Bureaucratic Forces Research Articles

Legacies of Change: Probation Staff Experiences of the Unification of Services in England and Wales

Abstract A discourse of professionalism has proved crucial to driving recent organizational restructurings of the probation service in England and Wales. The Coalition Government argued that bureaucratic, state provision of services had stifled probation practice—for which the introduction of market logic, via the 2014 Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms, would restore professional discretion. And yet, the detrimental impact of TR on practice meant that re-professionalization was an important objective of yet more restructuring. This paper explores probation staff experiences of organizational change, particularly since services were returned to the public sector, in June 2021, through three dominant modes of workplace organization around which change has been articulated: professionalism, the market and bureaucracy. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 members of staff, it argues that the exercise of professionalism in probation has been, and continues to be, shaped by a legacy of organizational change that is both bureaucratic and dependent upon market(-like) mechanisms. It contends that the ongoing impact of a ‘discursive battle’ between market and bureaucratic forces has further eroded professionalism in probation.

Elder Crimes of the Law Abiding: Backwards Dresses, Covered Up Messes, and Nursing Homes

This article uses data from 75 biographies, autobiographies, and research monographs on nursing homes to explore physical neglect and abuse. Linked to crimes of the law abiding concepts, it implies employees see maltreatment as “normal.” It extends lines of research examining bureaucratic forces and their influence on nursing homes. It also provides a history of elder care in the UK and US and a review of structural ritualization theory. Findings concentrate on how rituals involving hierarchical structure, work efficiency, documentation, and rules adversely influence care homes. This includes physical maltreatment involving employee neglect of personal needs of residents, failing to provide medical help, bodily harm, and not maintaining quality living spaces.

Encountering grasslands: a collective approach to urban biodiversity

While the prolific nature of many grass and herbaceous species in urban parks offers an opportunity to cultivate more biodiverse and dynamic grasslands, widespread maintenance practices and complex cultural, economic, and bureaucratic forces often result in the undervaluing and regular destruction of these plant species. The research described in this paper reimagines the way grassy landscapes are cared for and understood in urban environments. Located in an urban park in inner Sydney, Australia, and using design research methods of observation, physical care, storytelling and installation, the research proposes three “frames of care” to assist landscape architects and other spatial designers to engage with communities at a local level. The frames have the potential to expand collective understandings of grassland communities, test alternative maintenance practices, and better support urban biodiversity and seasonal flux. With acknowledgment to the complexities of urban sites such as these, experimental installation provided a promising space to meaningfully engage with the local community and build a foundation to generate greater reciprocity between humans and non-humans of the site.

Founder Turnover and Organizational Change

Why might start-ups not change even when doing so may enhance firm performance? It seems reasonable to point to founder presence as a potential culprit given founders’ cognitive myopia and/or commitment to the status quo. However, founder presence may instead be a facilitator of change in response to environmental uncertainty because founders can uniquely coordinate resources needed for organizational change. We empirically address these two opposing views on the impact of founder presence (versus loss) on organizational change by using a comprehensive administrative data set of start-ups in the United States. Correlational analysis shows that start-ups generally become less likely to change following founder turnover. Given the potentially endogenous nature of founder turnover, we exploit premature deaths as a natural experiment that suddenly removes some founders from their start-ups while leaving others intact. We find that start-ups are less likely to change after losing a founder, especially if the founder loss happens during an economic recession. At the same time, the effect is attenuated when losing a founder with more experience in the same industry, suggesting that founder presence can also contribute to reinforcing the status quo under some conditions. Broadly, these results not only show that founders tend to facilitate change in their organizations but also identify when founders are merely subject to organizations’ bureaucratic forces that they themselves may have imprinted originally. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1668 .

점령기 GHQ에 의한 지역공동체 인식과 재편 - 조나이카이(町内会)를 중심으로 -

This research was conducted to shed light on why GHQ used Chōnai-kai (neighborhood associations) once again as a mobilization instrument for governance during the occupation, given their essential position as the lowest administrative body under the total mobilization system throughout the wartime period. In addition, this article examines which aspects of Chōnai-kai were abolished and which were maintained. To achieve this objective, the perspective of Chōnai-kai by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the end of the war and GHQ during the occupation period was investigated. Due to the emergence of reverse course, the resurgence of bureaucratic forces as a support foundation for this policy was also investigated. Additionally, the rearrangement of the old Chōnai-kai into the new Chōnai-kai in the local community was investigated. As a result of the analysis, the empowerment of Chōnai-kai in local politics was identified as a reform priority as part of the democratization measures. However, GHQ utilized and maintained Chōnai-kai's community maintenance function. In the end, Chōnai-kai was the lowest administrative body, and its identity and function remained the same from wartime to the occupation period, with only the Japanese government being replaced by the GHQ. The occupation period coincides with the transition from Empire to Post-Empire. In the end, Chōnai-kai was resurrected as a new Chōnai-kai in the midway zone between power and life, and it continues to exist up to the present day.

