Participatory Form Research Articles

Using Campus Climate Surveys to Foster Participatory Governance

ABSTRACT Community colleges are under constant pressure to increase participatory governance and gather data for accountability and accreditation. Campus climate surveys can provide valuable information for these purposes. This study examined the experience of one college in moving to a more participatory form of governance with the aid of periodic climate surveys and various change strategies. After administering the Personal Assessment of College Environment (PACE) in 1999 to determine the existing campus climate, a North Carolina community college introduced a number of change strategies. It then measured the progress of these strategies with periodic administrations of the same instrument. Findings, which were also used for accreditation purposes, indicated significant progress toward a participatory governance model.

The Scottish committees and the goal of a ‘New Politics’: a verdict on the first four years of the devolved Scottish parliament

The launch in 1999 of a devolved Scottish Parliament with primary legislative powers was accompanied by extensive talk of the creation of a ‘new politics’ North of the Border. Eschewing the ‘yah‐boo’ adversarialism of the British House of Commons, ‘new politics’ in Scotland was to be open, consensual and participative in the style of the small Nordic democracies. It was to be predicated on a distinctive three‐way sharing of power between the government (Scottish Executive), parliament and people (civil society), which represented an attempt to devise a synthesis of traditional representative democracy and elements of a participatory form of democracy. The first part of this article explores the concept of a ‘power‐sharing democracy’ as it evolved through the Constitutional Convention debates of the early 1990s. The second focuses on the Scottish Parliament's committees which, combining the standing and select committee functions of their Westminster counterparts, were viewed as a motor of the ‘new politics’. The final part analyses the extent to which Scotland is a power‐sharing democracy. It is argued that, in linking parliament and civil society, various aspects of committee practice have lent a new dimension to Scottish politics. However, an innovative power‐sharing relationship between the Scottish Executive and Scottish Parliament, diverging in its essentials from the Westminster model, was neither envisaged by the architects of the new parliament, nor has it emerged. Beyond some tinkering with higher education and free face‐washing for granny, little has changed. Kirsty Scott, A new hymn sheet, The Guardian, 10.5.2003

The human rights situation in present-day Cuba

It is a pleasure to be here with you today. I wish to thank the University of Miami, the Cuban Transition Project and Dr. Jaime Suchlicki for their kind invitation to speak with you on a subject that occupies most of my waking moments, the struggle for the respect of human rights in Cuba and the transition towards a participatory form of government. These, along with continued successful implementation of the 1994/1995 Migration Accords, remain our primary objectives in Cuba. I am a career foreign service officer with more than 33 years of experience, mostly in Latin America and southern Europe. For the last eight months, I have been serving as the chief of mission of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. It is a unique place and the experience has so far provided me with some of the most interesting tales I will have to tell about my service to my country. But a month ago, I would have started this speech by drawing attention to the fact that the Cuban people had managed to preserve their fundamental dignity in the face of more than four decades of repressive rule. Today, I must say that dignity is being stretched very thin. With its recent crackdown against human rights activists and the country's nascent civil society, the Castro regime has shown that it is willing to risk even the ire of the international community to maintain its central role. I say the government is repressive because no one I deal with on a regular basis in Cuba says otherwise. And in fact, all of our allies agree that their policy goal in Cuba is, ultimately, the same as ours; the rapid and peaceful transition to a democratic government characterized by strong support for human rights and an open market economy. Before I get to the heart of my remarks, I'd like to discuss recent events that have a direct impact on our efforts to support safe, orderly and legal migration. As you are aware, there have been six hijackings in the last six months, three of which occurring over the last three weeks. I want to take this opportu-

Delivering devolved approaches to local governance

English Community involvement has long been associated with measures to tackle the problems of deprived neighbourhoods, but government policies for modernising government and promoting democratic renewal have focused on the need to broaden citizen engagement and devolve decision making to local communities. Encouraging people to do things for themselves can be seen as a ‘good’ thing, but whether this participatory form of government can be achieved in England is uncertain. This article explores the rationale underpinning New Labour’s commitment to devolved local governance and the challenges this brings for central government. We investigate the choices and the organisational and management implications for local authorities. We conclude by examining the inherent ambiguities in government policy, which need to be resolved if devolved solutions are to be implemented effectively.

