Reorganizing Government

Author(s):  
Alejandro Camacho ◽  
Robert Glicksman

Reorganizing Government seeks to transform how policymakers and scholars understand relationships between government institutions, and offers a pioneering model for constructing and assessing government authority. Regulation is frequently less successful than it could be. This is at least partly because the relationships among regulatory institutions are poorly understood and regulatory structures are routinely poorly designed. The book advances a framework for assessing how governmental authority may be structured along three dimensions-centralization, overlap, and coordination-and demonstrates how differentiating among these dimensions and among particular governmental functions (e.g., standard setting, enforcement) better illuminates the tradeoffs of organizational alternatives. It illustrates these neglected dimensional and functional aspects of interjurisdictional relations through six in-depth explorations involving securities and banking regulation, food safety, environmental protection, and terrorism prevention. In each case study, the authors explore how differentiating among dimensions, and among particular governmental functions, better illuminates the advantages and disadvantages of available structural options. (Re)Organizing Government thus offers a way for officials and scholars to evaluate both adopted and contemplated allocations of authority and to structure intergovernmental authority more effectively. It uses the lens of climate change, an emerging and vital global policy challenge, to illustrate the practical value of applying the book's novel analytical framework to future reorganization efforts. The book concludes by proposing an "adaptive governance" infrastructure that provides a way for policymakers to embed the creation, evaluation, and adjustment of the organization of regulatory institutions into the democratic process itself.

Author(s):  
Dobrosław Mańkowski

Various areas of social and economic life and their changes during the political transformation after 1989 have been studied and analyzed by Polish sociologists. It seems that one of the areas that has been left out and which constitutes a terra incognita is the world of sport.  As in other areas, individual and collective social actors who organized, managed or participated in the world of sport had to come to terms with the new social, economic and political order. That is why the transformation seen through their eyes and what they did, their motivations and ways of coping with changes are interesting and broaden our knowledge about the transformation period.  In the article, I present a fragment of my own research on the course and effects of political transformation, based on the example of a multi-sectional Workers’ Sports Club Stoczniowiec Gdańsk (currently GKS Stoczniowiec Gdańsk). I was interested in the struggles of people who organized sport, which they had to face in the period of transformation. I was interested in how they experienced the clash with the emerging new social order. What strategies they adopted in their organizational activities and their practices during the transformation. The case study is treated as a field study and a conceptual pilot study which is a starting point for further exploration. I used two methods: desk research (among others, press articles, club information, official data, statistical data were collected) and in-depth interviews (IDI) with social actors operating in the sports club. The analytical framework for the study consists of three dimensions of transformation, namely the economic, political and legal, and social ones. The theoretical foundations, on the other hand, are the perspectives of new institutionalism, especially the theory of fields by Fligstein and McAdam and the concept of deinstitutionalization by Christine Oliver.


2019 ◽  
pp. 229-248
Author(s):  
Alejandro E. Camacho ◽  
Robert L. Glicksman

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's contributions to the literature on institutional design. These include providing: (1) a common taxonomy for the analysis of intergovernmental relationships; (2) descriptive insights that substantiate the value of the dimensional and functional framework we advocate; (3) normative postulates, derived from the book's six case studies, about the best ways to structure authority along the various dimensions and for particular functions in specific contexts; (4) a call for future empirical work by scholars and policy analysts investigating the advantages and disadvantages of alternative allocative configurations revealed by actual experience with past reorganizations. The chapter then urges the adoption of an adaptive governance infrastructure that embeds systematic, continued assessment of existing regulatory allocations (principally overseen by an insulated federal entity) into the existing administrative system. The chapter suggests how authority to implement this learning infrastructure should be allocated along each of the three dimensions for three key information management functions. It also explains how integrating such a governance infrastructure into ongoing policymaking processes has the capacity to promote increased deliberation and accountable government.


