Learning in Organizations and Public Policy

2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEORGE J. BUSENBERG
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Organizational Learning ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
Policy Learning ◽  
Focusing Events ◽  
New Information ◽  
Shape Learning ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Over Time

This study builds a conceptual framework to guide empirical studies of learning in public policy. Learning in public policy is defined here as a process in which individuals apply new information and ideas to policy decisions. This topic is examined by adapting relevant concepts from studies of organizational learning to the context of public policy. Recent work in the organizational learning literature focuses on institutional structures, procedures, and customs (learning arrangements) that act to promote individual learning. Further work in the policy literature suggests that focusing events (incidents that focus public and political attention on a policy issue) can also shape learning in public policy. Combining insights from these two literatures, this study proposes that both learning arrangements and focusing events can play observable roles in shaping policy change over time. These concepts are developed and examined in the context of hazardous systems.

Investigating the President

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas L. Kriner ◽  
Eric Schickler
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Theater ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Presidential Power ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Partisan Polarization ◽  
Approval Rating ◽  
Congressional Investigations ◽  
Over Time

Although congressional investigations have provided some of the most dramatic moments in American political history, they have often been dismissed as mere political theater. But these investigations are far more than grandstanding. This book shows that congressional investigations are a powerful tool for members of Congress to counter presidential aggrandizement. By shining a light on alleged executive wrongdoing, investigations can exert significant pressure on the president and materially affect policy outcomes. This book constructs the most comprehensive overview of congressional investigative oversight to date, analyzing nearly 13,000 days of hearings, spanning more than a century, from 1898 through 2014. The book examines the forces driving investigative power over time and across chambers, and identifies how hearings might influence the president’s strategic calculations through the erosion of the president’s public approval rating, and uncover the pathways through which investigations have shaped public policy. Put simply, by bringing significant political pressure to bear on the president, investigations often afford Congress a blunt, but effective check on presidential power—without the need to worry about veto threats or other hurdles such as Senate filibusters. In an era of intense partisan polarization and institutional dysfunction, the book delves into the dynamics of congressional investigations and how Congress leverages this tool to counterbalance presidential power.

Environmentalists, Nuclear Waste, and the Politics of Passive Exclusion in Germany

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hunold
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
The State ◽  
Radioactive Wastes ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Ecological Democracy ◽  
Over Time

In this essay I examine the dispute between the German GreenParty and some of the country’s environmental nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs) over the March 2001 renewal of rail shipmentsof highly radioactive wastes to Gorleben. My purpose indoing so is to test John Dryzek’s 1996 claim that environmentalistsought to beware of what they wish for concerning inclusion in theliberal democratic state. Inclusion on the wrong terms, arguesDryzek, may prove detrimental to the goals of greening and democratizingpublic policy because such inclusion may compromise thesurvival of a green public sphere that is vital to both. Prospects forecological democracy, understood in terms of strong ecologicalmodernization here, depend on historically conditioned relationshipsbetween the state and the environmental movement that fosterthe emergence and persistence over time of such a public sphere.

Dualities, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizational Life

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Systems ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Organizational Studies ◽  
Organizational Life ◽  
Organizational Processes ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Process Studies ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Over Time

Organizational contradictions and process studies offer interwoven and complementary insights. Studies of dialectics, paradox, and dualities depict organizational contradictions that are oppositional as well as interrelated such that they persistently morph and shift over time. Studies of process often examine how contradictions fuel emergent, dynamic systems and stimulate novelty, adaptation, and transformation. Drawing from rich conversations at the Eighth International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, the contributors to this volume unpack these relationships in more depth. The chapters explore three main, connected themes through both conceptual and empirical studies, including (1) offering insight into how process theorizing advances understandings of organizational contradictions; (2) shedding light on how dialectics, paradoxes, and dualities fuel organizational processes that affect persistence and transformation; and (3) exploring the convergence and divergence of dialectics, paradox, and dualities lenses. Taken together, this book offers key insights in order to inform persistent, contradictory dynamics in organizations and organizational studies.

Ethics and Public Policy

1981 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
George J. Graham
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
Policy Choice ◽  
Single Text ◽  
Public Policy Analysis ◽  
The Government ◽  
New Framework ◽  
Selection Of

The purpose of this course is to introduce a new framework linking the humanities to public policy analysis as pursued in the government and the academy. Current efforts to link the particular contributions from the humanities to problems of public policy choice are often narrow either in terms of their perspective on the humanities or in terms of their selection of the possible means of influencing policy choice. Sometimes a single text from one of the humanities disciplines is selected to apply to a particular issue. At other times, arguments about the ethical dimensions of a single policy issue often are pursued with a single — or sometimes, no — point of access to the policy process in mind.