Representative democracy and the profession

Digital technology could be instrumental in providing a more democratic and participatory form of government. Whether justified or not, the perception of incipient economocracy must be reversed. For, to paraphrase a much admired judicial maxim, democracy must not only be done, it must also be seen to be done. Making elected representatives more democratic and responsive to those represented, or at least less liable to accusations of moving in the opposite direction, seems an obvious measure. The computing profession has a responsibility to take part in publicly discussing democratic reform, and in particular to make suggestions about how such reform could employ digital technology.

The European parliament – a model of representative democracy?

This article argues that the European Parliament (EP) provides a poor model of representative democracy, as the nature of its representativeness is rooted in a pre‐democratic form. If this is correct, the EP's experience might indicate that liberal representative democracy in western political systems has become an inadequate vehicle for governmental legitimacy. However, the EP could promote devolution of power, which is a prerequisite for a more participatory form of democracy better suited to a politically mature populace.

Bordering the Future: Resisting Neoliberalism in the Borderlands

In the last twenty years, and especially since NAFTA, the U.S.-Mexico border has been a site of intensive neoliberal development, particularly in the growth of 2,340 export-processing plants (maquiladoras), ninety percent U.S.-owned. The economic growth this has helped to promote has been both rapid and uneven, and the burdens it has placed on local communities through impoverished conditions of work and life have been immense—no where more so than in Tijuana. Although much of this growth and the associated social and environmental problems have been the subjects of many policy, academic, and journalistic discussions, Tijuana's local community organizations, which have attempted to meet local needs and formulate alternative development paradigms, have not. Based on interviews with community organization representatives in the San Diego/Tijuana region, this text argues that a more complete understanding of these movement efforts to resist neoliberalism, especially the alternative visions for development they construct, are crucial to any understanding of neoliberalism generally, transnational social movements, and more democratic labor and environmental policy. These alternative paradigms differ radically from those promoted by capital and states on both sides of la frontera, and potentially offer a more participatory, democratic, and sustainable form of transnational development, for Mexico and all of North America.

Assessment of Outcomes of Free Expression Courses

Although of expression is vital a democratic society, American college students, including communication majors, seem have little interest in protecting their First Amendment rights (Brock, 1996; McAdams & Beasley, 1994). Moreover, today's college freshmen indicate that their interest in political affairs is at an all-time low, and their willingness discuss political matters -- presumably including of expression issues - is even lower (Political interest, 1998). Such apathy among future leaders and communication professionals suggests that education on of speech and of press is more important than ever before. This study seeks examine effects of teaching free expression journalism and mass communication students. A 1997 Freedom Forum survey concluded that majority of Americans do not believe in of speech (Blumner, 1997). According survey, censorial instinct cuts across political and religious spectrum. Americans from all demographic groups embrace a flaccid and utterly meaningless definition of ... expressive [as] support [for] of speech for only speech that I agree deserves freedom (Blumner, p. 1D). Some believe education is first and best response a citizenry uninterested and uninvolved in protecting democratic values and processes. In 1967, Supreme Court noted importance of free expression in American universities: one should underestimate vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth (Whitehill v. Elkins). Thirty years later, in an analysis of roles of media and education in developing popular citizenship, Buckingham (1997) wrote that educators must enable students build connections between personal and political, and hence prepare them for a participatory form of citizenship which can function across a whole range of social domains. If a primary responsibility of a university is encourage students exercise their of expression, then it would seem particularly vital for journalism and mass communication departments instill in their students an appreciation of First Amendment rights increase students' commitment such values. This study attempts assess outcomes of instruction in three classes on free Literature review Although scholarship examines theoretical and applied, individual and communal values of free expression (Baker, 1989; Dworkin, 1996; Levy, 1985), few scholars have scrutinized means and outcomes of teaching free expression values college students. Interestingly, a survey of communication faculty found that 39 percent of respondents thought that more class time should be devoted free-expression issues (Scott, 1995). Merrill (1991) asserted that teaching free expression is the highest calling of a communications or journalism professor. Merrill's article suggested a number of teaching strategies to get students think, analyze, challenge, and come up with fresh and 'personal' answers many of difficult questions surrounding free expression. No attempt was made measure effectiveness of teaching techniques. Herbeck (1991) focused on difficulty of teaching of expression undergraduates. The subject is made complex by inconsistent and evolving history of protection for free expression in America, Herbeck wrote, and consequently effective instruction in free expression should be future-oriented. Herbeck suggested that a class applying core principles of free expression rather than rigid legal rules contemporary issues best enables students understand fluidity of free speech. Through a simple post-test measure, Geske (1991) examined effectiveness of a talk show format teach free expression in a large lecture course. The study asked how students felt about different teaching techniques and found that students enjoyed roleplaying activity, which author believed prompted students move beyond rote memorization toward higher orders of analysis and synthesis. …

