Funding Culture: An Analysis of Historic Site Preservation Policy

This paper examines the way in which public funding and tax policies are applied to federally recognized historic preservation sites and how that application influences the a variety of stakeholder communities including tax payers, historical organizations, historic property owners, and municipalities

Value-driven partner search for <i>Energy from Waste</i> projects

Energy from Waste (EfW) projects require complex value chains to operate effectively. To identify business partners, plant operators need to network with organisations whose strategic objectives are aligned with their own. Supplier organisations need to work out where they fit in the value chain. Our aim is to support people in identifying potential business partners, based on their organisation’s interpretation of value. Value for an organisation should reflect its strategy and may be interpreted using key priorities and KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs may comprise any or all of knowledge, operational, economic, social and convenience indicators. This paper presents an ontology for modelling and prioritising connections within the business environment, and in the process provides means for defining value and mapping these to corresponding KPIs. The ontology is used to guide the design of a visual representation of the environment to aid partner search

Forging partnerships in health care: Process and measuring benefits

Universally, there is concern that much academic learning has dealt mainly in theory, removing knowledge from context with a resultant lack of practical experience. Here, the catalyst for strengthening university-community engagement, emanated from a desire to foster greater propensity within students to make connections between their academic courses and responsibility toward the community and people in need, and thus develop enhanced skills in social interaction, teamwork and effectiveness. This paper explores a variety of models of university-community engagement that aim to achieve and model good practice in policy making and planning around healthcare education and service development. Ways of integrating teaching and learning with community engagement, so there is reciprocal learning with significant benefits to the community, students, the university and industry are described. The communities of engagement for a transdisciplinary approach in healthcare are defined and the types of collaborative partnerships are outlined, including public/private partnerships, service learning approaches and regional campus engagement. The processes for initiating innovation in this field, forging sustainable partnerships, providing cooperative leadership and building shared vision are detailed. Measuring shared and sustained benefits for all participants is examined in the context of effecting changes in working relationships as well as the impact on students in terms of increased personal and social responsibility, confidence and competence. For the health professions, it is considered vital to adopt this approach in order to deliver graduates who feel aware of community needs, believe they can make a difference, and have a greater sense of community responsibility, ethic of service and more sophisticated understandings of social contexts. In the longer term, it is proposed the strategy will deliver a future healthcare workforce that is more likely to have a strengthened sense of community, social and personal responsibility and thus effect positive social change

Project Controls and Management Systems : current practice and how it has changed over the past decade

Project Controls and Management System (PCMS) refers to an ecosystem of processes, tools and personnel required for the proper planning and execution of capital projects throughout the different phases of design, procurement, construction and startup. This can be divided into different focus areas (functions) that would include Estimating, Planning, Scheduling, Cost Control, Change Management, Progressing, and Forecasting. Various trends such as globalization, contractor specialization and information technology developments have impacted the way PCMS are implemented and made it the subject of extensive research over the past years to investigate how to best utilize those trends. Replicating the research methodology used in a 2011 report published by the Construction Research Institute (CII), this work aims to investigate the current status of PCMS implementation and how it has changed over the past decade. It was concluded that while the original PCMS principles are still valid, adoption has drastically changed in terms of efficiency for the majority of the functions. The research also identifies areas of potential concerns and provides recommendations for further improvement.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin

The challenge of the e-Agora metrics: the social construction of meaningful measurements

'How are we progressing towards achieving sustainable development in the EU's desired knowledge society?' Current lists of indicators, indices and assessment tools, which have been developed for measuring and displaying performance at different spatial levels, show that progress has been made. However, there are still a very large number of indicators, perhaps the majority, most specifically those which relate to social and political issues, that are difficult to capture. Issues such as intergenerational equity, aesthetics and governance come into this category. 'How is it possible to measure these and capture their full meaning and represent this back meaningfully to disparate groups of stakeholders in a society?' This paper will discuss these issues, highlighting the need for new methods and an alternative view of how to go about the capture and representation of the types of data with which we need to wor

The balanced scorecard logic in the management control and reporting of small business company networks: a case study

The purpose of this paper is to assess and integrate the application of the balance scorecard (BSC) logic into business networks identifying functions and use that such performance measuring tool may undertake for SME’s collaborative development. Thus, the paper analyses a successful case study regarding an Italian network of small companies, evaluating how the multidimensional perspective of BSC can support strategic and operational network management as well as communication of financial and extra financial performance to stakeholders. The study consists of a qualitative method, proposing the application of BSC model for business networks from international literature. Several meetings and interviews as well as triangulation with primary and secondary documents have been conducted. The case study allows to recognize how BSC network logic can play a fundamental role on defining network mission, supporting management control as well as measuring and reporting the intangible assets formation along the network development lifecycle. This is the first time application of a BSC integrated framework for business networks composed of SMEs. The case study demonstrates operational value of BSC for SME’s collaborative development and success

