Author: Nick Frost Publisher: ISBN: 9781529760750 Category : Organizational change Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In the public sector inspection regimes and performance targets provide a powerful and dominant narrative, often placing pressure on professionals and organisations to continuously quantify the quality of services and to achieve targets. This book explores the background, development, techniques and impact of such regimes across areas of the public sector including schools, universities, police forces, children's services and health services. Putting inspection and audit regimes under scrutiny, the author questions their role and function across these organisations and builds a persuasive critical argument for the re-thinking of public accountability mechanisms and techniques.
Author: David Card Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400880874 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 455
Book Description
From David Card, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Alan Krueger, a provocative challenge to conventional wisdom about the minimum wage David Card and Alan B. Krueger have already made national news with their pathbreaking research on the minimum wage. Here they present a powerful new challenge to the conventional view that higher minimum wages reduce jobs for low-wage workers. In a work that has important implications for public policy as well as for the direction of economic research, the authors put standard economic theory to the test, using data from a series of recent episodes, including the 1992 increase in New Jersey's minimum wage, the 1988 rise in California's minimum wage, and the 1990–91 increases in the federal minimum wage. In each case they present a battery of evidence showing that increases in the minimum wage lead to increases in pay, but no loss in jobs. A distinctive feature of Card and Krueger's research is the use of empirical methods borrowed from the natural sciences, including comparisons between the "treatment" and "control" groups formed when the minimum wage rises for some workers but not for others. In addition, the authors critically reexamine the previous literature on the minimum wage and find that it, too, lacks support for the claim that a higher minimum wage cuts jobs. Finally, the effects of the minimum wage on family earnings, poverty outcomes, and the stock market valuation of low-wage employers are documented. Overall, this book calls into question the standard model of the labor market that has dominated economists' thinking on the minimum wage. In addition, it will shift the terms of the debate on the minimum wage in Washington and in state legislatures throughout the country. With a new preface discussing new data, Myth and Measurement continues to shift the terms of the debate on the minimum wage.
Author: Paola Adinolfi Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319536001 Category : Medical Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
This provocative appraisal unpacks commonly held beliefs about healthcare management and replaces them with practical strategies and realistic policy goals. Using Henry Mintzberg’s “Myths of Healthcare” as a springboard, it reveals management practices that undermine care delivery, explores their cultural and corporate origins, and details how they may be reversed through changes in management strategy, organization, scale, and style. Tackling conventional wisdom about decision-making, cost-effectiveness, service quality, and equity, contributors fine-tune concepts of mission and vision by promoting collaboration, engagement, and common sense. The book’s multidisciplinary panel of experts analyzes the most popular healthcare management “myths,” among them: · The healthcare system is failing. · The healthcare system can be fixed through social engineering. · Healthcare institutions can be fixed by bringing in the heroic leader. · The healthcare system can be fixed by treating it more as a business. · Healthcare is rightly left to the private sector, for the sake of efficiency. The Myths of Health Care speaks to a large, diverse audience: scholars of all levels interested in the research in health policy and management, graduate and under-graduate students attending courses in leadership and management of public sector organization, and practitioners in the field of health care.
Author: James J. Heckman Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022610012X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 469
Book Description
Achievement tests play an important role in modern societies. They are used to evaluate schools, to assign students to tracks within schools, and to identify weaknesses in student knowledge. The GED is an achievement test used to grant the status of high school graduate to anyone who passes it. GED recipients currently account for 12 percent of all high school credentials issued each year in the United States. But do achievement tests predict success in life? The Myth of Achievement Tests shows that achievement tests like the GED fail to measure important life skills. James J. Heckman, John Eric Humphries, Tim Kautz, and a group of scholars offer an in-depth exploration of how the GED came to be used throughout the United States and why our reliance on it is dangerous. Drawing on decades of research, the authors show that, while GED recipients score as well on achievement tests as high school graduates who do not enroll in college, high school graduates vastly outperform GED recipients in terms of their earnings, employment opportunities, educational attainment, and health. The authors show that the differences in success between GED recipients and high school graduates are driven by character skills. Achievement tests like the GED do not adequately capture character skills like conscientiousness, perseverance, sociability, and curiosity. These skills are important in predicting a variety of life outcomes. They can be measured, and they can be taught. Using the GED as a case study, the authors explore what achievement tests miss and show the dangers of an educational system based on them. They call for a return to an emphasis on character in our schools, our systems of accountability, and our national dialogue. Contributors Eric Grodsky, University of Wisconsin–Madison Andrew Halpern-Manners, Indiana University Bloomington Paul A. LaFontaine, Federal Communications Commission Janice H. Laurence, Temple University Lois M. Quinn, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Pedro L. Rodríguez, Institute of Advanced Studies in Administration John Robert Warren, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Author: Jay Kappraff Publisher: World Scientific ISBN: 9789810247027 Category : Mathematics Languages : en Pages : 618
Book Description
This book consists of essays that stand on their own but are also loosely connected. Part I documents how numbers and geometry arise in several cultural contexts and in nature: scale, proportion in architecture, ancient geometry, megalithic stone circles, the hidden pavements of the Laurentian library, the shapes of the Hebrew letters, and the shapes of biological forms. Part II shows how many of the same numbers and number sequences are related to the modern mathematical study of numbers, dynamical systems, chaos, and fractals.