Valuation as Revelation and Reconciliation

Valuation is portrayed here as a dynamic and interactive process, not a static notion linked to willingness to pay. Valuation through economic measures can be built upon by creating trusting and legitimising procedures of stakeholder negotiation and mediation. This is a familiar practice in the US, but it is only beginning to be recognised as an environmental management tool in the UK. The introduction of strategic environmental and landuse appraisal plans for shorelines, estuaries, river catchments and rural landscapes, combined with the mobilisation of protest around landuse proposals that are not seemingly justified on the basis of ‘need’ (incinerators, landfills, quarries, reservoirs, roads) suggest that a more legitimate participatory form of democracy is required to reveal valuation through consensual negotiation.

Successful pesticide reduction policies: Learning from Indonesia

The rapid transition to integrated pest management in Indonesian rice production represents the world's most successful policy effort to reduce pesticide use on a national level. This article seeks to identify the reasons for this success. Conventional policy analysis, which focuses on state regulatory and economic intervention, misses several important factors. State and nonstate actors cooperated in a unique division of policy labor that allowed both traditional and alternative policy mechanisms to be used. These mechanisms included a decentralized and participatory form of information generation and dissemination. In addition to bureaucratic autonomy, institutional arrangements in the Indonesian case included a decentralization of decision‐making authority, creating an integrated policy‐making process capable of learning about, and responding to, local conditions.

Valuation as Revelation and Reconciliation

Valuation is portrayed here as a dynamic and interactive process, not a static notion linked to willingness to pay. Valuation through economic measures can be built upon by creating trusting and legitimising procedures of stakeholder negotiation and mediation. This is a familiar practice in the US, but it is only beginning to be recognised as an environmental management tool in the UK. The introduction of strategic environmental and landuse appraisal plans for shorelines, estuaries, river catchments and rural landscapes, combined with the mobilisation of protest around landuse proposals that are not seemingly justified on the basis of ‘need’ (incinerators, landfills, quarries, reservoirs, roads) suggest that a more legitimate participatory form of democracy is required to reveal valuation through consensual negotiation.

The Generative Effects of Instructional Organizers with Computer-Based Interactive Video

Sixty-one nursing students and faculty were studied to compare the use of participatory graphic organizers to final form graphic organizers and advance organizers as adjunct instructional aids for computer-based interactive video. The participatory form was hypothesized to be more representative of Wittrock's generative learning hypothesis. The more generative form was thought to engage the learner in a more active, overt learning activity than the other two forms, which depend upon their nominal stimulus characteristics for effect and, therefore, to be more effective in assisting the learning and retention of the program material. Results did not support this hypothesis. The participatory group actually achieved the lowest mean scores. Moreover, the difference between the mean scores of the final form and participatory graphic organizer treatment groups was statistically significant at the p ≤ 0.01 level on both posttests. Interview data indicated the effectiveness of the final form graphic organizer treatment likely derived from the guided discovery approach of the CBIV program which appeared to cause considerable learner disorientation. The final form graphic organizer contained specific information to allow that treatment group to successfully navigate the disorienting sequences and to concentrate more fully on the content of the program.

Toward a Comparative Framework for Learning From Experiences With Interactive Technology Assessment

To learn from experiences with interactive technology assessment (ITA), a framework for comparative analysis and evaluation is needed. Such a framework is developed in this article, taking into account both institutional and epistemological considerations. It is argued that a stakeholder-focused TA—the most participatory form of TA from an institutional point of view—can hardly contribute to behavioral change of public decision makers and corporate managers. Instead, institu tional and epistemological considerations are best reconciled in inter pretive forms of ITA, but only if the analysts consistently apply a constructivist methodology. In order to facilitate the elaboration of interpretive ITA, a set of institutional and methodological criteria to compare and assess practical approaches to ITA is developed.

