From governance to meta-governance in tourism?: Re-incorporating politics,interests and values in the analysis of tourism governance

Despite its theorization in the political and policy sciences in the early 1990s, the concept of metagovernance has gained relatively little recognition in tourism studies. Nevertheless, its significance in the political sciences and policy literature, especially as a result of the perceived failure of governance systems following the recent global financial crisis, has only served to reinforce its relevance. Metagovernance addresses some of the perceived failures of traditional governance approaches and associated interventions, and has enabled the understanding of central-state led regimes of shadowed hierarchical authorities and local-level micro-practices of social innovation and self-government. In contrast, tourism studies have tended to restrict study of the political dimension of tourism governance and the role of the state under the traditional parallelism between government and governance. Examination of how governance is itself governed enables a better understanding of the practices of planning and policy making affecting tourism and destinations. In particular, the applications of concepts of governance are inextricably linked to a given set of value assumptions which predetermine the range of its application. A short example of the application of the metagovernance paradigm is provided from the New Zealand context. It is concluded that governance mechanisms are not value-neutral and instead serve to highlight the allocation of power in a destination and the dominance of particular values and interests

Decision Support System for Managing and Determining International Class Program

Indonesian higher education today is faced with serious challenges that will threaten the existence of some universities. An increasing international competition will require that universities take a progressive approach to attract enough students to ensure their survival. One way the universities must improve is in the quality of their administration management. While universities in Indonesia do not compare well internationally, steps can be taken to improve the quality. There are potential lessons to be learned from corporate experience in quality control management. Decision-making in the field of academic resource planning involves extensive analysis of many data originating from multiple systems. Academic resource planning management is concerned with management resources in order to effectively support the university’s educational framework (such as offered degrees, enrolment and retention, resources teaching, course structure and curriculum). We propose a methodology for managing and determining the proposed International class based on many criteria of academic performance in university. The approach has been implemented as a decision support system allowing evaluation of various criteria and scenarios. The system combines two different methods in decision support system: Analytical hierarchy Process (AHP) and linear weightage model, the proposed model uses the AHP pairwise comparisons and the measure scale to generate the weights for the criteria which are much better and guarantee more fairly preference of criteria. Applying the system as decision-support facility for the management has resulted in significant acceleration of planning procedures and implementation, raised the overall effectiveness with respect to the underlying methodology and ultimately enabled more efficient academic administration

CRiBAC: Community-centric role interaction based access control model

As one of the most efficient solutions to complex and large-scale problems, multi-agent cooperation has been in the limelight for the past few decades. Recently, many research projects have focused on context-aware cooperation to dynamically provide complex services. As cooperation in the multi-agent systems (MASs) becomes more common, guaranteeing the security of such cooperation takes on even greater importance. However, existing security models do not reflect the agents' unique features, including cooperation and context-awareness. In this paper, we propose a Community-based Role interaction-based Access Control model (CRiBAC) to allow secure cooperation in MASs. To do this, we refine and extend our preliminary RiBAC model, which was proposed earlier to support secure interactions among agents, by introducing a new concept of interaction permission, and then extend it to CRiBAC to support community-based cooperation among agents. We analyze potential problems related to interaction permissions and propose two approaches to address them. We also propose an administration model to facilitate administration of CRiBAC policies. Finally, we present the implementation of a prototype system based on a sample scenario to assess the proposed work and show its feasibility. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Distributed Leadership: challenging five generally held assumptions

This article reports on a study exploring a distributed perspective on school leadership through three head teacher case studies conducted in Scottish primary schools. Drawing from a sequence of in-depth, semi-structured and narrative style interviews conducted with each head teacher, as well as from a semi-structured questionnaire and sociometric analysis conducted with staff, the article analyses the experiences and the perceptions of head teachers. The paper finds that in practice, distributed leadership is more complex and challenging than often represented, challenging five generally held assumptions in the theoretical, policy and practice frames. Implications are drawn for educational leadership at both school and system levels

New Prospects for Organizational Democracy? How the Joint Pursuit of Social and Financial Goals Challenges Traditional Organizational Designs

Some interesting exceptions notwithstanding, the traditional logic of economic efficiency has long favored hierarchical forms of organization and disfavored democracy in business. What does the balance of arguments look like, however, when values besides efficient revenue production are brought into the picture? The question is not hypothetical: In recent years, an ever increasing number of corporations have developed and adopted socially responsible behaviors, thereby hybridizing aspects of corporate businesses and social organizations. We argue that the joint pursuit of financial and social objectives warrants significant rethinking of organizational democracy’s merits compared both to hierarchy and to non-democratic alternatives to hierarchy. In making this argument, we draw on an extensive literature review to document the relative lack of substantive discussion of organizational democracy since 1960. And we draw lessons from political theory, suggesting that the success of political democracy in integrating diverse values offers some grounds for asserting parallel virtues in the business case

