Bureaucratic Job Research Articles

The Human Capital Effects of Access to Elite Jobs

We study the human capital effects of access to elite bureaucratic jobs in Taiwan, where performance on an examination determines entry into the civil service. Historically, quotas for successful applicants were set based on the 1948 populations of individuals’ native provinces in mainland China. This resulted in a higher probability of success on the exam—and, thus, greater access to elite positions—for descendants of certain migrant groups. These preferential quotas were replaced in 1962 with a uniform admissions policy. Using this variation, we find that the incentives created by preferential quotas increased human capital and improved long-run economic outcomes. (JEL D73, H83, J24, J45, M51)

Is the Bureaucracy Still Attractive? The Role of China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign in Reshaping Occupational Preference

Economic theory suggests that relative payoff scheme in a society might govern the allocation of talent to productive and unproductive activities. This paper provides empirical evidence by showing how China’s recent anti-corruption campaign reshapes people’s preference for bureaucratic jobs by affecting the relative payoff scheme. Employing the National Civil Service Exams data from 2012 to 2017 and using central inspections as quasi-natural experiments, our results, based on a difference-in-differences analysis, suggest that the campaign against corruption discourages people from applying for bureaucratic positions. The estimates are robust to several checks. We also carefully examined three underlying mechanisms behind the decline in applicants, which are income, privilege, and uncertainty. We found that the decrease is driven by the increasing political uncertainty, while the effects of income and privilege are not remarkable.

Gender Discrimination In Selection On Bureaucratic Jobs: A Case Study Of Sindh Public Service Commission

This research has focused on gender discrimination in selection on bureaucratic jobs through Sindh Public Service Commission (SPSC). The study was conducted on secondary data collected from annual reports of SPSC.The data was analyzed by the Management tool (fourth-fifths rule)and Statistical technique (Chi-square goodness of fit test). Analysis through 4/5th rule showed that in the combined competitive examination of year 2011, there was huge gender discrimination against females in the appointments of Deputy District Officers’ posts; and for the appointment on the posts of Section Officer, females were again discriminated as compared to males.Gender Discrimination in the appointment on the bureaucratic jobs was also assessed through Chi-Square goodness of fit test. Results yielded by the test showed that there was huge discrimination against females on the appointment of all bureaucratic jobs. This research has implications for the Government, Human Rights Activists and educated females.

WHAT CAUSES PATRONAGE REFORM? IT DEPENDS ON THE TYPE OF CIVIL SERVICE REFORM

Public employment in most developing countries is governed by political patronage. Patronage provides many incumbents with governability and electoral advantage. What causes governments to forsake patronage in favour of civil service reform? This article reviews scholarly explanations. It finds that studies usefully identify diverse socioeconomic and political‐institutional factors which can affect reform incentives. The causal effects of these factors – their weight, mechanisms and signs – are contested, however. This article partially resolves this contestation by considering which reform studies explain: different bureaucratic structures develop asynchronously and feature different determinants. To illustrate, political competition is argued to incentivize reform to ‘blanket in’ party appointees; or do the opposite by reducing expectations to reap longer‐term state capacity benefits. Yet, ‘blanketing in’ necessitates bureaucratic job stability, while state capacity requires merit recruitment of skilled bureaucrats – two poorly correlated reforms. The causes of patronage reform thus depend on the type of civil service reform.

Moving in, managing up: executive job formation and political behaviour

AbstractPublic agency executive jobs are temporary matches of individual bureaucrats with government employers. Together, the buyers and sellers of executive labour form jobs in ways that define critical links in the policy process: the relationships between agency administrators and their elected officials. This article argues that when the executive is hired from outside, the job typically carries a mandate for significantly greater engagement with elected officials than when the executive is promoted from within an agency. Analysis of three very different types of agencies demonstrates that individuals who were hired from outside interact with their elected officials more frequently than do those who were promoted from within. These results shed new light on bureaucratic executives’ roles in the policy process, their relationships with the governments that they serve, and the theoretical significance of bureaucratic jobs as units of analysis in public policy studies.

