Selection of Marine Conservation Zones

Marine Conservation Zones may contribute to the protection and recovery of the marine environment. This POSTnote examines the process and approach used to select and designate zones, and difficulties in identifying and managing suitable areas

Digital Scotland, the relevance of library research and the Glasgow Digital Library Project

The Glasgow Digital Library (GDL) Project has a significance over and above its primary aim of creating a joint digital library for the citizens of Glasgow. It is also both an important building block in the development of a planned and co-ordinated 'virtual Scotland' and a rich environment for research into issues relevant to that enterprise. Its creation comes at a time of political, social, economic and cultural change in Scotland, and may be seen, at least in part, as a response to a developing Scottish focus in these areas, a key element of which is a new socially inclusive and digitally driven educational vision and strategy based on the Scottish traditions of meritocratic education, sharing and common enterprise, and a fiercely independent approach. The initiative is based at the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University alongside a range of other projects of relevance both to the development of a coherent virtual landscape in Scotland and to the GDL itself, a supportive environment which allows it to draw upon the research results and staff expertise of other relevant projects for use in its own development and enables its relationship to virtual Scotland to be both explored and developed more readily. Although its primary aim is the creation of content (based initially on electronic resources created by the institutions, on public domain information, and on joint purchases and digitisation initiatives) the project will also investigate relationships between regional and national collaborative collection management programmes with SCONE (Scottish Collections Network Extension project) and relationships between regional and national distributed union catalogues with CAIRNS (Co-operative Academic Information Retrieval Network for Scotland) and COSMIC (Confederation of Scottish Mini-Clumps). It will also have to tackle issues associated with the management of co-operation

Learning from all sides: Triple Task as a new approach to problem solving

This paper introduces the rationale behind a new approach to problem solving – Triple Task (TT) – and discusses how this adds new dimensions to problem solving. TT provides a means for groups to engage together in purposeful work and, at the same time, for facilitators to understand what may be influencing the outputs generated by groups; in particular the role of the group dynamic. The latter should help with the process of facilitation but could also help groups appreciate their own functioning. TT thus moves away from envisioning problem solving only as a means to an output but to a better understanding of process that arrived at the output

Is project management the new management 2.0?

This paper considers the evolving nature of project management (PM) and offers a comparison with the evolving nature of management generally. Specifically, we identify a number of management trends that are drawn from a paper that documents a proposed ‘Management 2.0’ model, and we compare those trends to the way in which PM is maturing to embrace the challenges of modern organizational progress.Some theoretical frameworks are offered that assist in explaining the shift from the historically accepted ‘tools and techniques’ model to a more nuanced and behaviorally driven paradigm that is arguably more appropriate to manage change in today’s flexible and progressive organizations, and which provide a more coherent response, both in PM and traditional management, to McDonald’s forces. In addition, we offer a number of examples to robustly support our assertions, based around the development of innovative products from Apple Inc. In using this metaphor to demonstrate the evolution of project-based work, we link PM with innovation and new product development.

An institutional perspective on managing migrant workers in the North of England

Despite advances made in our understanding of migrant worker issues, analysis of the literature reveals disconnections between the policy and practice of 'managed migration' across three fundamental levels of the state (e.g. public institutions at the EU, national and regional levels), corporate (e.g. employers and unions) and community (e.g. migrant social networks) levels. Consequently, this has implications on corporate and community aspects that often escape deeper analytical scrutiny. Concomitantly, the literature often assumes that policy decisions at the state level are necessarily homogeneous, and fails to account for the local specificities that could exist in this area. This research therefore sought to investigate the interplay between state, corporate and community levels in managing migrant workers across three regions in the North of England, and explore its implications on managing migrant worker employment in construction. The key research questions examined include the critical issues confronted by state, corporate and community actors in terms of framing migrant worker issues, and the nature of existing interactions between these stakeholders in terms of managing migrant workers in each of the three regions. Cross-regional comparisons were also considered in this research. Through interviewing key participants, it was found that subtle differences exist in regional government actors' response to the impacts of migration through their policy formation. It was also noted that interactions between the three levels vary substantially cross the three regions, and the tendency for stronger relationships to be forged between government and corporate actors where economic imperatives are concerned, with weaker and more ad hoc connections made between stakeholders across the three levels where social policy is concerned. It was concluded that any migration policy cannot be viewed as stand-alone, since empirical analysis across the three regions demonstrate the intertwining dimensions of linking migration policy with social and employment concerns