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Deciphering genomic dynamics : locust swarming, cassava resistance, and unveiling whole genome duplication for evolutionary understanding
No full textGenoomassemblage en annotatie, essentieel voor de moderne genetica, omvatten het reconstrueren van genetische informatie met behulp van geavanceerde sequentietechnologieën. In een recent ontwikkeld genomics gebied integreert fylogenomica fylogenetische en genoomanalyses om evolutionaire relaties af te leiden en moleculaire aanpassingen in genen en soorten te begrijpen. Deze scriptie draait om essentiële processen in de genomica, namelijk genoomassemblage, annotatie en de studie van hele-genoom duplicaties (WGD's). Deze processen zijn fundamenteel in de moderne genetica en hebben zich ontwikkeld met technologische vooruitgang en verbeterde algoritmes
Biological importance of F-Box Nictaba in Arabidopsis thaliana defense against Pseudomonas infection
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Aspects of inter-professional collaboration and perceptions of caregiving in palliative care
No full textCome together : exploring unity in music interaction through agency and social connectedness
No full textFrom starving artist to entrepreneur : a sociological analysis of justifications in and evaluations of visual artists’ grant proposals between 1965 and 2015 in Flanders
No full textBeing an artist rarely leads to financial gain. In many Western countries, artists can therefore request state subsidies. While subsidies are meant to ensure artists’ autonomy by protecting them from the laws of the market, the logic of the state itself does not leave the art world unaffected, either. The relationship between the state and the arts is understudied in empirical sociological research. Combining pragmatist and critical art sociology, in this dissertation, I examine to what extent the neoliberalization and professionalization of Flemish cultural policy over the period 1965 to 2015 reflected in 1) the ways visual artists legitimized their applications and 2) the judgments of the evaluating committee. To this end, I analyze 494 grant proposals of Flemish visual artists and 12,254 decisions of the evaluating committee. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I find, among other things, that over time artists became less inclined to present themselves as romantic, suffering artists and more as entrepreneurs, academics, and questioners of social inequality. Further, the committee, which before 1990 frequently supported both debutant and oft-subsidized applicants, was after the 1990s sharply less inclined to subsidize first-time applicants. Artists’ justifications and the committee’s evaluations did thus indeed change with cultural policy. Still, this cannot be plainly read as a loss of autonomy for the visual arts. Alongside social, academic, and entrepreneurial discourses, artists still used justifications rooted in an artistic vocation and esthetics. Moreover, besides changing demands from the state, the tendency of the art world itself to continually innovate has been a motivator for artists to engage with other fields, such as politics and science. In turn, the committee’s changing selection pattern is no direct evidence of a conscious preference for reputationally established artists. Awarding grants primarily to artists who have previously received grants may reflect consistency in the committee’s esthetic judgment, allowing it to show that it “knows what it is doing,” which is vital for organizations that often receive social critique. Yet the entry of entrepreneurial language into artists’ discourse shows a certain acceptance of the “established order,” and the recent choices of the committee, because of which newcomers have less chance to obtain a grant, affect artists’ careers
Surrogate monitoring and control of landfill leachate treatment by a combination of Anammox-based biotreatment, ozonation and activated carbon adsorption
No full textTracing world-class universities in the global public(ity) sphere
No full textThe salience of reputation management has grown, both in terms of scale and prominence, in higher education management and governance, and, subsequently, higher education research in the past two decades. Reputation management is no longer a peripheral topic of interest for a few higher education researchers judging from the exponential growth in the volume of academic literature and the changing external environment in which universities communicate with their internal and external stakeholders. Neither practitioners nor higher education researchers would disagree that reputation plays an increasingly important role in university management and governance today, sometimes to the extent of “wagging the dog”.
Entitled “Tracing World-Class Universities in the Global Public(ity) Sphere”, the overarching aim of this thesis is to unpack the concept of “reputation management” in the higher education sector. Specific research focus has been placed on the cross-section of media and higher education sectors, the public(ity) sphere manifested in the form of media-driven world university rankings and the management of related positive or negative visibility through branding and rebranding activities. The thesis ends with a universal framing research framework to guide future research on university communication processes from a multidisciplinary and multi-paradigmatic approach.
Started since 2014, as a side project of the author’s professional activities in the promotion of international higher education on a supranational level, this thesis carries also an underlying, secondary aim of bridging practice, policy, and academic research. The author believes that it is not only important to address research gaps in university communication, but also the disconnect between academic research in different disciplines, and the delayed research on reputational management policies and practices in the higher education sector, which may explain why marketing practitioners in the sector sometimes uncritically borrowed failed or dated practices in the corporate world that turn reputation management activities into counterproductive aspirational branding activities that alienate internal stakeholders, particularly current students and alumni.
