HR development in local government: how and why does HR strategy matter in organizational change and development?

Human resource (HR) management has been proposed as being one of the core drivers of the modernization of the public sector, in particular with reference to the changing nature of people management and ‘HR-public service partnerships’ as an antecedent capacity of modernizing public service organizations. Notwithstanding the ongoing interest in the transformation of HR systems, this study explores how and why such relationships between HR management (HRM) and organizational change emerge. Considering a resource and capability-based approach, the analysis reveals strategic HRM practices as a useful concept to distinguish HR activities and the processes that are occurring when a HR strategy is performed. Moreover, using a multiple case study design, the study exhibits the antecedents and effects of HR strategy formation during accounting change in six German local governments. The results provide evidence that forces of either strategic or administrative patterns of alignment refer to different layers and the sequencing of HRM activities within a process of HR system change, thereby revealing the possibility of contradictory effects induced by HR change agency on either the ‘HR’ or the ‘public service’ side of the strategic coin

Intellectual heritages of post-1990 public sector accounting research: An exploration

PURPOSE: The article’s aim is to refine prospects for theorising in public sector accounting (PSA) research in order to capture the methodological benefits promised by its multi-disciplinarity. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The study primarily employs a bibliometric analysis of research outputs invoking New Public Management (NPM). Applying a content analysis to Hood (1991), as the most cited NPM source, bibliographic methods and citation/co-citation analysis for the period 1991 to 2018 are mobilised to identify the disciplinary evolution of the NPM knowledge base from a structural and longitudinal perspective. FINDINGS: The analysis exhibits disciplinary branching of NPM over time and its imprints on post-1990 PSA research. Given the discourse about origins of NPM-based accounting research, there are research domains behind the obvious that indicate disciplinary fragmentations. For instance, novelty of PSA research is found in Public Value Accounting, continuity is evidenced by transcending contextual antecedents. Interestingly, these domains are loosely coupled. Exploring the role of disciplinary imprints designates prospects for post-NPM PSA research that acknowledges multi-disciplinarity and branching in order to deploy insularity as a building block for its inquiries. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS: Criteria for assessing the limitations and credibility of an explorative inquiry are used, especially on how the proposal to develop cumulative knowledge from post-1990 PSA research can be further developed. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: A matrix suggesting a method of ordering disciplinary references enables positioning of research inquiries within PSA research. SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS: ORIGINALITY: By extending common taxonomies of PSA intellectual heritages, the study proposes the ‘inquiry-heritage’ matrix as a typology that displays patterns of theorisation for positioning an inquiry within PSA disciplinary groundings

Context-awareness in task automation services by distributed event processing

Everybody has to coordinate several tasks everyday, usually in a manual manner. Recently, the concept of Task Automation Services has been introduced to automate and personalize the task coordination problem. Several user centered platforms and applications have arisen in the last years, that let their users configure their very own automations based on third party services. In this paper, we propose a new system architecture for Task Automation Services in a heterogeneous mobile, smart devices, and cloud services environment. Our architecture is based on the novel idea to employ distributed Complex Event Processing to implement innovative mixed execution profiles. The major advantage of the approach is its ability to incorporate context-awareness and real-time coordination in Task Automation Services

Finite Generation of Algebras Associated to Powers of Ideals

We study generalized symbolic powers and form ideals of powers of ideals and compare their growth with the growth of ordinary powers, and we discuss the question of when the graded rings attached to symbolic powers or to form ideals of powers are finitely generated.Comment: 17 pages. The only change in this version is to add new reference

Extremal properties for dissections of convex 3-polytopes

A dissection of a convex d-polytope is a partition of the polytope into d-simplices whose vertices are among the vertices of the polytope. Triangulations are dissections that have the additional property that the set of all its simplices forms a simplicial complex. The size of a dissection is the number of d-simplices it contains. This paper compares triangulations of maximal size with dissections of maximal size. We also exhibit lower and upper bounds for the size of dissections of a 3-polytope and analyze extremal size triangulations for specific non-simplicial polytopes: prisms, antiprisms, Archimedean solids, and combinatorial d-cubes.Comment: 19 page

Die Integration von Naturschutzzielen in den Ökologischen Landbau - ein Projekt auf der Hessischen Staatsdomäne Frankenhausen.

