Search results for "Administration"
showing 10 items of 5106 documents
Objective and Subjective Party Leadership Selection: Regulations, Activists and Voters in Poland
2015
Over the last two decades, an increasing number of political parties have gradually formalized the influence of members in the process of leadership selection. This evolution has determined two partly contrasting behaviors in the new democracies of Eastern Europe: inclusive decision-making was formally mentioned but empirical evidence indicates implementation problems. Consequently, it remains an empirical question to what extent the East European political parties apply the formal provisions of inclusiveness when selecting their leaders. In order to provide an answer, this article compares the statutes and election regulations of four Polish parties with opinions of party members and voter…
The public sector's roles in the sharing economy and the implications for public values
2019
Abstract Motivated by the growing significance of the sharing economy, we discuss the roles the public sector may play within the sharing economy and the corresponding implications for public values. The sharing economy represents a transformative agent for the public sector within the current landscape of digital transformation. While the public sector has so far acted mainly as a regulatory body in the sharing economy, we here discuss implications for other roles the public sector may take on, including the roles of customer, service provider, and platform provider. Framed within the context of the public value ideals (professional, efficiency, service, and engagement), we examine the opp…
Nesting self-employment in education, work and family trajectories of Romanian migrant returnees
2019
Challenging a biased view towards self-employed returnees as neoliberal selves, as the normalized approach of the migration–development nexus tends to depict them, this article builds an alternative conceptual framework to unpack the variegated experiences of migrant returnees’ self-employment trajectories in post-socialist Romania. The authors argue that the overemphasis on the benefits of return migration for origin countries through the skewed focus on the migrants’ accrual of human and financial capital and their ostensible entrepreneurial orientation has resulted in disregarding more influential biographical and cultural aspects. Life story interviews with middle-aged participants reve…
The contested concept of vulnerability – a literature review
2018
The concept of vulnerability is widely used in the social sciences as well as in policy making, health and social care services and in social work, referring to a variety of groups or individuals, ...
Digital transparency and Web 2.0 in Spanish city councils
2016
Abstract The purpose of this study is to provide a Web 2.0 Disclosure Index to measure the Web 2.0 presence of Spanish city councils and the information disclosed by them on these media, and to test whether the use of Web 2.0 tools and social media by local governments improve their Web 1.0 digital transparency. We have structured the Web 2.0 Index as the sum of three partial indexes, referred to presence, the content and the interactivity of the Web, and we have estimated these indexes by a content analysis of the city council's websites. We find that the use of Web 2.0 tools has an essentially ornamental focus, and thus it is necessary to increase the content disclosed, especially at the …
Four aspects of politics in Max Weber’s Politik als Beruf
2019
The article offers a rereading of Weber’s Politik als Beruf as a conceptualisation of politics contingent and controversial activity in terms of the four aspects of politics: politicisation, polity, politicking and policy. Weber discusses politics as a concept abstracted from its content. All four aspects can be found in his exposition of the concept. Weber mentions first policy as the direction of politics and demarcates his focus on the state-type polities. Then, he presents the formula on politics as striving for power, consisting of chances to politicise its distinct shares, and discusses historical types of professional politicians and their styles of politicking. Weber illustrates th…
More Choice for Better Choosers: Political Freedom, Autonomy, and Happiness
2016
A substantial literature finds that freedom in the sense of an expanded opportunity set is positively related to happiness. A contrasting literature, however, finds that an excess of choice can have socially undesirable outcomes. We test the effect of two types of freedom—autonomy and political—on happiness using five waves of World Values Survey data (1981–2008). We find evidence supporting the claim that equipping people with the tools to direct the course of their lives (i.e. increasing autonomy freedom) incentivizes the desire to investigate alternatives (e.g. political parties) before making a decision. The effect of freedoms on happiness is diminished in contexts where individuals hav…
Social Inequalities in French Secondary Schools : From Figures to Theories
1996
In spite of the unified type of junior secondary school (the "college") implemented in France since 1975, significant social inequalities of school careers can be observed today. A specific longitudinal study sheds some light on the variety of mechanisms which generate these social inequalities. Difference in academic progress is one mechanism, but parents' strategies are also important. Finally, another aspect of social inequality arises from the school attended, some schools being more selective at the streaming points, these "school effects' being related to the social characteristics of the pupils of the catchment area. All these facts and figures have some relevance with regard to diff…
Does cultural policy matter? Political orientations, cultural management models, and the results of public cultural action in Barcelona and Valencia
2020
Since the beginning of the 20th century, analyses of local cultural policies have sought to highlight their instrumentalisation in projects for urban renewal and/or city branding. In general, the s...
Common Core in Danger? Personalized Information and the Fragmentation of the Public Agenda
2021
The diversification of information sources has reignited the controversy on media-induced fragmentation endangering social integration. The media's capability to set the public agenda and create issues as a common core is a pivotal part of the public sphere and contributes fundamentally to society's cohesion. Algorithm-driven sources like social media that personalize content to the preferences of individuals and their social networks are considered agents of fragmentation of the public sphere. Politically extreme individuals relying on them may be particularly vulnerable to losing touch with society's common core. We employ an innovative operationalization of fragmentation on the individu…