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Studies on agility in the workplace have focused excessively on technical factors, and little attention has been given to the workforce. Most studies on workforce agility are conceptual and have a notable absence of quantitative modelling and analysis. In the study, a theoretical model of the impact of two organisational characteristics, namely organisational learning and an organic structure (with three dimensions, which are decentralisation of decision-making, low formalisation and a flat structure), on workforce agility was developed and empirically tested. Several small- and medium-sized enterprises in Iran were investigated. The structural equation modelling showed that organisational learning and only the decentralisation of decision-making and a flat structure were positively and significantly correlated with workforce agility. The impact of the dimensions of an organic structure on organisational learning was also considered. Based on the results, we proposed a process model on workforce agility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The interdependence of national economies implies externalities in policy making, and these externalities lead to inefficient outcomes when policy makers are decentralized and independent. These externalities have been well documented from a theoretical point of view. This paper reports our attempts to discover when and if policy coordination matters, using the Liverpool World Model, which exhibits strong spillover effects for monetary policy and would therefore, we thought, yield very different results from those of earlier researchers. However, strong spillover effects do not guarantee that cooperative policies will differ much from the uncooperative; other aspects of the game's structure can be equally important. Indeed, we found many plausible game situations in which the uncooperative and cooperative solutions are so close together as to be operationally indistinguishable, given the precision with which central banks seem to be able to control their money supplies. We also found situations in which coordination makes a big difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management structures of public bodies responsible for supporting and funding research came under scrutiny after the publication of the science White Paper in 1993. The corporate organization of the Medical Research Council is described and discussed. Exploratory research in the MRC's 'ad personam' research units, examining centre/locality relations is reported; and the case is made for a decentralizing model, and the separation of the organization's 'funding' and 'performing' elements. Pressures for change, to deliver accountability, and to reflect the growth of organizational distinction between 'purchasers' and 'providers' elsewhere in public services—from which this public service area seems currently immune—are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purchasing department is now considered by many firms to be a vital link to the success of a firm because of its greater role in managing the supply chain. Therefore, critical to the ongoing viability of the firm is good purchasing performance. Certain, less controllable factors act as constraints on a purchasing organization, including the external environment, technology and the size of the firm. In addition, certain dimensions of organizational structure determine the performance of the firm and the purchasing function. These dimensions include centralization, formalization and organizational size. Based on the existing literature, there appear to be significant relationships between centralization and formalization, and centralization and job specialization, in addition, the research suggests that formalization is positively related to performance; structure is but one element that affects performance; and performance is positively related to a department's reward/measurement system. This paper develops a conceptual framework to examine the dependent relationship between purchasing performance, the structure of the purchasing unit, and environmental influences using literature from sociology, organizational behaviour and marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper treats the relationships between dimensions of size, technology and selected aspects of organizational structure in contractor firms operating in Turkey. It is proposed that the larger the organization, and the more advanced the technology employed, the higher the level of formalization, the higher the level of standardization, the higher the level of functional specialization and the lower the level of centralization. The data collected supported these propositions, except for the proposition about centralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highly skilled human capital is usually also highly mobile. Concerns regarding interregional migration revolve around suboptimal public financing of higher education rooted in free-riding behaviour if budget responsibilities are decentralized. This investigation sets out to answer whether cross-state mobility of students in general and individual taste variation in the preference for 'home' and 'university' states in particular justify concerns about the free-riding behaviour of state governments. We analyse graduates' location choices when leaving university using a mixed logit model and subsequently relate the revealed taste variation to individual characteristics. The results suggest some attachment to 'home' states that justify concerns about potential free-riding. However, substantial taste variation exists and is partly associated with the quality of human capital. State governments free-riding on the investment of others therefore may face a quality trade-off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