Transcending the City

Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest Asia Society New York City March 3-September 13, 2009 Yang Fudong's epic five-part film cycle, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003 07), made its museum premiere in the United States this summer at the Asia Society in New York City, presenting viewers with a rare twenty-first-century Proustian world of lengthy, meditative reflections on the passage of life. The film cycle begins with a reenactment of an ancient Chinese tale in which individuals from the third century leave their bureaucratic jobs and move to a bamboo forest in hopes of achieving a pure intellectual lifestyle. In Part I, we meet seven modern intellectuals of the urban generation who go on an excursion to the scenic Yellow Mountain. The group, two women and five men, are poster children for China's yuppie bourgeois. They are passionate lovers, sentimental poets, stylish philosophers, and sometimes reckless narcissists with grand ambitions and high ideals. Each was born trapped in an emotional uncertainty and their irresolvable contradictions continued by pre-existing cultural paradigms. For example, the seven try to evade the notion of responsibility, which is vitally important in Chinese culture. As one intellectual quietly confesses, I'm selfish. I feel sorry for my parents. For the one I love, I left my family. In this first film, lasting under thirty minutes, Yang already displays his signature filmic elements the choice of black-and-white 35mm film stock, the almost confession-like long narration, the quiet slowness, the photographic documentation of movements resembling Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962), and the surreal, dreamlike situations intermingling with reality. We listen to the characters take turns narrating pieces of their streams of consciousness, and their words arc slow but thoughtful, sometimes hesitant and unsure, sometimes heroic and Utopian. Yang invented a new life for them on screen, free from the urban jungle to which they belonged, and free from themselves. While exchanging deep gazes and romantic love gestures, the seven remain completely silent. As a part of the urban generation, Yang is fascinated by the idea of spiritual transcendence, something often lauded and pursued by ancient Chinese intellectuals. Part I of the cycle is arguably the purest chapter as it pursues a clear picture of the honesty, nakedness, and unpolluted humanity through the experiences of the seven. This type of existence sought by Taoist thinkers illustrates a dream that seems too good to be true, and, thus, is unsettling and almost disturbing upon awakening. Yang is not satisfied with the dream, however, but. desires to explore its aftermath. …

Contingent Professionalism: Bureaucratic Mobility and the Adoption of Water Conservation Rates

Professional networks are widely recognized as important sources of environmental protection policy innovation. I argue that innovations are most likely to diffuse from professions to governments under conditions of bureaucratic job mobility. When an agency head arrives from outside the government he serves, she carries both a reputation and mandate for innovation. The incentives for innovation are less potent when an agency head is promoted from within. The result is mobility-contingent professionalism, for the priorities of an administrator's profession are more likely to become manifest in policy when she arrives from outside than when she is promoted from within an agency. Analysis of data from an original survey of water utility executives tests the effect of career path and professional involvement on utilities’ adoption of conservation-oriented water rate structures. I find that executive career path is a strong predictor of an agency's adoption of conservation rates, even after accounting for climatic and institutional conditions. Further, the effect of professional involvement is contingent on career path: Professionalism is strongly associated with adoption of conservation rates for diagonally mobile executives but not for executives promoted from within.

Bureaucratic Job Mobility and The Diffusion of Innovations

In studies of innovation, policy entrepreneurs recognize latent demand for new policies and then expend resources to promote them. But studies of policy entrepreneurs have generally focused on the demand for innovation, while neglecting the supply side of policy entrepreneurship. This article argues that bureaucratic labor markets affect the emergence of policy entrepreneurs, and so affect the diffusion of policy innovations across local governments in the United States. Analysis of a survey of municipal police chiefs and water utility managers relates governments' hiring and promotion policies to their adoption of professionally fashionable innovations. Agency heads who advanced to their current positions diagonally (arriving from another organization) are more likely to initiate these innovations than are agency heads who were promoted from within. Bureaucratic policy entrepreneurs emerge where government demand for innovation meets a supply of mobile administrators, who carry the priorities of their professions into the agencies that they serve.

The Impact of Participative and Directive Leadership on Teachers' Performance: The Intervening Effects of Job Structuring, Decision Domain, and Leader-Member Exchange

Purpose: The contingency model theory suggests that the effects of a leadership style cannot be studied without explicit attention to the given situation. Accordingly, the authors propose a model that allows them to examine simultaneously the relative impact of participative leadership and directive leadership on teachers' performance through the intervening effects of three factors: job structuring (bureaucratic job structuring vs. person-job integration), decision domain (technical vs. managerial), and leader-member exchange (LMX). Method: Data were collected from a survey of 100 teachers and their principals at seven elementary schools in northern Israel. Results: The mixed models analysis shows that although the impact of directive leadership on teachers' performance was contingent in nature, the positive effect of participative leadership on their performance was above and beyond the specific conditions studied. Regarding the impact of directive leadership on teachers' performance, job structuring, decision domain, and LMX served as moderators in the directive leadership–teachers' performance relationship. Implications: These results offer a basis for ongoing conceptual development by helping researchers and practitioners to move from an either/or to a both/and leadership approach. Moreover, these interpretations take direction and participation to be interpersonal processes rather than stable personality traits.

