Emotional and developmental influences on the management of generational transitions by business-owning families

In recent years, succession has become a major theme in family business research. Much of the research effort has concentrated on the managerial dimension of succession, often subordinating the importance of other major variables such as family relationship dynamics and the form of business ownership on the succession outcome. Family enterprises are generally conceptualised as a dynamic, evolving systems in which the actions and interactions taking place amongst constituent groups determine the system's outputs. This study aimed to overcome the limitations of examining only one dimension of a system's activities by carrying out a longitudinal holistic analysis of the evolution of the family enterprise system as it went through the process of generational transition. The research for this thesis employed the multiple case study method to investigate the influence of emotional and developmental factors on the ability of business-owning families to make progress with the tasks required to complete a generational transition. Three specific issues were examined: the nature of the task environment facing the family enterprise system over the duration of the transition period; the approaches used by families to address the tasks required for them to move through the stages making up the transition process; and the extent to which emotional and developmental factors prevented or promoted progress being made with the generational transition. The results reveal that families face the same sequence of stages in the generational transition process. However, they differ in their ability to move through these stages, towards closure of the transition period and the achievement of a succession outcome, Importantly, the degree to which individuals and families are able to make progress is related to their ability to manage the anxiety generated during the transition process. Anxiety is created when the structures or network of interrelationships that hold their family enterprise system intact are evaluated and may be dismantled and reconstructed differently for the next stage in the system's development. The study supports the view that anxiety is generated during transition times when developmental pressures for change build up from changes taking place in the life-cycles underway within the family enterprise system. It also supports the view that developmental pressure (such as a crisis) from the business subsystem alone does not lead to transition task activity and progress. Progress in response to business sub-system pressure comes about when the opportunity exists to solve an ongoing adult development problem by implementing a solution to a transition task problem. The ability to manage anxiety was found to be related to both the quality of emotional functioning in the family and the extent to which the adult development agendas of both generations are in alignment. Favourable alignment brought a developmental opportunity for the individuals concerned. It allowed them to do the exploratory work required in order to assess the extent to which the family business could provide part of their life structure for the next phase of their development. However, in addition to adult development generational alignment, the study confirmed that the quality of emotional functioning in the family (their ability to overcome multigenerational patterns of functioning and behaviour) influenced the family's ability to make progress with ownership transfer and other tasks. The study concludes that emotional and developmental influences are mediating factors between the forces for change originating in the family enterprise system and its environment and the ability of those in the system to respond to the need for change and manage the transition process. It also found that families significantly underestimate the nature and complexity of the work involved in the transition process, as well as the timescale and emotional commitment required to complete the transition

The localist turn in EU Regional Policy viewed from a Tuscan Perspective

At a time in which European governments and senior officials are striving to find an agreement on the grand objectives for the new Lisbon strategy, scant attention has been dedicated so far to main economic policy of the European Union: the Regional Policy. The present work critically investigates the rationales and the intervention tools which shape the EU’s flagship policy, with a view to shedding light on the transformations which have lately affected the politics of local development in Europe. The analysis will focus on the thematic and pragmatic relationship which links together Regional Policy and new regionalist theorisations. It will highlight how, by embracing an endogenous and punctuated definition of development, the Regional Policy has fashioned an institutional framework in which regions are enrolled as self-contained action units, and are expected to compete against each other to secure their economic prosperity. Drawing on relational perspectives, I will contend that this approach is doubly problematic. From a substantive point of view, it leads to a prioritisation of local links, which fails to recognise the multifaceted spatialities characterising modern economic relations. In procedural terms, the institutional mechanisms involved in the Regional Policy encourage a “regional centralism” which, in the name of EU funds, compresses dissent and “technicalises” political choices. These arguments will be empirically scrutinized through a study of the innovation policy implemented in Tuscany under the Structural Funds. Methodologically, the inquiry has a bi-focal nature: on the one hand, I will rely on official evaluation reports to assess the effectiveness of new regionalist policy schemes; on the other hand, I will reconstruct regional governance dynamics, by tracing how a certain policy concept (innovation networks) has been adopted by the EU, translated at the local level, and finally consolidated in a set of institutional relations, expectations and power asymmetries. The heuristic hypothesis is that only by combining the two research levels it will be possible to grasp the direction and the significance of the political project pursued by the European Commission through the Regional Policy

Contracting with General Dental Services: a mixed-methods study on factors influencing responses to contracts in English general dental practice

