Article 12: The Right to Be Heard

Abstract‘Youth parliament or similar institutions representing all groups of children of the society and different ages should operate throughout the year and express their opinion to Ministers on all relevant draft laws. The same should happen with local authorities and all public agencies.’ (Eastern Europe)

Factors Influencing Intent to Adopt Big Data Analytics in Malaysian Government Agencies

In Big Data Analytics (BDA), many government agencies directly raised their ICT expenditure in their effort to understand the attitude of the users towards new technologies. This research is intended to analyze factors affecting IT practitioners’ behavioral intentions in adopting (BDA) using a combination of multiple technology acceptance models. The synergistic three IS theory strengths: (1) Task Technology Fit (TTF), (2) Unified Technology Acceptance and Utilization Theory (UTAUT), and the (3) Initial Trust Model (ITM). The concept was validated in Malaysian government agencies, one of the highly dependent BDA promoters and initiators. 186 respondents in the Information Management departments of public agencies were recruited as part of the rigorous methodology to gather rich data. Partial least squares were analyzed by the structural models (PLS). The two key factors determine behavioral intention to adopt BDA in government agencies. Firstly, the assumption that the technology is going to produce great results raises the expectation of performance. Technological fit was the second determinant factor. Initial trust, on the other hand, was found to be adversely related to the BDA intention. Implicitly, the proposed model would be useful to IT officers in public agencies in making investment choices and designing non-adopter-friendly outreach strategies because they have more barriers to acceptance than adopters and lead adopters in the reward ladder. All public agencies will benefit from the findings of this study in gaining awareness of BDA application and fostering psychological empowerment of employees to adopt this revolutionary approach. The article outlines how dynamic TTF, UTAUT and ITM are for researchers to integrate in their emerging decision support framework for the study of new technology adoption.

relationship between research and innovation in the public sector – an analysis of five cases from labour and welfare services

Many public agencies promote renewal in the public sector through projects that require a productive combination of research and innovation activities. However, the role of research in innovation processes is a neglected theme in the public sector innovation literature. We address this gap through an analysis of five cases from the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration. We find few examples of innovations based directly on research, but several examples of research on innovations and on more complex co-evolutionary processes of the two activities. Research seems to be particularly important for the diffusion and scaling up of innovations. We find that research has an impact on innovation in later phases of the innovation process through the formalisation of practice-based and unsystematic knowledge, codification of experiences, and legitimation to ensure political support and funding. This new conceptualisation contributes to the public sector innovation literature and may help improve policies that set up a rather limited role for research.

“Havens of mercy”: health, medical research, and the governance of the movement of dogs in twentieth-century America

This article argues that the movement of dogs from pounds to medical laboratories played a critically important role in debates over the use of animals in science and medicine in the United States in the twentieth century, not least by drawing the scientific community into every greater engagement with bureaucratic political governance. If we are to understand the unique characteristics of the American federal legislation that emerges in the 1960s, we need to understand the long and protracted debate over the use of pound animals at the local municipal and state level between antivivisectionists, humane activists, and scientific and medical researchers. We argue that the Laboratory Animal Care Act of 1966 reflects the slow evolution of a strategy that proved most successful in local conflicts, and which would characterize a “new humanitarianism”: not the regulation of experimental practices but of the care and transportation of the animals being provided to the laboratory. Our analysis is consistent with, and draws upon, scholarship which has established the productive power of public agencies and civil society on the periphery of the American state.

AB 5 and AB 2257 Impacts on Small California Public Agencies

With the recent changes, government agencies are struggling to define worker status under the new laws (DeBlanc and Safarloo, 2020). The interest in eliminating independent contractors is tied to concerns about workers in the private sector, specifically the gig economy, being denied appropriate pay and benefits, yet even government agencies are affected by AB 5 changes (Andoyan, 2017, Bergman, 2020). Traditionally, small public agencies use contractors frequently for professional services, specialists, backfill positions, recreation, geographic information systems (GIS), and much more. This research analyzes the following question: What is the impact of Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) and Assembly Bill 2257 (AB 2257) on small public agencies in California?

Who’s talking to whom in agribusiness? And should anyone listen? The network of intellectual influence in agribusiness research

PurposeTo develop an understanding of communication among agribusiness journals and to examine patterns of citations that allow the measurement and description of the structure of communication flows among those journals in a network.Design/methodology/approachThe data for this study were gathered from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) published by Thomson Scientific (Philadelphia). The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis, based on an international trade analogy to explain the network of agribusiness journals and how these journals communicate with business and economics journals.FindingsBusiness and economics journals and, particularly the traditionally major ones, surprisingly were scarcely every used. However, the British Food Journal stood out with 50 citations to marketing and strategic management journals.Research limitations/implicationsThere are predominantly four such limitations: only 33 journals were studied, only one 5-year time period was involved, that time period is a few years old and the journal characteristics were derived using data from the “Scopes” and “Information for Authors” text on the website of each journal.Practical implicationsExchanges of agribusiness knowledge and information among diverse stakeholders (consumers, suppliers and public agencies) in a complex environment require a better understanding of the network of agribusiness journals and their relation to traditional business and economics journals.Social implicationsNetworks of journals facilitate cooperation and interactions to improve developments in the field.Originality/valueExamining citations from and to the field of agribusiness is interesting and important because knowledge is transferred through networks comprise those who contribute to journals, read them and learn from them, i.e. by “talking” to each other as well as by practitioners who also read and learn from those journals.

Bringing all clients into the system – Professional digital discretion to enhance inclusion when services are automated

The increasing use of automated systems for decision-making and decision support in public administration is forming new practices and challenging public values since public services must be impartially accessible and designed for everyone. New robotistic process automation (RPA) systems are generally designed based on back-office structures. This requires clients to submit relevant data correctly in order for these services to function. However, not all potential or intended users of these services have the competence and the capacity to submit accurate data in the correct way. Front-line case workers at public agencies play critical roles in supporting those who have problems using the services due to the aforementioned accessibility requirements and thereby work in bridging digital divides. This article analyses strategies used by front-line case workers to complement RPA and improve the inclusion of all clients in the services. It builds on qualitative case studies at two Swedish authorities, including in-depth interviews and observations. The study shows that the discretion of the front-line case workers is limited by the RPA systems, and they also have limited discretion to support clients in their use of the digital services. Instead, they develop strategies in line with more service- and socially-oriented values; duty-oriented values are integrated into the RPA. The analysis shows the importance of forming new support structures for inclusion when public services are automated to maintain the core public values of inclusion and democratic legitimacy.

Mapping Covid-19 Governance in Lebanon: Territories of Sectarianism and Solidarity

Many states, including Lebanon, have used the Covid-19 pandemic as an occasion to reassert their power and to consolidate their policing and repressive apparatuses. We are far from a seamless scenario, however. Rather than a mere reproduction of the sectarian political system, we argue in this paper that the governance of the pandemic in Lebanon reveals tensions between powerful political parties, weakened public agencies, as well as multiple solidarity groups with diverging aspirations, colliding over the imagined future of the country. Using various sources of information (broadcast, print and online news media, social media), we build a database of the types of actors and the categories of actions across locations, and analyze the territorial and political variations of the governance of the pandemic. The paper demonstrates that the Covid-19 response in Lebanon operates through ongoing negotiations over the national territory in which timid yet visible aspirations for a non-sectarian country confront sectarian territorialities through back-and-forth cycles.