Behavioural science has found growing application in applied public policy settings, offering a vast literature to bring to bear on apparent cognitive errors. The potential, however, is not without peril. Policymakers and scholars may draw unwarranted confidence that successful behavioural interventions from elsewhere will replicate in their institutional settings. In this research, I partner with Minneapolis Public Housing and use a design-based approach to identify interventions that can reduce eviction actions. This study presents three vignettes that demonstrate and categorize the mistakes behavioural science can make when it fails to understand how formal and informal institutional features influence decision-making. But, in integrating methods and theories from the design sciences, public policy and public administration, we have the potential to create behavioural interventions that fit the social context.

Widespread adoption of the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) represents a puzzle. It cannot be described as serving the interests of any state as understood in conventional theories of international relations because it commits countries to radical social change. Yet all but six UN member states have ratified it. We argue that the case can only be explained by reference to Waltz’ first image, the individual level. We invoke Giddens' notion of structuration to explain how a small group of like-minded women, many of them diplomats, were able to work within existing structures of international diplomacy to create institutions that embedded their ideals in international law. These women were critical actors, positioned simultaneously in activist organizations and government and diplomatic institutions, giving them leverage to institutionalize new norms. The case shows the importance of analysis at the individual level to explain normative change in the international system.

Social care policy is actively promoting integrated and personalised care. Local organisations are starting to re-engineer their business processes, review front line practice, develop new operational tools and revise their information systems to support and deliver these new approaches. This article draws on a study undertaken in one local organisation as it began to implement its response to these expectations. It uses structuration theory to explore how the macro agendas described by policy and legislation are translated into local perspectives and then further refracted through the lens of operational practice, shaping the business tools which deliver the change. The evidence suggests that there needs to be a better understanding of how the expectations of policy are interpreted – and potentially distorted – through their translation into local practice, and of the role that information and information services play in enabling, or disabling the delivery of those expectations at the front line.

How do individual actors figure out what to do? This article advocates a departure from carving up research on this key question about political agency into narrow scholarly categories. Such categories, especially what has to become framed as incompatible logics of action in International Relations Theory, may make for neat and tidy scholarly boxes. But they miss the winding roads through which actors come to embark on a course of action. In order to overcome this shortcoming, I start with uncovering an important clue on which authors adhering to different logics of action converge; political agency has a lot to do with making judgements. I proceed with conceptualizing political judgement broadly in terms of subsuming particulars and universals. I follow-up with outlining a map for empirical research on judgement that helps us follow the actors in how they figure out what to do (the agent's logics of action) rather than superimposing our narrow scholarly categories on their reasoning (a scholarly logic of action). Scrutinizing the usefulness of this map, finally, I analyse McNamara's exercise of political agency during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The findings underline my overall argument: the inclusive conceptualization of political judgement, coupled with the balance of theoretical and empirical inquiry that the research map facilitates, improves on our understandings of how actors figure out what to do.

‘The separation of theory and practice is not one that will easily be overcome by academic and philosophical critique, however necessary and important these are.’ (Shanks & Tilley 1992: xxii). Here a team of archaeologists address this difficult theme, in the light of their experiences under the flightpath of Heathrow Airport.