Background: Independent contractor status of NHS general dental practitioners (GDPs) and general medical practitioners (GMPs) has meant that both groups have commercial as well as professional identities. Their relationship with the state is governed by a NHS contract, the terms of which have been the focus of much negotiation and struggle in recent years. Previous study of dental contracting has taken a classical economics perspective, viewing practitioners’ behaviour as a fully rational search for contract loopholes. We apply institutional theory to this context for the first time, where individuals’ behaviour is understood as being influenced by wider institutional forces such as growing consumer demands, commercial pressures and challenges to medical professionalism. Practitioners hold values and beliefs, and carry out routines and practices which are consistent with the field’s institutional logics. By identifying institutional logics in the dental practice organisational field, we expose where tensions exist, helping to explain why contracting appears as a continual cycle of reform and resistance. Aims: To identify the factors which facilitate and hinder the use of contractual processes to manage and strategically develop General Dental Services, using a comparison with medical practice to highlight factors which are particular to NHS dental practice. Methods: Following a systematic review of health-care contracting theory and interviews with stakeholders, we undertook case studies of 16 dental and six medical practices. Case study data collection involved interviews, observation and documentary evidence; 120 interviews were undertaken in all. We tested and refined our findings using a questionnaire to GDPs and further interviews with commissioners. Results: We found that, for all three sets of actors (GDPs, GMPs, commissioners), multiple logics exist. These were interacting and sometimes in competition. We found an emergent logic of population health managerialism in dental practice, which is less compatible than the other dental practice logics of ownership responsibility, professional clinical values and entrepreneurialism. This was in contrast to medical practice, where we found a more ready acceptance of external accountability and notions of the delivery of ‘cost-effective’ care. Our quantitative work enabled us to refine and test our conceptualisations of dental practice logics. We identified that population health managerialism comprised both a logic of managerialism and a public goods logic, and that practitioners might be resistant to one and not the other. We also linked individual practitioners’ behaviour to wider institutional forces by showing that logics were predictive of responses to NHS dental contracts at the dental chair-side (the micro level), as well as predictive of approaches to wider contractual relationships with commissioners (the macro level) . Conclusions: Responses to contracts can be shaped by environmental forces and not just determined at the level of the individual. In NHS medical practice, goals are more closely aligned with commissioning goals than in general dental practice. The optimal contractual agreement between GDPs and commissioners, therefore, will be one which aims at the ‘satisfactory’ rather than the ‘ideal’; and a ‘successful’ NHS dental contract is likely to be one where neither party promotes its self-interest above the other. Future work on opportunism in health care should widen its focus beyond the self-interest of providers and look at the contribution of contextual factors such as the relationship between the government and professional bodies, the role of the media, and providers’ social and professional networks. Funding: The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme

The historical development and basis of human factors guidelines for automated systems in aeronautical operations

In order to derive general design guidelines for automated systems a study was conducted on the utilization and acceptance of existing automated systems as currently employed in several commercial fields. Four principal study area were investigated by means of structured interviews, and in some cases questionnaires. The study areas were aviation, a both scheduled airline and general commercial aviation; process control and factory applications; office automation; and automation in the power industry. The results of over eighty structured interviews were analyzed and responses categoried as various human factors issues for use by both designers and users of automated equipment. These guidelines address such items as general physical features of automated equipment; personnel orientation, acceptance, and training; and both personnel and system reliability

Beyond Storytime: Whole Class Interactive Reading Aloud in Kindergarten

Existing research has established the value of reading aloud to young children and suggested a lens with three elements to describe when a teacher reads aloud to an entire kindergarten class during a planned period of instruction (CIRA): teacher practice, student activity, and text. Over four months, I observed and interviewed four experienced kindergarten teachers in the naturalistic setting of their public school classrooms. To analyze the data, I created bounded collective and individual case studies that answer my central questions: What patterns characterize teacher practice, student activity, and text during kindergarten CIRA sessions taught by experienced kindergarten teachers? How do these patterns relate to one another within or across teachers? Across the four classrooms, teachers read with inflection; employed a transparent proactive style of classroom management; purposefully selected texts to read; embedded instruction of concepts of print, vocabulary, and comprehension while they read; and differentiated for their students, especially English Language Learners (ELL). Students demonstrated nearly exclusive on task behavior including spontaneous responses. Texts were primarily narrative, chosen to support the literacy skills or content to be taught, but often did not reflect the cultural or linguistic backgrounds of the students. CIRA also differed within the four classrooms. At one end of a continuum, CIRA sessions were characterized by little apparent planning on the part of the teacher (similar to the features of parent/child read aloud sessions), impulsive student responses, and complex texts. At the other end of the continuum, the teacher planned highly controlled CIRA sessions (with many of the characteristics of a scripted lesson), students' answers were constrained by the teacher's questions, and the texts were simplistic. No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2002) appeared to directly influence state and local policy that impacted the practice of all four teachers. Differences within classrooms paralleled the continuum: the teacher with the less structured sessions had the highest SES students and was least impacted by NCLB, and the teacher with the most highly-controlled sessions had the lowest SES students and was most impacted by NCLB. Results from the study inform both future research and teacher education

