Performance management from the bottom up

Current interest in middle-managers’ compliance with performance management (PM) reforms focuses on their downward roles. To explore their understudied upward roles, this analysis draws on police chiefs’ voice directed to senior management regarding the Israeli PM system as documented since its first introduction in 1999, and as reported both by chiefs and senior managers (N = 54). Unfolding four patterns of inconsistencies between PM systems’ design and the operational, daily, course-of-work, close-to-the-field managers’ upward roles allows us to move beyond criticism to constructive efforts, and provides new insights for reconciling the well-documented gap between policy intentions and outcomes in PM reforms.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Behavioural governance in the policy process: introduction to the special issue

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this recordResearch adopting an interdisciplinary, behavioural perspective on Public Policy and Public Administration is booming. Yet there has been little integration into mainstream public policy scholarship. Behavioural public administration (BPA) and behavioural public policy (BPP) have emerged largely as two disconnected subfields. We propose the overarching term ‘behavioural governance’ to refer to the cognitive and decision processes through which decision-makers, implementing actors and target populations shape and react to public policies and to each other, as well as the impacts of these processes on individual and group behaviour. To allow an integrative perspective, this introductory essay discusses how a behavioural perspective can deepen understanding of different phases of the policy process. We connect insights from a long established public policy and administration scholarship which has not always been self-defined as ‘behavioural’ with more recent studies adopting a more explicitly behavioural perspective, including those in this Special Issue from varied national contexts

PsyToolkit: a software package for programming psychological experiments using Linux

PsyToolkit is a set of software tools for programming psychological experiments on Linux computers. Given that PsyToolkit is freely available under the Gnu Public License, open source, and designed such that it can easily be modified and extended for individual needs, it is suitable not only for technically oriented Linux users, but also for students, researchers on small budgets, and universities in developing countries. The software includes a high-level scripting language, a library for the programming language C, and a questionnaire presenter. The software easily integrates with other open source tools, such as the statistical software package R. PsyToolkit is designed to work with external hardware (including IoLab and Cedrus response keyboards and two common digital input/output boards) and to support millisecond timing precision. Four in-depth examples explain the basic functionality of PsyToolkit. Example 1 demonstrates a stimulus—response compatibility experiment. Example 2 demonstrates a novel mouse-controlled visual search experiment. Example 3 shows how to control light emitting diodes using PsyToolkit, and Example 4 shows how to build a light-detection sensor. The last two examples explain the electronic hardware setup such that they can even be used with other software packages