Evaluation of the Promotion of Through-Life Management in Public Private Partnerships for Infrastructure

One justification of public private partnerships (PPP) is the alleged benefit they offer in terms of through-life management (TLM). Aiming at an evaluation of this claim, the dominant reasoning connecting PPPs and TLM is first defined: In creating a single point of responsibility and a long temporal involvement, the PPP model provides an effective incentive to implement TLM. This reasoning is first evaluated through prior large scale studies and through two case studies undertaken by the authors. No substantial evidence of TLM benefits is found. To identify the causes for this gap between intention and achievement, a critical review of the PPP literature supported by insights from management and organization theory is undertaken. Four problems in the reasoning are found to explain the gap: fragmentation is factually prevailing; not all parties in PPPs intend to have a long term commitment to the project; there may be competing incentives for some parties; and the effort to achieve the change and learning necessary for TLM may be missing. It is concluded that for the TLM benefits to be achieved, the PPP model has to be redesigned to secure incentivisation towards TLM and to incorporate TLM mechanisms at the level of the production system

Tourism policy making: the policymakers' perspectives

This research explores tourism policy making, from the perspectives of policy makers using grounded theory. It focuses on Leeds, a city in the North of England, which is characterized by its turbulent environment. The paper identifies themes around policy making, including low status, lack of clarity, uncertainty, lack of consensus and congruence and complexity. Its findings indicate policy making is essentially a social process, involving communication and negotiation between people in the context of wider change. It suggests a social conceptualization, and further research to investigate the communications involved in producing policy rather than the current research focus on the tangible outputs of the process such as a plan or a physical development

The future of interpretive accounting research:A Polyphonic Debate

In 1997-99 the three of us organised a series of European Commission funded conferences aimed at building a network of young researchers in the area of accounting. At the time “young” was defined by the Commission as researchers under 35 years of age (allowing for maternity leave or national service). Over the intervening years our network had grown and we wanted to try and take stock of the field in which we had now been working for a surprising number of years. To that Page 1 of 29 Accepted Manuscript 2 end we put together the above email and a broad invitation list of people who had been at those first meetings, and others of the same generation (or even younger) whom we had met since. About half of those originally contacted managed to make the meeting where we spent a stimulating couple of hours of debate on the topics raised below—so stimulating that we developed a collective desire to leave a trace of the discussion. Writing a traditional paper with so many, so widely dispersed authors was not going to work. Instead we came up with a different form of collective writing that mirrored the original debate, and that might contribute to ongoing debates in this journal concerning the nature and status of our research (e.g. Arrington, 2004; Inanga & Schneider, 2005; Macintosh, 2004). We agreed a process in which each of us in turn would have one week to add a target of 300 words to a rolling document, going through the contributors alphabetically. After two rounds we would see what we had got

Evaluating the Effects of Cutoffs and Treatment of Long-range Electrostatics in Protein Folding Simulations

The use of molecular dynamics simulations to provide atomic-level descriptions of biological processes tends to be computationally demanding, and a number of approximations are thus commonly employed to improve computational efficiency. In the past, the effect of these approximations on macromolecular structure and stability has been evaluated mostly through quantitative studies of small-molecule systems or qualitative observations of short-timescale simulations of biological macromolecules. Here we present a quantitative evaluation of two commonly employed approximations, using a test system that has been the subject of a number of previous protein folding studies–the villin headpiece. In particular, we examined the effect of (i) the use of a cutoff-based force-shifting technique rather than an Ewald summation for the treatment of electrostatic interactions, and (ii) the length of the cutoff used to determine how many pairwise interactions are included in the calculation of both electrostatic and van der Waals forces. Our results show that the free energy of folding is relatively insensitive to the choice of cutoff beyond 9 Å, and to whether an Ewald method is used to account for long-range electrostatic interactions. In contrast, we find that the structural properties of the unfolded state depend more strongly on the two approximations examined here