Recently, a very bright student of mine (current) asked me which courses I would suggest that she takes BEFORE heading into graduate school. While my department (Political Science at The University of British Columbia) has an extremely well-rounded BA degree, I’m sure my students would benefit from taking other courses that would allow them to arrive to graduate school more prepared.

Given the recent emphasis in political science and public policy in quantitative methods, I suggested to my student to take a couple of courses in basic economics: microeconomics and macroeconomics. I also suggested an additional course in statistics (although our course in statistics in political science, taught by my colleague Dr. Fred Cutler, is a very robust course). Several of my fellow colleagues in the department have very strong quantitative and formal modeling backgrounds.

On a personal level (read: my own methodological preferences) I work with mixed research methods. I have about the same degree of fluency in discourse analysis and institutional ethnography as I do in multivariate analysis. I am (obviously) a fan of geographical information systems (GIS) and thus I enjoy and encourage my students to undertake spatial analysis.

I also suggested a course in econometrics, as it will definitely be valuable (honestly, it never hurts to know econometrics). Josh Greenberg and Wendy Waters both suggested additional courses, in discourse coalitions analysis, dramaturgy, public-private partnerships and some housing policy (although in my Public Policy course I do talk about housing). Janet De Luna (a graduate student at the University of Chicago, in Public Policy) also suggested political institutions and political economy. Reema Faris suggested courses in humanities (but I’m sure they DO already take those!).

If you were to suggest courses that undergraduate students could take to arrive to graduate school in public policy better prepared, which courses would you recommend? Feel free to add in the comments section.

Second, because I believe that the theoretical and empirical lessons learned in a Public Policy Analysis course can be applicable in real life situations. So I designed my course to be an applied, theoretically-founded and empirically-informed course. My students undertake a 72 hour, under-pressure policy-analytical exercise. And they learn a lot from it.

This week I had the pleasure to host The Honorable Naomi Yamamoto, MLA for Lonsdale North Vancouver and Minister of Advanced Education of the province of British Columbia. Minister Yamamoto spent an hour guest-lecturing and interacting with my 3rd and 4th year undergraduate Political Science students. I was extremely pleased at the depth of respectful, engaged intellectual discussions my students had with Minister Yamamoto.

Theoretically-grounded and empirically-informed intellectual discourse is the foundation of good policy design. My students and Minister Yamamoto engaged in a very productive conversation on the future of Canadian and BC post-secondary education. Minister Yamamoto challenged my students to come up with the #1 barrier to access to postsecondary education, and ways to overcome these barriers.

I have conducted theoretical and applied research on policy analysis. I have also undertaken consultancy policy-analytical projects. Because of my experience both in industry, and advising governments, I firmly believe that inviting guest lecturers who are working in the actual policy field is a substantially productive exercise, and I publicly wanted to thank Minister Yamamoto for taking the time to have this conversation with my students, for helping me educate them on the challenges and opportunities for British Columbia’s post-secondary education policy and for opening the forum to an engaged, civilized conversation on something all of my students have a stake on (as well as me): their future.

While I teach Public Policy (with a very specific focus on Canada but using cross-national comparisons to illuminate the theories), my research is not in the field of industrial policy. That said, when I was undertaking my doctoral dissertation research, I had to read and understand a lot of scholarly materials (books, book chapters, conference papers and journal articles) on industrial restructuring. The rigorous methodological approach I took to understanding the puzzle I was trying to solve (how do coupled industries respond to industrial restructuring under multiple stressors) required me to do a very thorough literature review, and many of the scholarship I explored came from the industrial and labor economics field. Industrial restructuring as a field of research has far-ranging and wide scope.

