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

International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the “conditionality” terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40099/3/wp713.pd

Insiders, Outsiders, and the Struggle for Consecration in Cultural Fields: A Core-Periphery Perspective

Building on recent research emphasizing how legitimacy depends on consensus among audiences about candidates’ characteristics and activities, we examine the relationship between cultural producers’ (candidates) position in the social structure and the consecration of their creative work by relevant audiences. We argue that the outcome of this process of evaluation in any cultural field, whether in art or science, is a function of (1) candidates’ embeddedness within the field, and (2) the type of audience—that is, peers versus critics—evaluating candidates’ work. Specifically, we hypothesize that peers are more likely to favor candidates who are highly embedded in the field, whereas critics will not show such favoritism. We find support for these hypotheses in the context of the Hollywood motion picture industry

Institutional Transplant as Political Opportunity: The Practice and Politics of Indian Electricity Regulation

India has a decade-long experience with independent regulatory agencies in public services as an institutional transplant from the industrialized world. Introduced at the behest of international donor agencies, regulators in India are intended, somewhat naively, to provide an apolitical space for decision making to assuage investor concerns over arbitrary administrative actions, and thereby stimulate private investment. In practice, regulators have had to negotiate a terrain over which the state has continued to exercise considerable control. Regulators have also been been shaped in their functioning by national and sub-national political traditions and by administrative and political practices. The result is a hybrid institutional form that combines politics as usual with intriguing new, and unanticipated, opportunities for political intervention. This paper will explore the origins of electricity regulation as a form of institutional isomorphism. It will then compare the regulatory experience in India\u27s electricity sector across two Indian states to understand the implications of transplanting regulatory agencies in the global south. An examination of the process through which regulatory decisions are reached illustrates how existing bureaucratic and technocratic networks, transplanted procedures, and administrative cultures combine to conservatively manage long-standing political tensions around electricity. In seeking to manage those tensions, regulators often take decisions - on tariff setting, for example - based on a political reading that belies the technocratic narrative on which institutional credibility rests. At the same time, civil society groups ranging from residential associations to professional associations to individuals are using newly created regulatory spaces to structure a more deliberative decision process

The Effects of Home Computers on Educational Outcomes: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Schoolchildren

Are home computers are an important input in the educational production function? To address this question, we conduct a field experiment involving the provision of free computers to schoolchildren for home use. Low-income children attending middle and high schools in 15 schools in California were randomly selected to receive free computers and followed over the school year. The results indicate that the experiment substantially increased computer ownership and total computer use among the schoolchildren with no substitution away from use at school or other locations outside the home. We find no evidence that the home computers improved educational outcomes for the treatment group. From detailed administrative data provided by the schools and a follow-up survey, we find no evidence of positive effects on a comprehensive set of outcomes such as grades, test scores, credits, attendance, school enrollment, computer skills, and college aspirations. The estimates also do not indicate that the effects of home computers on educational outcomes are instead negative. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even modestly-sized positive or negative impacts. The lack of a positive net effect on educational outcomes may be due to displacement from non-educational uses such as for games, social networking, and entertainment. We find evidence that total hours of computer use for games and social networking increases substantially with having a home computer, and increases more than total hours of computer use for schoolwork

Commercial orientation and grassroots social innovation: insight from the sharing economy.

There is growing interest in the roles of the sharing economy and grassroots innovation in the transition to sustainable societies. Grassroots innovation research has tended to assume a sharp distinction between grassroots organisations and businesses within niches of socio-technical innovation. However, the non-profit sector literature identifies a tendency for non-profit organisations to actually become more commercially-oriented over time. Seeking to account for this tendency, we develop a conceptual model of the dynamics of grassroots organisations within socio-technical niches. Using a case study of Freegle, a grassroots organisation within the sharing economy niche, we apply the conceptual model to illustrate the causes, processes and outcomes of grassroots niche organisations becoming more commercially-oriented. We show that a grassroots organisation may be subject to coercive and indirect (isomorphic) pressures to become more commercially-oriented and highlight the ambiguities of this dynamic. Furthermore, we highlight that global niche actors may exert coercive pressures that limit the enactment and propagation of the practices and values of grassroots organisations. We conclude by highlighting the need for further research exploring the desirability and feasibility of protecting grassroots organisations from pressures to become more commercially-oriented

Institutionalizing Inequality: Calculative Practices and Regimes of Inequality in International Development

This paper focuses on the institutionalization of inequality in relations between donors and NGOs in the international development sector. We argue that these relations operate within a neoliberal and competitive marketplace, which are necessarily unequal. Specifically, we focus on the apparently mundane practice of impact assessment, and consider how this is fundamental to understanding the performative enactment of institutional inequality. For our analysis we draw upon Miller and Rose’s work on governmentality and calculative practices. We develop our argument with reference to a case study of a donor driven impact assessment initiative being conducted in India. Specifically, we consider an impact assessment initiative that the donor has piloted with one of the NGOs they fund that seeks to improve the livelihoods of Indian farmers. We will argue that institutional inequality can be understood in the way the market as a social institution becomes enacted into mundane calculative practices. Calculative practices produce different kinds of knowledge and in so doing becomes a way in which subjects position themselves, or become positioned, as unequal

Means to an End: An Assessment of the Status-blind Approach to Protecting Undocumented Worker Rights

This article applies the tenets of bureaucratic incorporation theory to an investigation of bureaucratic decision making in labor standards enforcement agencies (LSEAs), as they relate to undocumented workers. Drawing on 25 semistructured interviews with high-level officials in San Jose and Houston, I find that bureaucrats in both cities routinely evade the issue of immigration status during the claims-making process, and directly challenge employers’ attempts to use the undocumented status of their workers to deflect liability. Respondents offer three institutionalized narratives for this approach: (1) to deter employer demand for undocumented labor, (2) the conviction that the protection of undocumented workers is essential to the agency’s ability to regulate industry standards for all workers, and (3) to clearly demarcate the agency’s jurisdictional boundaries to preserve institutional autonomy and scarce resources. Within this context, enforcing the rights of undocumented workers becomes simply an institutional means to an end