Engaging Indigenous Communities: Towards a Policy Framework for Indigenous Community Justice Programmes

Community engagement has come to the fore as a policy and programme approach that seeks to connect citizens both with each other and with government in order to deliver improved social and economic opportunities and outcomes. This model has become a key aspect of the intervention approach within Indigenous communities and is seen to have particular application in addressing community justice issues. This article examines a suite of community justice initiatives being used in Indigenous communities in Australia with a view to ascertaining how the principles of community engagement are operationalized. The article draws on this information and argues that community engagement is only one aspect of a number of community‐oriented justice initiatives currently being applied. These initiatives range from concepts of community as a location, community as an interest group, and the leveraging of community capital so as to tap into and build better and stronger relationships. In so doing, the latter attempts to increase the social infrastructure, resources and capacity of communities. However, despite government attention in this area, there is a lack of a policy and programmatic framework to guide a coherent and apposite approach to issues of community in specific policy settings. The article contributes to the development of a framework that begins the process of differentiating and assessing justice administration interventions.     

INNOVACQ: Serials control at Boalt Hall

Many changes in the Law School Library have occurred during this past year because of INNOVACQ. Within the Serials/Acquisitions Section, almost all the routines and procedures have been radically redefined to allow for the computerization of serials control. There have been some staff reassignments and shifts in responsibility, and in most instances, old tasks and manual file maintenance have been done away with completely and replaced by work at a VDT. Naturally, the impact of INNOVACQ has also been felt in the Cataloging Section, and the instant availability of serials check-in and routing information in public services has certainly added a level of service that was never possible before. In addition, the immediate and up-to-date fiscal information has been a boon for both the library's collection development officers and the Library administration.Various staff members throughout the year have been working to clean up and upgrade different parts of the serials files and to add or exchange better information in a number of fields in each record. Past payment history has been keyed into over 2/3 of the records in the file. The records for all the loose-leaf services contracted for by the Library are not fully online.All the records for our California documents have been edited and check-in cards have been created for this large and obviously important part of the file. Conversion of the U.S. documents which had been deferred at the very beginning of the fiscal year, has begun and most entries now can be checked-in and claimed online.All invoices (both serials and monographs) for this fiscal year have been processed on INNOVACQ, and while there are still some vendor and fund anomalies, Boalt has better, more comprehensive — and certainly more accurate — financial records than ever before.A massive editing and claiming project has recently gotten under way. All titles on INNOVACQ are being checked against the shelf list to make sure that all the bibliographic elements in each record are in sync and are presented in a standard, retrievable (punctuation and spacing count in INNOVACQ) format. Routine claiming (as part of serials check-in) has been in place for some time now, and that activity was begun when that feature was delivered. A second part of the editing project, is however, to get the thousands of blank boxes out of the check-in screens where they will remain as claimable items until some sort of purging action is taken. The files are now being gone through (a simple command in INNOVACQ can allow one to review every check-in record in the system), our holdings are being checked on the shelves, and decisions to claim or replace the missing pieces are being made. We anticipate that this editing/ claiming project will take approximately half a year.The INNOVACQ system was pretty exciting when we first saw it demonstrated, and we were eager then to incorporate it into our technical processing activities here at Boalt. If anything, our enthusiasm has grown as the capabilities of INNOVACQ have been realized. Enhancement and refinement — some at our prompting, others by the design staff at Innovative Interfaces — over the past year have resulted in what we believe to be the most comprehensive and easy-to-use serials control system available. Our confidence was manifested when we shifted all of our acquisitions activities from RLIN to INNOVAQ at the beginning of our fiscal year in mid-1984.Many tasks remain for the Law Library in making the best use of the INNOVACQ system. The rapid acceptance by the public service staff and users has been heartening, and the continuing work to clean up the Serials Records has proven fruitful. System performance and maintenance have been outstanding, and we are excited about various possibilities for future growth. It has not been a simple nor uncomplicated process, but the gains realized by the Law library have been substantial.     

An application of catastrophe theory to management science process

Practicing management scientists often complain of the alleged irrational behavior on the part of the managers they are trying to serve, particularly when a manager suddenly and unexpectedly shifts behavior from one of support to one of resistance. The authors feel such behavior is only believed to be irrational because the management scientist is using the wrong mental model when projecting past behavioral patterns into the future. This paper attempts to solve this problem by using the newly developed catastrophe theory to develop a different model where sudden shifts in behavior are considered perfectly rational and explainable. The basic implication that is drawn from this new model is that successful implementation of management science depends on a sequence of interactions with the ultimate model user and that care in the structuring of these interactions can greatly enhance the probability of eventual user acceptance.     

Econometric analysis and managerial decision making

Econometric analysis is concerned with the quantitative relationships between economic variables and it can provide an important input into the decision making process of managers. Typically econometrics differs from other apsects of management science in that it considers problems primarily, though not exclusively, from a background of economics rather than of other disciplines and behaviour is usually dealt with at higher levels of data aggregation than the individual firm.This paper considers some applications of typical econometrics to the general area of managerial decision making, where primarily the techniques have a role to play in assisting the general process of data analysis. Initially discussion is pointed towards the use of the analysis for predictive purposes and the contrast with time series methods. Subsequently examples are presented where the objective is to obtain a better understanding of individual economic relationships that aim to be important inputs into the decision making process, for example cost and revenue analysis. Finally, an example is given of how these ideas contribute more generally to the activity of model building for the firm as a whole both for the purpose of forecasting and policy simulation.