Active citizenship and local governance: political and geographical dimensions

This paper discusses the possibility of a participatory form of democracy emerging in the UK out of the confluence of ‘active citizenship’ and ‘local governance’ and through reform of the state and civil society. A consideration of the type of ‘active citizenship’ strategy being pursued, an examination of the institutional and constitutional nature of ‘local governance’, and a review of patterns of participation in voluntary sector governance all serve to raise doubts about the potential outcome. It is important to recognize that both the citizen's inclination to participate or ‘get active’ in local governance, and the institutional structures and arrangements of local governance, have crucial geographical dimensions. The nature of places affects the citizen's capacity for governance and yet, although local governance exacerbates territorial fragmentation, disjuncture and conflict, the improvement of places can be a beneficial outcome of local governance. A study of the role of place as both mediator and outcome of active citizenship and local governance is relevant as an empirical question relating to the impacts of modernism and Thatcherism, but also affords opportunities to consider the causes and significance of ‘place-uniqueness’, and to evaluate their consequences for postmodernist epistemologies which eschew the notion of generalized theories of place.

Organization Designs for the Management of End-User Computing: Reexamining the Contingencies

To date, little research has been directed at the management infrastructure for end-user computing (EUC) from an organization design perspective. This study reports on the testing of a previously published contingency model in which two different structural forms are modeled for four states of EUC implementation: (1) an organic design (characterized by a decentralized, highly participatory form of decision making with loose controls), and (2) a mechanistic design (characterized by centralized decision making with a more tightly controlled form of management). Based on questionnaire data from 63 companies, statistical support is found for only the two states of EUC implementation for which a mechanistic design is modeled. Although only moderate support for this contingency model is found, the results of this study provide additional evidence for the effectiveness of a more controlled approach to EUC management under a low EUC growth objective at an early stage of implementation. This finding has important implications for other EUC management models and organization design options for assimilating new information technologies in general. The article concludes with recommendations for future empirical research, including a revised contingency model.

Singapore: Continuity in Change as the New Guard´s Agenda Becomes Clearer

With the opening of Singapore's seventh Parliament on 9 January 1989, the transition to an entirely new leadership from that which founded the independent nation-state and charted its economic and political course in the country's first two decades was all but formally complete. The retirement of fourteen senior People's Action Party (PAP) members together with the addition of seventeen new faces in the government's ranks meant that fifty-six of the PAP's eighty parliamentary members have entered the assembly since 1980. Only Lee Kuan Yew himself remains of the Old Guard, having already indicated that he intends to stand down as prime minister (PM) by the end of 1990.1 Not surprisingly, then, the new Parliament would be viewed with expectation, observers on the lookout for concrete indications of the political direction of the country's younger leaders in this final passage of the transition. The sense of expectancy was further engendered by the presence of Singapore's first Non Constituency Member of Parliament (NCMP), Dr Lee Siew Choh, made possible by amendments in 1984 to the Constitution. Was this the beginning of a new era in Singapore's politics, one in which the space for political opposition would be significantly expanded? Speculation about Singapore's possible political direction under the New Guard was, of course, not new. The carefully managed changing of the guard over the last decade ensured that. However, recent developments in Singapore have fostered contrasting interpretations of the significance of the leadership transition. According to one view, such reforms as the NCMP provision, the establishment of Government Parliamentary Committees (GPCs), the Feedback Unit, the Institute of Policy Studies, together with a preparedness to modify unpopular policy on graduate mothers and uses of superannuation funds, are evidence of a more consultative, participatory and flexible form of government in the making. Protestations by various government leaders about the need for a change of style have encouraged this interpretation. Against this view, however, recourse to the Internal Security Act (ISA), the treatment of the then opposition parliamentarian, J.B. Jeyaretnam, and curbs on the international press are cited as demonstration that Singapore's political style is being

Best Practicable Environmental Option (BPEO): A Case-study in Partial Bureaucratic Adaptation

