Be vicarious: the challenge for project management in the service economy

Purpose. The paper aims to answer to the following questions: which are the critical dynamic capabilities to survive in the rubber landscape of service economy? Does it exist in service economy a dynamic capabilities provider? Methodology. The paper combines the literature review on dynamic capability perspective and that on vicariance to the Project Management professional services. Findings. Firstly, the paper identifies vicariance as an intriguing dynamic capability, crucial to survive in the rubber landscape of service economy. Secondly, the paper sheds light on Project Management (PM) as a vicarious that provides vicariance. Practical implications. For each critical organizational dimension, the paper identifies the links among the service economy challenges and the vicariance typology required to the project manager to face those challenge. Originality/value.The approach to conceive the PM as a vicarious that provides vicariance is original and leads to new insights on the professional services management. In fact, on one hand, dynamic capabilities cannot easily be bought through a market transaction; on the other hand, they must be built. This building can be achieved internally, by the organization itself (i.e. hierarchy), or through a partnership (i.e. hybrid form among hierarchy and market). PM professional services enrich organizations with additional information variety according to a hybrid (i.e. non- market) coordination model

Head Tracking via Robust Registration in Texture Map Images

A novel method for 3D head tracking in the presence of large head rotations and facial expression changes is described. Tracking is formulated in terms of color image registration in the texture map of a 3D surface model. Model appearance is recursively updated via image mosaicking in the texture map as the head orientation varies. The resulting dynamic texture map provides a stabilized view of the face that can be used as input to many existing 2D techniques for face recognition, facial expressions analysis, lip reading, and eye tracking. Parameters are estimated via a robust minimization procedure; this provides robustness to occlusions, wrinkles, shadows, and specular highlights. The system was tested on a variety of sequences taken with low quality, uncalibrated video cameras. Experimental results are reported

The PMBOK standard evolution: leading the rising complexity

The aim of this work is to enlighten how the Standard for Project Management (part II of PMBOK® Guide) has evolved over the last 30 years as it has introjected the perspective of complexity. The several contexts (private firms, public institutions etc.) in which Project Management is applied become more and more complex (i.e. uncertain and characterized by unpredictable feedbacks among their own variables and their environments). This needs an enrichment (and perhaps a new conceptualization) of the endowment of information variety provided by the Standard for Project Management with respect to the specific requisite variety asked at a local level (i.e. the specific organizational contexts), to lead a project with efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability. The traditional Standard for Project Management can no longer be considered as a “comfort zone” (i.e. a set of established and “familiar” frameworks, rules and tools aiming to ensure certain and predictable results). On the contrary, the Standard for Project Management should shift towards an open standard, that is able to consistently co-evolve with the increasingly complex contexts that even more ask for new tools, creative solutions and original combinations between exploitative and explorative knowledge

A Lightweight Distributed Solution to Content Replication in Mobile Networks

Performance and reliability of content access in mobile networks is conditioned by the number and location of content replicas deployed at the network nodes. Facility location theory has been the traditional, centralized approach to study content replication: computing the number and placement of replicas in a network can be cast as an uncapacitated facility location problem. The endeavour of this work is to design a distributed, lightweight solution to the above joint optimization problem, while taking into account the network dynamics. In particular, we devise a mechanism that lets nodes share the burden of storing and providing content, so as to achieve load balancing, and decide whether to replicate or drop the information so as to adapt to a dynamic content demand and time-varying topology. We evaluate our mechanism through simulation, by exploring a wide range of settings and studying realistic content access mechanisms that go beyond the traditional assumptionmatching demand points to their closest content replica. Results show that our mechanism, which uses local measurements only, is: (i) extremely precise in approximating an optimal solution to content placement and replication; (ii) robust against network mobility; (iii) flexible in accommodating various content access patterns, including variation in time and space of the content demand.Comment: 12 page

Village People: critical reflections on a gay-branded space of leisure in Rome

Gay Village is a three-month-long summertime festival, organised in the capital of Italy: Rome. It was created in 2002, after the success of the 2000 World Pride, and has quickly turned into a key event in Rome’s summertime entertainment. Ethnographic work at the Gay Village 2017 edition revealed a significant presence of heteronormed cisgender young men among the festival crowd; their experience of and practices throughout the dancing nights often turned into forms of aggressive spatial appropriation, which easily produced a sense of discomfort and lack of safety among women and queer subjectivities. The case study aims at understanding how this form of heteronormed colonisation has come about, in an effort to revive the intellectual debate on gay-branded spaces of consumption. While scholarly work has thoroughly investigated the progressive ‘straightening’ of mainstream gay-connoted venues, Rome’s Gay Village appears to be an urban artefact that not only does not convincingly challenge spatial heteronormativity, but to a certain extent also fails to successfully replicate a classic paradigm of ‘urban gay-friendliness through consumption’. And this happens in a metropolitan context that is fully integrated within the common notion of ‘West’. Consequently, Rome’s Gay Village challenges, from within, assumptions on the uniformity of the geopolitical construct of ‘West’ in terms of gender and sexual matters, while also echoing the scholarly problematisation of urban models attempting to conjugate queer liberation with capital accumulation

EU: Education Policies and Third Countries. Civilian Power or "Just" Foreign Policy?

Despite the lack of attention from academia, there are concrete examples that show an attempt to Europeanize the education policies and institutions of countries outside of the EU. This dissertation investigates the relationship between education and foreign policy, looking at the partnership between EU and third countries. Following a social constructivist theoretical framework, the results of the expert interviews, policy analysis, and empirical cases showed that, indeed, education is closer than ever to the realm of high politics and foreign affairs. The results have shown that, the same time, the EU retains a positive image of a soft and civilian power. Can we expect a growing EU cultural diplomacy