scholarly journals On activism of European researchers about science policy

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (02) ◽  
pp. C05
Author(s):  
Alain Trautmann

The organization and functioning of research have radically changed over the last 10 or 20 years, as a result of a determined political action. The activism of some scientists, during this period, has failed to significantly alter this trend. So far. Today, New Public Management is triumphant. It has been implemented by a category of former scientists who have become administrators, evaluators, organizers. As a result, the prime role of scientific publications is no longer to exchange scientific information but to allow a measure of scientific production, and to rank the principal investigators. Now, the massive use of numerical tools (impact factors, h index), allows policy makers and their collaborators to evaluate publications without reading them. In addition, researchers are told to work in a budgetarily stable system (or even a decreasing one), with internal dynamics that should make it increase exponentially. This has led to the development of precarious jobs. One day, this bubble will explode.

2021 ◽  
pp. 001872672110077
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Leuridan ◽  
Benoît Demil

Organizations that operate in extreme contexts have to develop resilience to ensure the reliability of their operations. While the organizational literature underlines the crucial role of slack when facing unanticipated events, a structural approach to slack says little about the concrete ways in which organizational actors produce and use this slack. Adopting a practice-based perspective during a 14-month ethnographic study in a French critical care unit, we study the slack practices, which consist in gathering, arranging and rearranging resources from both inside and outside the medical unit. This permanent process is captured in a dynamic model connecting situations, their evolutions and slack practices. Our research highlights the importance of situational slack production practices to ensure resilience. We also argue that these micro-practices are constitutive of the context in which actors are evolving. Finally, we discuss why these slack practices, although essential for ensuring resilience, can be endangered by the New Public Management context.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Goddard ◽  
Tausi Ally Mkasiwa

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the budgeting practices in the Tanzanian Central Government. New budgeting reforms were introduced following exhortations from the bodies such as the UN, the World Bank and the IMF and reflect the new public management (NPM). Design/methodology/approach A grounded theory methodology was used. This methodology is inductive, allowing phenomena to emerge from the participants rather than from prior theory. This ensures both relevance and depth of understanding. Findings The principal research findings from the data concern the central phenomenon of “struggling for conformance”. Tanzanian Central Government adopted innovations in order to ensure donor funding by demonstrating its ability to implement imposed budgetary changes. Organizational actors were committed to these reforms through necessity and struggled to implement them, rather than more overtly resisting them. Research limitations/implications The research is subject to the usual limitations of case study, inductive research. Practical implications This research has several implications for policy-makers of NPM and budgetary reforms. These include the recognition that the establishment of the rules and regulations alone is not adequate for the successful implementation of budgetary and NPM reforms and should involve a comprehensive view of the nature of the internal and external environment. Originality/value There are few empirical papers of NPM accounting practices being implemented in the public sector of developing countries and none at all based in Tanzania. The paper identifies the existence of struggling to conform to reforms rather than resistance identified in prior research.


Author(s):  
Jana Štrangfeldová ◽  
Štefan Hronec ◽  
Jana Hroncová Vicianová ◽  
Nikola Štefanišinová

Education is a key area, the results of which play an important role in the development of each society. The role of education focused on the inclusion of children into school groups, to prepare students to enter the labour market or continue their studies in the context of tertiary education is a sufficient argument to enable beginning to look for answers and possible solutions to the difficult question of the quality of schools. Constant pressure from the public forces them to monitor and improve the provision of public services, and continually enhance their own performance in order to achieve long-term existential security. These facts consequently require a comprehensive measurement of their performance. This opens up opportunities for applying the concept of Value For Money based on the principles of New Public Management. The purpose of the scientific study is to show the potential uses of Value for Money on the example of education. The suggestion of methodology of VFM to measure the performance in education presented in this study shows possibilities to measure, evaluate, monitor and achieve necessary and especially relevant information about the situation of education and subsequent decision-making not only for public forces, but also, it can be the suitable tool for public grammar schools themselves. The article is co-financed by the project VEGA 1/0651/17.


Author(s):  
Stephen Bach ◽  
Ian Kessler

As human resource management (HRM) has developed as a field of study, the attention paid to public sector employment relations has been relatively limited. The preoccupation with the link between HR practice and corporate performance has been less applicable to public service organizations that are answerable to a range of stakeholders and in which HR policy has been geared to ensuring political accountability. There has been a recognition that the public sector confronts fiscal and political pressures that are altering HR practice. However, this observation has rarely been backed up by a sustained focus on people management in the public sector. This limited attention arises from characteristics of the sector. Defining the public sector is not straightforward because there are differences between countries in terms of the size, scope, and role of the sector.


