Search results for "public service"
showing 10 items of 76 documents
Strategies for Progress: Looking for Firm Ground
2015
Over the last thirty years, there have been various and increasing efforts made to establish effective and consistent public service interpreting and translation. Good progress has been made but there are impasses. This paper attempts to stand back and look objectively at where, and more importantly how, we might proceed from here. This could be said to be a turning point for legal interpreting for two reasons. Firstly, enough time has elapsed for us to copy our scientific colleagues, who view the process of exploring and eliminating unsatisfactory approaches overtly, so that what does not work is recognised and discarded. Secondly, this process of exploration has enabled us to clarify and …
Conflict management in massive polylogues: A case study from YouTube
2014
Abstract The aim of this paper is to examine how conflict begins, unfolds and ends in a massive, new media polylogue, specifically, a YouTube polylogue. Extant research has looked into how conflict begins, unfolds and/or ends. However, to our knowledge, the models and taxonomies developed so far have not been applied to the analysis of the mediated conflict of massive polylogues. Drawing on the difference between methods of analysis that are natively digital versus those that have been digitized, i.e., they were developed for off-line research and then migrated on-line, one of the goals of this paper is to test whether non-natively digital, extant models and taxonomies, if digitized, would …
Users of home-care services in a Nordic welfare state under marketisation: the rich, the poor and the sick
2017
Stricter access to public services, outsourcing of municipal services and increasing allocation of public funding for the purchase of private services have resulted in a marketisation wave in Finland. In this context of a Nordic welfare state undergoing marketisation, this paper aims to examine the use of Finnish care services among older people and find out who are using these new kinds of private services. How wide is their use and do the users of private care services differ from those who are using public services? How usual is it to mix both public and private care services? The questionnaire survey data set used here was gathered in 2010 among the population aged 75 and over in the ci…
Understanding the Dynamic Effect of Contracting Out on the Delivery of Local Public Services
2015
Máñez J., Pérez-López G., Prior D. and Zafra-Gómez J. L. Understanding the dynamic effect of contracting out on the delivery of local public services, Regional Studies. Contracting out is a mechanism through which the delivery of public services can be made more efficient. However, the process has yielded conflicting results. This paper presents a dynamic, mixed approach, incorporating an intertemporal frontier and a matching technique, to measure the short- and long-term effects of the implementation of contracting out on the efficiency of local public service delivery. The study demonstrates the existence of temporary inefficiency arising from the change in service management when contrac…
The role of public biological resource centers in providing a basic infrastructure for microbial research
2009
Public collections of microorganisms have been established since the late 19th century, and currently 573 service collections are registered at the World Data Center for Microorganisms (www.wdcm.org). All together, they hold more than 1.5 million microorganisms. By implementing guidelines compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), many public service collections evolve into professional ex situ repositories of biodiversity and distribution nodes for known, validated and precisely identified microbial resources and associated information to legitimate end-users. These Biological Resource Centers (BRCs) may be the preferred mechanism for the appropriate exp…
Indicadores compuestos como metodología innovadora en Comunicación. Aplicación para la evaluación de los medios públicos europeos
2020
The currently dominant scientific production model in the field of Communication exhibits an excess of standardization towards mainly empirical work that is overwhelming caried out using quantitative techniques based on simple statistical analyses, in many cases limiting the presentation of results to a reading of the available data. This article presents an innovative proposal in this area, designed as a new form of dissemination and scientific presentation, with the objective of constructing three composite indicators that, when applied to European public service media, will enable the assessment of the perception of their social value, independence, and management efficiency. Another aim…
Three Models of Public Administration Reform and the Legitimacy of Civil Service
2018
Public administration is subject to permanent reforms, adapting its organization, tasks, approach to the needs and ideas of the modern world. At the same time, looking for the elements and forms that legitimize its functioning. Introduced reforms change the role and position of the civil service, affecting its legitimacy. Executive Management Model NPM affects the range of public benefits, and thus, indirectly, acceptance of a new model of public service. NPG model strengthens the position of the citizen in the process of setting public purpose, forces civil service to the negotiations, consensual activities while defining the public interest. In this way, a citizen deciding together with t…
“I take an oath to the state, not the government”: Career Trajectories and Professional Ethics of Ghanaian Public Servants
2014
This chapter explores normative statements and narratives that feature role models or castigate discrimination and patronage. It argues that these ideals and stories create moral boundaries and support an 'esprit de corps' of dedicated public servants. The chapter discusses how such particularist identities are mobilised in the construction of a universalist ethos of public service. It gives an overview of the educational background of the public servants. The chapter discusses their experiences and views with respect to two major themes: firstly, the motivation to join the public service and the factors they identify as determining their own and other public servants' career trajectories; …
Gendered Labor Market (dis)advantages in Nordic Welfare States. Introduction to the Theme of the Special Issue
2021
Gender equality has been named as one of the normative foundations of Nordic wel- fare states. This is reflected in how, year after year, Nordic states rank among the most gender egalitarian countries in the world (see, e.g., World Economic Forum 2020). In Nordic countries, the state has been, and continues to be, a central actor in shaping women’s citizenship, labor market opportunities, and caring roles. Especially publicly funded welfare services and policies that facilitate the reconciliation of work and care have played a major part in advancing women’s labor market participation (see, e.g., Bergquist et al. 1999; Borchorst & Siim 2002; Ellingsæter & Leira 2006; Siim & Stol…
Bad News and Quality Reputation among Users of Public Services
2018
This manuexamines whether the effect of anchoring bias is greater when citizens evaluate the quality of a public service after receiving negative initial information about service performance than after receiving positive information. It also tests whether there are differences in this anchoring bias by comparing formal (report) vs. informal (rumor) communication. Two field experiments were conducted with the participation of passengers of a commuter public train transportation organization (Experiment 1, N = 105) and users of a public university administrative service (Experiment 2, N = 172). The first experiment confirmed the bias produced by the negative initial information, whereas this…