scholarly journals Friendship paradox in growth networks: analytical and empirical analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergei P. Sidorov ◽  
Sergei V. Mironov ◽  
Alexey A. Grigoriev
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Preferential Attachment ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Mean Field ◽  
Network Models ◽  
Average Degree ◽  
Closure Model ◽  
Triadic Closure ◽  
Attachment Mechanism ◽  
Over Time

AbstractMany empirical studies have shown that in social, citation, collaboration, and other types of networks in real world, the degree of almost every node is less than the average degree of its neighbors. This imbalance is well known in sociology as the friendship paradox and states that your friends are more popular than you on average. If we introduce a value equal to the ratio of the average degree of the neighbors for a certain node to the degree of this node (which is called the ‘friendship index’, FI), then the FI value of more than 1 for most nodes indicates the presence of the friendship paradox in the network. In this paper, we study the behavior of the FI over time for networks generated by growth network models. We will focus our analysis on two models based on the use of the preferential attachment mechanism: the Barabási–Albert model and the triadic closure model. Using the mean-field approach, we obtain differential equations describing the dynamics of changes in the FI over time, and accordingly, after obtaining their solutions, we find the expected values of this index over iterations. The results show that the values of FI are decreasing over time for all nodes in both models. However, for networks constructed in accordance with the triadic closure model, this decrease occurs at a much slower rate than for the Barabási–Albert graphs. In addition, we analyze several real-world networks and show that their FI distributions follow a power law. We show that both the Barabási–Albert and the triadic closure networks exhibit the same behavior. However, for networks based on the triadic closure model, the distributions of FI are more heavy-tailed and, in this sense, are closer to the distributions for real networks.

Belief Movement, Uncertainty Reduction, and Rational Updating*

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ned Augenblick ◽  
Matthew Rabin
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Tests ◽  
Uncertainty Reduction ◽  
The State ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
New Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Market Beliefs ◽  
Over Time

Abstract When a Bayesian learns new information and changes her beliefs, she must on average become concomitantly more certain about the state of the world. Consequently, it is rare for a Bayesian to frequently shift beliefs substantially while remaining relatively uncertain, or, conversely, become very confident with relatively little belief movement. We formalize this intuition by developing specific measures of movement and uncertainty reduction given a Bayesian’s changing beliefs over time, showing that these measures are equal in expectation and creating consequent statistical tests for Bayesianess. We then show connections between these two core concepts and four common psychological biases, suggesting that the test might be particularly good at detecting these biases. We provide support for this conclusion by simulating the performance of our test and other martingale tests. Finally, we apply our test to data sets of individual, algorithmic, and market beliefs.

scholarly journals Persisting inequality: A case of probabilistic drive towards divergence

2017 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Maialeh
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Global Inequality ◽  
Economic Disparities ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Over Time

The aim of the study is to prove that agents organised by market forces tend to create and even more so deepen economic disparities over time. Empirical studies do not reliably describe the trend and causes of interpersonal global inequality in recent decades. Hence, the attention is turned to general economic theory with inspiration from Schumpeterian and neoclassical theories. The results indicate that pure market economy logic will tend to lead to multi-level divergence.

Remembering the News: Effects of Medium and Message Discrepancy on News Recall over Time

1995 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 666-681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Wicks
Keyword(s):  
Associative Memory ◽  
News Media ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
Important Variable ◽  
News Stories ◽  
New Information ◽  
News Effects ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Better Than

This article suggests a theoretical explanation of the processes related to recall and learning of media news information. It does so by linking the concepts of schematic thinking and the Search of Associative Memory (SAM) to the variable of time. It argues that learning from the news may be better than many recent studies suggest. Although humans may have trouble recalling discrete news stories in recall examinations, it seems likely that they acquire “common knowledge” from the news media. Time is an important variable in helping people to remember news if they use it to think about new information in the context of previously stored knowledge.

KNOWLEDGE DYNAMICS IN FRAGMENTED INDUSTRIES

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (02) ◽  
pp. 1450004
Author(s):  
FEDERICA CECI ◽  
DAJANA D'ANDREA
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Learning ◽  
Project Based Learning ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Individual Project ◽  
Comprehensive Picture ◽  
Knowledge Dynamics ◽  
Systematic Understanding ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Over Time

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive picture of knowledge dynamics in fragmented industries in which economic activities are performed through inter-firm projects. The organization performing the project often does not survive the project itself, though knowledge is acquired and retained over time and across the whole industry. Notwithstanding scholars' interest, a systematic understanding of this subject is still lacking. To fill this gap, an analytical model has been developed to describe the processes of knowledge acquisition and retention in fragmented industries. Drawing upon empirical evidence collected from the UK media content industry and literature on project-based learning, project-based organization and organizational learning, the model presents the variables involved in these processes, distinguishing them according to the level at which they act (individual, project, industry) and according to the role they play (process or moderator). Implications for practitioners and policymakers are then discussed.

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