Off the Beaten Path?

Frédéric Cailliaud ran the Natural History Museum of Nantes from 1836 to 1869. An explorer, Egyptologist, geologist, and public political figure, Cailliaud’s profile resists any attempt at categorization, yet a common denominator of his activities is the production of knowledge about nature. As an employee of the Nantes municipality, Cailliaud’s activities, especially fieldwork, intersected with administrative demands. This did not make him the puppet of standardizing bureaucratic forces. Rather, the term bureaucracy is used in this article as an epistemic category to reassess the role of instrumental changes in scientific knowledge production as it was increasingly integrated into public administration. Focusing on Cailliaud’s papers (notes, manuscripts, publications) and the place of fieldwork in them, this article seeks to cast light on the material and relational dimensions of knowledge production in a nineteenth-century provincial museum. In doing so, I seek to reassess the place of bureaucratic work in the production of geological knowledge and argue that the field and the office were not “separate worlds.” Instead, the exploration of their entanglements complexifies our understanding of knowledge production in the nineteenth century.

러일전쟁 전후 러시아 극동총독부와 극동특별위원회의 설치와 해체

The Government-General of the Far East and the Special Committee for the Far East were established in 1903 led by the imperial powers within the Russian government. State Advisor Bezobrazov (А.М. Безобразов) diagnosed the weakening of power in the Far East and suggested the need for the establishment of the Government-General of the Far East. The reason was that first, conflicts between government departments and the inefficiency of the consultation system brought irresponsibility, and second, the lack of accurate information on the Far East and erroneous evaluation of the situation occurred. Imperial powers, including Bezobrazov (А.М. Безобразов), opposed bureaucratic forces, arguing that in order to avoid the Russo-Japanese War, war preparations should be strengthened in the Far East and a single independent organization should be established. As a result, Nicholas II accepted the imperial powers’ insistence and, on July 30, 1903, ordered the establishment of the Government-General of the Far East in the Senate, the highest authority for judicial and legislative powers. The Governor-General of the Far East was composed of the Governor-General of Priamour and the Governor-General of Lusun. Naval Admiral Alexeyev (Е.И. Алексеев) was appointed as the governor of the Far East. The Government-General of the Far East was an organization centered on the Governor-General of the Far East that encompassed the order and safety of the Far East. The Governor-General of the Far East could present his or her opinion directly to Nicholas II or through the Secretary General. Here, the Governor-General of the Far East had the powerful authority to command the Pacific Fleet and the Far East Army. The Governor-General of the Far East was in charge of not only the military commander of Priam, but also the military administration of the Manchurian Railway. On August 23, 1903, by order of Nicholas II, the Governor-General of the Far East was able to negotiate directly with the Ministry of the Army. In the end, the Government-General of the Far East was the body that oversaw the administrative system reorganization and economic development of the Russian Far East. The Special Committee for the Far East was an organization that provided administrative and legal support for the Government-General of the Far East and devised a plan for the development of the Far East. Above all, the Government-General of the Far East was established under the pretext of establishing a single independent organization to prepare for war in the Far East. In fact, the staff department under the Government-General of the Far East has established a “strategic action plan” in preparation for the Russo-Japanese War. The Special Committee for the Far East planned colonial management for the entire Far East, including Manchuria, by examining cases of colonization abroad. This fact meant that the Government-General of the Far East and the Special Committee for the Far East were established with the intention of carrying out Russia''s military response to Japan''s threat of war and promoting colonial management throughout the Far East in the future. Nevertheless, when Russia was defeated in the Russo-Japanese War, the Special Committee for the Far East was dissolved, and the Government-General of the Far East had no choice but to cease its activities.

The Politics of Treatment: A Qualitative Study of Canadian Military PTSD Clinicians

There has been an upsurge in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) research, but these efforts have not included trauma clinicians. Using a constructivist grounded research methodology, we examined clinicians’ views about military PTSD, their experiences in utilizing accepted interventions, and the personal impacts of this work. Our findings indicate that clinicians struggle with conceptualizations of PTSD, accepted treatments, and the requirements of navigating the Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) bureaucracy. Demands to negotiate occupational realities while attempting care for clients underpinned experiences of emotional exhaustion. Contrasting the literature on secondary trauma, bureaucratic forces, implied expert status, and lack of supports for clinicians were at the root of exhaustion. Military trauma clinicians appear caught in the politics of treatment with detrimental effects on their health. This study is the first to explore clinician views on the benefits and costs of working with military trauma survivors.