Die Domäne Frankenhausen – Kulturlandschaft als Aufgabe: Die Hessische Staatsdomäne Frankenhausen bei Kassel wurde ab Juli 1998 auf Ökologischen Landbau umgestellt und dient als Versuchs- und Lehrbetrieb der Universität Kassel. Zuvor hatte der Betrieb in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten die typische Intensivierung der konventionellen Landwirtschaft durchlaufen: 1971 wurde die Erzeugung von Vorzugsmilch aufgegeben, zwei Jahre später das letzte Vieh abgeschafft und seither reiner Ackerbau (Schwerpunkt Saatgetreide und Zuckerrüben) betrieben. Die Landschaft ist ein Spiegelbild der intensiven Nutzung: Ausgeräumte und drainierte Acker-schläge, tief in den Löß eingeschnittene und teilweise kanalisierte Fließgewässer, Dominanz von Eutrophierungszeigern und Erosionsprobleme. Unproduktive Landschaftsbestandteile, etwa ein flachgründiger Trockenhang, weisen Spuren früherer Nutzung auf, sind sich heute selbst überlassen und verbuschen. Mit der Umstellung auf Ökologischen Landbau erweiterte sich das Kulturartenspektrum; in den heutigen Betrieb integriert sind pflanzenbauliche Versuchsflächen, De-monstrationsflächen mit alten Kulturpflanzen und ein Gemüse-Selbsternteprojekt. Rund 20 ha Ackerfläche sind in Dauergrünland umgewandelt worden, das zur Ernäh-rung der im Aufbau begriffenen Milchviehherde dient (aktuelle Informationen im Inter-net s. http://www.wiz.uni-kassel.de/dfh/index.html). Bei der Umstellung der Domäne auf ökologische Landwirtschaft musste in den ersten Jahren der Bewirtschaftung durch die Hochschule der Aufbau eines ökonomisch tragfähigen Betriebes im Vordergrund stehen. Ein vorgesehenes „Modul Kulturlandschaftsentwicklung“ war von vornherein auf die Einwerbung von Drittmitteln angewiesen. Somit wurden in der Umstellungsphase nur wenige Veränderungen in der Landschaft sichtbar, insbesondere, was die vorhandenen Strukturen und die Schlaggrößen der Felder betrifft. Zur weiterge-henden Umsetzung von konkreten Maßnahmen zur Anlage, Gestaltung und Pflege wurde ein fundiertes Gesamtkonzept angestrebt, das im Rahmen einer Voruntersuchungsphase entwickelt werden sollte (VAN ELSEN & GODT

Entwicklung eines stickstoffbasierten Ertragsprognosemodells zur Optimierung des Ökologischen Kartoffelbaus

Potatoes are one of the most important crops in organic farming with respect to farmers’ income. Yields are often strongly influenced by regional and yearly diffe-rences. Despite the availability of detailed knowledge, it is only now that a crop growth model has been generated which allows for the estimation and prediction of potato yield under organic conditions. The aim of our study was to produce a highly elaborate prediction model based on the utilization and speed of nitrogen uptake as they relate to the yield dynamics of tubers and canopy in combination with late blight dynamics. Therefore, from 2005 to 2014, these parameters were assessed in up to 18 varieties of potatoes comprised of differing maturity groups. The data were ana-lyzed in R using similar algorithms to the Grofit package. Our distinct model included updated mathematical functions to estimate the yield development in organic potato-es. Finally, we demonstrate that at a relatively early time in the season it is possible to estimate the yield of potatoes of various varieties and maturity groups