Can we win them all? Benefits and costs of structured and flexible innovation– implementations

AbstractBureaucratic job structuring was compared with person–job integration in an attempt to determine which of the two approaches was a better means for innovation implementation in the workplace. The solution was hypothesized to be complex, depending on the criteria chosen for innovation effectiveness. Seventy incumbents of new linking roles in healthcare organizations were recruited. They provided data on the innovation–implementation approach applied in their case. Measures for different stakeholders' perceptions of innovation effectiveness were gathered. Three colleagues of the incumbents provided performance appraisals, reflecting internal customers' criteria for innovation effectiveness, each incumbent completed a questionnaire about burnout as a reversed proxy of innovation effectiveness, and semi‐structured observations of incumbents' activities provided an index of the fit between their role behaviors and role requirements, reflecting external customers' criteria for effectiveness. While performance appraisals were found to gain most from implementation through bureaucratic job structuring, the fit between incumbents' role behaviors and role requirements benefited most from implementation through person–job integration. Decreased burnout required maximizing the two implementation processes. These findings point to possible trade‐offs between the different criteria for innovation effectiveness, and call for combining features from the two implementation processes to produce a superior implementation approach. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Where Job Values Come from: Family and Schooling Background, Cognitive Ability, and Gender

This paper develops a framework for conceptualizing preferences for different job properties in terms of a tradeoff between risk and return in the pursuit of economic welfare. Following portfolio theory, job properties are viewed as having mean-variance properties with respect to the distribution of rates of growth in economic welfare. Actors may pursue a high-return, high-risk strategy, or a low-return, low-risk bureaucratic strategy. An actor's choice is determined by entrepreneurial ability and risk preferences, which in turn are rooted in the major dimensions of family and schooling background, cognitive ability, and gender. This theory is tested by anchoring it in the Wisconsin status attainment model and then fitting rank-ordered logit models to data from the 1957 and 1992 Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey. The findings support the theory: Actors who are advantaged with respect to family background, schooling, cognitive ability, and gender express a preference for as opposed to bureaucratic job properties. Findings also highlight the strong parallels between the process generating adult job values and the process of socioeconomic achievement itself.

Potential Student Decision Making in Academic ESL Grammar Textbooks

This article presents research on the potential of four intermediate-level ESL grammar textbooks to provide student control of learning, based on the textbook authors' presentation of student decision making opportunities in tasks. Textbook tasks were analyzed for the potential controller of learning conditions related to content choice, procedure options, and evaluation techniques, based on the studies of Grannis. The findings suggest that students potentially have few choices and thus little control of the educational process. The majority of tasks may train students primarily for bureaucratic jobs while the focus on right answers may impede language learning. ESL teachers need to mediate a textbook's potential to control if the goal is to create learners who have some control over their own learning through curricular decision making.

Sizing up the African state

This paper reviews empirical evidence concerning government errors of commission and omission in Africa. Seen in the context of international comparisons, how do African states measure up in the defensive functions of avoiding government excess? And how do they rate in the constructive functions of supplying public goods in response to demands from society? Regarding errors of commission, African states do not stand out as singularly prone to spend large shares of GNP, to employ high ratios of the population in bureaucratic jobs, or to own extensive state-owned enterprises. The data on errors of omission are more equivocal. African states do too little to prevent corruption, to protect civil and political rights, and to secure the legal environment for business. Yet, other developing regions display many of the same deficiencies. Overall, there is little empirical evidence of a sui generis African state.

Functional Religiosity and Modernization in Indonesia

Functional religiosity refers to the use of religion in daily life. This paperfocuses on the relation between modernization andfunctional religiosity. Specifically, two propositions were tested: 1) as education and urbanization increase, functional religiosity declines; and 2) people working in more bureaucratized jobs are less likely to use religion in their daily lives. Respondents used were a stratified random sample of residents of Java who were religiously active Muslims. It was found that functional religiosity increased with education and urbanization. However modernization affected religion differently among Sundanese and Javanese respondents. Functional religiosity did not seem lessened by working in bureaucratic jobs. In fact one type of modern job, being a teacher, seemed conducive to using religion in daily life. The article emphasizes the importance of the impact of modernization on family structure and of the specific nature of a job marketforfunctional religiosity.