Challenges, solutions and future directions in the evaluation of service innovations in health care and public health

HeadlineEvaluating service innovations in health care and public health requires flexibility, collaboration and pragmatism; this collection identifies robust, innovative and mixed methods to inform such evaluations.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the National Institute for Helath Research via http://dx.doi.org/10.3310/hsdr0416

SOCIAL SCIENCES POSTGRADUATE INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR (SSPIS) 2017

The objectives of this seminar are: To provide an avenue for postgraduate students to present their research findings, impart knowledge and get feedback; To promote interactions among participants; To enhance networking among researchers; and To assist postgraduate students with publication opportunities

Decolonizing Colonial Heritage

Decolonizing Colonial Heritage explores how different agents practice the decolonization of European colonial heritage at European and extra-European locations. Assessing the impact of these practices, the book also explores what a new vision of Europe in the postcolonial present could look like. Including contributions from academics, artists and heritage practitioners, the volume explores decolonial heritage practices in politics, contemporary history, diplomacy, museum practice, the visual arts and self-generated memorial expressions in public spaces. The comparative focus of the chapters includes examples of internal colonization in Europe and extends to former European colonies, among them Shanghai, Cape Town, and Rio de Janeiro. Examining practices in a range of different contexts, the book pays particular attention to sub-national actors whose work is opening up new futures through their engagement with decolonial heritage practices in the present. The volume also considers the challenges posed by applying decolonial thinking to existing understandings of colonial heritage. Decolonizing Colonial Heritage examines the role of colonial heritage in European memory politics and heritage diplomacy. It will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of heritage and memory studies, colonial and imperial history, European studies, sociology, cultural studies, development studies, museum studies, and contemporary art

Egypt: a fluid institutional affair - an institutional theory interrogation of the Egyptian business services sector: the triad relationship of institutions, entrepreneurship and institutional intermediaries

This research is set out to examine the interrelation between high-growth entrepreneurship and institutions in Egypt. A triad relationship was identified among high-growth firms, formal institutions, and institutional intermediaries (hereafter II). Firstly, a set of institutional voids were examined on regulative, normative, and cultural aspects. The examined voids preclude entrepreneurship from achieving its full potential amid a challenging institutional framework. This gave rise to informal institutions and different forms of response behaviours while the institutional framework adjusts itself. Entrepreneurs in the meantime had to make do with what’s possible to capitalise on newly emerged market gaps following 2011. As such both market and political entrepreneurs exploited various forms of informal institutions resulting in both productive and unproductive forms of entrepreneurship. Secondly, IIs emerged as important players in the Egyptian institutional framework. This exploratory research identified five types of institutional intermediaries: user, process, regime-based, systemic, and niche. The IIs conduct an interchangeable variety of activities including institutional support, demand articulation, capacity building and knowledge brokering. The role of political economy particularly emerges when the Egyptian institutions are examined up close, especially as IIs play such salient roles. Here, the political economy interacts with the economy at large, and entrepreneurship in particular in three ways: First, the 2016 economic reform program should be questioned. Albeit positive reviews by the IMF (systemic II), and observable leaps for the economy, the Egyptian political power is still owned by an unaccountable few. A political few which are not subject to auditing, answerability, nor are they publicly voted in (or out). Secondly, Egypt has been all but receiving less development aid and concessional funding. Albeit rising voices against human rights violation and draconian crackdown on opposition, programs to promote entrepreneurship, develop technical and vocational education, female-led businesses and the like (systemic and process IIs), cannot fix the flawed institutions at their core. Thirdly, and perhaps most important, the involvement of the Egyptian military in the economy, at best as a monitoring authority, and at worst as a large market player, has been greatly disrupting the economy. State-owned and army-affiliated firms provide the market with much-needed merchandise that is both cheap and fast. This activity crowds out private investors, big and small, unless, of course, they join the military-affiliated businesses, thus exacerbating the already challenging problems of cronyism and clientelism. Finally, amid the rapid institutional changes, the Egyptian government, IIs and high-growth firms have been manifesting patterns of institutional entrepreneurship. In this sense, they do not simply react to the changes occurring in their environment. Rather, they display a variety of entrepreneurial behaviours, and rely on their good judgement to shape the institutions around them. Through collective institutional entrepreneurship market and political entrepreneurs pool their skills, resources, and power together to challenge their surrounding institutions. However, as the political economy of Egypt introduces an extra set of complications, informal institutions will remain stronger than formal ones, giving rise to evasive behaviour and unproductive entrepreneurship. Hence, institutional and regime uncertainty will deepen, and the Egyptian institutions will remain in a constant state of flux, i.e. fluidity. Accordingly, market and political entrepreneurs will keep adapting to the fluid institutions until either side subsides. Hopefully, this will not be the entrepreneurs