District Health Management Teams (DHMTs) are often entry points for the implementation of health interventions. Insight into decision-making and power relationships at district level could assist DHMTs to make better use of their decision space. This study explored how district-level health system decision-making is shaped by power dynamics in different decentralised contexts in Ghana, Malawi and Uganda. In-depth interviews took place with national- and district-level stakeholders. To unravel how power dynamics influence decision-making, the Arts and Van Tatenhove (2004) framework was applied. In Ghana and Malawi, the national-level Ministry of Health substantially influenced district-level decision-making, because of dispositional power based on financial resources and hierarchy. In Uganda and Malawi, devolution led to decision-making being strongly influenced by relational power, in the form of politics, particularly by district-level political bodies. Structural power based on societal structures was less visible, however, the origin, ethnicity or gender of decision-makers could make them more or less credible, thereby influencing distribution of power. As a result of these different power dynamics, DHMTs experienced a narrow decision space and expressed feelings of disempowerment. DHMTs' decision-making power can be expanded through using their unique insights into the health realities of their districts and through joint collaborations with political bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The desire to grow a tax base often compels local governments to compete and cooperate simultaneously with nearby jurisdictions. Managing interjurisdictional relations is an important role of administrative officers. While scholars have expressed concern about the dominance of masculine imagery and the underrepresentation of women in public administration, gender's role in interjurisdictional relations has received little attention. This study compared perceptions of interjurisdictional competition and cooperation among US. city and county administrators. The main results suggest that men and women have similar perceptions of competition and cooperation. Moreover, perceptions of whether competition comes from nearby or distant jurisdictions also does not appear to vary by gender. Rather than being influenced by individual identities, perceptions varied based on institutional characteristics, such as the extent of local responsibility over economic development planning, the number of organizations that participate in the planning process, and fiscal decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The VW diesel emissions scandal ("dieselgate") recounts how Volkswagen became ensnared in a self-inflicted and staggeringly costly cheating scandal that started in the U.S. and then spread to the European Union. This case study shows how fundamental differences in comparative public administration (CPA) between the U.S. and the European Union (EU) led to different consequences for one of the world's largest and most highly-regarded European auto manufacturers with respect to four institutional variables: (a) approaches to decentralization, (b) the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), (c) civil (tort) law, and (d) regulatory environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a short period of transition to democracy, Greece joined EC in 1981, in spite of its obvious misfit. Europeanization exercised strong adaptation pressure. Being one of the most centralist countries in Europe, Greece introduced decentralization reforms as part of a wider democratization endeavour. New policy fields were introduced and the domestic governance system became more complex and inclusive, especially through the introduction of the regional meso-level, even though the primacy of central government was not really challenged. Europeanization changed the structure of constraints and opportunities, the orientation, the beliefs and the priorities of actors. The EU became an important frame both for rescaling various interests as well as for the transformation of public administration. The crisis marked the shift from adaptation to conditionality and the revival of centralization and exclusive intra-state politics, while at the same time the central government is accountable for policy implementation to supra-national institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Netherlands is traditionally considered a decentralized unitary state. Recent decentralization of responsibilities from the national to the local level and scaling-up of authority from the local to the city-regional level, accompanied by continuing transfer of tasks to the European Union level, have changed the face of the Dutch state. This article investigates a key question that these developments evoke: what factors, at the national and possibly European levels, drive subnational mobilization and reconfiguration of central-local relations in the case of the Dutch decentralized unitary state? It explores the particular process by which rescaling is taking place in the Netherlands, with 'the region' gaining in importance, as well as the specific combination of historical-institutional and situational-functional factors that – alongside the role of political actors – are driving this process. Updating and complementing previous studies on the Dutch case, the article suggests that these factors of a mainly domestic nature have played a crucial role in the foreground, while 'Europe', as a force of change with regard to subnational mobilization and reconfiguration of central-local relations, has played a background role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1978 reforms, China has experienced rapid economic and social development. GDP growth has been in the double digits on average yearly, creating the fastest sustained economic growth recorded by a major economy in history. Not only did this transform the economy and society at large, China reached important milestones in terms of reducing poverty and creating prosperity in a short period of time. This article uses the conceptual framework of new institutional economics to examine China's economic growth and how growth has been achieved largely by 'informal institutions' that are grounded in culture, customs, and private interactions that emerge spontaneously. The trajectory by which these informal institutions left their imprint on China's complex economic landscape and how they can constrain future economic growth are also of central importance. After examining decentralization and risk management practices, property rights, and the legal system, we emphasize the importance of creating formal institutions necessary for long-term growth, most importantly innovation. Preliminary evidence shows total factor productivity is tapering off which may reflect the constraints of China's