Exploring the effects of flexible working practices and family friendly policies on the employment and welfare of insecure workers

This paper raises a number of controversial issues in an attempt to evaluate the effects of flexible working practices and family friendly policies on employment and welfare of mainly people with disabilities, senior citizens and the women and men with caring responsibilities. Over the recent years many governments have championed the idea of flexible working for obvious political and economic motives while most employers who have accepted or even initiated such practices and policies have acted on purely economic and business grounds. This study attempts to explain the concepts of flexible working and family friendly policy and then to explore the reasons for and procedures of implementing such policies. It is concluded that family friendly policies can be useful means of meeting the needs of both employers and employees, depending on the way they are implemented and the people who benefit from them

A European research agenda for lifelong learning

It is a generally accepted truth that without a proper educational system no country will prosper, nor will its inhabitants. With the arrival of the post-industrial society, in Europe and elsewhere, it has become increasingly clear that people should continue learning over their entire life-spans lest they or their society suffer the dire consequences. But what does this future lifelong learning society exactly look like? And how then should education prepare for it? What should people learn and how should they do so? How can we afford to pay for all this, what are the socio-economic constraints of the move towards a lifelong-learning society? And, of course, what role can and should the educational establishment of schools and universities play? This are questions that demand serious research efforts, which is what this paper argues for

The impact of national culture on e-government implementation: A comparison case study

Over the past decade there has been increasing interest in the IS research literature on the impact of cultural differences on the development and use of information and communications technologies (Ives & Jarvenpaa, 1991; Shore & Venkatachalam, 1995; Tractinsky & Jarvenpaa, 1995, Myers and Tan, 2002, Ali and Brooks, 2008). In this paper the authors explore the influence of national culture on eGov implementation. The authors have conducted a comparative case study in two different countries the UK as a developed country and Sari Lanka as a developing country. The research findings highlight the potential influence of cultural differences on eGov implementation

A Regulatory Framework for a Policy of Sustainability: Lessons from the Neo-Liberal School

In this paper targets, institutions and policy measures for describing and implementing sustainable development are evaluated in terms of their conformity with the economic framework of a market system. Firstly, from the viewpoint of neo-liberal economic thinking as conceived by the German Freiburg school of economists (Eucken), a general set of criteria is developed, including issues of operationalization and legitimation of goals as well as institutional and instrumental issues. On this basis general rules for designing an ecological framework guaranteeing the greatest possible degree of conformity with a market system are derived. The concrete application of these rules leads to recommendations for a policy of sustainability with respect to the setting of goals, the establishment of institutions (role of ecological councils, of a central environmental organization on UN level and of the GATT/WTO regime) as well as the use of appropriate instruments. --sustainability targets,regulatory rules,neo-liberal framework,environment and international trade,environmental policy assessment

Big Data in the Oil and Gas Industry: A Promising Courtship

The energy industry remains one of the highest money-producing and investment industries in the world. The United States’ own economic stability depends greatly on the stability of oil and gas prices. Various factors affect the amount of money that will continue to be invested in producing oil. A main disadvantage to the oil and gas industry is its lack of technological adaptation. This weakens the industry because the surest measures are not currently being taken to produce oil in optimally efficient, safe, and cost-effective ways. Big data has gained global recognition as an opportunity to gather large volumes of information in real-time and translate data sets into actionable insights. In a low commodity price environment, saving time, reducing costs, and improving safety are crucial outcomes that can be realized using machine learning in oil and gas operations. Big data provides the opportunity to use unsupervised learning. For example, with this approach, engineers can predict oil wells’ optimal barrels of production given the completion data in a specific area. However, a caveat to utilizing big data in the oil and gas industry is that there simply is neither enough physical data nor data velocity in the industry to be properly referred to as “big data.” Big data, as it develops, will nonetheless significantly change the energy business in the future, as it already has in various other industries.Petroleum and Geosystems Engineerin

Chapter 9: Building an Iron-Clad Supplier Diversity Program

There are critical issues identified with reconciling parity in supplier diversity initiatives. Supplier diversity programs (SDP) are an instrument utilized to facilitate the process. This endeavor analyzes the best techniques to develop diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) strategy to develop manufacturing suppliers. Moreover, quality control frameworks for developing supplier diversity programs in manufacturing necessitates strategic planning, which is necessary to support supplier diversity initiatives. For instance, questions that supplier diversity managers must ask include, Does the company have an existing minority supplier program? If so, what are its pros, cons, and evaluative measures? If not, why hasn’t there been a supplier diversity program or why is it now defunct? Moreover, supplier diversity managers must develop, safeguard, and sustain supplier diversity programs by gaining support from leadership, create policy (institutionalize), and tie the SDP to organizational performance metrics

Different routes, common directions? Activation policies for young people in Denmark and the UK

