The Impact of Demographic Representation on Absences and Suspensions

Representative bureaucracy theory is central to public administration scholarship due to the likely relationship between the demographic composition of the public workforce and both the actual and perceived performance of public organizations. Primary school classrooms provide an ideal context in which to test the predictions of representative bureaucracy theory at the micro (student) level. Specifically, as parents have at least some agency over primary school students’ daily attendance, absences partially reflect parental assessments of their child's school, classroom, and teacher. Ensuring students attend school each day represents an effort at coproduction on the part of parents. The representativeness of the teacher workforce, and specifically that of the student's classroom teacher, is therefore likely to influence student absenteeism. Similarly, student suspensions reflect students’ relationships with their teacher, students’ comfort level in the classroom, and teachers’ discretion in the referral of misbehavior. These academically and socially important outcomes provide convenient, objective measures of behaviors that are likely influenced by street‐level representation. Using longitudinal student‐level administrative data from North Carolina, we use a two‐way (student and classroom) fixed effects strategy to identify the impact of student–teacher demographic mismatch on primary school students’ absences and suspensions. We find that representation among street‐level bureaucrats significantly decreases both absenteeism and suspensions and that these effects can be given a causal interpretation. This pushes literature forward by establishing the importance of demographic representation in shaping productive relationships between individual bureaucrats and clients.     

European trade ceramics on the Arabian Peninsula 1800–1960

European trade ceramics found across Arabia date from the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries and were made at factories mostly located within northwest Europe. After c. 1930, imitations of European ceramics are increasingly represented from factories in Japan and later China. Combining the information from archaeological excavations on the Arab coast of the Gulf and ceramics from museum and private collections, information from the archives of the British India Office and the Maastricht pottery order books for Arabia, a relatively detailed overview of this market for trade ceramics can be reconstructed. Three key points may be highlighted: First, the complex routes via which European ceramics arrived within Arabia, second, the significance of the link between producers and consumers on opposite sides of the globe, exemplified by specific designs and types of vessels manufactured for the Arabian market, and third, new layers of meaning that were given to such objects as they were incorporated into the homes, social fabric and the lives of people in Arabia.     

Integrating Technical Analysis With Deliberation in Regional Watershed Management Planning: Applying the National Research Council Approach

This paper suggests that applications of watershed management planning would benefit from a theoretical consideration of the policymaking process. A conceptual schema from the field of risk analysis proposes that policymaking be conceived of as a combination of two types of activities: analysis and deliberation. We argue that these concepts are relevant to watershed management planning and we illustrate how a process successfully might integrate both kinds of activities into an iterative, participatory process that is informed competently with relevant knowledge and that promotes learning.