All Minds on Deck? Assessing Distributed Strategic Capacity in Public-Sector Organizations

Networked governance requires public managers to think and act strategically across organizational boundaries. Taking the literature on the transition from government to governance and its implications for Human Resource Management (HRM) as a starting point, we argue that not only top management, but also lower-level employees are likely to be involved in this work. In order to invest effectively in the strategic and collaborative competencies required for networked governance at all levels of the organization, one needs to be able to assess strategic capacity. This article develops an assessment framework based on an in-depth case study conducted in a government department in the Netherlands over a 6-month period. We evaluate an initial framework to assess strategic capacity derived from existing literature and propose an augmented framework that acknowledges the tension between different accountability relationships and the need for continuous, structured, reflective interaction between managers, employees, and key stakeholders.

Educación para hacer las paces transracionales —Una perspectiva fenomenológica

El ensayo rememora las raíces fenomenológicas que comparten las obras Filosofía para hacer las paces de Vicent Martínez Guzmán, La paz imperfecta de Francisco Muñoz y la filosofía de las paces transracionales en la que se enfoca la escuela de Estudios de Paz de la Universidad de Innsbruck. Sobre esta base me refiero después a la aplicación pedagógica y didáctica de dichas raíces en la educación académica para la paz. Este trabajo hace referencia a las experiencias metodológicas del aprendizaje académico en grupos, y sus consecuencias para el desarrollo del currículo de los Estudios de Paz, entendiendo estos como una formación en la construcción estratégica de capacidades y relaciones. Finalmente resalto las etapas del aprendizaje, en el sentido de ‘pelar la cebolla del Ego’ y de proveer el marco para el desarrollo libre de los grupos y los temas.This essay retraces the shared phenomenological root of Vicent Martínez Guzmán’s Filosofía para Hacer las Paces, Francisco Muñoz La Paz Imperfecta and the Innsbruck School’s Transracional Peace Philosophy. From there it forges ahead to the pedagogical and didactical application of these roots in academic peace education. It refers to the methodological experiences of academic learning in T-groups and its consequence for curricula development if Peace Studies is understood as Strategic Capacity and Rela-tionship Training. Finally, it highlights the stages of learning in the sense of `Peeling the Ego’s Onion´ and providing the frame for the team’s and the theme’s free development.

Down but not out: Union strategies and power resources in response to liberalization and changes in national postal services – The cases of Spain and Belgium

This article analyses national postal services unions’ strategic capacity in Spain and Belgium in response to the effects of liberalization and changes in the postal sector. The analysis shows, first, that despite having had to operate in a hostile context, Correos and bpost unions have been able to mobilize their power resources to resist the impact of market pressures on employment and working conditions. Second, it detects the relevance of national industrial relations institutions in order to understand the strategies unions adopt.

Non-Strategic Capacity Withholding from Distributed Energy Storage within Microgrids Providing Energy and Reserve Services

Microgrids have the potential to provide security and flexibility to power systems through the integration of a wide range of resources, including distributed energy storage, usually in the form of batteries. An aggregation of microgrids can enable the participation of these resources in the main system’s energy and ancillary services market. The traditional minimum-cost operation, however, can undermine microgrid’s ability to hold reserve capacity for operation in islanded mode and can rapidly degrade distributed batteries. This paper studies the impacts of various operational strategies from distributed energy storage plants on their revenues and on market prices, considering an array of microgrids that act in a synchronized fashion. The operational model minimizes the entire electric power system cost, considering transmission-connected and distributed energy resources, and capturing capacity degradation of batteries as part of the cost function. Additionally, microgrid-based, distributed batteries can provide energy arbitrage and both system-level and microgrid-level security services. Through several case studies, we demonstrate the economic impacts of distributed energy storage providing these services, including also capacity degradation. We also demonstrate the benefits of providing reserve services in terms of extra revenue and battery lifespan. Finally, we conclude that limitations in the provision of system-level services from distributed batteries due to degradation considerations and higher microgrid-level security requirements may, counterintuitively, increase system-level revenues for storage owners, if such degradation considerations and microgrid-level security requirements are adopted, at once, by a large number of microgrids, leading to unintended, non-strategic capacity withholding by distributed storage owners.

Analysis of the State Universal Basic Education Board's Execution of Strategic Capacity Building and Teachers' Job Satisfaction in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

This study examined the relationship between the State Universal Basic Education Board's execution of strategic capacity building and teachers' job satisfaction in Akwa Ibom State. One objective, research question and null hypothesis were formulated to guide the study. The correlational design was adopted. The population of the study consisted of 12,566 public primary school teachers in Akwa Ibom State. A multi-stage approach was used to select a sample size of 1,750 teachers. Two researcher-developed instruments namely ‘Executing Strategic Capacity Building Questionnaire (ESCBQ) and ‘Teachers’ Job Satisfaction Questionnaire (TJSQ)’ were both completed by teachers and used for data collection. The instruments were validated by three experts from the University of Uyo. The Cronbach’s Alpha Statistic was used to ascertain the reliability coefficients of .832 and .790 respectively. Correlation (r) was used to answer research question while the PPMC analysis was used to test hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed that strategic capacity building has a significant relationship with teachers’ job satisfaction. It is therefore recommended that SUBEB management should strategically design and carryout capacity building programmes for teachers based on needs assessment that leads to successful implementation of educational strategies.