58,905 research outputs found

    Emerging Opportunities: Monitoring and Evaluation in a Tech-Enabled World

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    Various trends are impacting on the field of monitoring and evaluation in the area of international development. Resources have become ever more scarce while expectations for what development assistance should achieve are growing. The search for more efficient systems to measure impact is on. Country governments are also working to improve their own capacities for evaluation, and demand is rising from national and community-based organizations for meaningful participation in the evaluation process as well as for greater voice and more accountability from both aid and development agencies and government.These factors, in addition to greater competition for limited resources in the area of international development, are pushing donors, program participants and evaluators themselves to seek more rigorous – and at the same time flexible – systems to monitor and evaluate development and humanitarian interventions.However, many current approaches to M&E are unable to address the changing structure of development assistance and the increasingly complex environment in which it operates. Operational challenges (for example, limited time, insufficient resources and poor data quality) as well as methodological challenges that impact on the quality and timeliness of evaluation exercises have yet to be fully overcome

    Coevolution of Firm Capabilities and Industry Competition

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    This paper proposes that rival firms not only search for new capabilities within their organization, but also for those that rest in their competitive environment. An integrated analysis of these search processes at both firm and industry levels of analysis shows how their interaction makes industries and firms coevolve over time. To contribute to an enhanced understanding of the concept of coevolution, a dynamic and integrative framework crossing meso and micro levels of analysis is constructed. This framework is applied to a longitudinal study of the music industry with a time-span of 120 years. The first part, a historical study, covers the period 1877 - 1990. The second part, a multiple-case study, covers the period 1990 - 1997. We conclude that search behavior drives coevolution through competitive dynamics among new entrants and incumbent firms and manifests itself in the simultaneous emergence of new business models and new organizational forms.coevolution;competitive regime;longitudinal research;multilevel research;music industry

    Fund of hedge funds: origins, role and future.

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    The emergence of the fund of hedge funds (FoHF) was the natural evolutionary outcome of the appearance of the hedge fund itself and its consequential rapid rise to success as a result of offering absolute returns to a market where the generality of world savings was invested in relative returns. However, the lack of transparency, large minimum required investment and some early highly publicised accidents restricted access to this investment class mainly to high net worth individuals. To overcome this, the concept of packaging hedge funds into funds of hedge funds was born, though at fi rst with mainly institutional investors using these funds as providers of ill-defi ned alpha rather than introducing them into their portfolios as a particular style. From this simple beginning, the role of the fund of hedge funds has evolved into today’s fully-fledged multi-manager. This progression occurred naturally as the growing concern to identify more rigorously the type of risk from which hedge funds generated their returns and the need for managers to prove their added value meant that, increasingly, funds of hedge funds had to clarify their role in terms of risk management, asset allocation and reporting as they do today. A lack of experience, together with the complexity of risks to which hedge funds were exposed, highlighted both the importance of making a risk assessment prior to an investment, and the importance of risk management during the investment’s lifetime. Despite a better understanding of risk exposures and alpha sources, building a well-diversified multi-manager portfolio remains a diffi cult task. However, due to their in-depth knowledge of alternative styles and their use of an investment process combining top-down asset allocation and bottom-up manager selection, funds of hedge funds have been able to build robust portfolios, generating absolute returns over the long term. Furthermore, capitalising on their ability to consolidate and interpret information from various hedge fund managers has allowed funds of hedge funds to produce meaningful reports for their investors. Over the last few years, it has been thought that the huge infl ow of money into this universe would exhaust the source of alpha. However, this capacity constraint concern has since faded (to be replaced to a certain degree by manager constraints) and funds of hedge funds have been able to strengthen their role by providing secured access to a diversifi ed source of alpha as a result of their ability to identify, monitor and time risk factors. The knowledge acquired in understanding and evaluating the role of skills in producing absolute returns has also proved to be of value when applied to the traditional space, and has contributed to broadening the added value of the managers’ institutional proposition. As funds of hedge funds have become fully-fledged multi-managers in their own right, they are also now able to compete in the institutional sector with the traditional multi-manager.

