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

Red and infrared phosphide materials grown by solid source molecular beam epitaxy

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Institute of Optics, 1999.Materials and device research is presented on the growth and characterization of GaInAsP and AlGaInP to demonstrate the effectiveness, for III-V semiconductor materials development, of the valved cracker solid phosphorus source. Incorporation differences into GaInAsP between As₂ and As₄, and P₂ and P₄ are studied. In preparation for 1.3 μm laser development, the growth parameters for high quality GaInAsP are determined. Low threshold 1.3 μm InAsP/GaInAsP lasers are demonstrated and characterized. Laser processing procedures applicable to the InP material system are also described. Material quality comparisons are made on samples grown by the two prevailing solid phosphide sources; the valved cracker phosphorus source and the GaP effusion cell. Room temperature photoluminescence measurements are used to determine the optimum growth conditions, when using each phosphide source, for a test GaInP/AlGaInP laser core structure. Secondary ion mass spectroscopy is used to compare oxygen contamination of the two phosphide sources and to investigate the influence of cracker temperature on oxygen contamination. The potential of the GaP source to produce white phosphorus deposits in the growth chamber is also explored

FRAMEWORK FOR SENSEMAKING IN THE SPACE POLICY SUBSYSTEM A

This study investigates how the establishment of blame becomes a framework for sensemaking in a national policy subsystem. Using the only two fatal accidents in NASA’s manned space flight history as case studies, this dissertation examines how the space policy subsystem responded to these two accidents and the process by which culpability was established. This dissertation extends our knowledge of how the blame dynamic operates within a policy subsystem and how, through this assignment of blame, the policy subsystem and the nation makes sense of these tragic events. Three distinct literatures (i.e. policy subsystems, sensemaking, and blame) are brought together to describe this complex blame environment. The conclusions of this research are that the membership of the space policy subsystems increases following a disaster; the locus of the blame attribution rhetoric rests with Congress and the media, which are members of the space policy subsystem; those who were blamed for the Apollo 1 and Challenge