Hostility to Hospitality: Authors’ Response

Abstract This article offers a brief response to constructive criticism of the book featured in this edition of Spiritual Care. Hostility to Hospitality argues that the role of spirituality within the care of sick patients, despite clear empirical evidence demonstrating its importance, remains deeply contested because of bias against religious communities. Deeply flawed conceptualizations of the nature of religion and the secular camouflage how a society's commitment to immanence functions like a spirituality. A secular framework weakens how spiritual communities can positively influence medical institutions or socialize professional guilds in caring for the whole patient. The diminishment of communities that champion compassion as a chief end, pave a way for hostile economic, technological, and bureaucratic forces to suppress our ability to fully care for patients in body and soul. Rather than being neutral as purported, the secular structures of medicine manipulate and use pastoral care for its own immanent ends. Hostility to Hospitality argues that unless pluralism is embraced, allowing for a diversity of religious communities to influence the structures of medicine, compassionate and holistic care will increasingly become unlikely as impersonal social forces increase.

Crippled community governance and suppressed scientific/professional communities: a critical assessment of failed early warning for the COVID-19 outbreak in China

The public governance of epidemic outbreaks faces great uncertainty. Successful governance is only possible with a competent early warning system, which hinges upon efficient production, sharing, and use of relevant knowledge and information. In this process, functional scientific/professional communities are critical gatekeepers. Analyzing China’s failed early warning for the COVID-19 outbreak, we show that an epidemic governance system dominated by bureaucratic forces is doomed to failure. In particular, we identify the lack of autonomy of scientific/professional communities—in this case, virologists, physicians, and epidemiologists—as one of the major contributing factors to the malfunction of the early warning system. Drawing upon the idea of community governance, we argue that only by empowering scientific/professional groups to exert efficient community governance can a state modernize its early warning system and perform better in combatting epidemics.

The Autism Spectrum: Human Rights Perspectives.

In the next decade, approximately half a million teenagers on the autism spectrum will transition to adulthood. Unlike earlier generations, who were institutionalized as children in state psychiatric hospitals or hidden by their families, many of today’s young adults with autism spectrum disorders grew up at home and attended school in their communities. This was a major accomplishment of strong and tireless advocacy on the part of families who challenged powerful governmental and bureaucratic forces. Whether teenagers will succeed as adults in their communities depends in part on the strength and tirelessness of their families and the responses of our society. We are at the beginning of a massive social experiment. Much of the outcome hinges on the attitudes of the over 70 million “neurotypical” (nonautistic) millennials, many of whom had opportunities to meet neurodiverse classmates in inclusive programs at school and may be more accepting of neurodiversity than are their parents. But now that the autism community is “aging out” of school, they will need to interact with the broader community, including older generations of neurotypical doctors, who had never seen peers with autism and who may be uncomfortable. This will come as a surprise. To pediatricians, the emergence of an adult population on the spectrum is no surprise. They have watched for decades the rapid expansion of the diagnostic criteria and the rapid evolution of therapeutic approaches. Pediatricians have been learning about autism for decades from experts and, perhaps mostly, from their patients. In contrast, their physician colleagues in adult medicine and other fields, such as urology, typically have limited exposure to adults diagnosed with autism. Because parents (or whoever is responsible for care) realize this, many still cling to their adult children’s pediatricians, begging them to continue providing care long after their children reach age 18. But … Address correspondence to Linda L. Demer, MD, PhD, Departments of Medicine, Physiology, and Bioengineering, CHS A2-237, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1679. E-mail: ldemer{at}mednet.ucla.edu

A Development Policy of Networking-Based Creative Marine Small and Medium Enterprises as a Solution for Poverty Alleviation in Indonesia

Poverty and environmental degradation are issues that have not been resolved in the coastal communities and regions yet. The various policies and development programs have been implemented to address these two main issues. Nevertheless, the poverty rate of coastal communities remains high. To address the problem of poverty in coastal areas, this study tries to offer a policy solution for SME development based on the creative power of network resources. The concept of creative economy is very relevant because the environment and marine fisheries resources provide potential materials for SMEs to manage. Management of marine resources by combining creativity, innovation, and technology can lead to products that have market competitiveness. To support these efforts, the utilization of network resources can provide synergistic power to improve product quality and competitiveness. These networking resources can come from elements of government, business, civil society, financial institutions, professional institutions, universities, and other social communities. The collaboration of these various network resources can be an effective force in poverty alleviation efforts in coastal areas. Studies have supported that poverty alleviation is not effectively implemented if it does not synergize the bureaucratic, business and community forces. The problem of poverty in coastal areas of a complex character cannot be overcome with a linear approach. Moreover, breakthroughs and innovations need to be done to address the complexity of poverty of coastal communities. To that end, the strength of marine SMEs needs to be integrated with the approach of creative economy and networking so that it becomes a driver of the local economy that serves as a solution for poverty alleviation.

