scholarly journals Possible Barriers to a Successful Further Diffusion of the Best Value Approach in the Netherlands: Observations of Major Misunderstandings on the Concept and Theory

Author(s):  
Wiebe Witteveen ◽  
Jeroen Van de Rijt

In recent years Best Value (BV) has gained popularity in the Netherlands. Many clients have adopted BV after the successful application in the ‘Spoedaanpak Wegen’ projects (Fast Track Projects) by Rijkswaterstaat (Department of Public Works). The social system of users of BV is evolving. In the past years primarily the procurement community was interested in BV (where it all started), but recently risk managers and project managers are becoming increasingly aware of the philosophy. Van de Rijt & Santema (2012) observed that (potential) users of BV all have a different level of awareness of the BV methodology and that experts in BV cannot force others into the “right” or “pure” methodology. However, BV experts can reflect upon major misunderstandings in order to improve the understanding and implementation of the philosophy. In this paper, the authors elaborate on this matter. They observe ten common misperceptions in the everyday application of the Best Value approach, which may hinder a successful further diffusion of the Best Value approach in the Netherlands.

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua C Gordon

AbstractOver the past 25 years, Sweden has gone from having one of the most generous unemployment benefit systems among the rich democracies to one of the least. This article advances a multi-causal explanation for this unexpected outcome. It shows how the benefit system became a target of successive right-wing governments due to its role in fostering social democratic hegemony. Employer groups, radicalized by the turbulent 1970s more profoundly than elsewhere, sought to undermine the system, and their abandonment of corporatism in the early 1990s limited unions’ capacity to restrain right-wing governments in retrenchment initiatives. Two further developments help to explain the surprising political resilience of the cuts: the emergence of a private (supplementary) insurance regime and a realignment of working-class voters from the Social Democrats to parties of the right, especially the nativist Sweden Democrats, in the context of a liberal refugee/asylum policy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-140
Author(s):  
Constantin Vadimovich Troianowski

This article investigates the process of designing of the new social estate in imperial Russia - odnodvortsy of the western provinces. This social category was designed specifically for those petty szlachta who did not possess documents to prove their noble ancestry and status. The author analyses deliberations on the subject that took place in the Committee for the Western Provinces. The author focuses on the argument between senior imperial officials and the Grodno governor Mikhail Muraviev on the issue of registering petty szlachta in fiscal rolls. Muraviev argued against setting up a special fiscal-administrative category for petty szlachta suggesting that its members should join the already existing unprivileged categories of peasants and burgers. Because this proposal ran against the established fiscal practices, the Committee opted for creating a distinct social estate for petty szlachta. The existing social estate paradigm in Russia pre-assigned the location of the new soslovie in the imperial social hierarchy. Western odnodvortsy were to be included into a broad legal status category of the free inhabitants. Despite similarity of the name, the new estate was not modeled on the odnodvortsy of the Russian provinces because they retained from the past certain privileges (e.g. the right to possess serfs) that did not correspond to the 19th century attributes of unprivileged social estates.


2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerstin Potthoff ◽  
Aleš Smrekar ◽  
Mateja Šmid Hribar ◽  
Mimi Urbanc

The paper aims to analyse the characteristics and trends in pastoral farming, tourism and recreation in the Norwegian and Slovenian mountains and resulting landscape changes. These land uses and related driving forces have been scrutinised in the context of economic, social, and political aspects. While pastoral farming has a centuries-old tradition in the higher altitudes of both countries, interest in mountains for tourism and recreational purposes dates back only to the nineteenth century but has been increasing steadily ever since. The findings of the study, based on a literature review and secondary data, suggest that the social, economic, and especially the political situation in Norway and Slovenia have been different, but the development of mountains in both countries in the field of mountain pasturing and tourism and recreation has shared more similarities than differences, although nuances and specificities should not be disregarded. It is evident that mountain pasturing in both countries is sensitive to societal changes. Further on, we can infer the synergy and the right balance between it and tourism and recreation can be an opportunity for a viable mountain economic situation and would preserve the long traditions of cooperation between the two sectors. //   Članek analizira značilnosti in trende pašništva in rekreacije ter posledične spremembe pokrajine v norveških in slovenskih gorah. Spremembe v rabi zemljišč in z njimi povezane gonilne sile smo preučili z ekonomskega, družbenega in političnega vidika. Planinsko pašništvo ima v obeh državah večstoletno tradicijo, zanimanje za gore iz turističnih in rekreativnih vzgibov pa se je začelo šele v 19. stoletju, vendar se od tedaj stalno povečuje. Ugotovitve te študije, ki temeljijo na pregledu obstoječe literature in sekundarnih podatkov, kažejo, da je bil družbeni, gospodarski in še posebej politični položaj na Norveškem in v Sloveniji sicer različen, vendar razvoj gorskih območij v obeh državah izkazuje več podobnosti kot razlik, pri čemur ne smemo zanemariti določenih razhajanj in posebnosti. Jasno je, da na planinsko pašništvo v obeh državah vplivajo družbene spremembe. Prav tako je očitno, da sinergija in ustrezno ravnovesje med planinskim pašništvom in turizmom ter rekreacijo nudita priložnost za vitalno gospodarsko stanje v gorah in obenem omogočata ohranitev dolgoletne tradicije sodelovanja med obema panogama.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-491
Author(s):  
Prolet Trifonova Petkova

