1,720,961 research outputs found
From imposed to the co-developed governance processes in IT captive offshoring engagements
Full text linkThis thesis examines the impact of governance process development on engagements between onshore and offshore subsidiaries of multinational IT services organisations. Offshoring is a significant global phenomenon. Over the last decade, there has been substantial growth in the number of organisations setting up ‘captive’ (wholly owned subsidiaries) centres in offshore locations. The desired benefits of greater coordination, leveraging and sharing of knowledge have, in many instances, failed to materialise for these IT services organisations. These failures arise from a variety of causes including a lack of intra-organisational processes to coordinate and manage work, weak alignment between the parent organisation’s strategic objectives and those of the subsidiary, and the inability to navigate cross-organisational and cultural barriers.
This thesis comprises three interrelated projects. The first established that organisations develop offshore subsidiaries in order to obtain one or more of a number of complex and interrelated set of strategic objectives. The second project, through the use of grounded theory, demonstrates that within one IT services organisation, imposed governance processes do not facilitate communication and engagement between the onshore and offshore subsidiaries. Cross-cultural and organisational differences inhibited the engagement between the subsidiaries, thus contributing to the failure to achieve the desired benefits of offshoring. Organisations engaged in captive offshoring are faced with two apparently contradictory sets of issues: a set of highly desirable and interrelated strategic benefits and a variety of operational challenges that arise from the imposed nature of the governance processes. The third project, a case study of a similar IT services organisation, examines how these apparently contradictory issues were resolved. The results show that it is the co-development and implementation of governance processes based on the informal working practices of both the onshore and offshore teams that enable the operational challenges established in the second project to be resolved and thus provide reconciliation between these and the achievement of the strategic benefits that drive offshoring.
This thesis concludes that co-developed and implemented governance processes are a key factor in the mitigation of the deleterious effects of cross-organizational and cultural working and adds the notion of co-development and implementation of governance processes to the academic literature on the governance of outsourcing
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
Exploring shared leadership in a UK public sector programme
Full text linkThis thesis considers shared leadership in a UK public sector programme.
Many UK public sector change initiatives are delivered through programmes. In
recent years, the practice and academic domain of programme management
have developed from within the established discipline of project management.
The leadership of projects has been widely studied, both conceptually and
empirically, but programmes are substantively different. Shared leadership is a
relatively new conceptualisation of leadership which may be valuable for the
study of leadership of programmes.
The thesis uses a case study of one programme to explore shared leadership in
this environment, primarily based on 15 interviews and observation of meetings
and events. In particular, it focuses on the leadership tasks of setting the vision
and establishing and structuring the programme.
The study helps to improve the characterisation of the emerging theoretical
concept of shared leadership by adding empirical evidence. It supports the
conceptualisation of shared leadership as a plural, processual, diagonal and
lateral influence-based phenomenon by unpacking the above leadership tasks
into their constituent activities and interactions. It provides evidence for the
mechanism of “numerical action” through the seamless transfer of leadership and
contributes to the discussion on the nature of “concertive action”. It also
highlights the propensity of organisational actors to attribute artefacts of
leadership to individuals. It supports the conceptualisation of leadership in such
an environment as hybrid or integrated, combining traditional vertical with shared
leadership. In light of this, it proposes a dual processual and artefactual approach
to the study of leadership. It does not support defined, complementary roles and
structures as important for effective programme leadership. It provides useful
guidance to programme management practitioners and stakeholders from seeing
their own experiences and environments through the lens of shared leadership
Exploring projectification in the public sector: the case of the next stage review implementation programme in the department of health
Full text linkObjective: Public projects are used to delivery policy objectives. From a financial
perspective, the Major Projects Authority (MPA) estimated a whole life investment
of £488 billion for 199 major projects in 2014, only a small subset of the total
number of public projects. Given the financial exposure, the impact of endemic
public project failures could put the economic health of the nation at risk. This
thesis studies the challenges facing public projects. It applies an organisational
capabilities lens to investigate projectification, when organisations shift away from
functional-based organising (FBO) toward project-based organising (PBO).
Research Design: This study adopts an interpretivist research paradigm, with a
constructionist epistemology and an idealist ontology, and employs an abductive
research strategy. Structurally, it follows the Cranfield Executive Doctorate in
Business Administration (DBA) methodology, with a linking document that
summarises three complementary research projects: a systematic literature
review (SLR) followed by two empirical studies that investigate the Department of
Health (DoH) during the early phases of the Next Stage Review Implementation
Programme (NSRIP). The findings are derived from over 250 academic literature
sources, 100 government publications and 41 semi-structured interviews. ...[cont.
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
Project sponsor competence in the UK public sector: A systematic review
Full text linkMasters by ResearchThis thesis reviews the literature on project sponsorship, competence and accountability in the public sector. It adopts a systematic review methodology, which aims to find, evaluate, analyse and synthesize literature on a transparent, replicable basis. Based on a set of keywords derived from a scoping study and practitioner inputs, a series of keyword searches were conducted on a number of databases. The literature found was evaluated for relevance and rigour against a set of specified source, content and quality criteria. I developed new content criteria in response to new uses of keywords in the literature. I also used the reference lists in the material that passed all the criteria to find further literature, which I also reviewed for rigour and relevance against the source, content and quality criteria. Systematic review is therefore a deductive process, which changed my understanding of the research subject form a general one to a more specific one. I found project sponsorship to be a common role in many areas where project management is used. My synthesis of the literature suggested that the role is a powerful, risk-taking one, requiring leadership and ownership. Competence is a divided , ambiguous concept, with current approaches limited by virtue of their rational, dualistic ontology. Accountability is fundamental to any understanding the role of the project sponsor in the public sector, but is a difficult, changing concept, capable of being viewed from either a process or an organizational perspective. I found significant research gaps in the project sponsorship literature. It has been the subject of little direct research. Whilst there is some understanding of the role in relation to the project, the wider aspects of the role and what may constitute competence in the the role are fertile areas for further research
- …