Energy in a Finite World: A Global Systems Analysis (Volume 2)

This volume presents the results of a seven-year study conducted at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. The work, which involved over 140 scientists from 20 countries, aimed to provide new and critical insights into the international long-term dimensions of the energy problem. Given this objective, the 50-year period from 1980 to 2030 was analyzed in detail, though parts of the study looked even further into the future. Geographically, all countries of the world were included -- developed and developing, market and centrally planned economies. The picture that emerges is one of a world facing, during the 1980-2030 period, what is anticipated to be the steepest ever increase in its population. At the same time, the developing regions of the world, in which most of this population growth will occur, will be trying to close the economic gap separating them from the developed regions. Despite the resultant strains on the world's physical resources, on its institutions, and on human ingenuity, the conclusion is that the physical resources and the human potential exist to provide the energy for a 2030 world that is more prosperous than the world of today while supporting a population double that of 1975. Moreover, if resources are developed judiciously and strategically, the world of 2030 could be at the threshold of a critical and ultimately necessary transition from a global energy system based on depletable fossil fuels to one based on nondepletable, sustainable resources. The companion volume, "Energy in a Finite World, Vol. 1, Paths to a Sustainable Future", also published by Ballinger, summarizes the findings of the study. ER-81-4, "Energy in a Finite World: Executive Summary", provides a more concise summary for a wide readership and is available directly from IIASA

The Happy Judicialization of Sexual Rights: Abortion and Same Sex Marriage in Mexico

This project studies one of the most intense moments of the judicialization of Mexican politics: the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice’s intervention in the legal reforms on abortion and same sex marriage approved by the Legislative Assembly in Mexico City in 2007 and 2009. The cases stimulated the optimism of a transnational sexual rights agenda with images of progressive legal reforms and a responsive Court. But a study of the cases, it is argued here, reflects little engagement of the Supreme Court with human rights agendas of progressive images of judicial activism; instead, the momentum of judicialization speaks of a critical period of readjustment of authority in Mexico’s democratic institutions. Judicialization in Latin America is generally studied as the opening of constitutional courts to the citizenry and the establishment of tools for judicial review as the guarantor of constitutional rights in the new democracies. The Mexican experience of judicialization has been of a Court becoming the arbiter of conflicts between the executive and legislative branches of the government; it was historically initiated as a project to guarantee the stability of the political regime and the federal order. The Mexican Supreme Court evolved in democracy with a narrow formalist and self-constrained interpretation of human rights. The sexual rights cases were accepted by the Court when it was going through a compromising political period, and their successful decisions helped to moderate the legitimacy of the judicial tribunal, encouraging the attachment of social movements towards the Court, seen as a vehicle for social change. The thesis recognises sexual rights as a location of enunciation and production of subversive knowledge, generating intimate processes of subjective empowerment that inform new relationalities across a political sphere which includes legal culture. Sexual rights guide the study of the Court and the desire of a better trajectory of judicialization. The legal reforms and their judicial interventions are presented as optimistic promises, as signs that anticipated something good to come, even though they did not fully deliver against such hopes. Part 1 presents a theoretical frame to engage with optimism and promises, aiming to relate to the strategies of critical optimism with which one as a researcher can evaluate the conditions in which different people can relate (or not) to desired futures. Chapter 1 is a theoretical consideration of promises and optimism, chapter 2 presents the optimistic development in the new constitutionalism in Latin America embodied in constitutional moments, or constitutional reforms. Part II presents the political context that precedes the cases: first, in chapter 3, with the history of Mexico City and the institutionalisation of opposition, and then, in chapter 4, with the establishment of tools for constitutional review in the Supreme Court. Part II is dedicated to the case studies