‘Clock-watching and box-ticking’: British local authority planners,professionalism and performance targets

The speed of the statutory planning system has concerned UK Governments for decades. The Labour Government of 1997–2010 placed particular emphasis on increasing the efficiency of public services through performance targets. Whilst the subsequent Coalition Government of 2010–2015 removed many targets, those measuring the speed of planning application processing were kept. These performance targets have important potential implications in terms of the autonomy and space for discretionary judgement traditionally seen as intrinsic to the professional nature of planning. Empirical material exploring how British local authority planners responded to these targets suggests they have both restricted and empowered professionals and, whilst changes to practice have occurred, professional identities have remained more resilient. This contradictory picture highlights the importance of considering the role of frontline professionals in implementing reforms.     

House Haunting: The Domestic Novel Of The Inter-War Years

In this article we attempt to historicize and address the literary manifestations of the meaning and idea of home culture in the English domestic novel of the inter-war years. During this period, the cult of domesticity was avidly promoted by the government and popular magazines. We discuss how both houses and novels furnish a dwelling place that invites the exploration of private and social relations. In their turn to domestic space and the domestic interior, domestic novelists of the inter-war years inaugurated a turn to interiority, feminine subjectivity and the everyday.     

Liberal Chiefs or Illiberal Development? The Challenge of Engaging Chiefs in DFID's Security Sector Reform Programme in Sierra Leone

It is increasingly recognised that informal actors, including chiefs, are dominant providers of services and need to be factored into overwhelmingly state‐focused programmes. This article looks at the ability of the UK's Department for International Development to engage with the chieftaincy system in Sierra Leone through its security sector reform programme – a relationship which poses important political challenges.     

Hyper-Segmentation and Exclusion in Financial Services in the U.S.

Abstract

The last twenty years has been a period of major structural change for the financial services sector in the United States. Some of this restructuring has been prompted by technological change, but public policy has actively facilitated the increased mobility of capital to places where it brings the highest short-term private return but not necessarily the greatest long-term social return. While deregulation and technology have combined to provide a wider choice of services and increased price pressure in the lucrative segments of different financial markets, the pursuit of affluent customers has left lower-income consumers and very small firms at a disadvantage. The sector overall has moved toward a hyper-segmentation of customer bases by income and race, leaving many communities served primarily by higher-cost and sometimes abusive financial services firms.     

Interorganizational network portfolios of nonprofit organizations: Implications for collaboration management

Increasingly, nonprofit organizations engage in interorganizational collaboration to address large‐scale social problems. Scholarship typically focuses on the characteristics of both within‐sector and cross‐sector partnerships of two collaborating organizations or all partnering organizations involved in a collaboration, but we know little about the patterns of interorganizational relationships that single nonprofit organizations maintain. This research draws upon surveys from 452 nonprofits and introduces nonprofit network portfolios, which we define as the number, integration, intensity, and duration of relationships that nonprofits purposefully develop with other organizations. Using 12 network measures, Ward cluster analysis revealed three distinct network portfolios: restricted within‐sector (n = 319, 70.58%), which included limited collaboration and prioritized within‐sector partnerships; robust within‐sector (n = 80, 17.70%), which included more nonprofit partnerships than restricted within‐sector portfolios; and cross‐sector (n = 53, 11.72%), which had a rich assemblage of integrative partnerships with nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies. Further, nonprofits that maintained each type of portfolio differed in their revenue and social mission, suggesting these factors are related to the types of collaboration that nonprofits maintain. This study makes contributions to existing research on interorganizational networks and cross‐sector collaboration and suggests practical and policy implications for nonprofit network management.     

Public policies promoting the informal sector: Effects on incomes,employment and growth in Burkina Faso

Since the 1990s, Burkina Faso has intensified the implementation of supporting policies to enhance the access to capital and liquidity in the informal sector. This paper analyzes the effects of these public policies on incomes, employment and economic growth by taking into account the interactions between the informal sector, the formal sector and the agricultural sector. For that purpose, policy shocks are simulated through the Partnership for Economic Policy Network's static computable general equilibrium (CGE) model which is adapted to the structure of a 2008-based social accounting matrix developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Our results highlight mixed effects including a paradoxical contraction of the informal sector, the formal sector and economic growth as well as an improvement of the informal households and the farmers’ incomes.     

财产税与地方财政关系的公共部门经济学探析

该文从公共部门经济学角度对财产税与地方财政的关系进行了分析。全文从财产税较为切合地方财政的主要特征、财产税较有利于地方政府履行其经济职能以及财产税较适宜由地方政府征收管理这3个方面,分析说明了财产税之所以成为地方税的基本经济原因。     

Interorganizational relations of nonprofit organizations: An exploratory study

In their several roles as appropriators, redistributors, and providers, nonprofit organizations are involved in complex transactions with organizations in the nonprofit, for-profit, and public sectors. The purpose of this exploratory investigation, based on a sample of New York State nonprofits, is to explain variation in the extent of intrasector and intersector transactions. Various kinds of prevailing environmental complexities, coupled with the ways in which organizations are structured to deal with these complexities, help explain variation in the extent of organizational transactions. Another important predictor is directors' perceptions of main problems affecting the activities of their agencies. These findings are consistent with the conclusion that environmental uncertainties and perceptions about them affect the nature and extent of interorganizational contact.     

公共产品民营化和我国第三部门的职能走向

20世纪 80年代以来 ,西方国家率先实施了公共产品民营化的改革思路 ,促进了第三部门迅速在全球勃兴。对于改革开放 2 0余年且已纳入经济全球化进程中的我国 ,公共产品民营化的趋势对我国第三部门的嵌入与成长起了重要作用 ,并直接影响我国第三部门的职能走向。