Some scholars have explored plants closure and the role of labor restructuring in industry decline. Others have examined how the shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy has shifted the focus (and popularity) of industrial plants and the erosion of jobs in these factories (there’s a lot of scholarship in the past 2 years). While I’m fluent in the literature, my work on environmental policy itself has had a somewhat tangential interest on the transformation of jobs. But my professional and personal experience has been affected by, and keeps me immersed, in this particular issue. The concept of permanent employment seems to be eroding with time, and fragmented jobs are a reality. I define a fragmented job as the sum of non-permanent employment gigs (remember, I’m not a labour economist nor is this my field of research – I’m just trying to make sense of the current state of affairs). As my friend and colleague Tris Hussey noted,

The next thing that struck me is that since 2003 (and since 2005 specifically) I haven’t had just a single job at any given time. I usually had a full-time 9 to whenever job plus several other side things going on. Why? To make ends meet. Now I don’t live high on the hog and I’ve tended to work for startups and smaller companies so augmenting my income to keep afloat isn’t really surprising. However, I think the “more than one job at a time” is more of a sign of how the economy has been shifting and changing below our feet in the past 10 years (ish). Yes, there are lots of people who do have just one job that pays enough for them to live, but I also know that I’m not alone in the world of always having to juggle multiple “jobs” to keep things on track.

This is not a rare situation, and particularly not in the academic world (unless you are on a tenured or tenure-track situation). In my own case, I have built my own academic life: I consult, I do research, I teach and I participate in scholarly life, even if I’m not tenured (I am, however, considering going on the academic job market, just to give it a go). My professional integrated (or fragmented) job situation is a choice of mine. Not everybody has that choice. Some colleagues need, as Tris mentions above, to keep 4-5 contracts at a time to make ends meet.

This is, I believe, the situation worldwide. I was reading a recent article, and I quote:

German Morales uses a vacuum to tidy up in an Alexandria, Va., house he painted. The mercurial economy has put a strain on his business. A record number of people exist on the fringes of the workforce: part-timers looking for more hours and the self-employed eager for more work.

If the statistics quoted on the article are to be believed (and I’m not one to believe statistics unless I rigorously test their reliability), the average length of time a person is unemployed rose to 40.4 weeks last month, the longest period ever, and an estimated 1.1 million Americans have given up on looking for work entirely. I wonder what the statistic is in Canada.

From a public policy perspective (and this is a question I intend to explore with my students in POLI350A Public Policy), my biggest question is – what can governments at the federal, provincial and municipal levels to improve the job situation? And is this a time where civil society and businesses need to take matters into their own hands and create more jobs, even if those jobs are contract, even if people need to have a fractured, fragmented job situation? This is a puzzle that will probably haunt me for the rest of the term, in addition to all the items on my current research agenda.

UPDATE – My friend and colleague Mat Wright had posted a link to a recent article that spoke to the decline of the permanent job, which he found, for your perusal. Thanks, Mat. I found the following paragraphs particularly haunting, and I quote:

The new world, however, is characterized by short-term jobs. You may be on contract; you may be a temporary employee; you may work part-time. But the key is that you will probably be hired for a very short period (“just-in time work” is the moniker) and then “let go when the work is done.” You will probably have to hold two or three jobs simultaneously for your entire working life. You will have no pension, no benefits, no vacations, no sick days. You will be constantly looking for work. “The permanent job, for the most part, is a thing of the past.”

photo credit: Latvian Foreign Ministry

Professor Eugene Bardach is, in my opinion, one of the most practical policy analysts out there. An emeritus professor at University of California Berkeley, Professor Bardach wrote a practical, widely cited, the Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving: A Practical Guide to Policy Analysis. I have used his text and many of his articles not only in my research but also in my teaching (POLI 350A Public Policy).

As I prepare to teach The Comparative Politics of Public Policy (e.g. examining cross-national variations in national public policies, or at the regional level, cross-regional changes), I thought it would be a great exercise for me, for my students and for my readers to conduct a full policy analysis (national or regional level, I don’t expect to do cross-national comparisons) using Bardach’s method.

I plan to write separate blog posts for each one of the steps of Bardach’s model to help my readers (and my students) understand how policy analysis is conducted, in real life. I have been thinking for a long time as to which policies I would like to analyze. I know that the Burrard bike trial could be one, where there’s at least *some* data. I could look at the ban on water bottles at the municipal level.

So, have your say on here. Suggest policy decisions that you would like me to examine using Bardach’s model. I’ll consider all options, primarily based on the amount of information we have available. I’ll decide by early next week (the first week of November, 2009). Drop a comment on this post with your suggestions. It can be a Vancouver, Lower Mainland or Canadian issue, or an international one.