Managing the entanglement: complexity leadership in public sector systems

Complexity in public sector systems requires leaders to balance the administrative practices necessary to be aligned and efficient in the management of routine challenges and the adaptive practices required to respond to dynamic circumstances. Conventional notions of leadership in the field of public administration do not fully explain the role of leadership in balancing the entanglement of formal, top-down, administrative functions and informal, emergent, adaptive functions within public sector settings with different levels of complexity. Drawing on and extending existing complexity leadership constructs, this article explores how leadership is enacted over the duration of six urban regeneration projects representing high, medium, and low levels of project complexity. The article suggests that greater attention needs to be paid to the tensions inherent in enabling leadership if actors are to cope with the complex, collaborative, cross-boundary, adaptive work in which they are increasingly engage

Constraint-based probabilistic learning of metabolic pathways from tomato volatiles

Clustering and correlation analysis techniques have become popular tools for the analysis of data produced by metabolomics experiments. The results obtained from these approaches provide an overview of the interactions between objects of interest. Often in these experiments, one is more interested in information about the nature of these relationships, e.g., cause-effect relationships, than in the actual strength of the interactions. Finding such relationships is of crucial importance as most biological processes can only be understood in this way. Bayesian networks allow representation of these cause-effect relationships among variables of interest in terms of whether and how they influence each other given that a third, possibly empty, group of variables is known. This technique also allows the incorporation of prior knowledge as established from the literature or from biologists. The representation as a directed graph of these relationship is highly intuitive and helps to understand these processes. This paper describes how constraint-based Bayesian networks can be applied to metabolomics data and can be used to uncover the important pathways which play a significant role in the ripening of fresh tomatoes. We also show here how this methods of reconstructing pathways is intuitive and performs better than classical techniques. Methods for learning Bayesian network models are powerful tools for the analysis of data of the magnitude as generated by metabolomics experiments. It allows one to model cause-effect relationships and helps in understanding the underlying processes

Outcomes Achieved Through Citizen-Centered Collaborative Public Management

One result of the inability of citizens to make themselves heard by administrative arms of government is frustration that ultimately festers into distrust and alienation. There is ample evidence of serious levels of generalized distrust of government and alienation from it on the part of the citizenry (King and Stivers 1998; Nye, Zelidow, and King 1997). In the case of Los Angeles, these feelings began taking on active and organized manifestations in the efforts by parts of the city to secede and form their own municipal governments (Box and Musso 2004). One of the main motivating concerns behind these movements was an expressed belief that their communities were not receiving their fair share of public services from city agencies. The San Fernando Valley, with over one million residents, had made several unsuccessful attempts at secession over several decades, but state legislative changes in the 1990s made that process less difficult. The result was that by 1999 three areas of Los Angeles began moving through the legal process of secession: the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, and the L.A. Harbor areas of San Pedro and Wilmington. The San Fernando Valley and Hollywood qualified for the ballot in a special election but did not receive enough votes to break away (Hogen-Esch 2001; Sonenshein and Hogen-Esch 2006)

Hybridity and the search for the right mix in governing PPP collaboration

Public-private partnerships are a vehicle used a lot by governments all around the world. When it was introduced the idea relied a lot on economic reasoning in which contracts, monitoring and performance criteria were important to achieve results. But from the beginning PPP’s were a hybrid idea because there were also assumptions about collaborations and synergy that fused the idea. In this chapter we explore the ideas behind PPP, the importance of collaboration to make PPP’s work and we show, with recent research results, that PPP’s actually need a mix of contracts and collaboration to work