Suchergebnisse

Outcomes assessment is an intense topic that has been debated and discussed on university campuses around the world. Educational accountability is a very important topic. There is tremendous pressure from accreditation agencies to comply with outcomes assessment requirements to maintain accreditation. In addition, to be competitive in a market of many choices, students, employers, and legislators are seeking trustworthy programs. This has raised many questions for Provosts, Deans, and Department Chairs. What are the purposes of outcomes assessment? What should we assess? What methods should we use? How do we overcome faculty objections? Do we need to hire additional administrators to conduct or assist with outcomes assessment? What type of training do we need to provide to our faculty? What do we do with the data that we collect?

'Good' Outcomes – Handling Multiplicity in Government Communication This thesis examines how five Danish government organizations produce and assess communicative solutions in practice, and argues that government communication may be understood as a case of multiplicity. In the practices of producing and assessing communicative solutions it is uncertain what constitutes a 'good' outcome of government communication. This uncertainty is grasped by drawing upon analytical resources from the field of multiplicity-oriented ANT analyses. Empirically, the thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the five government organizations. Combining empirical observations, theoretical insights, and political programmes, four 'modes of ordering' are developed and these are utilized in exploring how the multiplicity of government communication unfurls and how it is handled in practice. The thesis shows how the ordering attempts described by the four modes of ordering coexist and interfere, and it suggests the notions of 'sequencing' and 'singularizing' for understanding how the multiplicity of government communication is handled in the production and assessment of communicative solutions. The study upon which the thesis reports has been carried out in connection with a larger Industrial PhD project, entitled Measurements you can learn from, that aimed at developing, testing, and implementing new and better communication measurements.

Outcomes assessment is an intense topic that has been debated and discussed on universitycampuses around the world. Educational accountability is a very important topic. There is tremendouspressure from accreditation agencies to comply with outcomes assessment requirements to maintainaccreditation. In addition, to be competitive in a market of many choices, students, employers, andlegislators are seeking trustworthy programs. This has raised many questions for Provosts, Deans, andDepartment Chairs. What are the purposes of outcomes assessment? What should we assess? Whatmethods should we use? How do we overcome faculty objections? Do we need to hire additionaladministrators to conduct or assist with outcomes assessment? What type of training do we need toprovide to our faculty? What do we do with the data that we collect?

In contexts where political corruption is endemic, why would political elites build state capacity to prosecute corruption? Prior studies emphasize exogenous pressure from social movements or international organizations and the rise of political leaders committed to fighting corruption. While important, these factors are not sufficient to explain the case of Brazil, where politicians empowered investigative bureaucracies, even though several political elites later became victims of prosecution. Drawing on document analysis of charges and sentences and on 110 in-depth interviews with prosecutors, judges, and politicians, I develop a framework that focuses on the processes through which corruption is criminalized on the ground. By examining the initiatives of politicians in interaction with the actions of civil servants who investigate and prosecute cases of corruption, I show that political elites empowered investigators because, at the time, these steps seemed innocuous. Prosecutors later reframed how they talked about corruption—getting other colleagues to pay attention to this issue—and learned new strategies to uncover corruption schemes, but these changes happened under the radar: they were not visible to politicians. Popular pressure also led courts to broaden the definition of corruption and lower the threshold of evidence for it, but these decisions took place after the politicians' actions.