1,721,492 research outputs found
Welfare choices : a story of market forces and social progress
No full textThe implementation of market solutions has been widely attempted in many different parts of the public sector. This chapter concerns a groundbreaking social reform, which introduced personal assistants for ‘functionally impaired’ people. It was a far-reaching and liberating reform aimed at making disabled people part of society. It replaced collective institutional care with individual choice, in turn built on a number of market-oriented mechanisms. The reform, though, soon grew costly and has been plagued by fraud and public mistrust. The chapter discusses how ideas of market mechanisms are not equal to ready-made solutions; they may come ill-conceived and before long be in need of revision and negotiation. The chapter provides a case of a major Swedish social reform, which illuminates, first, an experimental full-scale policy implementation and, second, how market ideas easily become confused with and substituted for the idea of individual choice
New Public Management in a Scandinavian context
No full textThis chapter gives an overview of the main NPM reforms and trends in the Nordic countries. The idea of a uniform Scandinavian model of NPM is discussed - the chapter presents the different countries as members of a shared public administration tradition, albeit with different traits and particular reforms. The Swedish constitution and the organization of the public sector in a centralized and a two-part local government structure are presented, both as a backdrop to the subsequent chapters and for a reflection about whether there is a uniqueness to be found in the Swedish NPM initiatives. The long history of decentralized public decision-making and its ramifications on the structure of the Swedish public-sector organization is given special attention. From a Scandinavian perspective, the public-sector structures and characteristics in Norway, Denmark and Finland are presented, by which the idea of a single Scandinavian model for all is discussed and contested
Modernizing the public sector : The Scandinavian way
No full textLooking at the Swedish public sector from a Scandinavian perspective, this chapter argues for a challenged but resilient (although not uniform) Scandi- navian public sector. Sweden is a nation with a long tradition of decentral- ized decision-making, semi-autonomous government agencies and independent local governments. This is considered a receptive context for continuous and incremental modernization. It has fostered a high degree of experimentation in terms of modes of production and distribution, albeit without the risks associated with purely market-driven social reforms based on privatization of both production and financing. The variations on the Swedish modernization theme are many, involving various forms of mar- ketization initiatives, boundary-spanning cooperative efforts and an open attitude and willingness towards trying and sharing experiences. High levels of transparency and trust are two initial traits signifying the Scandinavian public sector, which have been both amplified and challenged by the NPM agenda. The inherent strive of NPM for compartmentalization, quantifica- tion and performance measurement challenges some of the institutional glue of the welfare state, which has kept the parts together in a solid unity. Simultaneously, many NPM reforms – with their emphasis on performance measurement and reporting for increasing transparency and improving the outcomes of public polices and services – contribute both to sustained trust and welfare. The chapter concludes that Sweden keeps defending the Scan- dinavian model and values of universalism, solidarity and market independ- ence, a defence in which developments in society and future public management reforms may prove wanting
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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