Kite-marks, standards and privileged legal structures; artefacts of constraint disciplining structure choices

As different countries and regions continue to develop policy and legal frameworks for social enterprises this paper offers new insights into the dynamics of legal structure choice by social entrepreneurs. The potential nodes of conflict between exogenous prescriptions and social entrepreneur’s own orientation to certain aspects of organization and what social entrepreneurs actually do in the face of such conflict is explicated. Kite-marks, standards and legal structures privileged by powerful actors are cast as political artefacts that serve to discipline the choices of legal structure by social entrepreneurs as they prescribe desirable characteristics, behaviours and structures for social enterprises. This paper argues that social enterprises should not be understood as the homogenous organisational category that is portrayed in government policy documents, kite-marks and privileged legal structures but as organisations facing a proliferation of structural forms which are increasingly rendered a governable domain (Nickel & Eikenberry, 2016; Scott, 1998) through the development of kite marks, funder / investor requirements and government policy initiatives. Further, that these developments act to prioritise and marginalise particular forms of social enterprises as they exert coercive, mimetic and normative pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) that act to facilitate the categorising of social enterprises in a way that strengthens institutional coherence and serves to drive the structural isomorphism (Boxenbaum & Jonsson, 2017; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) of social enterprise activity. Whilst the actions of powerful actors work to maintain (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006) the social enterprise category the embedded agency of social entrepreneurs acts to transform it (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009). The prevailing Institutional logics (Ocasio, Thornton, & Lounsbury, 2017; Zhao & Lounsbury, 2016) that serve to both marginalise and prioritise those legal structures are used to present argument that the choice of legal structure for a social enterprise is often in conflict with the social entrepreneur's orientation to certain aspects of how they wish to organise. Where the chosen legal structure for a social enterprise is in conflict with the social entrepreneur's own organising principles as to how they wish to organise then this can result in the social entrepreneur decoupling (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009) their business and/or governance practices from their chosen legal structure in order to resolve the tensions that they experience. Social entrepreneurs also experiencing the same tension enact a different response in that they begin to create and legitimate new legal structures on the margins of the social enterprise category through a process of institutional entrepreneurship (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Hardy & Maguire, 2017)

Three Models of Democratic Expertise

How can expertise best be integrated within democratic systems? And how can such systems best enable lay judgment of expert claims? These questions are obscured by the common framing of democratic politics against an imagined system of pure and unmixed expert rule or ‘epistocracy’. Drawing on emerging research that attempts to think critically and institutionally about expertise, this reflections essay distinguishes three ways of democratically organising relations between experts and non-experts: representative expertise, in which experts are taken to exercise limited and delegated power under the supervision of political representatives; participatory expertise, in which expertise is integrated with publics by means of directly participatory processes; and associative expertise, in which civil society groups, advocacy organisations, and social movements organise expert knowledge around the objectives of a self-organised association. Comparing these models according to the cognitive demands they make on lay citizens, the epistemic value of citizen contributions, and the ways in which they enable public scrutiny and contestation, the essay goes on to explore how they can support and undermine one another, and how they can open up new questions about democracy, trust and expertise in political science and political theory

A study of university law students’ self-perceived digital competences.

The concept of digital competences incorporates the effective use of constantly-changing digital tools and media for learning and performing digital tasks, digital behaviours (such as online communication, teamwork, ethical sharing of information), as well as digital mindsets that value lifelong digital learning and development. The current pandemic crisis has accelerated the need to diagnose and understand more systematically Higher Education students’ digital competences and the way in which they shape academic performance and outcomes. This empirical study explores the digital competences of students, studying in Law related courses, by means of a self-assessment survey tool, which has been previously tested with information and library science students, and was developed to study students’ technology mastery (i.e. the abilities, competences, capabilities and skills required for using digital technology, media and tools) and their digital citizenship mindsets (consisting of attitudes and behaviours necessary to develop as a critical, reflective and lifelong learners). The study found age demographic differences, which presented significant correlations pointing to the presence of diverse levels of competences in the student group. Correlation statistics of the survey data demonstrated that students’ prior everyday participation as a digital citizen was connected to a number of important academic skills, such as the ability to identify information in different contexts, students’ digital learning and development, their digital abilities to complete academic work, their information literacy skills and their skills around managing their digital wellbeing and identity. Focus groups data with academics revealed that they valued the development of students’ digital competences for the purposes of learning, while studying at university and placed less emphasis on digital citizenship skills. These academics also considered the value of digital platforms and tools (the focus on ‘ICT Proficiency’) to be more relevant for academic study than digital citizenship mindsets

Guided self-organisation in open distributed systems

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The constitution of supply chain relationships: A post-failure case study

This study aims to investigate how relationships between main contractors and second-tier subcontractors are constituted, particularly after project experiences that deteriorated relationships. Trust is regarded as a structural property of relationship and the duality of trust provides an analytical perspective of investigating the constitution of relationship. This process-based research used case study method and collected data from semi-structured interviews with actors from both main contractor and subcontractor companies. Findings reveal five processes, learning, relating, collaborating, controlling and routinising, that helped constitute trust and thus supply chain relationships. It reveals that relationship failure had strong impacts on initial trust and practices at the front end. The research also shows that constituting relationship and trust is an intended but also an unintended consequence of project organising enabled and constrained by structures of project ecologies. This study contributes to knowledge in that it 1) provides an analytical approach, from the perspective of structuration theory, and relational approach to understanding construction supply chains, 2) empirically demonstrates the dynamics of trust, in the shadow of the past as well as contemporary lifecycle of the construction project, and 3) links construction project management field with the wider field of social science

