Patterns of transition. Female native Dutch and ethnic minority employment patterns in the Dutch labour market, 1991 and 2002

This study analyses female native Dutch and ethnic minority employment patterns in the Dutch labour market. Focusing on life-course employment patterns, it aims to find out if native Dutch and ethnic minority women in the Netherlands have undergone a transition towards more labour market participation between 1991 and 2002. Three patterns of change in employment integration by age can be discerned. First, increasing employment levels for native Dutch women of almost all age groups, but in particular for those age groups that have to combine employment with rearing children. Second, a high employment level for Surinamese and Antillean women, revealing strong employment integration of all age groups, so that combining market work and rearing children does not hamper labour market integration. Third, a more traditional pattern for Turkish and Moroccan women, yet indicating an increased employment rate for almost all age groups, in particular 20-24 years. We find that critical life events such as motherhood have different effects on employment for Mediterranean, Caribbean and native Dutch women. In addition, the analysis shows that the attachment of both native Dutch and ethnic minority women to the labour market becomes stronger, and the influence of motherhood becomes smaller, over time. All in all, Caribbean women are the most attached to the labour market. © 2006 Taylor & Francis

How do frontline tax workers assess citizen-clients’ trustworthiness? The role of signals and status characteristics

Within the literature on street-level workers’ encounters with citizens it is generally known that bureaucrats’ decision making is partly dependent on the relationship they have with them. Within policy areas that promote notions as trust and responsiveness, bureaucrats’ relationship with citizen-clients becomes even more crucial. Very little is known about what frontline workers deem trustworthy and untrustworthy citizen-clients in the first place, and how they know they have to do with either a trustworthy or untrustworthy citizen-client. The street-level bureaucracy literature suggests that frontline workers rely on universalistic standards of deservingness, but also on particularistic attributes such as ethnicity and socio-economic background to categorize citizen-clients. Such attributes are commonly believed to signal an unobservable characteristic, such as a citizen-client’s general ability. Belonging to a certain social grouping, then, serves as ‘a signal’ that one is, for example, either competent or incompetent. In line with signaling theory (Spence, 1973; Weiss, 1995), existing research thus emphasizes the information problem street-level bureaucrats encounter in ‘getting a grip’ on citizen-clients. Drawing on status characteristics theory (Ridgeway, 1991) this study scrutinizes the epistemological problem too, i.e. how street-level bureaucrats know, by focusing on how their interpretation of signals is influenced by citizen-clients’ status characteristics. By analysing eleven semi-structured interviews with tax officials who inspect the acceptability of entrepreneurs’ tax returns, this study shows how status characteristics could lead to unequal evaluations of citizen-clients’ signals

Balanceren en experimenteren. Wetenschap en praktijk van publiek management

Increasing demands and competing values force public organizations to introduce new organizational forms that veer away from rigid bureaucratic structures while remaining in control. How do public managers and their employees deal with the dilemmas that these decentralized and organic ways of organizing entail? On the one hand it must be prevented that public managers fall back too quickly on structures that rely on control and formalization, while, on the other hand, they themselves as managers are still primarily held accountable based on those bureaucratic principles. New organizational forms also assume that leadership is shared and distributed. This not only asks for a higher degree of self-management of employees, but also requires from formal leaders that such behavior is supported and encouraged. In our research and teaching on these changes in public organizations, we work closely with practice. That too is a matter of balancing, this time of public engagement with scientific independenceThe politics and administration of institutional chang

Anders kijken naar besturen. Verbind het horizontale met het verticale leiderschap.

The politics and administration of institutional chang

Het belang van bureaucratie. Omgaan met ambivalentie in publiek management.

Oratie uitgesproken door Prof.dr.S.M. Groeneveld bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar op het gebied van Publiek Management aan de Universiteit Leiden op 27 mei 2016The politics and administration of institutional chang

The Superorganism: Problems and Perspectives

This article aims to contribute to recent debates on research methods in public administration by examining the use of quantitative methods in public administration research. We analyzed 1,605 articles published between 2001–2010 in four leading journals: Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART), Public Administration Review, Governance, and Public Administration (PA). Results show that whereas qualitative methods are still predominant compared to quantitative methods (56% versus 44%), the field is becoming increasingly quantitative. Of quantitative methods used, surveys are most dominant, while a combination of methods is used far less often. In general, very few studies use a mixed methods design. As to the areas of research, we found that the use of quantitative methods is unequally distributed; some subfields (public management) use quantitative methods more often than others (policy and politics), and some journals (JPART, PA) publish articles on quantitative research more than others (Governance). Implications for public administration research are discussed

New steering instruments: Trends in public sector practice and scholarship

The chapters in this book have all in some way focused on new steering instruments in the public sector, or on how governments, often in collaboration with other actors, attempt to achieve integrated results and broad social outcomes. The trend away from the traditional and NPM-style prescriptions, the latter of which often resulted in a certain degree of fragmentation and a loss of steering capacity (Terry, 2005), is visible in a wide range of areas, both on the delivery level, and on the more strategic level. This has put the need to coordinate the public sector and to find new ways of steering firmly on the agenda (Bouckaert et al., 2010; Braun, 2008)

Contingent representativity: Rival views of representatve bureaucracy and the challenges for nationbuilders

In this paper, we argue that representative bureaucracy is a changing concept, and that in the academic and policy debate on representative bureaucracy in fact three different debates are intermingled. While the debate on representative bureaucracy in Public Administration is generally situated within wider debates about tensions between bureaucracy and democracy, this is only part of the story. We argue that discussions and scholarship on representative bureaucracy in fact employ three different concepts of representative bureaucracy. The reasons for making the bureaucracy representative in these three rival concepts are quite divergent, and even the conception of what representativity means is totally different. These rival concepts reflect a particular view on the role of the state and the relation between states and citizens

De invloed van diversiteitsmanagement op de binding van werknemers in de publieke sector

In reactie op de ontwikkelingen in de samenleving en op de arbeidsmarkt voeren publieke organisaties vaak diversiteitsbeleid. Er is weinig bekend over de effectiviteit van diversiteitmanagement en de concrete beleidsinstrumenten die in dat kader worden ingezet. In dit artikel is de invloed van diversiteitmanagement en enkele beleidsinstrumenten op de binding van werknemers in de Nederlandse publieke sector onderzocht en wordt nagegaan wat daarbij de rol is van leiderschap. De beleidsinstrumenten zijn onderverdeeld volgens de typologie van Ely en Thomas (2001): Discrimination & Fairness (D&F), Access & Legitimacy (A&L) en Integration & Learning (I&L). Diversiteitmanagement en twee beleidsinstrumenten, namelijk het divers samenstellen van selectieteams (A&L p

Management van diversiteit

The politics and administration of institutional chang