Author(s):  
Dries Vansteenkiste ◽  
Estelle Swart ◽  
Piet Van Avermaet ◽  
Elke Struyf

Any answer to the question “What is professional development (PD) for inclusive education (IE)?” needs to be based on a deep understanding of the nature of IE. Taking fully into account its multileveled nature, encompassing inclusive practice, policy, advocacy, and philosophy, IE appears as a “glocal” phenomenon that is affected by institutions (e.g., accountability, new public management, and neoliberalism) with which it can resonate or collide, resulting in tensions within the educational field. These tensions complicate the endeavors of teachers to orient themselves and their actions because different institutions conceptualize teaching and the role of teachers differently, demanding different and sometimes conflicting things from them. Further, teachers also need to give meaning to perceived similarities, differences, and conflicts between these professionalisms and elements of their own professional identity. This results in specific concerns for teachers and imposes challenges for teachers’ agency. PD based on this understanding of IE refers to creating and exploiting spaces where the different actors involved address the complexities of, and coconstruct, a teaching profession that is inclusive. This conceptualization implies formal and informal, social and local, embedded, open-ended practices that can strengthen teacher agency. To do this, it needs to recognize the teacher as being at the center of PD. These spaces are experimental zones for the exertion of agency, incorporating transformative ideals which can involve developing a different behavior repertoire, changing the immediate professional context, or addressing contradictory institutions. As such, PD is not regarded as the prerequisite for IE, but as its consequence.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (6) ◽  
pp. 773-790 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greta Bradley ◽  
Lambert Engelbrecht ◽  
Staffan Höjer

Drawing on research, we contextualize social work and describe the role of supervisors in child welfare settings in South Africa, England and Sweden. Exploratory frameworks and models of supervision illustrate how it has been influenced by principles of New Public Management and the concluding discussion proposes an agenda for change.


2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 174-185
Author(s):  
Orly Benjamin

Purpose – When public agencies seek to privatize a service, a commissioning process begins wherein public sector budgeters must decide how generous the funding will be while taking occupational standards into account so that the quality of service is assured. One important area of occupational standards is the required personnel and job sizes of certified employees. Not enough attention has been directed to how occupational standards’ related knowledge is treated in the process. The purpose of this paper is to: first, investigate how the commissioning process is experienced by Israeli, often female, occupational standards administrators. Second, proposing a gendered perspective on Sennett’s corrosion of character thesis. Design/methodology/approach – As part of an institutional ethnography project, 16 interviews were conducted with (14 female and two male) occupational standards administrators at the Israeli Welfare, Education and Health Ministries. Findings – The routine of commissioning involves a stage of using occupational standards’ knowledge and experience, and a stage of dismissing it. The “corrosion of character” embedded in the dismissal stage undermines historical achievements in the area of recognizing caring work and skills. Research limitations/implications – The research is unable to distinguish between the specific caring occupations discussed. Practical implications – Service delivery modes has to develop into more publicly visible forums where occupational standards’ are protected. Social implications – The continuous corrosion of occupational knowledge may result in the demise of professionalization in care service occupations causing increasingly more polarization and poverty among their employees. Originality/value – While Sennett’s thesis has already been found plausible for understanding public servants’ experiences of the “new public management,” until recently, not enough attention has been devoted to the commissioning processes’ gendered implications for contract-based delivery of services. This paper examines these implications for the power struggle between the feminist achievements protecting skill recognition in caring occupations, and policy makers.


2019 ◽  
pp. 123-141
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Łęgocka ◽  

New public management, as well as institutional and market pressure, brought business-like requirements to HEIs. Their implementation resulted in profound changes in university governance. This paper presents a systematic literature review of the scholars’ perception of a quality system introduced by new public management and the corporatization of universities. The implications of the new practices and discourses for academic identity, university governance, power-balance, as well as the role of a scholar are investigated. The findings reveal that the underlying values and university culture stay in tension with managerialist ideology. The presence of the institutional logics approach in a university context was also examined. It enabled to analyze whether it was used in the context of providing insight into the academics’ perception of quality assurance systems.


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