Principal‐agent models of corruption control that emphasize rules, incentives, and sanctions as prime antecedents of corruption often stop short when evaluating how these general principles translate into concrete Human Resource Management (HRM) policies. Following a call to develop research about how day‐to‐day public management operations change incentives to be corrupt, we use data of 5.22 million USD audited to 545 local Mexican governments over 3 years to test the correlation between the misappropriation of public funds and specific HRM functions. Our results suggest that HRM is a critical, underseen factor in understanding the risk of corruption. In line with previous findings, we show that having merit‐based recruitment can prevent corruption. However, we also find that having performance and departmental evaluations and a less unequal structure of remunerations may also help local governments effectively avoid the misappropriation of public money.
This study analyzes how adverse working conditions shape frontline workers' behavioral and cognitive coping mechanisms. It builds on the idea of frontline work as a precarious profession and explores how workers deal with associated challenges. Specifically, evidence is provided for factors associated with alienative commitment among frontline workers. We do so against the background of the 2020–2021 Mexican and Brazilian pandemic response by health workers, social workers, and police officers. Findings from our qualitative analysis show that they feel abandoned, vulnerable, and left to deal with the risks of the pandemic by themselves. In response, they tend to cognitively disconnect from their work and prioritize their own job survival. We contribute to the literature by showing how institutional factors over which street‐level bureaucrats have little control, such as resource scarcity, lack of job security and managerial support, and low trust by citizen‐clients, are fertile conditions for these coping patterns.
Access to rights depends on the institutional capacity to deliver and citizens’ capacity to benefit from public services and programmes. This is where bureaucracy and inequality meet: many times, even if access procedures are designed for equality, they do not produce equal results. Bureaucratic pathologies, deficits, and administrative burdens imply that different citizens might not share the same experience while interacting with government agencies. Moreover, in some developing countries like Mexico, inequality in access leads to the creation and reinforcement of "low-trust” bureaucracies. This paper offers some general ideas on this problem and stresses the relevance of understanding bureaucratic dysfunction from the citizens' point of view particularly in weak institutional contexts.
The pandemic from 2019 has led us to the implementation of different protocols to reduce the number of infections per day and avoid the overwhelming of the health centers. Until 2021, the implemented methodologies to stop the continuous growth of the pandemic have greatly reduced the infections, but they are not enough for the society. Thus, we propose Risco, an application that will aid not only in the reduction of infections via the early detection of contact with infected people by providing real time analytics and contact tracing support but improve the awareness of the user location data.
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