4,364 research outputs found

    TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF EFFORTFUL FUNDRAISING EXPERIENCES: USING INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IN FUNDRAISING RESEARCH

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    Physical-activity oriented community fundraising has experienced an exponential growth in popularity over the past 15 years. The aim of this study was to explore the value of effortful fundraising experiences, from the point of view of participants, and explore the impact that these experiences have on people’s lives. This study used an IPA approach to interview 23 individuals, recognising the role of participants as proxy (nonprofessional) fundraisers for charitable organisations, and the unique organisation donor dynamic that this creates. It also bought together relevant psychological theory related to physical activity fundraising experiences (through a narrative literature review) and used primary interview data to substantiate these. Effortful fundraising experiences are examined in detail to understand their significance to participants, and how such experiences influence their connection with a charity or cause. This was done with an idiographic focus at first, before examining convergences and divergences across the sample. This study found that effortful fundraising experiences can have a profound positive impact upon community fundraisers in both the short and the long term. Additionally, it found that these experiences can be opportunities for charitable organisations to create lasting meaningful relationships with participants, and foster mutually beneficial lifetime relationships with them. Further research is needed to test specific psychological theory in this context, including self-esteem theory, self determination theory, and the martyrdom effect (among others)

    Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean 2022: Trends and challenges of investing for a sustainable and inclusive recovery

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    The 2022 edition of the Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean consists of three parts. Part I outlines the region’s economic performance in 2021 and analyses trends in the early months of 2022, as well as the outlook for growth for the year. It examines the external and domestic factors that have influenced the region’s economic performance in 2021, trends for 2022, and how these factors will affect economic growth in the coming years. Part II of this edition presents some of the main challenges the region faces in investing for sustainable and inclusive economic growth. It analyses the trends in total investment over the last 70 years and highlights the profound change brought about by the 1980s debt crisis, with a slowdown in investment from the 1990s onwards. Part III of this publication may be accessed on the website of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (www.eclac.org). It contains the notes relating to the economic performance of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean in 2021 and the first half of 2022, together with their respective statistical annexes. The cut-off date for updating the statistical information in this publication was 15 July 2022.Presentation .-- Executive summary .-- Part I. Regional macroeconomic report and outlook for 2022 .-- Chapter I. Regional overview .-- Part II. Trends and challenges of investing for a sustainable and inclusive recovery. Chapter II. Greater investment needed to drive sustainable and inclusive development in the Latin American and Caribbean economies. Chapter III. Public investment to boost growth. Chapter IV. Energy transition and investment challenges in the copper, iron and lithium industries in countries of the region .-- Statistical annex

    LIPIcs, Volume 244, ESA 2022, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 244, ESA 2022, Complete Volum

    New world, new rules? : final report on the transformation of global governance project 2018-2021

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    This book presents the results of the ‘Transformation of Global Governance’ project, a horizontal initiative that run between 2018 and 2021 at the European University Institute, as a joint endeavour of the School of Transnational Governance and the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Chair in European Economic and Monetary Integration at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies

    Cyanotoxins in Bloom

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    At present, cyanobacteria and their toxins (also known as cyanotoxins) constitute a major threat for freshwater resources worldwide. Cyanotoxin occurrence in water bodies around the globe is constantly increasing, whereas emerging, less studied or completely new variants and congeners of various chemical classes of cyanotoxins, as well as their degradation/transformation products are often detected. In addition to planctic cyanobacteria, benthic cyanobacteria, in many cases, appear to be important toxin producers, although far less studied and more difficult to manage and control. This Special Issue highlights novel research results on the structural diversity of cyanotoxins from planktic and benthic cyanobacteria, as well as on their expanding global geographical spread in freshwaters

    The governance of housing association diversification in Northern Ireland: managing interdependent social and commercial logics

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    Housing associations (HAs) are hybrid bodies located between the state, market and community sectors. These divergent influences often give rise to contested notions of identity and purpose as HAs pursue social and commercial goals. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the drivers of HA change, focusing specifically on diversification into private housing markets. It developed the literature on hybridity and institutional logics in two distinctive ways. First, it focused on the Northern Ireland HA sector and second, it studied change through a corporate governance lens, both of which remain under-researched. The study adopted a four-stage grounded methodology to capture data at the sectoral and organisational levels, including observations of board and committee meetings in Northern Ireland’s two largest HAs, using Critical Incident Technique methodology. The thesis conceptualised the tensions that confronted the two HAs as they diversified into private housing markets and also the approaches they adopted to simultaneously manage social and commercial logics. Many studies of HA hybridity have reported evidence of logic succession, whereby market influences displace social purpose goals whenever HAs enact private market norms and values. In contrast, this study drew on the concepts of hybridity, paradox and institutional logics to construct a new ‘paradox model of organisational hybridity’, which reframed the debate on social and commercial goals, from one of logic dominance and succession to one of logic interdependency and management