Finally, the thesis emphasizes that context matters in reputation management. Empirical data of institutional level research were collected primarily from Hong Kong, a system with a very high density of both media and “word-class universities” riding on world university rankings. While the site was chosen purposively because of the author’s contextual knowledge, this piece of research happens to address a very important university governance issue that plagues the Hong Kong system since after the 2019 social unrests; namely, the citing of “reputation risks” as a justification for stifling voices of dissent on campus and for removing legitimate, established student representation from the university governance structure. The direct impact of representation and reputation on university governance is a new phenomenon that calls for more critical research on reputation management in the higher education sector world-wide.
It is believed that the same “marketing-driven universities” exist in other national systems that place the protection of institutional or national image above institutional autonomy and academic freedom. Increasing digitalization and mediatization of higher education has exerted unprecedented level of pressure on organizations, private and public alike, to engage in constant and often also instant communication with multiple stakeholders both locally and globally via mass media and social media. The intricacy of the changing external environment implies the need to broaden and deepen university communication research to refocus on change processes beyond representation analysis indicative of the underlying change processes
Why do they do it? Explaining local governments’ choices of service delivery modes
No full textWhile local governments have historically provided citizens with public services through in-house service delivery using their own employees and resources, in the past few decades, the array of alternative service delivery modes available to local governments has increased dramatically. Studies have found that today the default approach in many countries is the choice of local alternative service delivery modes, i.e. local governments rely on ‘external’ providers in service delivery rather than on in-house service delivery. This has spurred scholars to investigate why local governments choose alternative service delivery modes or externalise service delivery. Scholars generally point to the relevance of financial, economic efficiency and political-ideological drivers, i.e. focused on municipal-level and service-level drivers. This dissertation examines the drivers of these choices in a Flemish context and focuses on the elderly care sector and the household waste management sector. Doing so, we rely on a large number of data of various kinds such as government documents and semi-structured interviews with politicians, civil servants and not-for-profit partners.
After a general introduction and problem statement, Chapter 1 sets the scene by means of a conceptual and theoretical outline with a discussion on the most prominent evolutions within the literature. We find that, despite the continuing interest of scholars in investigating the issue, literature still presents inconclusive and divergent research findings. In our opinion, two prominent issues remain a challenge in current research, related to both theoretical underpinnings of the predominant body of literature (i.e. current research is largely based on rational choice theory) as methodological in nature (i.e. many research efforts fail in capturing choices of service delivery modes in and over time and revealing their true underlying drivers). This dissertation aims at contributing to the body of knowledge by taking up the abovementioned theoretical and methodological gauntlet in the empirical parts (Chapters 3, 4 and 5). Based on a multiple-case study design, we find that financial and economic efficiency factors are important drivers of externalisation, while the impact of political ideology impacts the choice of PPP (Chapter 3). While entailing a satisfying explanation for the studied choices of service delivery modes in the elderly care sector in Chapter 3, we expand the framework both theoretically (by introducing the concept of coercive isomorphism) and methodologically (by employing a longitudinal multiple-case study design) in Chapter 4. Focusing on household waste collection, we show that these factors have to be studied in relation to (the evolution of) coercive pressures not only on the service delivery mode itself (direct), but also on the service characteristics (indirect). Bringing in the influence of central governmental policy, and moving beyond merely looking at municipal-level and service-level factors, on these choices, thus, proves to be essential in understanding the drivers of these choices. In chapter 5, focusing on household waste processing and household waste collection, we theoretically innovate by seeking inspiration in historical institutionalism to improve our understanding of local service delivery modes. We find that choices are highly influenced by path dependent processes and that they are structured and shaped by the confluence of a limited number of critical junctures generated by mostly exogenous factors while only in some cases combined with endogenous factors.
Conclusively, this dissertation provides evidence that financial and economic efficiency drivers are, indeed, important factors in explaining choices of service delivery modes. While we did not find evidence of political-ideological drivers on choices of service delivery modes in the household waste management sector, they do appear to impact the choice for PPP in the service delivery of elderly care centres. This said, we showed that in order to fully understand why local governments choose certain service delivery modes, one should account for the impact of central governmental policy and pay attention to the temporal dimension. One overarching important finding in this dissertation is that research has potentially been overstressing endogenous determinants (at the expense of exogenous determinants) and overestimating the discretionary power of local governments in making these choices. Further, this dissertation indicates that findings from the international literature are not ipso facto generalisable to the context of Flanders, which is still characterised by a more European Napoleonic tradition, i.e. powerful, centralised bureaucracy and functionally rather weak local governments. Accordingly, future research could further undertake more comparative endeavours by, for example, deliberately choosing to research the topic in regions and countries with similar or dissimilar central-local relations or other traditions and starting positions in service areas. Key in this should be firstly assessing the actual autonomy of local governments in making these choices prior to turning to explain their choices