This article analyses and compares the development of activation policies for young people in Denmark and the UK from the mid-1990s. Despite their diverse welfare traditions and important differences in the organisation and delivery of benefits and services for the unemployed, both countries have recently introduced large-scale compulsory activation programmes for young people. These programmes share a number of common features, especially a combination of strong compulsion and an apparently contradictory emphasis on client-centred training and support for participants. The suggested transition from the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ to the ‘Schumpeterian workfare regime’ is used as a framework to discuss the two countries’ recent moves towards activation. It is argued that while this framework is useful in explaining the general shift towards active labour-market policies in Europe, it alone cannot account for the particular convergence of the Danish and British policies in the specific area of youth activation. Rather, a number of specific political factors explaining the development of policies in the mid-1990s are suggested. The article concludes that concerns about mass youth unemployment, the influence of the ‘dependency culture’ debate in various forms, cross-national policy diffusion and, crucially, the progressive re-engineering of compulsory activation by strong centre-left governments have all contributed to the emergence of policies that mix compulsion and a commitment to the centrality of work with a ‘client-centred approach’ that seeks to balance more effective job seeking with human resource development. However, attempts to combine the apparently contradictory concepts of ‘client-centredness’ and compulsion are likely to prove politically fragile, and both countries risk lurching towards an increasingly workfarist approach

State Capacity and Non-state Service Provision in Fragile and Conflict-affected States

How can governments effectively engage with non-state providers (NSPs) of basic services where capacity is weak? This paper examines whether and how fragile and conflict affected states can co-ordinate, finance, and set and apply standards for the provision of basic services by NSPs. It explores ways of incrementally engaging the state, beginning with activities that are least likely to do harm to non-state provision. Through the ‘indirect’ roles of setting the policy environment and engaging in policy dialogue, regulating and facilitating, contracting, and entering into mutual and informal agreements with NSPs, the state can in principle assume responsibility for the provision of basic services without necessarily being involved in direct provision. But government capacity to perform these roles is constrained by the state’s weak legitimacy, coverage and competence, lack of basic information about the non-state sector, and lack of basic organisational capacity to form and maintain relationships with NSPs. The experience of the exercise of the indirect roles in fragile settings suggests: * Governments may be more willing to engage with NSPs where there is recognition that government cannot alone deliver all services, where public and private services are not in competition, and where there is evidence that successful collaboration is possible (demonstrated through small-scale pilots). * The extent to which engagements are ‘pro-service’may be influenced by government motives for engagement and the extent to which the providers that are most important to poor people are engaged. * Formal policy dialogue between government and NSPs may be imperfect, unrepresentative and at times unhelpful in fragile settings. Informal dialogue - at the operational level - could more likely be where synergies can be found. * Regulation is more likely to be ‘pro-service’ where it offers incentives for compliance, and where it focuses on standards in terms of outputs and outcomes rather than inputs and entry controls. * Wide scale, performance-based contracting has been successful in delivering services in some cases, but the sustainability of this approach is often questioned. Some successful contractual agreements have a strong informal, relational element and grow out of earlier informal connections. * Informal and mutual agreements can avoid the capacity problems and tensions implicit in formal contracting but may present problems of non-transparency and exclusion of competition. Paradoxically, the need for large-scale approaches and quick co-ordination of services in fragile and conflict-affected settings may require ‘prematurely high’ levels of state-NSP engagement, before the development of the underlying institutional structures that would support them. When considering strategies to support the capacity of government to engagement with NSPs, donors should: * Recognise non-state service provision and adopt the ‘do no harm’ principle: It would be wrong to set the ambition of 'managing ‘ non-state provision in its entirety, and it can be very harmful for low-capacity states to seek to regulate all NSP or to draw it into clumsy contracts. * Beware of generalisation: Non-state provision takes many forms in response to different histories and to political and economic change. The possibilities and case for state engagement have to be assessed not assumed. The particular identities of NGOs and enterprises should be considered. * Recognise that state building can occur through any of the types of engagement with NSPs: Types of engagement should therefore be selected on the basis of their likely effectiveness in improving service delivery. * Begin with less risky/small scale forms of engagement where possible: State interventions that imply a direct controlling role for the state and which impose obligations on NSPs (i.e. contracting and regulation) require greater capacity (on both sides) and present greater risk of harm if performed badly than the roles of policy dialogue and entering into mutual agreements. * Adopt mixed approaches: The choice between forms of engagement does not have to be absolute. Rather than adopting a uniform plan of engagement in a particular country, it may be better to try different approaches in different regions or sectors

Outsourcing And Public Sector Efficiency: How Effective Is Outsourcing In Dealing With Impure Public Goods?

The debate on new public management, together with the shortage of public funds, has had a considerable impact on public administration. Accordingly, many governments have searched positive impacts on the efficiency, equity and quality provision of public services through increasing competition and active participation of the private sector, considering outsourcing as the appropriate instrument to attain such endeavor. However, private involvement in public services provision is controversial. While, on the one hand it is touted as a way to increase efficiency and accountability by turning over choices to individuals in the market place, on the other hand, some argue that it has the potential to produce considerable fraud and corruption if managerial control by the public sector is weak. So, given this context, we aim to assess the private involvement in public services in efficiency terms, putting aside ideological considerations. So, after the introduction, we present a definition of public goods and we characterize their different types, with particular emphasis on “impure” public goods. Section 3, focuses on market failures together with equity considerations as the main reasons that configure the role of the public sector in providing impure public goods, as well as on the possibility of government failures. Section 4 deals with the benefits and costs of outsourcing in the public sector. Section 5 describes the most frequent forms of private sector involvement in the provision of impure public goods, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the different options. Section 6 carries out some comments on the need for regulation. Finally, section 7 concludes.Contracting out, impure public goods, market/government failures, private sector involvement, public sector