The Romanian Public Administration facing the Challenges of Integration into the European Union

The paper achieves an analysis of some issues concerning the changes in the Romanian public administration in the context of integration into the European Union. The most important processes approach Europeanization and its theoretical and practical mechanisms. Concerning the Romanian public administration, the analysis starts with the reform process, on local and national level. The paper reveals the main laws and rules as well as the principles expressed in the administrative change: actuality and continuity, openness and transparency, accountability, efficiency and effectiveness. The paper also achieves a brief analysis of the reform strategies in view of complying with the European Administrative SpaceEuropeanization, administrative system, reform, anti-corruption strategies

An Introduction to the Integrated Community-Engaged Learning and Ethical Reflection Framework (I-CELER)

Cultivating ethical Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics researchers and practitioners requires movement beyond reducing ethical instruction to the rational exploration of moral quandaries via case studies and into the complexity of the ethical issues that students will encounter within their careers. We designed the Integrated Community-Engaged Learning and Ethical Reflection (I-CELER) framework as a means to promote the ethical becoming of future STEM practitioners. This paper provides a synthesis of and rationale for I-CELER for promoting ethical becoming based on scholarly literature from various social science fields, including social anthropology, moral development, and psychology. This paper proceeds in five parts. First, we introduce the state of the art of engineering ethics instruction; argue for the need of a lens that we describe as ethical becoming; and then detail the Specific Aims of the I-CELER approach. Second, we outline the three interrelated components of the project intervention. Third, we detail our convergent mixed methods research design, including its qualitative and quantitative counterparts. Fourth, we provide a brief description of what a course modified to the I-CELER approach might look like. Finally, we close by detailing the potential impact of this study in light of existing ethics education research within STEM

Assessing the Proposed IAM, UAW, and USW Merger: Critical Issues and Potential Outcomes

[Excerpt] We examine the many difficult issues facing the IAM, UAW, and USW as they move toward the creation of a single organization. In order to place this merger in con- text, the larger issue of mergers in the American labor movement will be addressed, as will the origins and history of each of the three unions. The specific issues confronting the unions will be examined in three categories — structure, administration, and functions and services. We conclude with an assessment of the current status of the unification effort and the prospects for its realization

Teacher Stability and Turnover in Los Angeles: The Influence of Teacher and School Characteristics

Analyzes how teacher and school characteristics - including demographics, quality and qualification, specialty, school type (public, magnet, charter) and size, academic climate, and teacher-student racial match - influence teacher turnover

Aiming for service excellence: Implementing a plan for customer service quality at a blended service desk

This article discusses a public service review and redesign that resulted in a blended service desk combining reference and circulation functions, staffed by nonlibrarians. The redesign implements a number of organizational structures that encourage service excellence, as found in the business literature and in examples of nonlibrary organizations that excel in customer service. The article identifies key organizational structures that have been shown to support or hinder good service and discusses the process of implementing these structures in practice and the results of an assessment process designed around determining success

Summary Statistics for Partitionings and Feature Allocations

Infinite mixture models are commonly used for clustering. One can sample from the posterior of mixture assignments by Monte Carlo methods or find its maximum a posteriori solution by optimization. However, in some problems the posterior is diffuse and it is hard to interpret the sampled partitionings. In this paper, we introduce novel statistics based on block sizes for representing sample sets of partitionings and feature allocations. We develop an element-based definition of entropy to quantify segmentation among their elements. Then we propose a simple algorithm called entropy agglomeration (EA) to summarize and visualize this information. Experiments on various infinite mixture posteriors as well as a feature allocation dataset demonstrate that the proposed statistics are useful in practice.Comment: Accepted to NIPS 2013: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2013/Program/event.php?ID=376

