Nancy C. Roberts

PUBLIC DELIBERATION IN AN AGE OF DIRECT CITIZEN PARTICIPATION

Citizen participation in the decisions that affect their lives is an imperative of contemporary society. For the first half of the 20th century, citizens relied on public officials and administrators to make decisions about public policy and its implementation. The latter part of the 20th century saw a shift toward greater direct citizen involvement. This trend is expected to grow as democratic societies become more decentralized, interdependent, networked, linked by new information technologies, and challenged by “wicked problems.” The purpose of this article is to summarize the past experiments in direct citizen participation—the forms they take, the challenges they raise (including the need for redefined roles for public officials and citizens), and the consequences they produce. By laying out what has been done in the past, we are better positioned to identify the critical issues and challenges that remain for researchers and practitioners to address in the future.

Keeping Public Officials Accountable through Dialogue: Resolving the Accountability Paradox

How can public officials be held accountable, and yet avoid the paradoxes and pathologies of the current mechanisms of accountability? The answer, claims Harmon (1995), is dialogue. But what exactly is dialogue, and how is it created? More importantly, how can dialogue ensure accountability? To address these questions, I begin with a brief description of dialogue and its basic features, distinguishing it from other forms of communication. An example illustrates how dialogue occurs in actual practice. Not only does dialogue demonstrate the intelligent management of contradictory motives and forces, it also supports Harmon’s claim that it can resolve the accountability paradox and avoid the atrophy of personal responsibility and political authority. I suggest that dialogue’s advantage outweighs its cost as a mechanism of accountability under a particular set of conditions: when public officials confront “wicked problems” that defy definition and solution, and when traditional problem-solving methods have failed, thus preventing any one group from imposing its definition of the problem or its solutions on others.

Developing a Dark Web collection and infrastructure for computational and social sciences

In recent years, there have been numerous studies from a variety of perspectives analyzing the Internet presence of hate and extremist groups. Yet the websites and forums of extremist and terrorist groups have long remained an underutilized resource for terrorism researchers due to their ephemeral nature and access and analysis problems. The purpose of the Dark Web archive is to provide a research infrastructure for use by social scientists, computer and information scientists, policy and security analysts, and others studying a wide range of social and organizational phenomena and computational problems. The Dark Web Forum Portal provides web enabled access to critical international jihadist and other extremist web forums. The focus of this paper is on the significant extensions to previous work including: increasing the scope of data collection, adding an incremental spidering component for regular data updates; enhancing the searching and browsing functions; enhancing multilingual machine-translation for Arabic, French, German and Russian; and advanced Social Network Analysis. A case study on identifying active participants is shown at the end.

Organizational Power Styles: Collective and Competitive Power under Varying Organizational Conditions

This article reports research on the extent to which managers exercise both competitive and collective power with bosses, peers, and subordinates and the extent to which this exercise is related to organizationalfactors such as resource availability, normative structures, and organizational form (Type A or Type Z). Based on data from a survey of 350 managers from three levels of management in two businesses and two universities, the author finds that managers exercise both collective and competitive power in these organizations, in all role relationships, and that the type of power exercised is associated with resource availability and organizationalform.

Organizing for peace operations

There have been two general approaches to organizing for peace operations: an ad hoc approach, in which entities independently intervene and operate on the basis of their unique expertise and interest; and a top – down approach, in which all entities are directed and controlled by a single authority. Using the UN experience in Afghanistan, we demonstrate how this view of the organizing problem is limited. Instead, we develop a typology that distinguishes among three systems for organizing peace operations-Command, Market and Community – on the basis of their differences on four analytic dimensions (agency, social attachment, social control and inter-organizational relations). Our analysis of the UN experience in Afghanistan demonstrates the utility of our framework for both theory and practice.

Network structure from relational data: Measurement and inference in four operational models ☆

Abstract An empirically-based assessment of the operational procedures routinely used in network analysis reveals serious measurement deficiencies that render spurious images of network structure. Based on explicit, exhaustive measurement along three basic relational dimensions, an alternative approach is described that resolves these problems. The three dimensions (type of relation, the relations existential status, and level of analysis) combine to create a general framework for classifying and assessing a range of relational operational procedures in terms of measurement capability and inference potential.

Public Entrepreneurship as Social Creativity

The article begins with an overview of the innovation process and the entrepreneurial process, each treated as separate but interrelated phenomena. The innovation process tracks the evolution of a new idea through time, whereas the entrepreneurial process tracks the activities that entrepreneurs develop to promote and defend the idea against its detractors. The model of innovation and entrepreneurship introduced distinguishes between individual and collective entrepreneurship and identifies two types of collective entrepreneurship: team entrepreneurship and functional entrepreneurship. A Minnesota case study demonstrates the power of both team and functional entrepreneurship. It also illustrates how important the linkages are between the entrepreneurs and their larger community. An innovative ideas development and survival depends on an “ecology of organizations” that provide “venture” capital for analysis and experimentation. The vast networks of contacts and associations represent a form of social capital just as important as the communitys economic capital. In this case, both aspects of social creativity—the community resources and the network of social relations—were found to be instrumental in passing and implementing the first public school choice program in the country.

Relational dynamics of charismatic organization: The complementarity of love and power

Abstract: This paper outlines a new theory of structural transformation in charismatic systems by postulating a complementary relationship between love and power. Radical reorganization of social organization, the function of charismatic systems, requires mobilizing and realigning enormous amounts of social energy. The source of this social energy is love. When patterned as communion, love fuses the group into an undifferentiated whole and releases the social energy previously locked up as institutionalized structure. Released from structure or form, however, social energy is highly volatile and produces immense pressures towards instability. Counterbalancing the pressure from communion, a strong, collective order of power functions to harness and align the energy, thereby promoting group stability and enhancing the prospects for structural transformation. Data from a national study of sixty urban communal organizations are used to ground key aspects of the theory.

Progress in Organization Development Research.

Despite the frequent criticisms of OD in the behavioral science literature, there are four major areas ofprogress in OD: progress in operationalizing the concept of change; progress in improving measurement processes and procedures; and progress in designing statistical procedures used to analyze OD intervention data. The authors are encouraged by recent developments in OD research which point to a more solid base on which to build OD practice and theory.

Entrepreneurship in Peace Operations

A central question guides this article: To what extent can entrepreneurship be a force for change and transformation in war-torn areas? To address the question, this article introduces the topic of social entrepreneurship and illustrates how social entrepreneurs are serving as change agents in rebuilding and reconstructing areas devastated by conflict. The social enterprise of Kiva, the brainchild of social entrepreneurs Matthew Flannery and Jessica Jackley, provides an example. It is notable for its innovative idea—a Web-based, internet-facilitated micro-loan process that attracts individual investors worldwide in support of business entrepreneurs in the developing world. As a counter example to top-down, mandate-driven, organization-centric intervention strategies that many organizations pursue in peace operations, Kivas enduring legacy may very well be its bottom-up, entrepreneur-driven, network-centric model of change. Its most salient features are: a supply chain that ‘contractually’ connects all the partners in the loan process to minimize coordination problems and ensure that each step in the workflow sequentially adds value; processes and systems that guarantee work is transparent, efficient and accountable; a model of learning that enables global and local partners to co-create a complex, worldwide community-based learning system in support of entrepreneurship; and a rich network of social relations built from face-to-face and online interactions to help generate social capital needed for development.