The Australian experience in using tenders for conservation

Over the past 15 years Australia has been trialling conservation tenders and other market based instrument approaches to generate environmental outcomes, particularly on private lands. The best known of these is the BushTender auction for vegetation protection in Victoria, begun in the early 2000s. Subsequently, nearly 100 other tenders for biodiversity protection have been run in Australia with substantial variations in application and methodology generated by a mix of both intended design and case study differences. The number of separate conservation tenders that have been performed, and the variations in environmental targets, state jurisdictions, case study circumstances, design and implementation, provides a rich data base of projects for analysis – unique at the international level.The review section of the paper covers three broad areas. The first aim is to provide an overview of the various tenders and their history and design in different settings. The second is to review their application, particularly in relation to auction design, metric design and contract design aspects, while the third is to identify the extent to which tenders provided more cost-effective outcomes than alternatives such a fixed rate grants. An additional goal is to explain why, after so many trials, conservation tenders are not more widely used in Australia. Key conclusions are that the multiple trials show that tenders are robust, relatively simple to apply and deliver more cost-effective allocations of public funding than other grant mechanisms. The reasons for their limited use can be related more to political and bureaucratic forces and inertia rather than to economic and design limitations.

What are the consequences of a managerial approach to union renewal for union behaviour? A case study of USDAW

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of a managerial approach to renewal for a union’s behaviour by analysing the UK’s fourth largest trade union – The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW).Design/methodology/approachThe findings draw on in-depth semi-structured interviews with union officials.FindingsThe research findings show the significance of a managerialist approach to UDSAW’s renewal strategy and its correlation with existing renewal strategies of organising and partnership. However, this approach was not immune to context, with tensions between agency and articulation challenging the basic concept of managerialism and influencing union behaviour.Research limitations/implicationsThe data were collected from a single case with a small sample size.Practical implicationsThe authors’ findings suggest that tensions between bureaucracy and democracy will mediate the extent to which managerialist approaches can be used within unions adding support to the strategic choice theory and underlying arguments that unions can influence their fortune. However, institutional and external pressures could see managerialism becoming more prevalent, with oligarchic and bureaucratic forces prevailing, which could be particularly applicable to unions operating in challenging contexts, such as USDAW. The managerialisation of unions has consequences for union officers; with officers facing increasing pressure in their roles to behave as managers with attendant implications for role conflict, identity and motivation.Social implicationsIf managerialism is becoming more prevalent with unions, with oligarchic and bureaucratic forces prevailing, this has potentially wider societal implications, whereby collectivism and worker-led democracy could become scarcer within unions and the workplace, thus irretrievably altering the nature of the employment relationship.Originality/valueThis paper brings together disparate themes in the literature to propose a conceptual framework of three key elements of managerialism: centralised strategies; performance management and the managerialisation of union roles. The authors’ findings demonstrate how there is scope for unions to adopt a hybrid approach to renewal, and to draw upon their internal resources, processes and techniques to implement change, including behavioural change. Consequently, theories and empirical studies of union renewal need to better reflect the complexities of approaches that unions are now adopting and further explore these models within the agency and articulation principles that underpin the nature of unions.

Looking Beyond Conventional Intergovernmental Fiscal Frameworks: Principles, Realities, and Neglected Issues

Fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental fiscal relations reform have become nearly ubiquitous in developing countries. Performance, however, has often been disappointing in terms of both policy formulation and outcomes. The dynamics underlying these results have been poorly researched. Available literature focuses heavily on policy and institutional design concerns framed by public finance, fiscal federalism, and public management principles. The literature tends to explain unsatisfactory outcomes largely as a result of some combination of flawed design and management of intergovernmental fiscal systems, insufficient capacity, and lack of political will. These factors are important, but there is room to broaden the analysis in at least two potentially valuable ways. First, much can be learned by more robustly examining how national and local political and bureaucratic forces shape the policy space, providing opportunities for and placing constraints on effective and sustainable reform. Second, the analysis would benefit from moving beyond design to considering how to implement reform more strategically.