Welfare, Labor Supply and Heterogeneous Preferences: Evidence for Europe and the US

Following the report of the Stiglitz Commission, measuring and comparing well-being across countries has gained renewed interest. Yet, analyses that go beyond income and incorporate non-market dimensions of welfare most often rely on the assumption of identical preferences to avoid the difficulties related to interpersonal comparisons. In this paper, we suggest an international comparison based on individual welfare rankings that fully retain preference heterogeneity. Focusing on the consumption-leisure trade-off, we estimate discrete choice labor supply models using harmonized microdata for 11 European countries and the US. We retrieve preference heterogeneity within and across countries and analyze several welfare criteria which take into account that differences in income are partly due to differences in tastes. The resulting welfare rankings clearly depend on the normative treatment of preference heterogeneity with alternative metrics. We show that these differences can indeed be explained by estimated preference heterogeneity across countries – rather than demographic composition.welfare measures, preference heterogeneity, labor supply, Beyond GDP

Transactions, Transformations, Translations: Metrics that Matter for Building, Scaling, and Funding Social Movements

This report provides an evaluative framework and key milestones to gauge movement building. Aiming to bridge the gap between the field of community organizing that relies on the one-on-one epiphanies of leaders and the growing philanthropic emphasis on evidence-based giving, the report stresses three main insights. The first is that any good set of movement metrics should capture quantity and quality, numbers and nuance, transactions and transformations. They are related -- an energized leader with a clear power analysis (a transformative measure) may turn out more members for a coalition rally (a transactional measure) -- and the report offers a matrix that weaves together both types of metrics across ten different movement-building strategies. The second is that a movement is more than one organization -- and if the whole is to be greater than the sum of its parts, we must measure accordingly. While report includes measures of success at the organizational level, it attempts to move beyond and focus on whether groups can align and work together to create a more powerful force for social change -- suggesting that in the same way that movements need to scale up to face the challenges of our times, metrics, too, must expand to capture the whole. The third is that metrics must be co-created, not imposed. Recognizing the gravity of the times and hoping to gauge their effectiveness, movement builders are eager to come up with a common language and framework for themselves -- and are developing the tools and capacities to do so. The report suggests that the funder-grantee relationship can build on this wisdom in the field and develop a set of evaluative measures that are not onerous requirements but tools for mutual accountability. The report also offers a set of recommendations to funders and the field, ranging from practical steps (like building a new toolbox of measures, improving the capacity to use them, and documenting innovation and experimentation) to more far-reaching suggestions about leadership development, the connection of policy outcomes with broader social change, and the need to generate movement-level measures. We, at USC PERE, hope this report contributes to a conversation about how to best capture transformations as well as transactions in social movement organizing, and how to build the broader public and philanthropic support necessary to realize the promise of a more inclusive America

Methodology development for measuring virtual university social responsibility (VUSR)

This thesis addresses the most challenging issues in online education and its social responsibility. A world’s first ontology on virtual university social responsibility (VUSR) along with an ontological-driven approach for measuring the corporate social responsibility (CSR) for virtual universities (VUs) in five dimensions, namely education, research, engagement, ethics and transparency is developed. The impact on social, economic and ethical standards is ascertained by rigorously defining measurement indicators and performance assessment attributes to help assess CSR

Using Cyber-enabled Transaction Data to Study Productivity and Innovation in Organizations

This paper draws on recent research in a wide variety of disciplines to identify the key elements necessary to build an empirical infrastructure that will advance research on one of the key building blocks of science and innovation policy: organizations. We argue that cyber-tools and new data will permit researchers to examine the innovation process |both successes and failures| and explore business performance and business dynamics at the level of the appropriate economic entity. We develop a roadmap that outlines how the new data can be developed, from harvesting the web to direct observation from deep within companies. The paper identifies a set of research questions and an approach whose pursuit could be used to develop a national research data infrastructure for the study of innovation and organizational performance. One key element of the approach is to identify and study innovation processes within organizations by collecting data on inputs and outcomes of innovation projects (or initiatives) within organizations. Another is the collection of representative data by business function/processes across firms, a proven statistical and economic approach (Sturgeon et al. 2006, Brown 2008, Lewin et al 2008). Finally, we argue that the work to develop new data from deep within firms should involve the participation of computer and information scientists. Opportunities for quasi experimental approaches to data collection, and noninvasive techniques to harvest data from within firms (i.e., auto-populating of researcher databases) need to be explored. More generally, the bringing together of scientists to consider business microdata privacy/access and data collection from organizations is itself significant, with potential for creating opportunities in a broad range of applications.