Recent state and federal legislation holds the promise of sweeping reform in special-education practices. In this article, Richard Weatherley and Michael Lipsky examine the implementation of Chapter 766, the dramatically innovative state special-education law in Massachusetts. They show how the necessary coping mechanisms that individual school personnel use to manage the demands of their jobs ...

Abstract The recent debate on administrative bodies in international organizations has brought forward multiple theoretical perspectives, analytical frameworks, and methodological approaches. Despite these efforts to advance knowledge actors, the research program public administrations (IPAs) missed out two important opportunities: reflection scholarship relations (IR) administration synergies ...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the recruitment of elites in the Western world leads to social cohesion, or to the opposite -social stratification. We show that the main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their recruitment. Although meritocratic selection should result in the best being chosen, we show that m...

Does clientelism perpetuate the weak state capacity that characterizes many young democracies? Prior work explains clientelist parties skew public spending to private goods and under-supply goods. Building on these insights, this article argues creates a bureaucratic trap. Governments rely invest in labour-intensive, low-skilled bureaucracies can design implement relatively more straightforward...

Max Weber believed that bureaucracy could be understood by analysing its ideal-typical characteristics, and that these characteristics would become more pervasive as the modern age advanced. Weber’s horizontal account of bureaucracy can be criticised on various grounds, including its unrealistic notion of bureaucratic rationality. An alternative view is proposed, namely, that the development of...

At the beginning of the 21 century, all organizations need to address the continually changing social and economic landscape in which they operate. In this landscape organizations need to be responsive, flexible and agile and acquire the capability to leverage information and use collective knowledge to make appropriate decisions quickly and effectively. The practice of knowledge management all...