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This article reports on the results of a collaborative action research project (2010–12) in which 10 development organizations (nine Dutch and one Belgian), together with their southern partners, explored different actor-focused Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PME) approaches with the aim of dealing more effectively with complex processes of social change. A major challenge that organizations were trying to address during this action research pertained to the demonstration of observable results in complex contexts where such results are not always easy to measure or to quantify and where causal links between cause and effect cannot always be predicted. Drawing from recent literature, the article presents an analytic framework to assess the effectiveness of a PME approach in dealing with complex social change. This framework is then used to explore how actor-focused PME approaches can help international development programmes to manage complex processes of social change by stimulating processes of real-time results-based learning.

Although providing psychological consultation to the network around looked after children is a popular intervention within the practice literature, there is little evidence examining its value for social workers. This study utilised mixed methods, integrated through an explanatory sequential design, to explore the extent to which psychological consultation met social workers' goals and in what way it made a difference. Feedback questionnaires were collated from 48 social workers attending such consultations. Two focus groups were then held with consulting clinicians to gain their perspectives on consultation and the feedback obtained. The survey data demonstrated that social workers wanted a broad range of input and support from consultation, which they reported was largely provided. This reinforced clinicians' perspectives of consultation as a valuable service. Surprisingly, the survey data implied that consultation had a limited impact in terms of making a difference. This is discussed in relation to the methodology and challenges of gaining feedback. An improved model of evaluation is subsequently proposed.

AbstractLegislators are thought to delegate policymaking authority to administrative actors either to avoid blame for controversial policy or to secure policy outcomes. This study tests these competing perspectives and establishes that public attention to policymaking is a powerful predictor of the extent to which significant United States statutes delegate authority to the executive branch. Consistent with the policy‐concerns perspective, by one calculation statutes dealing with high‐attention issues entail 48 percent fewer delegating provisions than statutes dealing with low‐attention issues – a far stronger relationship than is typically found in the delegation literature. As per the blame‐avoidance perspective, a number of additional analyses yield results consistent with the notion that fears about future public attention motivate statutory delegation if legislative conflict is sufficiently great. Overall, however, the results suggest that conflict typically is not sufficiently great and that legislators are generally more inclined to limit statutory delegation when the public is paying attention.

Recent years have seen an increase in sex worker organisation, with sex workers and their allies forming unions and collectives, protesting in defence of sex workers' rights, contesting working conditions, opposing criminalisation and aiming to decrease the stigma associated with sex work. However, the actions of male clients have remained invisible. Drawing on empirical data collected from interviews with thirty-five men who pay for sex, and borrowing from social movement literature, specifically Diani's (1992) framework of social movements, this article examines the role of collective identity and the way some clients negotiate political and media constructions of the client figure, and respond to policy processes surrounding the regulation of commercial sex. By taking a cultural studies approach to the sex industry, the article locates commercial sex and its actors within the wider social, cultural and political landscape, reflecting how wider trends regarding the mobilisation and resistance of marginalised groups are apparent within the most unlikely communities.

This article discusses a strange case of shamanic ritual performed for a Buryat family in Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar. This performance not only differs from those described in the regional literature, but it also seems to challenge some of the models used to account for ritual efficacy. Indeed, while the cathartic use of Buryat traumatic history to deal with a patient's misfortune in shamanic rituals is quite well documented, this performance stands out for the uncompassionate hopelessness with which spirits spoke of the family's fate as exiles in Mongolia. Meanwhile, the ever‐growing tension between participants, which culminated in an open crisis, would be a sure sign of a ritual failure had it not been the clear result of the shaman's own efforts to establish mutual misunderstanding between the spirits, the patients, and herself. Drawing on a pragmatic approach to ritual efficacy, this article ponders on the specific purpose of a performance which seems to be aimed at creating a context of miscommunication between participants.