Author(s):  
Alejandro E. Camacho ◽  
Robert L. Glicksman

This chapter introduces the book's thesis, goals, and structure. Allocations of authority to regulatory institutions and the relationships between them are poorly understood and underexplored in popular and academic debates about the administrative state. Attempts to create new regulatory programs or mend underperforming ones are routinely poorly designed. The book advances a framework for assessing how governmental authority may be structured along three dimensions: centralization, overlap, and coordination. It demonstrates how differentiating among these dimensions and among particular governmental functions (e.g., ambient monitoring, standard setting, planning, enforcement) better illuminates the tradeoffs of organizational alternatives. This framework (1) provides a common taxonomy for designing or assessing interjurisdictional relations; (2) develops explanatory insights about the nature of interjurisdictional relations that validate the value of the book's taxonomy; (3) provides preliminary normative postulates about the circumstances under which certain distributions of authority are most likely to be successful; (4) serves as a roadmap for the accumulation of empirical evidence about why certain institutional arrangements work and others fail; and (5) can, when combined with an adaptive governance infrastructure, transform regulation by being systematically integrated by both experts on government organization and policymakers into the design, assessment, and periodic redesign of regulatory institutions.


Author(s):  
Nguyen Thu Ha ◽  
Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen

The retail market in Vietnam continues to grow with the entry of foreign retail brands and the strong rise of domestic businesses in expanding distribution networks and conquering consumer confidence. The appearance of more retail brands has created a fiercely competitive market. Based on the outcomes of previous research results on brand choice intention combined with a customer survey, the paper proposes an analytical framework and scales to examine the relationship of five elements including store image, price perception, risk perception, brand attitudes, brand awareness and retail brand choice intention with a case study of the Hanoi-based Circle K convenience store chain. These five elements are the precondition for retail businesses to develop their brands so as to attract customers.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphane Goria ◽  
Louise Dupet ◽  
Maëva Négroni ◽  
Gabriel Sega ◽  
Philippe Arnoux ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND most serious games and other game-based tools are designed as digital games or escape games. They are designed for learning or sometimes in the field of medicine as an aid to care. However, they can also be seen as an aid to research, in our case, to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of imaging techniques for cancer detection. OBJECTIVE we present a case study of action research on the design of a serious board game intended to consider the advantages and weaknesses of a diagnostic method in a different ways. The goal was to better understand the principles of designing a tool using game or play. METHODS we explicitly implemented another process than gamification to develop a structure reminiscent of the game to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of different imaging techniques from the point of view of the respondents (in this case specialists not directly involved in the project). Based on this feedback and the scientific literature on this subject, we detail the main categories of games and games developed for serious use in order to understand their differences. Concerning the cancer research part to which game contributes, our method is based on questions asked to experts and practitioners of this specialty. RESULTS an expert point of view translation tool in the form of a game has been realized to apprehend a research in a different way. CONCLUSIONS we show with the help of a diagram, some possible design paths leading to this type of design result including two hidden dimensions to consider (the awareness of the game or play by the "player" and his role as a contributor or recipient).


Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Nolan J. Argyle ◽  
Lee M. Allen

Pre-service and in-service MPA students share a common desire for hands-on, real world instruction related to their professional career goals, leading to a pedagogic discounting of fiction as an appropriate tool for analyzing and "solving" problems. However, several factors weigh heavily in favor of using science fiction short stories and novellas in the MPA classroom setting. These include the need for interesting case scenarios exploring various administrative issues; leveling the playing field between the two types of students by de-emphasizing the use of "contemporary" cases; access to literature that explores the future shock of increasing organizational complexity; and the desirability of Rorschach type materials that facilitate discussion of. values and administrative truths. The discussion proceeds by tracing the development of the case study technique, its advantages and disadvantages in the classroom, addressing the utility of "fiction" as an educational resource, and showing how the science fiction literature has matured to the point where it can be applied in all of the major sub-fields of public administration. Several outstanding examples are detailed, and a thorough bibliography is provided.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096100062110267
Author(s):  
Karen Attar