institutional environment. This ought to be reversed if China is to enjoy long-term sustained growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite state resilience and the waning of the 'Europe of the Regions', European integration persists in affecting subnational actors. Subnational actors have maintained lobbying offices in Brussels to access European Union institutions while others have continued to organize around regionalist parties in the European Parliament. This study explores whether and how EU membership has influenced decentralization. I argue that states exposed to Europeanization, candidates and members of the EU, decentralize more compared to non-EU states. Quantitative tests using recent data on regional authority and three case studies of France, Poland, and Spain provide support for this argument. This article contributes to the research on Europeanization and multilevel governance by focusing on state-level motivations for decentralization. This study's findings allude to the need of examining how other facets of European integration affect subnational actors and investigating variations in decentralization between EU member-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Tanzania only an estimated one-quarter of births are registered and certified. Birth registration uses a centralized system with geographic and cost barriers for families. A pilot decentralized birth registration system has been trialled in 11 of 26 regions, substantially increasing registration points, and enabling notification, registration and certification to occur in one step. This study compares completeness of birth registration and certification and achievement of key birth registration milestones in two districts where the birth registration system decentralized and two districts with the existing centralized system. Registration, notification, census and survey data were used to estimate birth registration completeness and quantify achievement of key registration milestones for births in 2012–16. These were compared between districts of Mbozi (decentralized in 2013) and Iringa (decentralized in 2016) and districts of Dodoma and Kibaha which remained centralized. For births that occurred from 2012 to 2016, completeness of birth registration/certification (by early 2017) was higher in districts that decentralized (Iringa 60%; Mbozi 52%) than remained centralized (Kibaha 36%; Dodoma 20%). Introduction of the decentralized system saw completeness for births registered within 12 months of occurrence increase in Iringa from 1% in 2014 to 67% in 2016, and in Mbozi from 15% in 2012 to 36% in 2013 before falling and subsequently increasing to 53% in 2016. In contrast, completeness in centralized districts did not increase. Although a higher proportion of births are notified in centralized than decentralized districts, registration and certification occurs for all notified births in decentralized districts but only one-third in centralized districts. Benefits of a decentralized system are more proximate registration points and the merging of notification, registration and certification steps. The findings, while demonstrating the immediate impact of the decentralized system on completeness, also show that continued efforts are necessary to sustain these improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare services face a dual challenge of being accessible as well as affordable. Making health centres available at remote locations increases the accessibility of the service but results in low utilization of resources, which eventually results in higher cost of service. This study proposes a middle-path approach in which some components of services are available at the central facility only, while the others are available at central as well as remote locations. The study proposes and uses a Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) approach to determine which component should be kept at the central facility. To elaborate the method, a case study approach using a diabetes management as a case organization was used. Taking a utility score of 0.5 as the cut-off point, the study concludes that Hospitalization, Neuropathy detection, Pathology, and Medicine (Pharmacy) should be kept at the central facility only. The study is first of its kind and provides an objective approach for decentralization in the case of healthcare services using the utility of the service components for a policy-maker as the criteria of selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agility is the performance measure of agile manufacturing (AM) practices and with the increasing adoption of AM systems its assessment has gained in importance. This study has been undertaken to fill the observed research gap that no research has been attempted to validate an agility assessment result using an alternative effective method. The agility assessment of an Indian electric automotive car manufacturing organisation has been done using a scoring approach and validated using an effective multi-grade fuzzy method. The result indicates that the organisation was agile to an extent of 84.1% using the scoring approach and 7.05 using the multi-grade fuzzy method, which implies the organisation is agile. The gap analysis results indicate that the largest gap is observed in the case of ‘nature of management’ criterion followed by ‘devolution of authority’, ‘customer response adoption’ and ‘employee involvement’. Necessary actions were taken for the improvement of these agility gaps. The improvement in agile performance measures is 7.7 to 9.7 (on a Likert scale of range 0–10) after the implementation of the suggested proposals. The statistical validation study indicates the feasibility of improvement in agility after the assessment exercise with a practical success rate of 90%. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this research is to study the performance of a newly developed decentralised conflict and error detection and prediction model (CEDPM) over different networks. In the CEDPM, conflict and error (CE) detection and prediction agents are deployed at each collaborative unit to detect and predict CEs, and exchange information with the support of a CE detection and prediction protocol. Two metrics, detection and prediction time and conflict severity, are defined to evaluate CEDPM and CE propagation, respectively, for linear, divergence, convergence, and parallel coordination networks in which different task dependences exist among collaborative units. Experiment results show that the CEDPM performs significantly better for networks with parallel activities. The conflict severity reflects network complexity and increases as the dependence between collaborative units increases. The findings are useful for the design of emerging prognostics systems-of-systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does "self-governance" happen in Wikipedia? Through in-depth interviews with 20 individuals who have held a variety of responsibilities in the English-language Wikipedia, we obtained rich descriptions of how various forces produce and regulate social structures on the site. Although Wikipedia is sometimes portrayed as lacking oversight, our analysis describes Wikipedia as an organization with highly refined policies, norms, and a technological architecture that supports organizational ideals of consensus building and discussion. We describe how governance on the site is becoming increasingly decentralized as the community grows and how this is predicted by theories of commons-based governance developed in offline contexts. We also briefly examine local governance structures called WikiProjects through the example of WikiProject Military History, one of the oldest and most prolific projects on the site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-based school governance has been promoted as a popular policy for decentralisation of education around the world. Within this policy, schools are expected to create institutional spaces such as School Management Committees with an assumption of reciprocal relation between school and community. This article questions the simplistic assumption through an ethnographic study of community-school relationship in Nepal. While these relationships may conflict with the kind of reciprocity assumed in school governance policies, we argue that this disjunctured reciprocity, firstly, reflects the gap between policy blueprints and action, and, secondly, reveals the competing logics of community-school relations which remain unacknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decentralization is a term widely used in a variety of contexts, particularly in political science and discourses surrounding the Internet. It is popular today among advocates of blockchain technology. While frequently employed as if it were a technical term, decentralization more reliably appears to operate as a rhetorical strategy that directs attention toward some aspects of a proposed social order and away from others. It is called for far more than it is theorized or consistently defined. This non-specificity has served to draw diverse participants into common political and technological projects. Yet even the most apparently decentralized systems have shown the capacity to produce economically and structurally centralized outcomes. The rhetoric of decentralization thus obscures other aspects of the re-ordering it claims to describe. It steers attention from where concentrations of power are operating, deferring worthwhile debate about how such power should operate. For decentralization to be a reliable concept in formulating future social arrangements and related technologies, it should come with high standards of specificity. It also cannot substitute for anticipating centralization with appropriate mechanisms of accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surprisingly, perhaps, China's flagship Belt and Road Initiative expresses a familiar mix of the security–development nexus and liberal interdependence thesis: Chinese leaders expect economic development and integration will stabilise and secure neighbouring states and improve inter-state relations. However, drawing on the record of China's intensive economic interaction with Myanmar, we argue that the opposite outcome may occur, for two reasons. First, capitalist development is inherently conflict-prone. Second, moreover, China's cross-border economic relations today are shaped by state transformation – the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of party-state apparatuses. Accordingly, economic relations often emerge not from coherent national strategies, but from the uncoordinated, even contradictory, activities of various state and non-state agencies at multiple scales, which may exacerbate capitalist development's conflictual aspects and undermine official policy goals. In the Sino-Myanmar case, the lead Chinese actors creating and managing cross-border economic engagements are sub-national agencies and enterprises based in, or operating through, Yunnan province. The rapacious form of development they have pursued has exacerbated insecurity, helped to reignite ethnic conflict in Myanmar's borderlands, and plunged bilateral relations into crisis. Consequently, the Chinese government has had to change its policy and intervene in Myanmar's domestic affairs to promote peace negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpreting the effects of scale on fund performance, portfolio dynamics and management fees [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global disaster policy frameworks promote decentralization as a prerequisite of good disaster governance. Using 44 interviews, this study contributes to the literature that focuses on disasters and decentralization by investigating three systemic mechanisms that seemingly challenge decentralization of disaster management in Turkey: introduction of oversight systems, resource-allocation failure, and central-local collaboration. The results indicate that these mechanisms are enabled by a combination of political-administrative system characteristics and disaster-induced processes. To better understand how to secure the benefits of decentralization, we should engage with a wide range of disaster management actor perspectives, and integrate research on political-administrative systems and collaborative governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature on urban studies, the size distribution of cities has been attributed to a random growth process where transportation externalities, congestion costs, and capital formation all play a crucial role. However, the classic economics models do not fully capture the impact of political institutions, particularly