Search results for "bureaucracy"
showing 10 items of 56 documents
The bureaucratic making of national culture in North-Western Ghana
2014
In this article I explore the making of national culture through bureaucratic routines in the Centre for National Culture in Wa, North-Western Ghana. I focus on an aspect of bureaucracy that is usually left aside: the productivity and creativity of bureaucratic routines. State, nation and culture are not fixed entities, but have to be constantly produced through processes of negotiation and meaning-making and through the continual reproduction of their boundaries and the categories that determine what is to be promoted or preserved. Bureaucratic routines and administrative processes are analysed as practices objectifying and nationalising culture and naturalising the boundaries and categori…
On the problem of finding a suitable distribution of students to universities in Germany
2009
For many years, the problem of how to distribute students to the various universities in Germany according to the preferences of the students has remained unsolved. Various approaches, like the centralized method to let a central agency organize the distribution to the various universities or the decentralized method to let the students apply directly at their preferred universities, turned out to lead to a significant fraction of frustrated students ending up at universities not being on their preference list or even not having a place to study at all. With our centralized approach, we are able to decrease the fraction of frustrated students as well as the bureaucratic expenses for applica…
Overload of Medical Documentation: A Disincentive for Healthcare Professionals
2020
This review addresses the theories concerning the development and functioning of medical bureaucracy creating an excess of the patient records. An ever-growing number of medical files comply with the typical development of the bureaucratic management of an entrepreneurial organization, an essential feature of which is the life cycle of documentation. When the life cycle ends, an update is created with a multiplication of forms and items to be filled out, resembling that of what happens with the outdated computer program. Yet medical records should have a logical and well-functioning structure using the language of computer science in the form of a cascade or evolutionary model. Further, we …
Dynamics in the Field of Museums: Contemporary Challenges for Polish Museologists
2018
The aim of this text is to present and analyze the attitudes of Polish museologists towards the changes currently taking place in the field of museums. More specifically, it will focus on their opinions regarding the evolution of museums—from the traditional model, based on symbolic violence, to the contemporary model, which accents the subjectivity of the audience. Its conclusions, based on analyses of 26 qualitative interviews with employees of Polish museums, are as follows: the organizational changes taking place in Polish museums do not relieve museologists from bureaucratic work; the collections in museums distinguish them from other institutions of culture; there is a struggle …
Municipal Building Regulations for Energy Efficiency in Southern Italy
2014
The building sector is still one of the most energy consuming sectors in Italy, like developed countries in Europe. At European level, the main policy driver related to the energy use in buildings is the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD, 2002/91/EC) and its recast. Through the EPBD in- troduction, requirements for certification, inspections, training or renovation are now imposed in Member States. In order to fulfill the expected changes, local regulations are a key factor aiming at sustainable territorial planning. It is thus required support the issue of local rules at municipal level in order to guide local administrators and technicians and to limit discretional power of …
Solutions to replace quantity with quality in science.
2012
In their recent letter, Joern Fischer and others [1xAcademia's obsession with quantity. Fischer, J. et al. Trends Ecol. Evol. 2012; 27: 463–474See all References[1] tackled one of the major problems in modern science: the obsession with quantity. Perspicaciously, they showed how targeting for quantity has faded out creativity and reflection from science. Fischer and others ended their letter with the words: ‘Starting with our own university departments (but not stopping there), it is time to take stock of what we are doing. We must recreate spaces for reflection, personal relationships, and depth. More does not equal better.’ Utopian as it may be, we applaud this statement.Unfortunately, Fi…
European Political Science and Global Knowledge
2018
In this chapter, the author maintains that rankings of universities and their social carriers participate in the relatively successful practical realization of the academic standards they seek to codify and of the shaping of reality according to the criteria they promote. In this sense, global university rankings are becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, a prediction that becomes true through positive feedback of varying intensity. They have succeeded in establishing through quantitative objectification certain types of equivalences between scientific excellence and numerical indicators. The reasons for their success are their performative efficiency (‘scientific’, quantitative) and the prac…
The problem of welfare: Is there a welfare civilization?
1990
Abstract Welfare policy is at present increasingly tied both to market forces and to primary social networks. This process splits society into two camps. One‐fifth of the population is segregated from the rest in its dependence on the welfare system, which is in turn dependent on a diminishing portion of the economy and required to rationalize itself in terms of market forces. Meanwhile, the welfare system is making an effort to minimize its social cost by decentralization and by utilizing community ties and lifestyles rather than relying on the professional welfare bureaucracy. This process tends to combine modern forms of production with the meanings and values of traditional society. It …
Causes of Public Expenditure Inefficiency and Proposals for Their Streamlining
2020
The public sector has continually developed, as new needs of the population have been identified and the expectations of the population regarding the quantity and the quality of the provided services have already been rising. Unlike private management, the public administration has not always been concerned with the way results have been achieved, but, particularly with the results themselves, and, as long as these have been satisfying for the population, the resources employed for obtaining the results were of no much concern. The public administration monopoly in the provision of some services has led to the possibility of generating imbalances between the quality of the provided services…
Regional leadership: a systemic view
2012
Published version of an article in the journal: Systemic Practice and Action Research. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11213-012-9268-2 New innovation and industrial policies contribute to the development of an informal economy and have increased collaborative processes across sectors and social spheres within regions. This paper addresses the role of regional leadership in the informal economy. By themselves, network processes increase complexity and create a series of uncertainties that differ from processes that are steered through the hierarchical procedures of public bureaucracy or regulated through the judicial and competitive mechanisms of the market.…