99,932 research outputs found

    Structuring the European Administrative Space - Channels of EU Penetration and Mechanisms ofNational Change

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    The author provides an analytical model to capture mechanisms of supranational impact on national public administrations. The aim is to understand how we can perceive a European administrative space given the persistent diversity between member states. In face of the overly complex subject matter, it is argued that a typology that presents ideal types of interaction modes between supranational and national levels of administration provides in fact a suitable pragmatic approach to understand the potential impact of European integration on national civil services. Scrutinizing which mechanisms of possible influence-taking the European Union (EU) invokes shows that administrative integration does actually not suggest overall convergence. Instead the shared administrative space works precisely because it preserves state-sensitive diversity. Only in the context of enlargement did the EU need to present a single model to the candidate states and thus the notion of an ever more converging single administrative space was invented. Despite the external promotion of a single model, the driving dynamic of the emerging European administrative space remains increased cooperation and common administration that respects and sustains differences between independent national public administrations. The theoretical framework and empirical application therefore provide a first step for further research to tackle how supranational integration changes national public administration.public administration; identity; ideas; integration theory; public administration; closer cooperation; Europeanization; Europeanization

    Eco-innovative Method to Improve the Distribution Phase of Product

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    The integration of the environmental dimension is crucial in industrial activity. Designers should integrate the new environmental constraints to adapt their approaches and methodologies in the framework of eco-innovation of industrial products and consumer goods. This paper proposes a new method integrating ecological aspects into the innovation process composed of three main stages: an analysis and structuring of the product, the formalization of the problem and the resolution phase. According to the structuring and the design objectives, actions can be selected and allow to guide the design to the most relevant modification to perform on the product. An illustration of the approach is applied on the optimization of the environmental impacts related to the logistical aspects

    An evaluation tool for design quality: PFI sheltered housing

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    The complex procurement process entailed by the private finance initiative (PFI) means that clients need new capacities to manage their relationships with bidders and to assess project proposals if the desired level of design quality is to be achieved. To assist local authorities in their client role, a new Architectural Design Quality Evaluation Tool was developed. The aim was to improve the quality of design in residential sheltered housing, procured through the PFI. The tool was developed for and applied to a programme that will see the replacement of a local authority's entire sheltered housing stock. The tool has two functions: (1) to inform the client's assessment process and assist with the selection of the preferred bidding consortium through a series of stages in the PFI process; and (2) to improve the quality of all the submitted designs through an iterative process. Although several existing mechanisms are available for evaluating the performance attributes of buildings, few also tackle the less tangible amenity attributes, which are vital to the feeling of home. The new tool emphasizes the amenity attributes without neglecting performance

    Structuring Liminality: Theorizing the Creation and Maintenance of the Cuban Exile Identity

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    In this article, we examine the exilic experience of the Cuban-American community in South Florida through the dual concepts of structure and liminality. We postulate that in the case of this exilic diaspora, specific structures arose to render liminality a persistent element of the Cuban-American identity. The liminal, rather than being a temporal transitory stage, becomes an integral part of the group identity. This paper theorizes and recasts the Cuban-American exile experience in Miami as explicable not only as the story of successful economic and political incorporation, although the literature certainly emphasizes this interpretation, but one consisting of permanent liminality institutionalized by structural components of the exiled diaspora. We argue that the story of exemplary incorporation so prevalent in the academic literature is a result of structured liminality. We apply Turner\u27s conceptualization to the creation and maintenance of the Cuban-American Exile Identity (Grenier and Perez, 2003). While testing the theoretical postulates is beyond the scope of this article, we interpret previous research through our new theoretical lens

    Hypermedia support for argumentation-based rationale: 15 years on from gIBIS and QOC

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    Having developed, used and evaluated some of the early IBIS-based approaches to design rationale (DR) such as gIBIS and QOC in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we describe the subsequent evolution of the argumentation-based paradigm through software support, and perspectives drawn from modeling and meeting facilitation. Particular attention is given to the challenge of negotiating the overheads of capturing this form of rationale. Our approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the representational scheme as simple as possible to enable real time meeting mediation and capture, attending explicitly to the skills required to use the approach well, particularly for the sort of participatory, multi-stakeholder requirements analysis demanded by many design problems. However, we can then specialize the notation and the way in which the tool is used in the service of specific methodologies, supported by a customizable hypermedia environment, and interoperable with other software tools. After presenting this approach, called Compendium, we present examples to illustrate the capabilities for support security argumentation in requirements engineering, template driven modeling for document generation, and IBIS-based indexing of and navigation around video records of meetings

    A PERSPECTIVE ON THE ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN NEIGHBORHOOD POLICY IN THE PAN-EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

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    The European Neighbourhood Policy introduces a new approach in the EU external relations with its interest neighbourhood; its strategic role is to provide a system which can allow the Union to set its external limits, without risking having new dividing lEuropean Neighborhood Policy, European Union, Pan-European Integration

    Managing risk in community practice: nursing, risk and decision-making

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    The development of modern nursing practice was closely linked to the development of health care institutions such as hospitals and asylums in the nineteenth century and its development outside such settings occurred more recently, mainly in the second half of the twentieth century. Since these two settings differ both in the type of risk which nurses are likely to experience and in the ways in which nurses assess and manage risk, I will compare and contrast these two settings before considering in more detail risk in community nursing practice
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