Search results for "centralization"
showing 10 items of 96 documents
University and small and medium enterprises: interdependent systems or monads? A comparison between the italian university systems and the french one
2011
The Bologna process and the Lisbona strategy showed the different national laws the organizational axes around which innovate and harmonize the various European universities. The analysis of the different national reforms of the universities show, however, that the objectives of full employment and economic competitiveness do not appear fulfilled (Charle 2007). The reforms concerned the repartition of the university studies into two cycles, the development of students mobility programs, the promotion of international cooperation programs but, rarely, the construction of a competitive knowledge (Vallauri 2004). Moving from the comparison between the recent university reform realized in Italy…
Local Powers and a Distant State in Rural Central African Republic
1997
‘The State Stops at PK 12’ – i.e. 12 kilometres from the capital, Bangui.The situation described by this statement, often heard in the Central African Republic, seems to conform to the objectives of the currently fashionable policies of decentralisation and structural adjustment – for example, to end ‘too much state’. However, the absence of the state in the rural areas of the CAR is so striking that the position in certain respects has almost reached the level of caricature. It also reflects the more general situation in other parts of the continent where the excesses of a centralised, over-staffed post-colonial regime can coexist perfectly with the pronounced absence in the rural areas of…
The local appropriation of democracy: an analysis of the municipal elections in Parakou, Republic of Benin, 2002–03
2006
Ever since the ‘democratic renewal’ of 1989–90, Benin has been regarded as a model democracy in the African context. The holding of local elections in 2002–03 can be seen as the culmination of this turn to democracy. Donors attach high expectations to decentralisation and local democracy. Based on an empirical analysis of municipal elections in Parakou, the country's third-largest city, the paper tries to gauge whether these expectations have been realised. The paper argues that while multi-party democracy has been instituted under considerable pressure from the outside, the particular form it has taken derives instead from rationales of national and local politics which go back to the late…
Definition and Holders of Key Functions
2015
This chapter takes up the four key functions established in the Solvency II Directive. In this vein, the significance of the key functions is highlighted first. Then follows the analysis of the terms “key function” and “key function holders”, terms undefined in the Solvency II Directive. The next step points out the distinctions among key function holders and their subordinate staff members. A part of this breakdown is to examine in practice who exercises which function in an insurance undertaking. The chapter wraps up by looking at whether key functions are performed in a centralized or decentralized organization.
Shaping the firm's external search strategy
2014
This paper explores the determinants of external knowledge search strategies, specifically, exploitative and exploratory search. The literature emphasizes environmental context and technological resources, especially R&D, as important determinants of the search strategy. In this paper we focus on two types of the firm's formal structure: formalized and decentralized structures. The study uses survey data from the ceramic tile industry in Spain. The results show that a competitive environment and a decentralized organizational structure play a role in shaping the firm's external search strategy, but that R&D has no effect. We find that competition inhibits exploratory search, while a decentr…
Improvisation for innovation: The contingent role of resource and structural factors in explaining innovation capability
2018
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. This paper focuses on resource and structural factors to explore the relationship between organizational improvisation and innovation capability. Although the role of improvisation has attracted increasing academic attention in fast-changing environments, little is known about the conditions under which firms benefit from improvisation. This paper addresses this gap using an organizational learning perspective that explains the role of a firm's organizational structure and organizational resources for improvisation and innovation. A large-scale …
An analysis of ego network communities and temporal a affinity for online social networks
2017
The wide diffusion of Online Social Networks (OSNs) presents several advantages, like the definition of simple tools for information sharing and spreading. However, OSNs present also some drawbacks, one of the most important one is the problem of privacy disclosures. Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs), which decentralize the control of the social network, have been recently proposed to overcome these issues. The decentralization of the control has issued several challenges, one of the main ones is guaranteeing data availability without relying on a central server. To define users’ data allocation strategies, the knowledge of the structure of the ego network and of the user’ temporal…
France: Forces Shaping Centralization and Decentralization in Environmental Policymaking
2007
This book examines how different countries define and address environmental issues, specifically in relation to intergovernmental relations: the creation of institutions, the assignment of powers, and the success of alternative solutions. It also investigates whether a systemic view of the environment has influenced the policy-making process. The broad perspective adopted includes a detailed analysis of seventeen countries in six continents by scholars from a range of disciplines – economics, political science, environmental science and law – thus producing novel material that moves away from the conventional treatment of decentralisation and the environment in economic literature.
Decentralization in Ukraine and Bottom-Up European Integration
2020
Decentralization is one of the most profound reforms undertaken in Ukraine. It includes the voluntary merging of previously independent villages and towns into larger Amalgamated Territorial Communities (ATCs). The European Union strongly supports the reform but does not make Ukraine’s further European integration conditional upon it. In order to study whether decentralization can, nevertheless, contribute to the country’s European integration, this chapter adopts a sociological perspective. It asks whether decentralization has led to an increase in community twinning and participation of Ukrainian communities in transnational municipal networks. It is based on a survey conducted among the …
The Footprints of a “Mastodon”: How a Decentralized Architecture Influences Online Social Relationships
2019
Decentralized online social networks (DOSNs) have recently emerged as a viable solution to preserve the users' privacy and ensure higher users' control over the contents they publish. However, little is known about the backlashes that the decentralized organization and management of these platforms may have on the overlaid social network. This paper fills the gap. Specifically, we investigate how a decentralized architecture based on distributed servers impacts the structure of the users' neighborhood and their ego-networks. Our analysis relies on social data gathered from the decentralized micro-blogging platform Mastodon, the newest and fastest-growing decentralized alternative to Twitter…