference. This shift has opened up new ways of understanding the complexities of city life and the formation of heterogeneous subjectivities and identities in the spaces of the city. There has been, we argue, a worrying tendency in this process to lose an analysis of the workings of power, While early Marxist, feminist and race/ethnicity debates were firmly located within a framework which highlighted power, post‐structuralist debates have operated with a more fluid notion of power, which at times has become so fluid as to evaporate into thin air. Our intention here in to re‐emphasise the significance of power while holding on to the concept of difference. We do this by using the notion of power networks that operate at different temporal and spatial scales. These give the city contrasting spatialities and temporalities that overlap one another. The city is seen as a palimpsest of time‐space networks that capture some of the presence of difference as well as suggesting its absences. These time‐space networks of power are considered in the material, perceived and imaginary realms in relation to bodies, interests and symbols.