Creative enterprise in west Yorkshire Arts organisations

This report describes and theorises the findings of a workshop discussion, commissioned by WYLLN, into the views of arts organizations on the challenges they face in becoming more enterprising and less grant dependent

Investigation into obedience in the face of unethical behavior

Significant concern about obedience in the face of unethical behavior in many corporate scandals is growing worldwide. However, the issue is underexplored because this type of research is faced by the challenge that the perpetrators are reluctant to harm their image by admitting their wrongdoings. The purpose of this study is to obtain a deeper understanding of the human aspects of obedience in the face of unethical behavior among employees in organizations. Using a qualitative cross-case approach, ten employees were interviewed, representing top, middle, and low-level employees in a broad range of private medium-to-large-sized enterprises. The analysis process involved reducing the raw data into meaningful themes, particularly why employees perform unethical behavior. The study's findings provide complex reasons for obedience in the face of unethical behavior, and it is shown to be the rule and habit of organizations. The respondents also explained why they justified their misbehavior. The employees' viewpoints on obedience in the face of unethical behavior will be useful for organizations to curb unlawful practices in the workplace, as these have detrimental effects on them

Towards a Layered Architectural View for Security Analysis in SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems support and control the operation of many critical infrastructures that our society depend on, such as power grids. Since SCADA systems become a target for cyber attacks and the potential impact of a successful attack could lead to disastrous consequences in the physical world, ensuring the security of these systems is of vital importance. A fundamental prerequisite to securing a SCADA system is a clear understanding and a consistent view of its architecture. However, because of the complexity and scale of SCADA systems, this is challenging to acquire. In this paper, we propose a layered architectural view for SCADA systems, which aims at building a common ground among stakeholders and supporting the implementation of security analysis. In order to manage the complexity and scale, we define four interrelated architectural layers, and uses the concept of viewpoints to focus on a subset of the system. We indicate the applicability of our approach in the context of SCADA system security analysis.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Knowledge modelling for integrating semantic web services in e-government applications

Service integration and domain interoperability are the basic requirements in the development of current service-oriented e-Government applications. Semantic Web and, in particular, Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology aim to address these issues. However, the integration between e-Government applications and SWS is not an easy task. We argue that a more complex semantic layer needs to be modeled. The aim of our work is to provide an ontological framework that maps such a semantic layer. In this paper, we describe our approach for creating a project-independent and reusable model, and provide a case study that demonstrates its applicability

Cultivating nutrition

"Over the past decade, donor-funded policies and programs designed to address undernutrition in the Global South have shifted away from agriculture-based strategies toward nutrient supplementation and food fortification programs. Given the potential benefits resulting from agriculture-based nutrition interventions, this study uses Q methodology to explore the views of a range of stakeholders from both developed and developing countries on the value of—and constraints related to—gender-sensitive, nutrition-oriented agricultural projects. The three distinct viewpoints that emerge from this exercise all support the use of agricultural strategies to improve nutrition and underline the importance of gender-sensitive approaches. The viewpoints differ, however, on the relative importance of nutrition education, the strategic use of nutrient supplementation and food fortification, and the degree to which agriculture-based approaches have an impact on nutrition. The findings indicate that there is common ground among a range of stakeholders—donors, researchers, policymakers, and program practitioners—on the benefits of agriculture and gender-sensitive strategies to improve nutrition. These areas of agreement can serve as a foundation for forging an effective integrative strategy to improve nutrition that includes gender-sensitive agricultural approaches." Authors' AbstractNutrition ,malnutrition ,Agriculture ,stakeholders ,Gender ,

Successful strategic plan implementation in public organizations : connecting People, Process, and Plan (3Ps)

Strategic planning (SP) remains the dominant approach to strategy formulation at all levels of government, and it is an enduring topic of public administration research and practice. Simultaneously, little is known about the conditions under which strategic plans are successfully implemented in government. This Viewpoint essay provides evidence-based recommendations from SP initiatives in Flemish municipalities using multi-informant and multisource survey data. It shows that successfully implementing strategic plans is influenced by the people, process, and plan (3Ps) underlying SP. Involving creators in SP helps make the SP process more informed. An informed SP process that includes constructive conflict helps induce high-quality strategic plans. High-quality strategic plans contribute to successful strategic plan implementation. Practitioners are encouraged to consider SP not as a one-size-fits-all solution to strategy formulation, but as an approach in which variation in people, process, and plan influences implementation success

Environmental Education in the Public Sphere: Comparing Practice with Psychosocial Determinants of Behavior and Societal Change

Environmental education of the general public is widely practiced by a variety of types of organizations. Dedicated environmental groups, nature centers, zoos, parks, and other entities work on issues ranging from local threats to air, water, and habitat to global problems such as climate change and deforestation. A great deal of those efforts focus largely on providing information and raising awareness. Behavioral research and change models, however, suggest other factors are important in order to effect change on an individual, regional, or societal level. An analysis of environmental education in practice, examining methods and materials in use, showed the degree to which there were alignments between the content and psychosocial determinants of change, as well as how actions related to change theories. This mixed-methods study of groups doing environmental education in the public sphere compared their practices with the factors shown to help predict pro-environmental behavior, why people change their actions and habits. Through this survey research and multiple case study, increased knowledge and understanding can help inform future efforts at change on critical local, national, and world environmental problems. It can also lead to further research into environmental education, using behavior and change theories

Deriving Information Requirements from Responsibility Models

This paper describes research in understanding the requirements for complex information systems that are constructed from one or more generic COTS systems. We argue that, in these cases, behavioural requirements are largely defined by the underlying system and that the goal of the requirements engineering process is to understand the information requirements of system stakeholders. We discuss this notion of information requirements and propose that an understanding of how a socio-technical system is structured in terms of responsibilities is an effective way of discovering this type of requirement. We introduce the idea of responsibility modelling and show, using an example drawn from the domain of emergency planning, how a responsibility model can be used to derive information requirements for a system that coordinates the multiple agencies dealing with an emergency