A Framework of Socioeconomic Organisation: Redefining Original Institutional Economics Along Critical Realist Philosophical Lines

The paper develops a theoretical framework of socioeconomic organisation to enrich understanding of the complex interrelation between economy and institutional environment. To achieve this, key elements from both new and old institutional economics are combined and integrated under the philosophical platform of critical realism. Institutionalist research can be, and has been, informed by a range of philosophical positions and analytical standpoints. Critical realism, in turn, has certain advantages, over the other philosophical perspectives, in discussing the institutional organisation of urban socioeconomy. These mainly stem from its ontological arguments that allow the dissociation of institutional structure from human agency, and acknowledge the separate identity and causal powers of institutions without undermining their agent-dependent nature. This is important because it enables a neat identification and analysis of the institutional qualities, mechanisms, causal powers and relations that characterise the socioeconomic fabric. Moreover, the fact that the realist ontology is compatible with a variety of economic theories renders its fusion with institutionalism on the whole both valid and feasible. The paper starts delineating the philosophical tenets of critical realism, which provide the basis for the development of a stratified ontological framework discussing the institutional organisation of the urban socioeconomy. In particular, a three-layer, interlocked reality is identified describing the complexity, multidimensionality, and dynamic character of the socioeconomic world. It is argued that deeper tendencies, capacities, ‘instincts’ and qualities of the human essence (understood as ‘creativity’, ‘emulation’ and ‘culture’) condition the institutional environment (differentiated in economic, political, legal, and social terms), which in turn constitutes the terrain upon which organisational arrangements are manifested and socioeconomic events are actualised. In these terms, institutions are defined as ingrained regularities or established rules of human life that mould and determine agents’ perception, expectations and behaviour, providing order, stability and certainty in social interaction and economic organisation. The paper closes summarising the epistemological and methodological position espoused to establish a generic analytical framework that can be used to investigate the institutional texture of the urban/regional socioeconomic environment.

ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact

Organisational Change in Irish Public Administration

Capturing, mapping and understanding organisational change within bureaucracies is inherently problematic, and the paucity of empirical research in this area reflects the traditional reluctance of scholars to pursue this endeavour. In this article, drawing on the Irish case of organisational change, potential avenues for overcoming such challenges are presented. Drawing on the resources of a time-series database which captures and codes the life-cycle of all Irish public organisations since independence, the paper explores the evolution of the Irish administrative system since the independence of the state in 1922. These findings provide some pointers toward overcoming the challenges associated with studying change in Whitehall-type bureaucracies.public administration, bureaucracies, organisational change, independence

Aspect-Oriented Programming

Aspect-oriented programming is a promising idea that can improve the quality of software by reduce the problem of code tangling and improving the separation of concerns. At ECOOP'97, the first AOP workshop brought together a number of researchers interested in aspect-orientation. At ECOOP'98, during the second AOP workshop the participants reported on progress in some research topics and raised more issues that were further discussed. \ud \ud This year, the ideas and concepts of AOP have been spread and adopted more widely, and, accordingly, the workshop received many submissions covering areas from design and application of aspects to design and implementation of aspect languages