fiscal decentralization, on urban size distribution and fail to explain the political economy of urban agglomeration. As a major transitional economy, China's economic decentralization, in conjunction with political control, portends a more complex environment for urban agglomeration and offers a new ground to analyze its institutional roots and policy implications. This study employs a panel data analysis of Chinese provinces between 1994 and 2015 and finds a pattern where more decentralized regions (provinces) are associated with stronger dominance of large cities for the whole study period. However, the period between 1994 and 2003 displays a different pattern wherein fiscal decentralization is negatively associated with urban agglomeration. Such phenomena can be attributed to the heated competition among local governments and the absorption of resources by dominant cities under the framework of fiscal decentralization in China, particularly in the recent years. More effective coordination is called upon to mitigate the unintended outcome of fiscal decentralization without proper control in shaping urban hierarchy in China and the findings provide lessons for other developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Task sharing of TTE may improve capacity for heart failure diagnosis and management in patients in remote, low-resource settings but the impact on diagnostic accuracy and patient outcomes has not been studied. Objectives: Determine feasibility and impact of non-expert training in transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) to improve the diagnosis and outcomes of patients with suspected heart failure in Uganda. Methods: This two-part study examined an innovative training program to develop TTE competency among non-experts and used a pre-post design to determine the impact of decentralized TTE. Four of 8 non-experts (50%) passed a three-part training course. The training comprised of distance learning through a web-based curriculum, a 2-day hands-on workshop with cardiologists, and independent practice with remote mentorship. Continuous measures were compared (pre- vs. post-TTE) using t-tests or Wilcoxon rank-sum tests as distributionally appropriate and categorical variables assessed through chi-square testing. Sensitivity and specificity were calculated according to standard methodology comparing diagnosis pre- and post-TTE during phase 2. Results: Performance in the post-training phase showed good agreement with expert categorization (κ = 0.80) with diagnostic concordance in 421 of 454 studies (92.7%). TTE changed the preliminary diagnosis in 81% of patients, showing low specificity of clinical decision-making alone (14.2%; 95% CI 10.1–19.2%). Dilated cardiomyopathy, hypertensive heart disease with preserved systolic function, and right heart failure were the most underdiagnosed conditions prior to TTE while hypertensive heart disease with decreased systolic function was the most over-diagnosed condition. Conclusions: In conclusion, non-expert providers can achieve a high level of proficiency for the categorization of heart failure using handheld TTE in low-resource settings and use of telemedicine and remote mentorship may improve performance and feasibility. The addition of TTE resulted in substantial improvement in etiological specificity. Further study is needed to understand implications of this strategy on healthcare utilization, long-term patient outcomes, and cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Decentralisation of antiretroviral therapy has been implemented to scale up HIV care provision for patients in resource-limited countries. Youth living with HIV demonstrate the poorest care outcomes, compared to other age groups. Objectives: To systematically evaluate evidence on the effects of decentralising facility-based HIV care on care outcomes for youth living with HIV in low- and middle-income countries. Methods: A systematic review was conducted through 12 electronic databases of peer-reviewed articles, conference abstracts, and grey literature; contacting relevant experts; and hand-searching references. Records were included if they were published after 1 January 1996 (advent of triple-drug ART) and reported health outcomes for decentralised and centralised care, separately, or evaluated the effect of decentralised care on care outcomes. Two authors independently screened search results. When age-disaggregated data (10–24 years old) were required for inclusion, we contacted study authors for data abstraction. Implementation fidelity of decentralisation, study quality, and risk of bias was assessed using the TIDieR checklist, CASP checklists, and ROBINS-I tool, respectively. Results: Of 11 potentially eligible studies, two studies from sub-Saharan Africa met inclusion criteria after data disaggregation by age. The studies and abstracted data were insufficiently homogenous in implementation and study design to justify meta-analysis. However, evidence suggests the potential for decentralised care to result in at least equivalent attrition-related outcomes (retention in care and mortality) for youth within decentralised HIV care. Limited sample size and significant selection and allocation bias confound clear, generalisable conclusions for youth living with HIV in resource-limited settings. Conclusions: There is a paucity of evidence for the effects of decentralising HIV care for youth living in resource-limited settings, particularly recent evidence reflective of the current HIV care landscape. Further work is required to rigorously analyse the effects of decentralising HIV care to inform policymakers and care providers, particularly as demand for HIV care in this population grows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the public economics literature expenditure needs, allocative efficiency and spatial dependence of local governments costs have been widely analysed separately implying bias estimations of the expenditure needs at local level. An original procedure that simultaneously takes into account the standard level of services, the allocative efficiency and the spatial proximity among Municipalities, has been proposed. The estimation strategy has been applied on a very detailed database of more than 4,000 Italian Municipalities for the year 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex event processing (CEP) techniques