Evidence-Based Social Care: Wheels off the Runway?

British social services departments are a beleaguered species. Political ideology continues to play a major role in shaping policy and practice, despite a change of government. Sheltering beneath the ideological umbrella are more considered views of the need to rethink structures developed as a means of solving social problems and delivering services, some of which have themselves become problematic, some of which are simply too expensive. These influences have combined radically to reframe the roles and responsibilities of many who work face-to-face with service users and carers. It is in this context of change and threat to professional identity that the implementation of evidence-based approaches to policy and practice within social work has to be considered.     

Using competency‐based assessment centres to select judges – implications for equality and diversity

This article is concerned with two significant areas of HR practice – competency‐based recruitment and selection and equality and diversity. The article provides a critical appraisal of the implications for equality and diversity of using a competency approach to select judges in the UK. The study reveals the socially constructed and ambiguous nature of competencies in practice. It offers partial support to previous claims that competency‐based HR practices have the potential to be used more creatively and inclusively and thus have the potential to further equality and diversity objectives. However, the study also revealed dangers inherent in competency‐based HR practices that arise from the inescapable fact that human, organisational actors (i.e. the assessors) are necessarily required to interpret the competencies and evaluate which candidates meet them and which do not. Thus, whatever the rhetoric, there is the potential for bias, prejudice and discrimination.     

Benefit shifting: The case of sickness insurance for the unemployed

This study describes the probability of transition from unemployment with unemployment insurance (UI) to sickness insurance (SI), using a proportional hazard duration model and a large register-based dataset. The combination of limited UI duration and the fact that SI rights do not depend on remaining UI, creates an incentive to use SI to effectively extend UI. The separate effects of elapsed unemployment duration and of UI duration on hazard rates are identified through a reform of the UI system. The estimated hazard rate for transition from unemployment to SI increases sharply the last months before UI exhaustion. The spikes are larger for diagnosis for mental illness, and vary across individuals, but are present for all groups and all diagnoses.     

Autopoiesis and general anti-avoidance rules

Legal autopoiesis is a post-modern, essentially positivist theory that tries to describe the true nature of law. Its principal tenets are the ideas of self-reproductive growth from reasoning that is self-referential and recursive, relative autonomy from, and “operative closure” against, other social systems, together with “cognitive openness” to “irritation” and to “noise” from outside the closed circle of the law.The authors are sceptical about the ability of autopoiesis theory to illuminate the nature of law in general, but see it as shedding useful light on income tax law, particularly the quality that income tax law shows in inventing legal structures that have no reality beyond the world of fiscal affairs.The authors argue that the general anti-avoidance rule punctures the autonomy and closure of income tax law, to allow the substantive norms of the economic and business system free play, or relatively free play, within tax cases. That is, while income tax law is in general a good example of legal autopoiesis, this observation is incorrect when a general anti-avoidance rule is in play.Two implications for accounting are (a) that the operative closure of law results in a disconnection between income tax law and accountancy, and (b) that a general anti-avoidance rule may repair this disconnection in cases where accountancy records are governed by substance rather than form.     

The Relationship between Animal Welfare and Economic Performance at Farm Level: A Quantitative Study of Danish Pig Producers

We propose a theoretical framework for the relationship between animal welfare and the economic performance of livestock farms. We empirically analyse this relationship based on a unique dataset of randomly sampled Danish pig herds that includes information from unannounced inspections of the compliance with the animal welfare legislation. We find large variations in economic performance and animal welfare. The relationship between these two indicators is rather weak, but tends to be slightly positive. A possible explanation for our results is that management has a major influence on both economic performance and animal welfare so that good farm managers are able to meet all animal welfare regulations, while achieving a high economic performance.     

e‐Government in the Irish Revenue: The Revenue On‐Line Service (ROS): A Success Story?

The Revenue Online Service (ROS) is one of the first e‐government initiatives introduced in Ireland. The primary purpose of this paper is to examine this reform initiative in the Irish Revenue, assess it through the lens of the New Public Management (NPM) and e‐government literatures and to critically assess whether its implementation can be deemed ‘a success story’. Many of the components of NPM were evident in the introduction of ROS which facilitated its implementation: decentralisation, the use of private sector styles of management, an emphasis on performance measurement and a search for efficiencies. ROS has, inter alia, transformed both access to taxation information for taxpayers and their agents, and the system of tax payment and filing in Ireland. Assessing its implementation in terms of the objectives of an e‐government initiative, ROS is ‘a success story’, and the Irish Revenue organisation has clearly benefited from its introduction in many ways. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that tax/accounting practitioners are also beneficiaries of this e‐government initiative. However, a critical analysis of the findings of this study contests the idea that ROS is an unqualified success story.     

The Importance of the Diverse Drivers and Types of Environmental Innovation for Firm Performance

Today, firms are faced with a number of environmental challenges, such as global warming, pollution control and declining natural resources. While there is increasing pressure to deliver environmentally friendly products and services, little is known about what drives the many different types of environmental innovation, or how such pursuits' impact firm performance. Using a sample of 2181 firms, this paper examines the factors that drive nine different types of eco‐innovation in Ireland, and assesses how such innovations impact firm performance. We find that, while demand‐side, supply‐side and regulatory drivers impact on the likelihood of a firm engaging in eco‐innovation, the relative magnitudes of these impacts vary across the types of eco‐innovation considered. Moreover, we find that only two of the nine types of eco‐innovation positively impact firm performance. The results point to regulation and customer pressure as viable mechanisms through which firms can be encouraged to eco‐innovate. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment