Foucault and the Iranian revolution: gender and the seductions of Islamism [Review]

Review of Foucault and the Iranian Revolutio

Incentives and Workers’ Motivation in the Public Sector

Civil servants have a bad reputation of being lazy. However, citizens' personal experiences with civil servants appear to be significantly better. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive contracts for public sector workers under different informational assumptions. When civil servants' effort is unverifiable, lazy workers find working in the public sector highly attractive and may crowd out workers with a public service motivation. When effort is verifiable, the government optimally attracts motivated workers as well as the economy's laziest workers by offering separating contracts, which are both distorted. Even though contract distortions reduce aggregate welfare, a majority of society may be better off as public goods come at a lower cost.public sector labour markets, incentive contracts, work ethics, public service motivation

Ambtenaren zijn lui! Een poging tot verklaring van stereotype beelden over ambtenaren en overheidsdiensten

Burgers hebben vaak een vrij negatief beeld over ambtenaren en overheidsdiensten in het algemeen, terwijl deze burger vaak tegelijkertijd vrij positief is over bepaalde specifieke overheidsdiensten. Stereotype theorie kan dit verschil deels verklaren. De context waarin een burger naar zijn of haar mening wordt gevraagd, bepaalt of deze mening een weerspiegeling van de objectieve kwaliteit van een overheidsdienst dan wel van een stereotypisch beeld over de werking van overheidsdiensten zal zijn. Er worden tevens een aantal strategieën aangereikt om het beeld van ambtenaren en overheidsdiensten te verbeteren

Perceptions of corruption as distrust? Cause and effect in attitudes towards government

In the first section we briefly present some of the available survey material on citizens’ perception of public sector corruption in Belgium. Using data from a general survey administered in Flanders (Northern part of Belgium) in 2003, we subsequently analyze determinants of general perceptions of corruption and unethical behavior. We show that these perceptions are to a large extent influenced by feelings of political alienation and general attitudes towards government. It is therefore difficult to distinguish cause and effect between trust in government and perceptions of corruption. We then will show that general perceptions of corruption should not be seen as an expression of individual experience. Parallels become apparent with how citizens evaluate government services, where a disconnection seems to exist between generally positive personal bureaucratic encounters and more negative attitudes towards public services in general. We end by reviewing possibilities for avoiding ‘contamination’ of perceptions of corruption by general attitudes towards government, and for developing indicators that better measure actual corruption

Commitment and optimal incentive

We propose an extended principal-agent model considering employee commitment and describe how to motivate committed agent, who not only shows regard for his own income but also cares the organizational benefit. The principal also would like to provide support to such an agent and his utility depends on both the final profit and the payoff to the agent. There are some interesting insights into the characteristic of optimal contracts: First, commitment is an effective motivator and committed employee needs less monetary inducement to perform his job well than one who not. More specifically, undifferentiated pay is sufficient in incentivizing committed agent to implement high effort in some cases. Second, commitment and wage differential are substitutable to each other in the optimal incentive compensation design. Third, commitment is not always good for organizational efficiency when the increase in employee commitment relies on the principal’s support. Our model's finding is consistent with employee incentive in some organizations, and also help to incentive mechanism design under wages differential constraints and understanding excessive compensation.Commitment, Organizational support, Optimal Incentive, Contract