Author: Michael C. Acree Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030732576 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 457
Book Description
This book proposes and explores the idea that the forced union of the aleatory and epistemic aspects of probability is a sterile hybrid, inspired and nourished for 300 years by a false hope of formalizing inductive reasoning, making uncertainty the object of precise calculation. Because this is not really a possible goal, statistical inference is not, cannot be, doing for us today what we imagine it is doing for us. It is for these reasons that statistical inference can be characterized as a myth. The book is aimed primarily at social scientists, for whom statistics and statistical inference are a common concern and frustration. Because the historical development given here is not merely anecdotal, but makes clear the guiding ideas and ambitions that motivated the formulation of particular methods, this book offers an understanding of statistical inference which has not hitherto been available. It will also serve as a supplement to the standard statistics texts. Finally, general readers will find here an interesting study with implications far beyond statistics. The development of statistical inference, to its present position of prominence in the social sciences, epitomizes a number of trends in Western intellectual history of the last three centuries, and the 11th chapter, considering the function of statistical inference in light of our needs for structure, rules, authority, and consensus in general, develops some provocative parallels, especially between epistemology and politics.
Author: John S. Lyons Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 0387928227 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Measurement in human services means one thing: how well the effort serves clients. But the data doesn’t exist in a vacuum and must be communicated clearly between provider and client, provider and management, and across systems. During the past decade, innovative communimetric measures have helped more than 50,000 professionals worldwide in health care, justice, and business settings deliver findings that enhance communication on all sides. Now, the theory and methods behind this fast-paced innovation are available in this informative volume. Communimetrics presents information in an accessible style, and its model of measurement as communication bolsters transparency and ease of interpretation without sacrificing validity or reliability. It conveys a deep appreciation for the unique position of service delivery systems at the intersection between science and management (and between quality and quantity), and shows readers how to create measures that can be used immediately to translate findings into practical action. This must-have volume offers readers the tools for understanding—and applying—this cutting-edge innovation by providing: The theoretical base for communimetrics. Practical illustrations comparing communimetrics with traditional methods. Guidelines for designing communimetric measures and evaluating their reliability and validity. Detailed examples of three widely used communimetric measures—the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS), the INTERMED, and the Entrepreneurial League System Assessment as well as detailed explanations for how they are used and why they work. Applications used in a range of settings, including children’s services, adult mental health, services for the aging, and business and organizational development. Communimetrics provides a wealth of real-world uses to a wide professional audience, including program evaluators, quality management professionals, enterprise managers, teachers of field research methods, and professionals involved in measurement and management design. It also makes an exceptionally useful text for program evaluation courses.
Author: Oswaldo de Rivero B. Publisher: Zed Books ISBN: 9781856499491 Category : Developing countries Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
In order to prevent increasing social and political disorders, the author argues that many countries with primary production and explosive urban growth will have to abandon dreams of development to adopt a policy of national survival based on the search for water, food, and energy security - and the stabilization of their populations."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: David Neumark Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262141027 Category : Income distribution Languages : en Pages : 389
Book Description
A comprehensive review of evidence on the effect of minimum wages on employment, skills, wage and income distributions, and longer-term labor market outcomes concludes that the minimum wage is not a good policy tool.
Author: Nick Frost
Author: David Card
Author: Paola Adinolfi
Author: James J. Heckman
Author: Robert Austin
Author: Jay Kappraff
Author: Michael C. Acree
Author: John S. Lyons
Author: Oswaldo de Rivero B.
Author: David Neumark