Suchergebnisse

This thesis aims to examine an emerging regime of public education provision in the Chinese context of planned urbanisation. The regime, referred to as property-led education in this study, has risen from three social phenomena. First, the launch of New Urbanisation Plan marks the national strategy to translate urban growth model to the countryside. Two, there is an acute demand of high-quality education in the basic education sector along with China's continuous economic development. Three, private education providers are increasingly engaged with public education. Claiming to be an innovative approach to realising urbanisation agenda while meeting educational demand, property-led education entails 'franchising' elite schools through government procurement of services from education enterprises. More importantly, these education public-private partnerships (PPPs) are directly or indirectly financed by the private capital from the local housing or land markets. This prompts the core inquiry of the study: how has the private sector been involved in property-led education and what are its impacts? The core inquiry is unbundled into three aspects for a comprehensive examination: governance, financing and economic-social outcomes. Integrating the neoliberal and Polanyian paradigms, the thesis presents an in-depth qualitative research with a critical case study of a widely promulgated and fast expanding education PPP network in Shandong Province, China. The critical case includes multiple PPP schools within the same network which are studied as nested cases. Research findings confirm that, as an education provision regime, property-led education is a form of and a contributor to property-led development. This regime of education provision on one hand incentivises both the private and the public sectors to invest into high-quality basic education and on the other makes housing more attractive to urban families. In the end, while housing developers appear to be the source of financing, property-led education is ...

It has been a decade since China launched its Expenditure-guaranteeing Mechanism (the New Mechanism) for rural compulsory education. With enormous amounts of investment being poured into school funding, the main issue has shifted from inadequacy to inefficient and ineffective use of funds. This research project examines the ways in which education is funded in a relatively wealthy county and evaluates their effectiveness against two sets of international theories: Atkinson et al s (2005) critique of main funding models and OECD s guideline to education equity (Field et al. 2007). With a focus on county and school levels, the study combines three qualitative methods with a triangulated design. In the first stage of research, for the purpose of mapping the procedures and models of school funding, the study draws on data publicly available from various websites of the State, provincial, prefecture and county governments. The second stage of research features data collection through interviews, focus group discussions and a questionnaire survey. By communicating with officials from local education authorities and school principals and surveying school teachers, the study not only creates a more comprehensive portrait of the real-life practices in implementing the New Mechanism but also investigates perceived effectiveness of funding programs. The study discovers that even in an area with arguably rich funding, there is considerable deficiency in meeting the needs of students with disadvantages. In particular, students with financial difficulties and students with disabilities are not fully covered by poverty relief assistance; meanwhile disabled children may have limited access to education. Moreover students with learning difficulties are a largely ignored group. The results also reveal that the active involvement of local governments in school funding may have worsened inequity as resources have not been rationally directed. Above two findings suggest that waste of resource coexists with insufficient funding. ...

The prevailing notion in electoral studies suggests that salient candidates boost the visibility of their neighbors on the ballot, whereas the selective visual attention theory from psychology predicts the opposite. This article leverages the unique setting of large Chinese block-voting ballots, which originally came from Europe, to resolve the theoretical controversy. Our findings reveal that conventional ballot position effects persist, with top-listed candidates receiving more votes. More importantly, we demonstrate that a candidate who receives more votes steals the spotlight of the local neighborhood by reducing the votes of her immediate neighbors. The selective visual attention effects vanish in randomly reshuffled placebo ballots yet remain robust when we use pre-election media exposure as an instrumental variable for the votes of spotlight candidates. Our research offers a novel perspective on the interaction between voter attention and candidate positioning, supporting the selective visual attention theory within an electoral context.

AbstractThis article explores the effects of social media on government accountability under authoritarian regimes. It examines whether online discussions have a disciplining effect on officials' scandals. We use a unique dataset containing records of scandals discussed on microblogs in China to systematically study their effects on the government response process and officials' disciplining. We find that the government employs clear strategies: higher levels of online discussion lead to quicker government responses and more severe punishment of the officials involved. Scandals involving sexual and economic factors, which initially capture more attention, involve quicker responses and more severe punishments. Even when we exploit rainfall as the instrumental variable to mitigate the endogeneity, the results are still robust. Our findings highlight the accountability mechanism facilitated by social media and the power of social media empowerment.