Do users tend to consume only like-minded political information online? We point to two problems with the existing knowledge about this debate. First, the measurement of media preferences by the typical means of surveys is less reliable than behavioral data. Second, most studies have analyzed only the extent of online exposure to like-minded content, not the users' complete web-browsing repertoire. This study used both survey data and real-life browsing behavior (661,483 URLs from 15,976 websites visited by 402 participants) for the period 7 weeks prior to the 2013 Israeli national elections. The results indicate that (1) self-report measurements of ideological exposure are inflated, (2) exposure to online ideological content accounted for only 3% of total online browsing, (3) the participants' media repertoires are very diverse with no evidence of echo chambers, and (4) in accordance with the selective exposure hypothesis, individuals on both sides are more exposed to like-minded content. The results are discussed in light of the selective exposure literature.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the idea of what may be called Public Demography, wherein the practitioners and interpreters of the discipline of population studies inform (and sometimes inflame) the popular discourse on population‐related matters. It looks at the representation of demographic research and policies in one form of public engagement, namely fiction — literature being an important way of transmitting the substance of a technical field of study to a lay public. Reviewing a sample of fictional writing that is clearly derived from a specialized knowledge of the subject of demography, the article finds it useful to classify this genre into two groups. The works in the first group tend to reproduce or reiterate the mainstream assumptions underlying the academic discipline, while those in the second group seem to take on board more recent criticisms of these assumptions, sometimes in unexpected ways. Readers, however, seem to react much more readily to those works that repeat some of the 'bad' habits of the discipline.

AbstractMostafa Malekian has yet to receive much attention in Western academic literature pertaining to Iranian intellectual life, but inside Iran, he has emerged as a popular public intellectual; seen as both a culmination of and rupture with the project of "religious intellectualism." Rather than offer a revolutionary and politically engaged vision of Islam, or a "reformist" or "democratic" interpretation of Shi῾ism, his project seeks to integrate what he calls "rationality" (῾aqlaniyat) and "spirituality" (ma᾽naviyat). As Malekian's project has developed, it has broken, in a number of important respects, with mainstream Islam as practiced in Iran, the religious reformist project, and even organized religion as a whole. This article seeks not only to offer one of the first comprehensive analysis of his existential and social thought in English, but also to analyze his project's deep affinities with a pervasive fatigue vis‐à‐vis collective projects of political emancipation and even "politics" tout court, in the latter phases of the "reformist" President Hojjat al‐Islam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami's tenure.

While there continues to be much assessment of the enduring, largely negative legacy of urban renewal, there has been very little quantified, nationwide analysis at the neighborhood level. This paper contributes to the literature on urban renewal by investigating one dimension of mid–20th century urban change: housing demolition. During the middle decades of the 20th century, government–backed demolition occurred under a variety of housing and transportation programs. Because during those controversial decades no single agency kept track of what was demolished and where, I use a proxy: net loss of housing units by census tract for each decade between 1940 and 1970. I consider three hypotheses: that substandard housing and percent nonwhite in a census tract predicted its likelihood of urban renewal demolition, that the eventual outcome of urban renewal was an increase in higher–density housing, and that there was an improvement in socioeconomic factors. None of the hypotheses are supported. Quantitative, national level analysis of urban renewal has been rare, and much more is needed.

Decision trees are an excellent tool for choosing between alternatives, where the likely financial outcomes of making a particular decision are usually measured by real numbers. To describe the uncertainty of outcomes, the notion of interval-valued decision trees was recently introduced, where only the lower and upper bounds of an outcome, described by an interval, are known. To address the difficulty of an interval-valued comparison of alternatives, several decision rules, including the Laplace and Hurwicz rules, have been discussed in the literature. In this paper, we show that in terms of such decision rules, the decision making for interval-valued decision trees can be equivalently reduced to real-valued ones, which means that an alternative is chosen at some decision node in the original interval-valued decision tree if and only if it is chosen at the same decision node in the corresponding real-valued decision tree. In this way, we develop an approach to solving interval-valued decision tree problems with the analysis technique for traditional decision trees.