The theater today knows many forms and uses different means and approaches to communicate with the contemporary viewer. The theatrical spectacle has so broadened its borders and boundaries that it gives us the opportunity to observe the scene of the combination and interaction of all kinds of arts presented in a new and different way, working in sync, the ultimate goal of which is the provocation, involvement and participation of the viewer / audience . In today's dynamic world, the theater is provoked to react more quickly to what is happening in society, not only with the themes it chooses, but also with the form and the language through which it presents them. The theatrical scene "incorporates" the inventions of the respective era as a means of developing their own language, scene and spectacle. Contemporary theater is in the process of achieving extreme freedom in terms of its choices - subject, text, expression, way of organizing the creative process, way of participation of the audience, director and actors, spaces, technologies, reality, etc. In total creative freedom, directed at innovation and experiment, there is one of the great challenges facing modern theater. The results are a variety of stage forms and expressions. This observation concerns drama. Modern theater is open to the treasury of literature, philosophy, arts-poetry, prose, drama, all visual arts. He freely draws from documentary and fictional. Uses all the possible acting techniques, established through the practices of theatrical systems of the directors' theater, dance, acrobatics and others. This freedom is a tremendous wealth and a challenge to entwine the borrowed into its own aesthetic world and meaningful context. Contemporary theater has won the right to tell, traveling through time and space. The theater is more and more sharing, personal confession, memories. The performance is more and more rare, it is just a stage reading of the play, the drama. It is built on the text, and the text is a very broad term, it is also non-dramatic text. Long ago it is not only the play of one or another author. The dramaturgical language and the functions of the monologue, the dialogue and the trailer are transformed into the free expression of the text. The themes that are being played out are seen in the everyday, in the differences, in the violence. These performances affect the senses, provoke the emotional world and thinking. We are seeing a process of constant rethinking and pulling away from it .The director's function goes through an individual creative reading of a text or theme and over-interpretations to collaborative work, a theater of high technology, a theater without actors, etc. Interdisciplinarity, the introduction of more digital elements, the blending of arts and genres will continue to be a way of building innovative forms. The importance of the collaborative process is associated with the freedom of self-expression. The choice of modern texts, the interpretation of the classical ones, does not mean the abandonment of the past, on the contrary, but the modernization and transformation of this past. Theater is the conduit of communication. This dialogue takes us beyond our comfort zone and at the same time offers us the opportunity to meet with ourselves personally and without roles.


Author(s):  
Woojeong Joo

Conclusion reemphasises the historicity of the everyday in Ozu’s films, which is not a void entity but characterized by various modern subjects – distinguished in class, gender and generation – with conflicting views, the interaction among which changes throughout history. Temporality (permeation of the past into the present) and spatiality (deviation) are also importantly discussed in relation to the working of Ozu’s everyday, especially in the postwar period when historical experience of wartime presents more complex layer of social critique. The role of the Japanese film industry (namely, Shochiku) is reiterated in terms of establishing Ozu’s everyday realism, which is constantly placed in negotiating relationship with the former’s commercial concerns. Lastly, a question is raised about whether Ozu should be regarded as conservative in representing the social reality, for which the particularity of his everyday realism is suggested as an answer.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-52
Author(s):  
Makhmudjon Ziyadullaev ◽  

This article presents ofthe content of the right to social security, which is considered as one of the constitutional rights of citizens, the role of state pensions in the social protection of pensioners and the world pension systems, including distributive, mandatory and conditional pension funds.As well as the size of pensions and their components, the relevance and importance in the Republic of Uzbekistan, the ratification of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and changes in thepension sector over the past 3-4 years, taking into account the types of pension provision, frombeginningsof independence of our country