have been used for business process (BP) monitoring of large organizations with high number of complex BPs and high rates of BP instance generations resulting in high number of monitoring rules and high rates of events. To circumvent the scale limitation of centralized CEP techniques, we present a decentralized CEP mechanism called dBPM that uses both task parallelism by decomposition and distribution of monitoring rules, and data parallelism by partitioning and dispatching of events. We show that dBPM is more scalable than a general distributed CEP mechanism, called VISIRI, by dynamically adapting to workload changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic was characterised by an innovative alliance of governmental and non-governmental actors inspired by a strong progressive tradition in public health. Brazil eventually moved to decentralise HIV/AIDS programmes to its states and cities, a policy endorsed and supported financially by the World Bank as consistent with the mix of public and private elements central to the country’s HIV/AIDS strategy. However, decentralisation has not provided the results anticipated. Through interviews with key informants, government officials and patient advocates as well as observation of treatment sites, we outline how the shift of administration and resources to state and municipal bodies operated in practice. The Bank promoted decentralisation as an uncontroversial technical matter, and its programmatic guidelines implied that the nonprofit sector would be strengthened by it. However, instead of bringing HIV/AIDS policy closer to the grassroots, decentralisation has undermined the country’s early work and opened the door to a rejuvenated epidemic by empowering unsympathetic local elites, marginalising the human rights focus, and removing federal oversight. Its experience holds crucial lessons for developing countries facing similar conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, health systems strengthening (HSS) has become a global health imperative. As an answer to the influence of large-scale initiatives and NGOs, HSS represents a backlash against disease-specific projects and funding. Depicted as a positive evolution, HSS advertises local autonomy, and a turn away from donor-driven agendas. Central to this shift was the hope that ‘vertical’ funding, especially for HIV/AIDS, could be better used to build up the ‘crumbling core’ of health infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa. As part of the change in Mozambique, HIV specialty clinics known as ‘day hospitals’ were decentralised (closed down) nationwide. Done in the name of efficiency and increased treatment coverage, the full impacts of this remain uncharted. In this article, I critique the ethical adequacy of HSS as a reorganising principle, pointing out the pursuit not of robust health systems, but of easily monitored ones instead. Occurring alongside performance-based financing, HSS invites the removal of specialty services, exposing health systems to additional shaping by outside forces. Based on ethnography with HIV support groups, I suggest HSS was an inevitable policy choice, but partially coercive. Such changes are neither counter-hegemonic nor capable of ameliorating foreign distortions in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study an attempt has been made to solve a problematic phenomenon regarding how a decentralised environment mediates the effect on supply chain performance (SCP) - by taking various dimensions of knowledge management (KM) - specifically in the dairy sector of Lahore, Pakistan. This study also explores the relationship between KM practices and SCP in the presence of a general system theory; the theory claims that every system is has sub-parts, and every sub-part is surrounded by other sub-parts. Decentralisation has a mediating role which influences the relationship between KM practices and SCP in the dairy sector of Pakistan. A self-administered questionnaire was developed, and data were collected through a random sampling of 355 supply chain members of different dairy organisations in central Punjab. The data was analysed by AMOS software and through structure equation modelling (SEM). The underlying study reveals that the hypothesis is accepted, that decentralisation mediates the relationship between KM practices and SCP at a 1% level of significance; it also reveals that KM practices (with the exceptions of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing) have a direct relationship with SCP. Meanwhile, statistical analysis also indicates that KM practices (with the exception of knowledge creation) have a significant positive relationship with decentralisation at the 1% significance level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the competitive and economic implications of information technology, the allocation of decision nights, and task bundling during business process reengineering. The popular reengineering literature advocates employee empowerment-decentralizing decision authority and consolidating tasks as complementary strategies. Our analysis reveals, however, that implementing these two changes simultaneously is suboptimal in many cases. Decentralization and consolidation decisions can occur separately or together; the optimal combination depends on the effectiveness of technology aimed at skill enhancement and the customers' sensitivity to time and quality. We identify those process parameters that can cause decentralization and consolidation to have opposite effects on process performance; we also point to other parameters, such as customer-to-customer variability, which can cause them to complement one another. Finally, we explain why, in a time-based competitive marketplace, firms are more likely to centralize their decision-making process while concentrating their information technology investments on enhancing productivity and intraorganizational communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, little research has been directed at the management infrastructure for end-user computing (EUC) from an organization design perspective. This study reports on the testing of a previously published contingency model in which two different structural forms are modeled for four states of EUC implementation: (1) an organic design (characterized by a decentralized, highly participatory form of