Best Practicable Environmental Option (BPEO) is an invention, peculiar to the British approach to pollution-control, that should have wider application than at present. As the British have developed the idea, BPEO will initially be geared to the mix of residuals emanating from specially-scheduled processes. The aim is so to integrate the residuals' stream that the ultimate environmental alteration is minimized in an optimal but realistic manner. The concept is polluter-orientated—not policy-, planning-, or environmentally-, directed—the aim being so to encase a pollution emitter in a single but comprehensive regulatory envelope that, ideally, best technology, best management, and best science, combine to produce the most efficient and least-offensive discharges.This paper analyses the genesis of the idea of BPEO, and examines the influence of the growing power of European Community environmental directives on its development and interpretation. For BPEO to work, more fundamental reforms to UK regulatory agencies and legislation will be required. These reforms relate to greater openness and documentation, to a more participatory form of judgement with innovations in economic auditing, and to a more explicit accountability through Parliament and the courts, than are currently practised.Bureaucracies adapt only slowly, however. So far the British have moved a little way to recognizing the realities of the BPEO approach, but nowhere nearly far enough. BPEO is a philosophy that is close to the practice of sustainable development. Placed in a broader planning and policy context, BPEO has great significance for ecologically-sustainable practices. However, that prospect lies beyond any present proposals for administrative reorganization, and only imaginative experimentation, led by an enlightened and determined private sector, seems at all likely to create the changes in attitude and procedure that would be necessary to incorporate BPEO within a practical programme of ecologically sustainable development.

Locality, Politics, and Culture; Poplar in the 1920s

The relationship between a local polity and its civil society is explored, and it is argued that local polities cannot be understood in isolation from the specific institutions, practices, and culture of the locality. This is no longer a particularly novel claim to make, of course; yet it is a claim interpreted in a peculiarly narrow way by current theorists of the locality and the local state, who see the influence of civil society on local politics wholly in terms of class. The author begins this paper by offering an alternative theoretical framework which unites locality, politics, and culture, In the second section the political beliefs and policies of the Labour Party in the cast London borough of Poplar in the 1920s are examined and it is shown how local cultural values and ways of understanding the world shaped those political commitments to a very large degree. In the third part the social power relations are explored which developed between the Labour-controlled local state and the institutions of its civil society and which sprang from those local Labour Party values, These power structures changed during the 1920s, shifting from a participatory form of mass politics in the early 1920s to a much more exclusionary and elitist mode later in the decade. It will be argued that both types of power relations can be linked very closely to Poplar's local culture, and in the final section some conclusions will be drawn from this about the politics of local culture.

The rhetoric of silence: The society of friends' unprogrammed meeting for worship

The Society of Friends' unprogrammed Meeting for Worship is examined as a unique form of rhetoric. The philosophical bases of Quaker worship are seen to contribute to a participatory form of rhetoric in which silence is the primary means of group identification and in which source and audience merge in the emergent vocal ministry. The strength of unity and common mission achieved through the rhetoric of silence is illuminated by the socio‐political contributions which Quakers have made in every area of modern society for the last two centuries. The silent meeting is held as a potential model for achieving participatory identification in a variety of non‐religious contexts.

Karl Marx on Democracy, Participation, Voting, and Equality

HHE CONCEPT OF democracy raises perennial divisions among its advocates and critics that may be characterized in the following way. Defendants see it as a complex of principles and procedures designed to realize certain values-those of liberty, equality, fraternity, justicesuch that it constitutes a uniquely favored species of political praxis. Critics of democracy, in sharp contrast, tend to see it as nothing more than a set of techniques designed to ensure the rule of the most powerful under the guise of popular consent. Among its critics, there is a further distinction to be made between those who see democracy as a necessarily corrupt form of rule, a political apparatus designed to ensure the rule of special interests (a number of Marxists, Leninists, anarchists, etc.), and those who see the reduction of democracy to such terms as a lamentable departure made necessary by mass politics, the military-industrial complex, etc. (Schumpeter, Bachrach, Pateman, C. B. Macpherson, more or less fitting into this category). Far from believing that democracy is corrupt sui generis, these latter critics condemn representative democracy as a departure from the direct democracy of antiquity and reserve hope for a return to apurer, more participatory form. An examination of Marx's own views on democracy shows that he by no means fits easily into the positions of either the qualified or wholesale critics of democracy and that he shares more in common with classical political philosophers, notably Plato, Aristotle and Hegel, on the subject of politics and democracy than is commonly assumed.' Marx's views on democracy call into serious question the (revisionist) Marxist assumptions that democracy represents the political epiphenomenon of a specific economic system and, consequently, constitutes no more than a set of practices or procedures to translate economics into juridicalpolitical terms. In addition, Marx, following Hegel, convicts advocates of participatory democracy (democracy's reformist critics) of radical