Administrative Management Capacity in Out-of-School Time Organizations: An Exploratory Study

Based on interviews with sixteen high-quality out-of-school time (OST) program providers, identifies the managerial and administrative needs of OST nonprofits such as financial and human resources management and information technology. Suggests solutions

Governance, risk and compliance (GRC): Conceptual muddle and technological tangle

The concepts of governance, risk and compliance are not new. However, the label ‘GRC’ has more recently gained traction in research and practice. Given the growing interest in GRC it is timely and important to reflect upon developments, as the literature is now peppered with a wide array of views to the extent that the term risks being misunderstood in theory and practice. This paper summarises and critiques the GRC literature for the purpose of revealing: the diversity of ambitions, assumptions and ambiguities that require questioning in conflations of governance, risk and compliance; and gaps in present research agendas. Grounding our argument on the critique of the literature we open up discussion of alternative perspectives and identify their possible contribution to the study of GRC. Moreover we argue that Latour’s (2005) concept of ‘panorama’ has the potential to fruitfully broaden the notion of GRC

Constraint programming for type inference in flexible model-driven engineering

Domain experts typically have detailed knowledge of the concepts that are used in their domain; however they often lack the technical skills needed to translate that knowledge into model-driven engineering (MDE) idioms and technologies. Flexible or bottom-up modelling has been introduced to assist with the involvement of domain experts by promoting the use of simple drawing tools. In traditional MDE the engineering process starts with the definition of a metamodel which is used for the instantiation of models. In bottom-up MDE example models are defined at the beginning, letting the domain experts and language engineers focus on expressing the concepts rather than spending time on technical details of the metamodelling infrastructure. The metamodel is then created manually or inferred automatically. The flexibility that bottom-up MDE offers comes with the cost of having nodes in the example models left untyped. As a result, concepts that might be important for the definition of the domain will be ignored while the example models cannot be adequately re-used in future iterations of the language definition process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that assists in the inference of the types of untyped model elements using Constraint Programming. We evaluate the proposed approach in a number of example models to identify the performance of the prediction mechanism and the benefits it offers. The reduction in the effort needed to complete the missing types reaches up to 91.45% compared to the scenario where the language engineers had to identify and complete the types without guidance

The sustainable future of implementation research: On the development of the field and its paradoxes

__Abstract__ As fashionable as implementation studies were in the 1970s and 1980s, as en vogue it has become four decades later to consider implementation as a research theme of the past. It is clear that in the study of government new themes and concepts have been put on the agenda. In the ‘age of governance’ that study takes place under a variety of headings beyond ‘implementation’. At the same time a continued attention to what happens with policies-on-paper can be observed. In this special issue the development of implementation research as a scholarly field is assessed. A closer look reveals some paradoxes, but also steady advancement

The"resource curse"in MENA ? political transitions, resource wealth, economic shocks, and conflict risk

The recent political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa region have exposed growing concerns about conflict risk, political stability, and reform prospects across its societies. Given the prevalence of oil and gas resource endowments in the region, which a voluminous literature suggests can be associated with adverse development consequences, this paper examines the interplay between their associated rents and political economy trajectories. The contribution of the paper is threefold: first, to examine the quantitative evidence of violent conflict in the region since 1960; second, to provide a nuanced review of the regional case study literature on the relationship between resource endowments, political stability, and conflict risk; and third, to assess how prospective political transitions have implications for the World Bank Group's work in the region on public sector management and private sector development. The authors find that resources and regimes have intersected to provide stability and limited violent conflict in the region, but that these development patterns have yielded a set of policy choices and development patterns that are proving increasingly brittle and unsustainable. A major institutional challenge for reforms will be to consolidate a requisite degree of inter-temporal credibility and stability in these regimes, while expanding inclusiveness in state-society relations.Environmental Economics&Policies,Post Conflict Reconstruction,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Emerging Markets

Leadership - Organization / Teamwork

Craig Dart: Conduct Trainings for Personal Achievement and Organizational Performance. Cathy Harrington: You, Too, Can Be an Awards Winner in 2004. Jo Jones: Learning Teams--\u3eProductive Teams--\u3eSatisfied Team Members--\u3eSupportive Clientele. Jacqueline Lamuth: I\u27m Not a Manager...Or Am I? Deborah J. Maddy: Building Capacity in the 21st Century. Kathleen Riggs: Effective Team Building for Cooperative Extension. R. Dale Safrit: A Longitudinal Study of the Evolution of Organizational Values of Ohio. Jerold R. Thomas: Designing the 21st Century Extension Professional

A glimpse of the limits of the European economic governance through the legislative and jurisprudential route of the "after-Weimar" German "economic constitution"

El objetivo de esta investigación es reconstruir los límites de la gestión de las finanzas públicas en la Unión Monetaria Europea, utilizando la perspectiva del camino de la "constitución económica" alemana posterior a Weimar. El proceso federativo de la UE no presenta las mismas características legales de ningún otro, incluido el alemán. Sin embargo, algunos problemas son necesariamente similares y similares soluciones se pueden encontrar. En consecuencia, esto documento se centra en la sucesión de reformas en la governance económica europea desde 2008 analizando, en particular, el tema de compartir las obligaciones de la deuda a nivel europeo, esto a través del diálogo entre el Bundesverfassungsgericht y la institución de la UE

Type inference in flexible model-driven engineering using classification algorithms

Flexible or bottom-up model-driven engineering (MDE) is an emerging approach to domain and systems modelling. Domain experts, who have detailed domain knowledge, typically lack the technical expertise to transfer this knowledge using traditional MDE tools. Flexible MDE approaches tackle this challenge by promoting the use of simple drawing tools to increase the involvement of domain experts in the language definition process. In such approaches, no metamodel is created upfront, but instead the process starts with the definition of example models that will be used to infer the metamodel. Pre-defined metamodels created by MDE experts may miss important concepts of the domain and thus restrict their expressiveness. However, the lack of a metamodel, that encodes the semantics of conforming models has some drawbacks, among others that of having models with elements that are unintentionally left untyped. In this paper, we propose the use of classification algorithms to help with the inference of such untyped elements. We evaluate the proposed approach in a number of random generated example models from various domains. The correct type prediction varies from 23 to 100% depending on the domain, the proportion of elements that were left untyped and the prediction algorithm used