A Tale of Three 'Professions': Search Engine Optimization, Lawyering & Law Teaching

The question has been posed: is legal practice today a profession? This leads, naturally enough, to another question: should society treat it as one? Using the concept of ‘profession’ in different ways, some argue that one thing modern legal practice needs is a good dose of “professionalism;” others argue that, whatever once might have been true, treating law practice as a ‘profession’ is a rum game best abandoned. These questions matter. Law enjoys special regulatory privileges and market protections that make little sense if law has become just another form of business – a specialized form of consulting, perhaps. At the same time, societies depend on professions to perform important public functions, and if a de-professionalized legal occupation either cannot or will not reliably perform those functions, new solutions must be sought. These questions matter particularly now, because technology now allows non-lawyers to offer personalized legal services that rival lawyers, but in the US such services are barred by the protective market shelter given lawyers.To date, the discussion has been hampered by loose – and often conflicting – uses of the terms profession and professional. To counter that, this article examines law practice and two similarly demanding occupations – teaching law and consulting on search engine optimization – through the lens of a fully developed model of professions developed by sociologist Eliot Freidson. By delving deeper into the aspects of an ideal form profession, with contrast to two somewhat similar occupations, the article provides a more nuanced look at law practice’s claims to professional status.The residual market protections given to lawyers are one reason to determine whether they still constitute a profession – if they are not able to deliver on the social bargain of protecting the justice system, there seems little reason to protect them from the full onset of the market or to allow them the privilege of self-regulation. Perhaps more importantly, the analysis raises the question of who, if anyone, is protecting the system of justice from naked market and bureaucratic forces if lawyers have abdicated or been driven from the role. In a world where law has been and can be used to oppress the powerless, and where legal claims have become a tradable asset class, it’s not a trivial question.

Youths’ Views on Corruption Control in China

It has been asserted that criminal law and common morality are not sufficient terms to describe specific behaviors as corruption because those in power have the capacity to include or exclude certain behavior as a category in the law. Thus, corruption should not be just treated as an objective behavioral category but as a form of social censure. This article reports on a quantitative and qualitative study that collected the views of Chinese youth on the control of corruption in China. It was found that they agreed with the moral-negative judgements behind the censure of corruption, and that bureaucratic forces can be mobilised to punish the corrupt and degrade their status. Mediation analysis discovered that political functions mediate the association between the moral-negative nature and bureaucratic form of the censure of corruption and status degradation of the censured.

“Hidden” threats to science education

Many readers of Eos are involved with education. Most would agree that what happens at precollege levels will ultimately affect the geoscience profession; after all, future scientists are today's precollege students. While a growing number of scientists are working to improve the quality of precollege programs, only a few are addressing what we term the “hidden” threats to science education. Hidden threats have nothing to do with scientific content; rather, they result from social, political, and bureaucratic forces operating within and outside of schools and universities.

Why has the United States not bombed Iran? The domestic politics of America's response to Iran's nuclear programme

Why has the United States (US), under both the Bush and Obama administrations, refrained from attacking Iran even though US officials have depicted the Iranian threat in all but apocalyptic terms and even though a loud chorus in Washington has been persistently calling for a preventive strike against Iran? I present an analysis—informed by Graham Allison's famous bureaucratic politics model—of the main political and bureaucratic forces in Washington acting to promote or impede a preventive attack on Iran's nuclear sites. I argue that America's abstention from attacking Iran should be understood not as a coherent national response to Iran's nuclear programme but rather as (in Allison's terms) an ‘intra-national political outcome’ resulting from the ‘pulling’ of ‘Iran Threat’ interests—primarily Vice President Cheney's camp in the Bush White House, members of Congress, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—and the countervailing ‘hauling’ of the Pentagon, the military's top brass, the intelligence community and the Department of State. The main reason why neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has opted for a military strike is that the ‘haulers’, who were led by a formidable bureaucratic-political player, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have had the upper hand over the hawkish ‘pullers’.

Governance of Terror: New Institutionalism and the Evolution of Terrorist Organizations

A preoccupation with network approaches in terrorism studies has inadvertently marginalized the fact that terrorist groups are subject to many of the same bureaucratic forces that impact all purposeful organizations. Because typical organizations are subsumed in the concept of networks, it is curious that scholars have been so quick to bypass more traditional models of organizations and bureaucracy that may help us understand network topology. This article relies on the new institutional approach to organizational behavior. Using the Coase theorem to explain the costs and benefits associated with different organizational structures, it follows that counterterrorism efforts may drive some groups toward greater autonomy while compelling others to adopt common bureaucratic processes, often referred to as isomorphism. By exploring the different costs that terror groups face and examining the characteristics of terrorists associated with different groups, organizational theory can help explain a divergent trend in terrorism research: leaderless jihad and increased bureaucratization.