Project management between will and representation

This article challenges some deep-rooted assumptions of project management. Inspired by the work of the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, it calls for looking at projects through two complementary lenses: one that accounts for cognitive and representational aspects and one that accounts for material and volitional aspects. Understanding the many ways in which these aspects transpire and interact in projects sheds new light on project organizations, as imperfect and fragile representations that chase a shifting nexus of intractable human, social, technical, and material processes. This, in turn, can bring about a new grasp of notions such as value,\ud knowledge, complexity, and risk

The impact of transport management on the local activities system: the role of limited traffic zones.

The impacts of transportation in planning land use and activities are not always intended, and can have unforeseen or unintended consequences such as congestion or evident impacts on the local economy where the interventions are conceived. This is the case of Limited Traffic Zones, i.e. areas where cars are not allowed in them. In this paper, the impact of these measures on the local economy is analysed, considering as case study the town of Napoli in the south of Italy, where two Limited Traffic Zones, in two different boroughs, named Vomero and Chiaia, and years, have been introduced. Moreover, impacts due to changes involving one of the ltz’s area are also observed and analysed through a before-after survey. The direct impact on traffic congestion has not been taken into account. More than 30% of all activities have been interviewed in the two restricted areas and some key points have been assessed for the successful or unsuccessful of car restriction measure . Retailers were also asked about their decrease in turnover in order to evaluate the effects of the ltz’s area after taking into account the actual economic crisis. The survey showed how much the retailers require: efficient public transport; parking places as close as possible; residential and activity density and typology . Those are the main reasons for the success of the Vomero ltz zone and of the failure of the Chaia restricted zone. Other revealed indicators gathered in the survey, confirmed the results underlying the attractiveness of the subzone of Chiaia that is a pole of restaurant close to the seafront

On choosing governance structures

Two main paradigms split the core of the debate on governance structures: the maxi-minimizing and the satisficing paradigms. Some differences between the two has been hidden by the (only apparently) similarity of the “maximum” and “maximal” concepts. If the maximizing behavior refers to the maximum of the utility function and not to the maximal of a binary preference relation, then satisficing does not correspond to maximizing behavior. Besides such differences, from an empirically grounded point of view the maxi-minimizing approach to choose and to evaluate governance structures has relevant limitations. The remarkable limitations of the maxi-minimizing approach become further evident and crucial when one acknowledges that the comparison between alternative governance structures is – like almost any other human choice – unavoidably multicriteria. The absence of tradeoffs among the different criteria prevents the generalized use of a single real-valued function (utility, profit, cost, etc.) to represent decision maker’s goals. However, multicriteria problems can be solved when properly dealt with outranking methods. These are heuristic choice algorithms fully consistent with the satisficing paradigm and with the behavioral economic theory. In order to show its effectiveness, a tutorial example is discussed in detail comparing the three main forms of governance structures: market, hierarchy and network. They are scrutinized by four evaluation criteria: profitability, effectiveness, accountability and organizational capability. It will be demonstrated that the outranking algorithm can solve multicriteria decision making problems under conflicting criteria of evaluation. Outranking solutions are at the same time satisficing solutions, that take into account and operationalize the Simonian “levels of aspiration” through concrete parameters