AbstractWe consider an infinite‐horizon periodic‐review inventory system with dual delivery modes, each with a minimum order quantity (MOQ). The expedited mode provides a shorter lead time than the regular mode but has a higher unit ordering cost. As the optimal ordering policy for a system with dual delivery modes and MOQ requirements is unknown and expected to be very complicated, we propose a class of simple policies called single‐index policies, and we provide an exact procedure to compute the expected long‐run average total cost. Specifically, we first analyze the steady‐state distribution of the inventory position. Then we develop a recursive procedure to determine the steady‐state distribution of the inventory level. In addition, for a special case where ordering from the regular mode follows a base‐stock policy, we apply normal approximation to simplify the exact calculation of the cost. We also study a more complicated class of policies called dual‐index policies. In numerical studies, we first compare the average cost of the single‐index policy with that of a modified single‐index policy without MOQ consideration and the policy for the single‐mode system respectively to investigate the value of the single‐index policy. In addition, we find that the simpler single‐index policy performs close to the dual‐index policy and the optimal policy computed via dynamic programming. Finally, to assess the effectiveness of the normal approximation in the special case, we numerically compare the cost and policy parameters of the exact calculation with those of the normal approximation. The results illustrate that normal approximation not only improves the calculation speed, but also has near‐optimal solutions.

Decentralization is often regarded as a panacea for achieving good governance. Yet few studies have explored how devolution (to subnational governments) affects policy agendas. In this article, we investigate how devolution affects two aspects of public service provision—economic growth and environmental protection based on the experience of China. The results show that the devolution simultaneously promotes local economic development and damages the environment. These mixed effects can be attributed to the administrative mechanism of the interaction between devolution and the distribution of government attention, which is more concerned with outcomes that can be observed in the short run rather than the long run. Our results highlight the complexity of governance and demonstrate the architecture for an effective policy framework design.

As the key to digital transformation, artificial intelligence is believed to help achieve the goal of government as a platform and the agile development of digital services. Yet we know little about its potential role in local governance, especially the advances that AI-supported services for the public sector in local governance have ventured and the public value they have created. Combining the digital transformation concepts and public value theory, we fill the gap by examining artificial intelligence (AI) deployment in the public sector of a pilot city of digital transformation in China. Using a mixed-method approach, we show how AI configurations facilitate public value creation in the digital era and identify four dimensions of AI deployment in the public sector: data integration, policy innovation, smart application, and collaboration. Our case analysis on these four dimensions demonstrates two roles that AI technology plays in local governance—"AI cage" and "AI colleague." The former builds the technology infrastructure and platform in each stage of service delivery, regulating the behaviors of frontline workers, while the latter helps frontline workers make decisions, thus improving the agility of public service provision.

AbstractA core aspect of agile governance is effectively managing communications between a government and its citizens. However, doing so during an emergency—particularly a pandemic—is often complex and challenging. In this article, we examine how various levels of the Chinese government (central, provincial, and municipal) communicated with the public in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Analyzing government social media posts during the COVID‐19 outbreak in Wuhan ("text as data"), we conduct topic modeling analysis and identify four strategies that characterize Chinese governments' responses to a variety of issues at the ground level, which we labelinstructing information, adjusting information, advocacy, andbolstering. The results show that local government agencies predominantly used the first two strategies, whereas the central government mainly relied on the last two. These strategies explain how various levels of government engaged in agile governance through their communication with citizens, highlight the coordination and control work undertaken by governments at all levels, and demonstrate how these methods shielded the central government from blame for the pandemic.

PurposeAlthough studies have demonstrated that knowledge hiding is an important inhibitor of organizational innovation, current research does not clearly address how intragroup relationship conflict influences knowledge hiding. This study aims to identify the underlying mechanism between intra-group relationship conflict and knowledge hiding.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on affective events theory (AET), the authors propose a theoretical model and empirically test it by applying hierarchical regression analysis and a bootstrapping approach to data from a multi-wave survey of 224 employees in China.FindingsConsistent with AET, the empirical results show that envy mediates perceived intragroup relationship conflict and knowledge hiding. As predicted, trait competitiveness moderates the indirect effect of perceived intragroup relationship conflict on knowledge hiding via envy.Originality/valueThe results support an AET perspective whereby knowledge hiding is shaped by relationship conflict, envy and trait competitiveness. This study introduces the novel proposition that relationship conflict and competitiveness influence envy, and consequently knowledge hiding.

The commentary addresses the government's role in mitigating information asymmetry problems during pandemic crisis response. We use the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, as a case to show the use of social media as a key mechanism in shaping the actions of the central government in its coordination with the local governments during the pandemic response. The Chinese government effectively collaborated with a social media platform to not only create a dedicated channel to allow citizens to post information about the pandemic to accelerate the speed of relief but also mobilize citizens and nonprofit organizations to support government response and recovery efforts. This suggests that social media can provide a venue for the government to not only tackle the information overload but also mitigate the friction among levels of governments.