"A manager in the minds of doctors" : a comparison of new modes of control in European hospitals

Background: Hospital governance increasingly combines management and professional self-governance. This article maps the new emergent modes of control in a comparative perspective and aims to better understand the relationship between medicine and management as hybrid and context-dependent. Theoretically, we critically review approaches into the managerialism-professionalism relationship; methodologically, we expand cross-country comparison towards the meso-level of organisations; and empirically, the focus is on processes and actors in a range of European hospitals. Methods: The research is explorative and was carried out as part of the FP7 COST action IS0903 Medicine and Management, Working Group 2. Comprising seven European countries, the focus is on doctors and public hospitals. We use a comparative case study design that primarily draws on expert information and document analysis as well as other secondary sources. Results: The findings reveal that managerial control is not simply an external force but increasingly integrated in medical professionalism. These processes of change are relevant in all countries but shaped by organisational settings, and therefore create different patterns of control: (1) ‘integrated’ control with high levels of coordination and coherent patterns for cost and quality controls; (2) ‘partly integrated’ control with diversity of coordination on hospital and department level and between cost and quality controls; and (3) ‘fragmented’ control with limited coordination and gaps between quality control more strongly dominated by medicine, and cost control by management. Conclusions: Our comparison highlights how organisations matter and brings the crucial relevance of ‘coordination’ of medicine and management across the levels (hospital/department) and the substance (cost/quality-safety) of control into perspective. Consequently, coordination may serve as a taxonomy of emergent modes of control, thus bringing new directions for cost-efficient and quality-effective hospital governance into perspective

Neopatrimonialism revisited : beyond a catch-all concept

The article provides a critical discussion of the literature on “patrimonialism” and "neopatrimonialism” as far as the use in Development Studies in general or African Studies in particular is concerned. To overcome the catch-all use of the concept the authors present their own definition of “neopatrimonialism” based on Max Weber’s concept of patrimonialism and legal-rational bureaucracy. However, in order to make the concept more useful for comparative empirical research, they argue, it needs a thorough operationalisation (qualitatively and quantitatively) and the creation of possible subtypes which, in combination, might contribute to a theory of neopatrimonial action.Der Artikel unterzieht die beiden Konzepte „Patrimonialismus“ und „Neopatrimonialismus“, wie sie in der entwicklungstheoretischen Literatur und in Afrikastudien Verwendung finden, einer kritischen Analyse. Damit dem Konzept des Neopatrimonialismus mehr als nur eine heuristische Bedeutung zukommen kann, präsentieren die Autoren eine eigene Definition des Begriffs, die sich eng an die Weber’schen Konzepte des Patrimonialismus und der legal-rationalen Bürokratie anlehnt. Darüber hinaus ist auf dieser Grundlage (1) eine sorgfältige (qualitative und/oder quantitative) Operationalisierung des Konzeptes und (2) die Bildung von möglichen Subtypen notwendig. Erst dann kann das Konzept sinnvoll für die vergleichende empirische Forschung eingesetzt und möglicherweise etwas wie eine neopatrimoniale Handlungstheorie entwickelt werden

Economic role of public administration in Central Asia: Decentralization and hybrid political regime

The aim of the paper is to understand how the organization of public administration in Central Asia shapes the results of economic development in the region. It discusses the main factors of bad quality of public administration in the region, paying particular attention to the link between political regimes and public administration. Moreover, it provides an overview of decentralization and devolution of power in Central Asian countries as one of the main channels of transformation of administration. The paper covers both formal decentralization and informal distribution of power between levels of government.Public administration, hybrid regimes, decentralization

The nature of IT services from a management and IS research point of view

Theory building is not only underdeveloped in IT services management research, but in general in IS. Given the paradigm shift that comes from the development away from a networked economy towards a network economy, the lack of spending enough attention to theorizing in IS becomes even more obvious. In the light of other "megatrends" in IS research, such as the increasing professionalization and use of statistical methods and the exploitation of extremely large sets of data (often harvested from social media sites), we might lose interest in theorizing in the presence of the tremendous amount of available empirical data. In this position paper, the author advocates that services science researchers should focus on rigor and relevance in their research approaches