Choice for bilingual education: the role of social background In the Netherlands, bilingual tracks in higher secondary education (TTO) are growing. Based on the literature on primary and secondary effects of social background and given the presumed advantages of these bilingual
tracks, we expected that children from higher social backgrounds more often choose TTO than children from lower social backgrounds. Results based on data from 498 first and second grade pupils in six schools who offer both TTO and regular pre-university education confirmed this expectation.
Parental cultural and social resources could not explain the relationship between social background and the choice for TTO. Children with parents who more use English at home or who are more involved in school do not follow TTO more often. Parental reading behaviour is however related to the
choice for TTO: children from higher social backgrounds whose parents read a lot in Dutch more often follow TTO, whereas children from lower social backgrounds whose parents read a lot in Dutch more often follow regular pre-university education.

Skepticism as to the relevance of collaborative governance theory and practice is often found in the literature on Korean public administration. It is not always clear, however, why and how collaborative governance is irrelevant. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the relevance of collaborative governance theory to South Korean public administration from the perspective of statelessness of the United States via three theoretical approaches: descriptive and explanatory, normative, and instrumental. Although collaborative governance can generate desirable public values related to participatory democracy, this paper suggests that if we are to apply the practice to Korean public administration, we need to develop an empirical theory of collaborative governance that incorporates the characteristics of a strong state and an instrumental theory of collaborative governance that explicitly considers group dynamics within the indigenous culture. To do this, furthermore, we first need to consider the degree to which Korean civil society appreciates the values related to collaborative governance.

While previous research in organization studies has utilized transgender to show how gender is done, overdone and undone, this literature lacks empirical grounding, and the theoretical arguments dominating it tend to idealize the transgressive power of transgender while reducing transgender to hyperbolic drag and stereotypical passing. To further advance the understanding of transgender within and around organizations, this article presents a qualitative study from a Northern European country to investigate how male-to-female transvestites do and undo gender in everyday life and work. In contrast to extant research, we found that participants did transgender and undid gender by underdoing gender, that is, by combining feminine, masculine and ungendered practices and attributes in ways that made passing and drag insignificant. As transvestites simultaneously expressed masculine and feminine forms of embodiment, we argue that they may more obviously challenge, though not dismantle, dominant forms of gender and identity than suggested by previous accounts. We conclude by discussing broader implications for the understanding of gender, identity, power and resistance in organizations.

The aim of this article is to propose a new breakdown of the Gini inequality ratio into three components ( within-group inequality, between-group inequality, and intensity of transvariation between groups to the total inequality index). The between-group inequality concept computes all the differences in salaries between men and women. The main contribution is to show this relationship when dealing with noninteger frequency data appearing on survey data. This article also proves the relationship between the very intuitive Gini concentration ratio and the very commonly used Gini index in the case of discrete distributions with a finite number of observations. The former refers to the relationship between the cumulative proportion of population and income, while the latter is the absolute mean difference divided by twice the arithmetic mean. This article complements the inequality decomposition literature that has stemmed from Gini's work. The research is applied to analyze gender income inequality in a Spanish region using Spanish Structure of Earnings Survey data from 2010.

This article seeks to take stock of the critique of the liberal peace and identify what it has and has not achieved. It also asks 'where do we go from here?' The article surveys an agenda for future research and can also be read as a rebuttal of some recent literature that has attempted to shut down the liberal peace debate. The article opens with a quick recap of the bases of the critique of the liberal peace. It then outlines the 'achievements' of the debate and examines the failings and oversights of the original critique. Questions are raised about the epistemology and terms of the debate, and of the ability of critical intellectual projects to break through the material power held by mainstream intellectual and policy actors. In its final substantive section, the article asks 'where next for the critique of the liberal peace?' We conclude by highlighting avenues of research that might be fruitfully explored.