This article addresses the challenge to make printed hidden collections known quickly without sacrificing ultimate quality. It takes as its starting point the archival mantra ‘More product, less process’ and explores its application to printed books, mindful of projects in the United States to catalogue 19th- and 20th-century printed books quickly and cheaply with the help of OCLC. A problem is lack of time or managerial inclination ever to return to ‘quick and dirty’ imports. This article is a case study concerning a collection of 18th-century English imprints, the Graveley Parish Library, at Senate House Library, University of London. Faced with the need to provide metadata as quickly as possible for digitisation purposes, Senate House Library decided, in contrast to its normal treatment of early printed books, to download records from the English Short Title Catalogue and amend them only very minimally before releasing them for public view, and to do this work from catalogue cards rather than the books themselves. The article describes the Graveley Parish collection, the project method’s rationale, and the advantages and disadvantages of sourcing the English Short Title Catalogue for metadata. It discusses the drawbacks of retrospective conversion (cataloguing from cards, not books): insufficient detail in some cases to identify the relevant book, and ignorance of the copy-specific elements of books which can constitute the main research interest. The method is compared against cataloguing similar books from photocopies of title pages, and retrospective conversion using English Short Title Catalogue is compared against retrospective conversion of early printed Continental books from cards using Library Hub Discover or OCLC. The control groups show our method’s effectiveness. The project succeeded by producing records fast that fulfilled their immediate purpose and simultaneously would obviously require revisiting. The uniform nature of the collection enabled the saving of time through global changes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0734242X2110031
Author(s):  
Ana Pires ◽  
Paula Sobral

A complete understanding of the occurrence of microplastics and the methods to eliminate their sources is an urgent necessity to minimize the pollution caused by microplastics. The use of plastics in any form releases microplastics to the environment. Existing policy instruments are insufficient to address microplastics pollution and regulatory measures have focussed only on the microbeads and single-use plastics. Fees on the use of plastic products may possibly reduce their usage, but effective management of plastic products at their end-of-life is lacking. Therefore, in this study, the microplastic–failure mode and effect analysis (MP–FMEA) methodology, which is a semi-qualitative approach capable of identifying the causes and proposing solutions for the issue of microplastics pollution, has been proposed. The innovative feature of MP–FMEA is that it has a pre-defined failure mode, that is, the release of microplastics to air, water and soil (depending on the process) or the occurrence of microplastics in the final product. Moreover, a theoretical recycling plant case study was used to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of this method. The results revealed that MP–FMEA is an easy and heuristic technique to understand the failure-effect-causes and solutions for reduction of microplastics and can be applied by researchers working in different domains apart from those relating to microplastics. Future studies can include the evaluation of the use of MP–FMEA methodology along with quantitative methods for effective reduction in the release of microplastics.


Pharmaceutics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 1157
Author(s):  
Elena K. Schneider-Futschik ◽  
Felisa Reyes-Ortega

Nanomaterials provide enormous opportunities to overcome the limitations of conventional ocular delivery systems, such as low therapeutic efficacy, side effects due to the systemic exposure, or invasive surgery. Apart from the more common ocular disorders, there are some genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, that develop ocular disorders as secondary effects as long as the disease progresses. These patients are more difficult to be pharmacologically treated using conventional drug routes (topically, systemic), since specific pharmacological formulations can be incompatible, display increased toxicity, or their therapeutic efficacy decreases with the administration of different kind of chemical molecules. Magnetic nanoparticles can be used as potent drug carriers and magnetic hyperthermia agents due to their response to an external magnetic field. Drugs can be concentrated in the target point, limiting the damage to other tissues. The other advantage of these magnetic nanoparticles is that they can act as magnetic resonance imaging agents, allowing the detection of the exact location of the disease. However, there are some drawbacks related to their use in drug delivery, such as the limitation to maintain efficacy in the target organ once the magnetic field is removed from outside. Another disadvantage is the difficulty in maintaining the therapeutic action in three dimensions inside the human body. This review summarizes all the application possibilities related to magnetic nanoparticles in ocular diseases.


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