2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Festić

AbstractThe paper discusses the possibilities of building a framework for conceptualization and understanding of the effects of the atrocities committed upon the collapse of ‘ex-Yugoslavia’. It relates the war-horrors and personal and collective traumas to the everyday of the people(s) of both the communist and post-communist times, and includes empirical cross-references from the social relations, cultural, educational and political contexts while revealing the ambivalent meanings of the ‘ghosts of the past’ and of their ‘return’. In rethinking the notions of the signifier, representation, the abject from the social/the symbolic, the text argues for the centrality of memory work based on victims’ experiences and their articulation in public spaces in the post-war societies. Envisioning the move forward and safer inter-ethnic relations on the discussed territories argues for individual responsibility in the processes of (re)construction and (re)formation of complex personal, collective and national identities, lived memory and institutions and in attempts to inter- and intracommunicate the particularized units.


2013 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Abrams

Inter-personal violence between men has often been accepted as a ubiquitous feature of male relationships in the past, and the contexts in which that violence was perpetrated is seen to reveal something about the mentalities and social roles of men in past societies. This article considers the social practices of masculinity and the acting out of codes of manhood in the context of Highland Scotland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – a period of significant economic and social change. Based primarily on the scrutiny of legal records relating to cases of violent assault involving men of the middling and lower classes from across the Highland counties, this article suggests that the everyday practice of Highland manhood was subject to taming, as the expressions of manhood appropriate for a society at war were gradually rejected as inappropriate for a society of commerce and civility. While customary forms of violence in pursuit of the restitution of honour continued to have some legitimacy until the early nineteenth century, especially in the rural Highlands, in Inverness a new model of disciplined masculinity was applied to male behaviour, offering a glimpse at new sensibilities around inter-personal violence that were to enter Highland society more generally in the following decades.


Author(s):  
Ramona Apostol

This paper discusses the legal implications of using the elements of the Performance Information Procurement System (PIPS) procedure in the Netherlands. The article proposes the pros and cons of the potential compliance of these elements, in the form adopted in a test case with the municipality of ‘s-Hertogenbosch who attempted to meet the requirements of Aanbestedingsreglement Werken1 (hereafter: ARW) 2005. The author proposes that the national restricted procurement with pre-selection prescribed by the ARW 2005 may raise potential issues of interpretation and may therefore be too strict for the efficient application of the elements of the American methodology. Based on the legal discussion of the test case, the author is proposing to choose a more flexible policy for the public works contracts, which can benefit from the application of the American methodology.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-232
Author(s):  
Vladimir P. Bezdukhov

The relevance of the paper is motivated by the importance of understanding the category of dignity as a category of pedagogical ethics. The author motivates the social relevance of solving a pedagogical plan of the issue of dignity by the fact that the value of dignity in current geopolitical and sociocultural conditions can become the basis of mutual understanding of peoples aspiring to preserve their cultural identity, to recognize the right to uphold traditional values for each of them. While developing a theoretical plan of the issue, the author proceeds from the idea that the basis for its solution should be an analysis of the ideas of thinkers and philosophers of the past that are of great importance to the present. The paper shows how the content of the dignity category, which is relevant for pedagogical ethics, is gradually being formed. Understanding of dignity by Plato is correlated with its understanding by Aristotle: for Plato, dignity is a virtue, which is manifested in the worthy behavior of a person, the quality of the soul (the dignity of the soul lies in wisdom); Aristotle connects dignity of a person with his/her deeds and actions, points to the importance of dignity in friendship based on equality, and not on superiority, on the inherent value of a person, and not on the choice of friends for benefit or pleasure. Summing up the analysis of the ancient thinkers ideas on dignity, the author draws special attention to the fact that it is the orientation to recognition of the dignity by each party of communication that is considered the basis of its adequacy. When analyzing ideas of T. Hobbes and I. Kant, the concept of price of a person becomes the key one. The author shows that T. Hobbes speaks of dignity as the superiority of some subjects over others (intellectual dignity, implying mental abilities, social value of a person, that is, the price given to him/her by the state) and emphasizes the social status of the phenomenon of dignity. I. Kant distinguishes between the concepts of price and dignity, assuming that dignity has neither value nor equivalent, it is higher than price and evaluation, that a person is respected for dignity as an internal moral value, and not for the origin and social status. The author of the paper insists that the value of dignity has the supra-situational importance in teacher-students interaction, it is based on recognition of the equality of all people in moral terms, regardless of their level of morality, social status and social roles performed, determines not only equal attitude of the teacher to all students, but also his/her attitude to him/herself and the attitude of students to him/her.


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