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In recent years, leaders in a number of nations have undermined their public sector's capacity to deliver on its core goals. To understand this interference, it is necessary to examine the formal and informal organizational dynamics at play within bureaucracies. Considering a widely applicable generalized organization, a formal model outlines how a leader may augment the career incentives of supervisors and lower-level workers, which shifts the alignment of policy with an organization's central mission. While hierarchy may amplify disruption, organizational culture can coalesce as a norm facilitating resistance to extreme shifts, thereby stabilizing long-term mission compliance. Yet, should disruption lead to an exodus of mission-driven employees, durable reversals of an organization's capacity to fulfill its aims may ensue. The model highlights three trajectories disrupted organizations follow: temporary reversal, erosion, and resistance. Implications are considered for public sector institutions and international organizations as well as for the study of bureaucratic and state capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How anthropology can contribute to understanding local and global realities within the security moment of the post-9/11 world is discussed. The analysis of critical cultural anthropology of security is relevant as neoliberalism declines and the rise of security paradigm as a framework for organizing contemporary social life. Insights on examples from Latin America are also given.

A study was conducted to present a method to help and understand consumers as they construct preferences for retirement income. This method allows consumers to build desired probability distributions of wealth constrained by market forces. It is concluded that the idea that marketing could help people construct better preferences is a shift away from the view that it is the job of marketing to uncover them.

Through analysis of preparedness for pandemic influenza in Israel, I explore how future uncertainty is conceptualized and the various practices put into action to deal with it. In particular, I discuss the emergence of a new type of uncertainty—potential uncertainty—and three technologies employed to cope with it: risk technology, preparedness technology, and event technology. Event technology emerges in the preparations for a potential uncertainty event—such as pandemic influenza. In contrast with the other two technologies, it acknowledges the problem of potential uncertainty and retains uncertainty through its action. Thus, uncertainty is not solely linked to the appearance of new risks in the world, which is the basis of the risk society approach (e.g., Beck 1992; Giddens 2000), nor is it related to the impossibility of calculating these risks, as the preparedness paradigm (e.g., Lakoff 2008) and science and technology studies argue. Rather, uncertainty underpins a technology through which the future, although not reducible to calculable forms, can still be governed. Employing the concept of potential uncertainty and considering the various technologies applied to management of the future allow for a more thorough discussion of problems of future uncertainty with which current societies are preoccupied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the second half of the nineteenth century, local and regional voluntary societies were among the most widespread, accessible, and familiar public scientific institutions in America. Collectively, they made up an institutional network that converted individuals' private interest in science into a public activity. They played an essential role in the dissemination of scientific information, the growth of a scientifically literate population, and the extension of public support for science in the decades after the Civil War. This essay delineates and maps the spread of these societies throughout the country, as well as the flow of scientific information both among societies and between a society and its regional hinterland. Using the Davenport [Iowa] Academy of Natural Sciences as an example, it demonstrates how local societies were embedded in a national scientific community and mediated between it and local scientific enthusiasts, to the benefit of both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Features James Dale Owen, who claimed to have been sent West by the Smithsonian to attend state fairs and make note of whatever new and inclusive profile of the natural science community. Smithsonian connection; Support for natural science; High regard for the Smithsonian Institution; Structure of the natural science community; Decline of the Smithsonian's correspondence network.