Development of Reliable Models of Signal-Controlled Intersections

The paper considers an approach to building various mathematical models for homogeneous groups of intersections manifested through the use of clustering methods. This is because of a significant spread in their traffic capacity, as well as the influence of several random factors. The initial data on the traffic flow of many intersections was obtained from real-time recorders of the convolutional neural network. As a result of the analysis, we revealed statistically significant differences between the groups of intersections and compiled their linear regression models as a basis for the subsequent formation of generic management decisions. To demonstrate visually the influence of random factors on the traffic capacity of intersections, we built distribution fields based on the fuzzy logic methods for one of the clusters consisting of 14 homogeneous intersections. Modeling was based on the Gaussian type of membership functions as it most fully reflects the random nature of the pedestrian flow and its discontinuity.

Economic Crisis and Public Administration

The last global financial and economic crisis started in 2007–2008; it had serious effects on public sectors of OECD countries and was still affecting some of them when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Different streams of literature contribute to understanding the public management and governance challenges emerging from economic crises: the public administration literature on cutback management of the late 1970s and 1980s, the contemporary literature on managing austerity, and the more generic management literature on organizational decline. Although public administrations are reacting to the same global crisis, they are expected to adopt a variety of approaches when designing policy and managerial responses, including strategic approaches, across-the-board approaches (cheese-slicing or piecemeal incremental shifts), or rhetoric and inertia, avoiding real change and manipulating discursive frames. A strategic approach is based on systematic, selective, or targeted measures, and it includes different reactions to the crisis, such as a directive, hollow, or communitarian approach. In light of the different approaches available to public administrations for addressing an economic crisis, attention turns to the factors that determine such a choice. Public administrations’ responses to austerity are shaped by external and internal determinants. The external drivers make the crisis faced by each public administration longer or more severe and shape the way public managers react. External forces include economic and social features of the environment in which the public administration operates as well as national austerity policies. According to the literature, the harsher the fiscal stress, the more likely it is that targeted cuts will be adopted, instead of an across-the-board approach that doesn’t take into account the different levels of efficiency of public administrations or the strategic priority of different policy areas. Internal forces influencing crisis management approaches are financial and fiscal dimensions, such as financial autonomy (reliance on central government for revenue), spending autonomy and flexibility, degree of fiscal stress, and financial vulnerability. All these forces influence a proactive response to the crisis. Another key factor is leadership: the literature is excessively focused on incentives faced by political leaders, and few studies examine the role of administrative leadership. Finally, the crisis management approach matters in terms of impact; the literature developed after the 1970s and 2007–2008 global economic crises all agrees on this. Such a link, however, is difficult to assess. Strategic and longer-term approaches seem to favor the strengthening of trust, resilience, and avoidance of electoral costs, whereas shorter-term changes lower employee morale, create recruitment and retention problems, cause loss of managerial expertise, cause distraction from the core purpose of the service, and increase costs.

EFFICIENT RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ON CONTAINER AS A SERVICE

Docker has been widely adopted as a platform solution for microservice. As the popularity of microservice increases, the importance of fine-tuning the efficiency of resource management in the Docker platform also increases. While Docker’s out-of-box resource management solution provides some generic management capability, more work is required to improve resource utilization and enforce Service Level Agreement (SLA) for critical services. In this research, an efficient Docker resource management scheme, called Adaptive SLA Enforcement, is designed and implemented. For the sake of comparison, we also study and implement three simpler schemes: 1) Fixed Number of Containers, 2) Dynamic Resource Management without SLA Enforcement, 3) Strict SLA Enforcement. We found that the Adaptive SLA Enforcement scheme can deliver efficient resource management with SLA enforcement, thus successfully addressing the deficiencies of the other three schemes.

EFFICIENT RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ON CONTAINER AS A SERVICE

Docker has been widely adopted as a platform solution for microservice. As the popularity of microservice increases, the importance of fine-tuning the efficiency of resource management in the Docker platform also increases. While Docker’s out-of-box resource management solution provides some generic management capability, more work is required to improve resource utilization and enforce Service Level Agreement (SLA) for critical services. In this research, an efficient Docker resource management scheme, called Adaptive SLA Enforcement, is designed and implemented. For the sake of comparison, we also study and implement three simpler schemes: 1) Fixed Number of Containers, 2) Dynamic Resource Management without SLA Enforcement, 3) Strict SLA Enforcement. We found that the Adaptive SLA Enforcement scheme can deliver efficient resource management with SLA enforcement, thus successfully addressing the deficiencies of the other three schemes.