    Setting priorities to inform assessment of care homes’ readiness to participate in healthcare innovation: a systematic mapping review and consensus process

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    © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedOrganisational context is known to impact on the successful implementation of healthcare initiatives in care homes. We undertook a systematic mapping review to examine whether researchers have considered organisational context when planning, conducting, and reporting the implementation of healthcare innovations in care homes. Review data were mapped against the Alberta Context Tool, which was designed to assess organizational context in care homes. The review included 56 papers. No studies involved a systematic assessment of organisational context prior to implementation, but many provided post hoc explanations of how organisational context affected the success or otherwise of the innovation. Factors identified to explain a lack of success included poor senior staff engagement, non-alignment with care home culture, limited staff capacity to engage, and low levels of participation from health professionals such as general practitioners (GPs). Thirty-five stakeholders participated in workshops to discuss findings and develop questions for assessing care home readiness to participate in innovations. Ten questions were developed to initiate conversations between innovators and care home staff to support research and implementation. This framework can help researchers initiate discussions about health-related innovation. This will begin to address the gap between implementation theory and practice.Peer reviewe

    Cooperative social enterprises: company rules, access to finance and management practice

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    Objectives: In light of the faster than expected take up of the Community Interest Company (CIC) in the UK, this paper revisits findings from a study undertaken in 2000 on the impact of asset-locks on the longevity, growth and management styles in co-operative social enterprises. Prior Work: The co-operative and employee-ownership movements played a leading role in the establishment of Social Enterprise London and the Social Enterprise Coalition. The heritage of the UK co-operative movement, however, differs from its continental counterpart in placing a much stronger emphasis on common ownership that inhibits the transfer of capital and assets to private interests. Approach: This paper is both conceptual and empirical. It examines different worker co-operative traditions and develops a meta-theory that explains underlying assumptions in different forms of co-operative social enterprise. Using empirical data from 5 common ownership co-operatives and 5 equity-based co-operatives, this exploratory study found differences in management style, access to finance and growth prospects both within and between the two groups. Implications: Devolution of management responsibilities was more prevalent in co-operatives permitting both individual and collective ownership, as opposed to common ownership. Access to external finance was less problematic for organisations where individuals had made investments. Despite this, it was not established that organisations with external equity or loan finance grew quicker or faired better over the longer term. Value: The value of the paper lies both in the development of a meta-theoretical framework for differentiating forms of worker co-operative, as well as empirical evidence on the impact of asset-locks in the management and development of social enterprises. The study suggests that the CLS version of the CIC, or abandonment of the CIC in favour of an appropriately structured CLS or IPS model, may be appropriate for social enterprises wishing to grow, but makes little difference in small service oriented social enterprises.</p

    Electronic Resources and Academic Libraries, 1980-2000: A Historical Perspective

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    published or submitted for publicatio

    Ethics and taxation : a cross-national comparison of UK and Turkish firms

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    This paper investigates responses to tax related ethical issues facing busines

    What's Cooking in Your Food System? A Guide to Community Food Assessment

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    Learn about Community Food Assessments, a creative way to highlight food-related resources and needs, promote collaboration and community participation, and create lasting change. This Guide includes case studies of nine Community Food Assessments; tips for planning and organizing an assessment; guidance on research methods and strategies for promoting community participation; and ideas for translating an assessment into action for change

    Decision-Making Processes of Residents in Preservation, Thermal Comfort, and Energy Efficiency in Heritage Buildings: A Pilot Study in Mexico City

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    With building construction representing one of the largest sectors responsible for the use of natural resources, retrofitting existing heritage buildings becomes a necessity, albeit a challenging one. The emergence of specific guidance on retrofitting heritage buildings has unveiled more than never the need to understand how residents negotiate, thermal comfort, energy efficiency, and heritage conservation decisions. The paper reports the complexity of the decision-making process of residents of heritage buildings in the Historic Centre of Mexico City regarding energy efficiency, intending to improve thermal comfort and reduce energy consumption while preserving heritage values. The study involved in-depth semi-structured interviews with users of heritage buildings that were thematically analysed, complemented by the monitoring of internal environmental conditions and system dynamics analysis. The results show that although the residents perceived the buildings’ temperature as poor, passive thermal comfort actions (e.g., wearing more clothes and closing windows) were preferred against invasive retrofitting solutions for thermal comfort due to residents’ resistance to a potential loss in the buildings’ values and the high cost of changes. The degree of change necessary for maintenance, renovation, and actions for improving the thermal comfort of a heritage building is related to values and to their preservation for future generations. The users’ changes were limited to small-scale interventions in floors and ceilings while avoiding touching what they consider essential to preserve and protect (i.e., social and cultural values). Integrating the user into the decision-making process would enhance the long-term continuity and sustainability of retrofitting policies and guidelines, thus avoiding losing heritage-built stock
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