Bridging the Organizational Divide -- The Making of a Nonprofit Merger

Nonprofit, community-based housing development organizations have only recently become significant players in the provision of affordable housing, at least in the United States. Historically, this job was left either in the hands of builders, developers, lenders and landlords of the business sector or in the care of agencies, planners and policymakers of the public sector. Only in the past 30 years has the provision of affordable housing moved beyond the familiar domains of the market and the state. A host of nonprofit organizations is now playing a larger role in constructing new housing, rehabilitating older housing, managing rentals and bringing home ownership within the reach of thousands of people for whom the American dream has proved elusive.The growth of these third-sector organizations has been both rapid and impressive, but it also has been uneven. Across the country, there are places where nonprofit housing development organizations are both plentiful and productive, supported by sophisticated networks of interorganizational collaboration, public funding, private financing and technical assistance. There are many other communities, however, where no nonprofits are engaged in affordable housing or where the ones that do exist are very new or very small, accounting for only a handful of new housing units every year.Lying between these two extremes are those communities where multiple nonprofits of varying size serve a similar geographic area, each producing a modest but respectable number of housing units; each competing for constituents, funding and development opportunities; each struggling to survive. The organizations that find themselves in this uncomfortable situation often confront a special set of challenges. They are productive, but not prolific. They are effective, but not efficient. They are successful, but not sustainable. Indeed, they are frequently quite precarious. The loss of a single staff person, the delay of a single project or the adverse decision of a single funder can threaten not only their short-term chances for success, but their long term prospects for survival.Those who sponsor and fund such organizations sometimes find themselves in a situation where competition among multiple nonprofits is weakening them all. In these cases, the sponsoring and funding organizations have taken different tacks to address this problem. In some cases, they have acted to strengthen every nonprofit, while working to increase the division of labor or the division of territory among them. In other cases, they have acted to strengthen one (or more) nonprofit at the expense of the others, culling weaker performers from the herd.While these have been the most common approaches for dealing with the weaknesses that organizational competition and duplication can sometimes create, a third alternative has been gaining ground. Multiple nonprofits, operating within the same jurisdiction, are being encouraged to collaborate -- even to the point of merging their programs, assets and hard-won identities.Why is collaboration gaining in popularity? A financial explanation would be that it is becoming harder to find enough resources to strengthen every nonprofit to the same degree, funding multiple nonprofits to serve a similar clientele in the same locale. There is also the political reality that public and private funders find it difficult to choose easily (or accurately) which nonprofits should live -- and which should die. There is a practical explanation as well. Collaboration is becoming a strategy of choice simply because it is proving to be an unusually effective way of achieving greater productivity, efficiency and sustainability. When a collaborative (or a merger) is carefully crafted, the nonprofit partners do a better job together than they did apart. This is not true in every case, of course.Read the full report for lessons in organizational matchmaking and the making of a nonprofit merger

The Emergence of Leader-Society Value Congruence: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Previous research on cross-cultural leadership has focused on the outcomes associated with leadership factors consistent with national cultural values without exploring how leaders’ individual cultural orientations become congruent with the societal culture in different national settings. The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of how leader-society value congruence is produced and how the degree of such congruency varies across cultures. This paper conceptually clarifies the mechanisms that mediate the influence of cultural context on leader-society value congruence; suggests that the effects of societal context are only distal antecedents of producing congruence between leaders’ individual and societal level cultural values; and concludes that their effects are manifest via their impact on self-construal and communication patterns

Evaluating Information Technology (IT) Integration Risk Prior to Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A)

Corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are considered significant, from both a strategic and an economic point of view, across almost all sectors of the economy.1 M&A is a complex process involving risk that ranges from financial and legal matters to sales and marketing challenges and everything in between. Despite well-established benefits of strategically driven expansion and integration of businesses through M&A, the consolidated organization exposes itself to a number of anticipated, unknown and unintended risk factors. The risk concerns the overall organizational integration of some or all of the previously distinct and interdependent assets, structures, business processes, technologies, systems, people and cultures of the two firms into a unified whole.

AI management an exploratory survey of the influence of GDPR and FAT principles

As organisations increasingly adopt AI technologies, a number of ethical issues arise. Much research focuses on algorithmic bias, but there are other important concerns arising from the new uses of data and the introduction of technologies which may impact individuals. This paper examines the interplay between AI, Data Protection and FAT (Fairness, Accountability and Transparency) principles. We review the potential impact of the GDPR and consider the importance of the management of AI adoption. A survey of data protection experts is presented, the initial analysis of which provides some early insights into the praxis of AI in operational contexts. The findings indicate that organisations are not fully compliant with the GDPR, and that there is limited understanding of the relevance of FAT principles as AI is introduced. Those organisations which demonstrate greater GDPR compliance are likely to take a more cautious, risk-based approach to the introduction of AI