Managers as Insiders or Outsiders to Public Organizations

The heart of public management is that the public sector context matters in ways that generic management research typically neglects. Generic management scholarship has found that the degree of match between top managers’ career experience and the characteristics of their current organizations creates managerial fit or misfit. However, public sector management adds the insight of “publicness fit” and the empirical finding that managers appointed from outside of public organizations tend to have shorter tenures, and in some contexts, weaker performance than managers with experience managing inside public organizations. This chapter reviews the current state of research on managerial publicness fit. First, the publicness fit on dimensions of public ownership, funding, and regulation is presented and a systematic review of broader studies of managerial fit for their relevance to the topic is given. Then, review evidence on publicness “insider/outsider” fit and its consequences for the public sector is offered. The third section concludes with an agenda for integrating publicness fit with the other dimensions of managerial fit identified in the review.

Establishing professional expectations in further education middle management: The human resource manager’s perspective

The further education sector is a challenging working environment with expectations to deliver high-quality education against a backdrop of continuous policy and structural reforms. Further education managers play a key part in how further education institutions respond to this dynamic operating environment. However, despite the importance of this role there is an absence of an agreed set of professional expectations for further education middle managers. Sector bodies have commissioned research to address recruitment challenges and support workforce development, but this is often directed towards teachers. As a result, the credibility of further education teachers has increased markedly, which is welcomed. However, further education middle managers who are responsible for the management of teachers and operationalisation of organisational strategies have not benefited from comparable opportunities for professionalisation. In contrast, they suffer from a lack of support when assimilating into the role. This paper investigates the role of further education middle managers through the lens of those responsible for their recruitment and development, human resource managers. Through the administration of a national survey of human resource managers, drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, this paper establishes a new theoretical framework: four pillars of professional expectations for further education middle managers. Furthermore, it highlights the value in a contextualised approach, moving away from generic management standards.

Institutional hybridity and cultural isomorphism in contemporary policing

Recent work on policing has increasingly acknowledged the influence of a broad array of changes upon both the structure and culture of police organizations. Generally, however, literature and research have tended to focus attention onto those elements of the broader police environment that effect such developments, whereas little commentary, to date, has been directed towards those features which impact across the broader public sector. Through drawing on the concepts of ‘hybrid professionalism’ [Noordegraaf M (2015) Hybrid professionalism and beyond: (new) forms of public professionalism in changing organizational and societal contexts. Journal of Professions and Organization 2: 187–206] and ‘institutional isomorphism’ [DiMaggio PJ and Powell WW (1983) The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review 48: 147–160], this conceptual paper will argue that the impact of neoliberal ideology on the contemporary public sector has created a police organization for which professionalism increasingly denotes generic management skills that are common across different occupations and different police roles. In particular, it will be suggested that such institutional isomorphism may drive ideational responses commensurate with cultural change within police organizations. In short, therefore, the paper will make the case that, in parallel with changes already identified by other academics, broader structural changes may lead to a narrower and more generic set of cultural responses within contemporary police organizations.

How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media for Fundraising: A Systematic Literature Review

Social media (SM) are widely used by nonprofit organizations (NPOs). However, little is known about how they are used for fundraising, especially regarding their benefits/disbenefits, and the optimum strategies for maximizing value from such campaigns. The study presented here aimed to address this gap by collecting, analyzing and synthesizing the results of the corpus of published academic research on this topic. Of 194 potentially relevant search results generated from seven international online databases, only 71 (62 studies) fully met the inclusion criteria. Most of these qualifying studies were published in social science journals in the past three years and derived from high-income countries. Our findings indicate that the benefits NPOs can obtain from using SM for fundraising include increased transparency and accountability, operational, involvement and engagement, and improved organizational image (although in respect of the two latter, outcomes can be mixed). The strategies for NPOs' SM use for fundraising focused either on generic management of social media for NPO’s fundraising or on management of some specific SM fundraising campaigns.

Project Management Guide and Project Management Maturity Models as Generic Tools Capable for Diverse Applications

Project management maturity models (PM3) are generic management tools designed to measure the approximate level of balance state of the organization's capability and capacity to manage projects. With its generic form and structure, it enables diverse applications where content and detail level can be tailored according to specific needs of industry, commerce, government, and knowledge. Yet, its capability is still not well understood, as vacancies continues incorrectly advertised and project management (PM) graduate program inappropriately parked under engineering faculty instead of management or industrial management. With this, it had obscured the PM generic capability to manage change holistically, as project scope, schedule, risk, resources, procurement, and stakeholder satisfaction are integrated, coordinated, and synchronized to deliver the expected outcome. Thus, this chapter aims to identify the factors inhibiting understanding of how PM can be generically applied, in bridging the PM knowledge gap, and to demonstrate how PM and PM3 principles can and are actually applied generically.