Are There Managerial Practices Associated with Service Delivery Collaboration Success?: Evidence from British Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships

Little empirical work exists measuring if interagency collaborations delivering public services produce better outcomes, and none looking inside the black box at collaboration management practices. We examine whether there are collaboration management practices associated with improved performance of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, a crossagency collaboration in England and Wales. These exist in every local authority in England and Wales, so there are enough of them to permit quantitative analysis. And their aim is crime reduction, and crime data over time are available, allowing actual results (rather than perceptions or self-reports) to be analyzed longitudinally. We find that there are management practices associated with greater success at reducing crime, mostly exhibited through interaction effects such that the practice in question is effective in some circumstances but not others. Our findings support the arguments of those arguing that effective management of collaborations is associated with tools for managing any organization, not ones unique to managing collaborations: if you want to be a good collaboration manager, you should be a good manager, period.

Hard, Soft, or Tough Love: What Kinds of Organizational Culture Promote Successful Performance in Cross-Organizational Collaborations?

One of the most-pervasive debates in literature on managing people is whether using “hard” or “soft” approaches produces better organizational performance -- those seeking to influence behavior by pressuring or by nurturing. This paper examines this question in the context of a cross-organizational collaboration in English local government between police, probation, social work, and other organizations designed to reduce crime. Using a survey to gather data about cultural features of these collaborations and actual crime data, we find interaction effects between the joint presence of “hard” and “soft” cultural features in explaining crime reduction. Taking a phrase from pop psychology, it appears that cultures characterized by “tough love” perform better than those with only “hard” or “soft” features by themselves. We suggest that further research be conducted surrounding the relationship of the “tough love” construct to organizational performance

Online Institutions, Markets, and Democracy

In this dissertation, I explore the implications of the advances in information and communication technology on democracy. In particular, I examine the roles of online institutions—search engines, news aggregators, and social media—in information readership and political outcomes. In Chapter 1, I show that information consumption pattern is more concentrated and polarized in online news traffic than in offline newspaper circulation. I then show that this pattern occurs not because online traffic better reflects people’s demand, but because online institutions generate a cascade. Using this evidence, I argue that online institutions produce a trade-off between the benefits involved when people access information and the costs of the cascade. In Chapter 3, I compare information consumption pattern on various online institutions. In Chapter 2, I explain why the cascade may become increasingly significant over time. An increase in Internet users suggests not only a reduced digital divide but also an even more concentrated and polarized online information consumption pattern as, ceteris paribus, the magnitude of the cascade will increase with an increase in the number of Internet users. I then empirically show a positive association between the traffic to an online institution and the estimated magnitude of the cascade observed on that site. In Chapter 4, I show that the observed concentrated and polarized online information consumption may affect political outcomes. For instance, if such an information consumption pattern affects political behaviors, we can expect the same pattern in measurable political outcomes. I test this prediction by investigating the association between U.S. Representatives using Twitter and their fundraising. Evidence suggests that, after politicians started using Twitter, their individual collected contributions became more concentrated, ideologically polarized, and geographically diverse. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings for political equality, polarization, and democracy. In sum, online institutions may result in political outcomes becoming more concentrated and polarized. Given that a significant part of the observed concentration and polarization can be attributed to the cascade effect, this paper challenges the notion that Internet-mediated political actions or communications will necessarily promote democracy

Are There Managerial Practices Associated with Service Delivery Collaboration Success?: Evidence from British Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships

Little empirical work exists measuring if interagency collaborations delivering public services produce better outcomes, and none looking inside the black box at collaboration management practices. We examine whether there are collaboration management practices associated with improved performance of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, a crossagency collaboration in England and Wales. These exist in every local authority in England and Wales, so there are enough of them to permit quantitative analysis. And their aim is crime reduction, and crime data over time are available, allowing actual results (rather than perceptions or self-reports) to be analyzed longitudinally. We find that there are management practices associated with greater success at reducing crime, mostly exhibited through interaction effects such that the practice in question is effective in some circumstances but not others. Our findings support the arguments of those arguing that effective management of collaborations is associated with tools for managing any organization, not ones unique to managing collaborations: if you want to be a good collaboration manager, you should be a good manager, period

Online Institutions, Markets, and Democracy

In this dissertation, I explore the implications of the advances in information and communication technology on democracy. In particular, I examine the roles of online institutions—search engines, news aggregators, and social media—in information readership and political outcomes. In Chapter 1, I show that information consumption pattern is more concentrated and polarized in online news traffic than in offline newspaper circulation. I then show that this pattern occurs not because online traffic better reflects people's demand, but because online institutions generate a cascade. Using this evidence, I argue that online institutions produce a trade-off between the benefits involved when people access information and the costs of the cascade. In Chapter 3, I compare information consumption pattern on various online institutions. In Chapter 2, I explain why the cascade may become increasingly significant over time. An increase in Internet users suggests not only a reduced digital divide but also an even more concentrated and polarized online information consumption pattern as, ceteris paribus, the magnitude of the cascade will increase with an increase in the number of Internet users. I then empirically show a positive association between the traffic to an online institution and the estimated magnitude of the cascade observed on that site. In Chapter 4, I show that the observed concentrated and polarized online information consumption may affect political outcomes. For instance, if such an information consumption pattern affects political behaviors, we can expect the same pattern in measurable political outcomes. I test this prediction by investigating the association between U.S. Representatives using Twitter and their fundraising. Evidence suggests that, after politicians started using Twitter, their individual collected contributions became more concentrated, ideologically polarized, and geographically diverse. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings for political equality, polarization, and democracy. In sum, online institutions may result in political outcomes becoming more concentrated and polarized. Given that a significant part of the observed concentration and polarization can be attributed to the cascade effect, this paper challenges the notion that Internet-mediated political actions or communications will necessarily promote democracy

Sharing Economy and Government

We compared sharing economy development in 90 countries to demonstrate that higher qualities of government are associated with greater sharing economy growth. To explain this finding, we assumed that sharing economy benefits are enjoyed by the public, whereas its costs are chiefly borne by market incumbents. In considering these competing interests, policymakers tend to favor the latter as single-industry interests that can be more easily organized to influence policymaking. We then hypothesized that an electorally competitive, depoliticized, and effective government may tilt the balance against the entrenched market incumbents, leading to the growth of sharing economy industries. Overall, we found some support for this hypothesis. We especially found that electoral competitiveness strongly impacted sharing economy development and that this impact was significantly greater in a country with a depoliticized bureaucracy and effective government