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Trust Signals in the eHealth Sector: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach

The Internet gives patients the opportunity to be better informed, have ownership over their data, and, therefore, be empowered in the medical decision-making process. All of these new forms of patient empowerment through eHealth, however, require the patients’ trust in online service. Existing literature provides a solid foundation regarding the development of trust in social encounters. What is more, the understanding of trust related to more general online services, such as e-commerce is advanced, too. Regarding eHealth in particular, however, there are substantial gaps in the literature. What is more, all existing studies have one pitfall in common. None of them investigates trust as a reciprocal, evolving system that is based on recurring interactions between trustee and truster. Studies either focus on the individual view of the trustee or the truster but fail to analyse the potential dynamics of a trust signal and its evolution. This led me to research questions that aim to identify trust-evoking factors specific to eHealth, on the one hand, and develop an understanding of the evolution and sustainability of communication between trustee and truster. I applied a mixed-methods approach in order to answer my research questions. This allowed me to use qualitative methods to explore a variety of trust antecedents that are unique to eHealth, develop hypotheses, and then test the derived hypotheses through a quantitative study. One surprising insight of this study is that the risk perception of the overall service offer can determine the level of trust in a service even before entering the website. Risk perception proved to be a more crucial indicator of perceived trustworthiness than presence of trust signals on the website. This allows the conclusion that both researchers and policy makers should differentiate between high-risk and low-risk eHealth services instead of approaching all services under the unifying umbrella of eHealth. Another key finding is that users judge the trustworthiness of eHealth websites depending on their “fit”. For eHealth providers that means that in order to increase trust in their service they need to mimic the offline experience as much as possible

A national initiative in data science for health: an evaluation of the UK Farr Institute

ObjectiveTo evaluate the extent to which the inter-institutional, inter-disciplinary mobilisation of data and skills in the Farr Institute contributed to establishing the emerging field of data science for health in the UK.&#x0D; Design and Outcome measuresWe evaluated evidence of six domains characterising a new field of science:&#x0D; &#x0D; defining central scientific challenges,&#x0D; demonstrating how the central challenges might be solved,&#x0D; creating novel interactions among groups of scientists,&#x0D; training new types of experts,&#x0D; re-organising universities,&#x0D; demonstrating impacts in society.&#x0D; &#x0D; We carried out citation, network and time trend analyses of publications, and a narrative review of infrastructure, methods and tools.&#x0D; SettingFour UK centres in London, North England, Scotland and Wales (23 university partners), 2013-2018.&#x0D; Results1. The Farr Institute helped define a central scientific challenge publishing a research corpus, demonstrating insights from electronic health record (EHR) and administrative data at each stage of the translational cycle in 593 papers with at least one Farr Institute author affiliation on PubMed. 2. The Farr Institute offered some demonstrations of how these scientific challenges might be solved: it established the first four ISO27001 certified trusted research environments in the UK, and approved more than 1000 research users, published on 102 unique EHR and administrative data sources, although there was no clear evidence of an increase in novel, sustained record linkages. The Farr Institute established open platforms for the EHR phenotyping algorithms and validations (&gt;70 diseases, CALIBER). Sample sizes showed some evidence of increase but remained less than 10% of the UK population in primary care-hospital care linked studies. 3.The Farr Institute created novel interactions among researchers: the co-author publication network expanded from 944 unique co-authors (based on 67 publications in the first 30 months) to 3839 unique co-authors (545 papers in the final 30 months). 4. Training expanded substantially with 3 new masters courses, training &gt;400 people at masters, short-course and leadership level and 48 PhD students. 5. Universities reorganised with 4/5 Centres established 27 new faculty (tenured) positions, 3 new university institutes. 6. Emerging evidence of impacts included: &gt; 3200 citations for the 10 most cited papers and Farr research informed eight practice-changing clinical guidelines and policies relevant to the health of millions of UK citizens.&#x0D; ConclusionThe Farr Institute played a major role in establishing and growing the field of data science for health in the UK, with some initial evidence of benefits for health and healthcare. The Farr Institute has now expanded into Health Data Research (HDR) UK but key challenges remain including, how to network such activities internationally.</jats:p

Giving and Receiving Help across the Border : Transnational Health Practices of Migrants in Finland

Peer reviewe

Scientific Research-Based View in Construction Projects: Creating Intelligent Infrastructure

Among the top ten construction projects in 2023, Crossrail 2 – London in the UK is the first, Mumbai International Airport in India is the second, and the third is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia. The first two projects are transport investments and the third is the largest hydroelectric energy investment in Africa. Crossrail 2 was estimated to cost £32,6 billion in 2016. In 2019 Crossrail 2 related reports suggested that the scheme might add up to more than £45billion. At Navi Mumbai International Airport the estimated cost of the project was US$600 million, this has since grown to US$2,0 billion. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is estimated to cost close to 5 billion US$. These hugely expensive projects impose a significant burden on society. How can those infrastructural investments be implemented so that the infrastructure to be built can be used safely and economically for several decades