1,721,093 research outputs found
Delivering ICT shared services to local governments : a new species of public enterprise?
Full text linkThe past decades have seen the OECD countries attempt a number of sourcing
practices in local governments, including corporatization, collaborative arrangements and partnerships. One such option is to share services, an emerging strategy that casts a new actor in a leading role, i.e., the shared service organization or ‘SSO’. In the
field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) these special-purpose
vehicles deliver services to the sharing councils based on models other than publicly funded collaboration arrangements and the usual ICT outsourcing practices. The paper uses an explorative case study to analyse the SSO route taken by an Italian
enterprise, wholly owned by a public utility, in which it steers and guides its client councils on their ICT strategies. The article offers a general reflection on the new
SSO’s operating model, discussing its hybrid nature (part-private and part-public), the system of multiple local relations and the indirect influence the SSO has over the ICT decisions of the client council
Implementing local partnerships : public incentives and invisible barriers
Full text linkThis article aims to shed light on the evaluation of public policies designed to incentivize partnering between municipalities. The increasing use of interorganisational arrangements to implement public programs poses yet another challenge for public managers and academics: that of developing an evaluation method for these initiatives. The variety of intermunicipal arrangements implemented in Lombardy analyzed and reported in this article highlights the influence of policy incentives on the capacity to create and maintain collaborative efforts in the context of local development. Our qualitative study extends the evaluation research on implementation but reaches mixed conclusions on what makes associative forms effectiv
Incentivising inter-municipal collaboration : the Lombard experience
No full textThe purpose of this exploratory research is to show how incentive policies have helped to shape the scenario of inter-municipal partnerships in the Italian region of Lombardy. Do these policies really work? Have they been the driver of greater collaboration among municipalities? Overall, the impact of the financial subsidies can be seen mainly when the intended beneficiaries are involved in the stages of negotiation and commitment that precede the setting-up of the collaborative arrangements. However, the capacity of the incentives to ensure that
collaborative efforts are effectively maintained and developed over time is questionable. Importantly, the incentives do not seem to make a real difference in the
collaborative choices aimed at joint policy-making and regulation. This qualitative
study extends the evaluation research on implementation and contributes to the
partnership management debate
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
Analysing the implementation of local partnerships : an organisational perspective
No full textThis article investigates joined-up government, especially the policies designed to incentivise partnering between municipalities, adopting an as yet under-explored perspective of the organizational type. A recent survey conducted in the Lombardy Region (Northern Italy) shows that, despite the financial incentives allocated by the regional administration to promote local agency collaboration, only one-fifth of the services currently made available by local councils are delivered in associative form. While the councils seem to have grasped the importance of partnership to help provide coordinated responses to public needs, in practice, the evidence is mixed, in terms of both the size of the aggregations and the types of projects implemented on the back of the regional programs. The paper claims that the rational assumption of the incentive policies (i.e. more financial incentives = more partnership creation) is too simplistic and concludes with some reflections on the use of a theoretically founded tool for evaluating implementatio
- …