    B/order work: recomposing relations in the seamful carescapes of health and social care integration in Scotland

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    As people, ageing and living with disabilities, struggle with how care is enacted through their lives, integrated care has gained policy purchase in many places, especially in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, there have been various (re)forms of care configurations instigated, in particular, promoting partnership and service redesign. Despite integrations apparent popularity, its contribution to improved service delivery and outcomes for people has been questioned, exposing ongoing uncertainties about what it entails and its associated benefits. Nonetheless, over decades, a remarkably consistent approach to integrated care has advanced collaboration as a solution. Equally, any (re)configurations emerge through wider infrastructures of care, in what might be regarded as dis-integrated care, as complex carescapes attempt to hold and aporias remain. In 2014, the Scottish Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act mandated Health and Social Care Integration (HSCI), as a means to mend fraying carescapes; a flagship policy epitomising public service reform in Scotland, in which normative aspirations of collaboration are central. What then are the accomplishments of this ambitious legislation? From the vantage point of 2021, HSCI has been assessed as slow and insubstantial, but this is not the complete picture. Narratives about failing to meet expectations obscure more complicated histories of cooperation and discord, successes and failures, and unintended consequences. Yet given collaborative ubiquity, if partnerships are contested how then are they practiced? To answer this question, I embarked on an interorganisational ethnography of the enactment of a Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP), which went ‘live’ on April 1st, 2016; in a place I call ‘Kintra’. I interrogate what happened when several managers (from the NHS and Council) endeavoured to implement HSCI according to the precepts of the Act; working to both (re)configure and hold things together behind care frontiers; away from the bodywork of direct care, immersed in everyday arrangements in the spaces of governance and operations. I chart their efforts to comply with regulations, plan, and build governance apparatuses through documents. I explore through coalescent objects how distributed forms of governance, entwined in policy implementation, were subsequently both sustained, and challenged. I observed for seven months actors struggling to (re)configure care services embedded in a collaborative approach, as well as establish the legitimacy of the HSCP; exemplified through the fabrication of what was understood as a 'must-do' commissioning plan. In tracing documents, I show the ways in which HSCI was simultaneously materialised and constituted through documentation. I reveal how, in the mundane mattering of document manufacturing, possibilities for (re)forming the carescape emerged. By delving into inconspicuous, ‘seamful’ b/order work that both sustained distinctions between the NHS and Council and enabled b/order crossings, I expose how actors were knotted, and how this shaped efforts to recompose the contours of the carescape. While ‘Kintra’s story might be familiar, situated in concerns that may resonate across Scotland; I reveal how collaboration-as-practice is tangled in differing organisational practices, emerging from quotidian intra-actions in meeting rooms, offices, car parks and kitchenettes. I deploy a posthuman practice stance to show not only the way in which public administration ‘does’ care, but it’s world-making through a sociomaterial politics of anticipation. I was told legislation was the only way to make HSCI in ‘Kintra’ happen, nevertheless, there was resistance to limit the breadth and depth of integrating. Consequently, I show how the (re)organising of b/orders was an always-ongoing act of maintenance and repair of a (dis)integrating carescape; as I learnt at the end of my fieldwork, ‘it’s ‘Kintra, ‘it’s aye been!

    Computational Optimizations for Machine Learning

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    The present book contains the 10 articles finally accepted for publication in the Special Issue “Computational Optimizations for Machine Learning” of the MDPI journal Mathematics, which cover a wide range of topics connected to the theory and applications of machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence. These topics include, among others, various types of machine learning classes, such as supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, deep neural networks, convolutional neural networks, GANs, decision trees, linear regression, SVM, K-means clustering, Q-learning, temporal difference, deep adversarial networks and more. It is hoped that the book will be interesting and useful to those developing mathematical algorithms and applications in the domain of artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as for those having the appropriate mathematical background and willing to become familiar with recent advances of machine learning computational optimization mathematics, which has nowadays permeated into almost all sectors of human life and activity
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