Evaluation Research and Institutional Pressures: Challenges in Public-Nonprofit Contracting

This article examines the connection between program evaluation research and decision-making by public managers. Drawing on neo-institutional theory, a framework is presented for diagnosing the pressures and conditions that lead alternatively toward or away the rational use of evaluation research. Three cases of public-nonprofit contracting for the delivery of major programs are presented to clarify the way coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures interfere with a sound connection being made between research and implementation. The article concludes by considering how public managers can respond to the isomorphic pressures in their environment that make it hard to act on data relating to program performance.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 23. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Varieties of Capitalism and the Learning Firm: Contemporary Developments in EU and German Company Law - A Comment on the Strine-Bainbridge Debate About Shared Values of Corporate Management and Labor

Research in corporate governance and in labour law has been characterized by a disjuncture in the way that scholars in each field are addressing organizational questions related to the business enterprise. While labour has eventually begun to shift perspectives from aspirations to direct employee involvement in firm management, as has been the case in Germany, to a combination of \u27exit\u27 and \u27voice\u27 strategies involving pension fund management and securities litigation, it remains to be seen whether this new stream will unfold as a viable challenge to an otherwise exclusionary shareholder value paradigm. At the same time, recent suggestions made by Delaware Chancery Court Vice Chancellor Strine, to dare think about potentially shared commitments between management and labor - and UCLA\u27s Stephen Bainbridge\u27s response - underline the viability - and, the contestedness - of attempts at moving the corporate governance debate beyond the confines of corporate law proper. While such a wider view had already famously been encouraged by Dean Clarke in his 1986 treatise on Corporate Law (p. 32), mainstream corporate law does not seem to have endorsed this perspective. This paper takes the questionable divide between management and labor within the framework of a limiting corporate governance concept as starting point to explore the institutional dynamics of the corporation, hereby building on the theory of the innovative enterprise, as developed by management theorists Mary O\u27Sullivan and William Lazonick. Largely due to the sustained distance between corporate and labour law scholars, neither group has effectively addressed their common blind spot: a better understanding of the business enterprise itself. In midst of an unceasing flow of affirmations of the finance paradigm of the corporation on the one hand and \u27voice\u27 strategies by labour on the other, it seems to fall to management theorists to draw lessons from the continuing co-existence of different forms of market organization, in which companies appear to thrive. Exploring the conundrum of \u27risky\u27 business decisions within the firm, management theorists have been arguing for the need to adopt a more sophisticated organizational perspective on companies operating on locally, regionally and transnationally shaped, often highly volatile market segments. Research by comparative political economists has revealed a high degree of connectivity between corporate governance and economic performance without, however, arriving at such favourable results only for shareholder value regimes. Such findings support the view that corporate governance regimes are embedded in differently shaped regulatory frameworks, characterized by distinct institutions, both formal and informal, and enforcement processes. As a result of these findings, arguments to disassociate issues of corporate governance from those of the firm\u27s (social) responsibility [CSR] have been losing ground. Instead, CSR can be taken to be an essential part of understanding a particular business enterprise. It is the merging of a comparative political economy perspective on the corporation with one on the organizational features, structures and processes of the corporation, which can help us better understand the distribution of power and knowledge within the \u27learning firm\u27

Bureaucracy as a Lens for Analyzing and Designing Algorithmic Systems

Scholarship on algorithms has drawn on the analogy between algorithmic systems and bureaucracies to diagnose shortcomings in algorithmic decision-making. We extend the analogy further by drawing on Michel Crozier’s theory of bureaucratic organizations to analyze the relationship between algorithmic and human decision-making power. We present algorithms as analogous to impartial bureaucratic rules for controlling action, and argue that discretionary decision-making power in algorithmic systems accumulates at locations where uncertainty about the operation of algorithms persists. This key point of our essay connects with Alkhatib and Bernstein’s theory of ’street-level algorithms’, and highlights that the role of human discretion in algorithmic systems is to accommodate uncertain situations which inflexible algorithms cannot handle. We conclude by discussing how the analysis and design of algorithmic systems could seek to identify and cultivate important sources of uncertainty, to enable the human discretionary work that enhances systemic resilience in the face of algorithmic errors.Peer reviewe

The interfacial bioscience grand challenge.

This report is broken down into the following 3 sections: (1) Chemical Cross-linking and Mass Spectrometry Applied to Determination of Protein Structure and Dynamics; (2) Computational Modeling of Membrane Protein Structure and Dynamics; and (3) Studies of Toxin-Membrane Interactions using Single Molecule Biophysical Methods