Improvising difference : constructing Canarian Jazz cultures

textThis dissertation is a performance of and around borders, emphasizing how physical and virtual boundaries impact members of a community on the global periphery. More specifically, it interrogates the ways in which Canarian jazz musicians encounter and interact with the multiple types of actively produced aislamiento (isolation). As an autonomous community of Spain, the vestiges of colonialism are quite present in everyday Canarian life, despite many inhabitants' self-identification as African. This project traces three main lines of inquiry: the historical construction of the Canary Islands as exoticized periphery; the eradication of the Afro/Canarian subject through the ongoing ideological and physical violence; and the ways in which Canarian populations are re-asserting their identities—as Afro/Canarian, diasporic, and trans-Atlantic—through critical performance against trenchant stereotypes and the dominant paradigms that propagate them. Throughout the dissertation, I examine how surfaces—architectural, cartographic, scholarly and sonic—act to frame (and mask) cultural and musical identity. The ideological seams of these surfaces can function as interstitial spaces from which critical resistance can be performed through improvising musical and discursive acts. Just as Canarian jazz musicians play against and across dominant paradigms to subsist, I will demonstrate how interstitial research methodologies can break open the potentially obscuring surfaces that these paradigms construct. I extend David Sudnow's notion of the "articulational reach" and his phenomenologically informed exploration of piano performance into ethnographic research, emphasizing how my own subjectivity as researcher/pianist impacts and shapes the project. Crucial to Sudnow's "reach" is its inherently improvisatory emergence and the uncertainty of its outcome. In short, the ways in which Canarian musicians must improvise performances in musical and social environments will be examined and resonating with an approach imbued with the same improvising, subjective unfolding—both in terms of research methodology and of writerly perspective. The dissertation could be read as an unfolding, improvised construction that is constantly accruing new meanings: its chapters are not so much driven by an overarching or individual theses so much as by the spinning out of possible responses to the questions surrounding the project's initial premises.Musi

The Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (DGO2022) Intelligent Technologies, Governments and Citizens June 15-17, 2022

The 23rd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research theme is “Intelligent Technologies, Governments and Citizens”. Data and computational algorithms make systems smarter, but should result in smarter government and citizens. Intelligence and smartness affect all kinds of public values - such as fairness, inclusion, equity, transparency, privacy, security, trust, etc., and is not well-understood. These technologies provide immense opportunities and should be used in the light of public values. Society and technology co-evolve and we are looking for new ways to balance between them. Specifically, the conference aims to advance research and practice in this field. The keynotes, presentations, posters and workshops show that the conference theme is very well-chosen and more actual than ever. The challenges posed by new technology have underscored the need to grasp the potential. Digital government brings into focus the realization of public values to improve our society at all levels of government. The conference again shows the importance of the digital government society, which brings together scholars in this field. Dg.o 2022 is fully online and enables to connect to scholars and practitioners around the globe and facilitate global conversations and exchanges via the use of digital technologies. This conference is primarily a live conference for full engagement, keynotes, presentations of research papers, workshops, panels and posters and provides engaging exchange throughout the entire duration of the conference

Parsing Perceptions of Place: Locative and Textual Representations of Place Émilie-Gamelin on Twitter

We increasingly engage in geographies mediated by social media, which is changing how we experience and produce places. This raises questions about how ‘place’ is conceived and received in networked virtual spaces. Place has remained difficult to grasp in both geography and communications studies that utilize social media data. To attend to this, I first develop a conceptual framework that bridges the phenomenology of spatiality with the communication of place. I then present a case study of Place Émilie-Gamelin in Montreal: a plaza located atop the city’s busiest transit hub. Despite its geographic centrality, it is a liminal space appropriated by marginalized groups and contentious political movements. Since 2015, it has been subject to a city-led revitalization program with intentions of attracting party-goers and tourists. Using a communications geography framework, I collected a year’s worth of tweets, first, employing a filter to capture georeferenced tweets in and around the study site, and second, using the site’s toponyms to retrieve tweets through textual queries. To understand these representations, I coded them by relevance, theme and communicative function. Results showed a place evolving in scope, name and meaning, reflecting diverging flows and uses. I found that there were more textual connotations of the study site than there were geotweets, and that the former were more diverse in their representation of place. The thesis demonstrates how promotional content on Twitter should be more critically analyzed in concert with expressive and descriptive tweets and geotweets, and that this implies spatial ontologies and data collection methods that consider a place on social media as a discursive construction. This is especially so since Twitter has become increasingly ‘platial’ through internal changes and its entwinement with other social media platforms: changes which require consideration in all Twitter-based spatial and textual analyses. The study provides an updated perspective on Twitter’s use in the spatial humanities, GIScience and geography and contributes to those interested in applying more nuanced cartographies of places