decision making with loose controls), and (2) a mechanistic design (characterized by centralized decision making with a more tightly controlled form of management). Based on questionnaire data from 63 companies, statistical support is found for only the two states of EUC implementation for which a mechanistic design is modeled. Although only moderate support for this contingency model is found, the results of this study provide additional evidence for the effectiveness of a more controlled approach to EUC management under a low EUC growth objective at an early stage of implementation. This finding has important implications for other EUC management models and organization design options for assimilating new information technologies in general. The article concludes with recommendations for future empirical research, including a revised contingency model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increasing pervasiveness of telecommunications technologies, very few studies have holistically attempted to examine their use in organizational contexts. This study approaches the use of these technologies from an innovation perspective. Literature on innovation is synthesized into a testable model and the results of a senior IS executive survey of 154 organizations is reported. Factors that enable initiation, adoption, and implementation of a set of 15 distinct telecommunications technologies are examined. Two factors in particular, environmental uncertainty and decentralization of decision making, show significant relationships with the usage of these technologies. The results provide useful insights into the usage of individual technologies and the contextual factors that enable diffusion of this important set of technologies in U.S. organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central challenge for local skills strategies is whether they can contribute to 'inclusive growth' including more and better jobs across a local economy. Skills strategies, it has been argued, must go beyond simply boosting skills supply and be integrated with policies that shape employer demand for, and utilisation of, skills, including economic development and business improvement. Among developed countries, this is particularly challenging for neo-liberal economies, with weakly regulated labour markets where many firms compete through low wages and low-skill job design. How much progress can be made locally is unclear. The article focuses on England, a highly centralised neo-liberal economy, with high levels of low-wage work and over-qualification. Since 2010, UK governments have promised to empower local communities to drive growth, reforming the infrastructure for sub-national economic development and localising elements of skills policy, as part of a devolution agenda for England set in the context of austerity. There are important questions around how local actors understand the 'skills problem' and whether they can evolve integrative approaches that might contribute to inclusive growth. Drawing upon qualitative research with local actors in the Midlands, the article explores their assumptive worlds in order to shed light on opportunities and constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of decentralization has attracted the attention of scholars and policy makers alike for number of decades. Yet, there still remains a significant amount of confusion over its measurement and its contribution to an economy. Current literature on decentralization is characterized by the multitude of conflicting definitions and measurement instruments. Current literature on the relationship of decentralization and economic growth is also mixed. This article builds on the existing literature and develops a decentralization index that includes its most frequently mentioned dimensions. We find that our newly developed index captures decentralization concept better than other tools and that there is no significant relationship between decentralization and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does regional decentralization threaten the commitment to regional equality in government outcomes and outputs? We attempt to shed a light on this question by drawing on unique evidence from the largest European unitary states to have engaged in countrywide health system decentralization: Italy and Spain. We estimate, decompose and run a counterfactual analysis of regional inequality in government output (health expenditure per capita) and outcome (health system satisfaction) during the expansion of healthcare decentralization in both countries. We find no evidence of an increase in regional inequalities in outcomes and outputs in the examined period. Inequalities are accounted for by differences in health system design and management by regional governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Water scarcity and floods caused by the effects of climate variability have been alarming and victimizing many people and alerting the authorities around the world, which has been promoting investments in the area. Nowadays, it is a global consensus that the best alternative for water resources management is the integrated approach, which combines several areas of knowledge and political organization levels for the maintenance of adequate quantity and quality of water. Therefore, the article presents an analysis of the main Brazilian watershed plans as a tool for integrated water resources management (IWRM), in comparison to selected plans from basins located in Portugal and the United States. A multicriteria analysis was performed to compare all the plans according to their completeness and quality of content. One of the greatest difficulties related to watershed plans and implementation of IWRM is the challenge of achieving the best planning strategies, elaboration and implementation. Brazil has elaborated strategies oriented to approach the challenges of water by regions, decentralization through user participation and organisms at a basin level such as the basin committees. The water concession and cost sharing based on the user-pay principle are also progressive approaches already used in Brazilian territory. In general, it was noted a superficial method of elaborating watershed plans in Brazil and the interference of political interests has been representing a problem to the quality and impartiality of the plans. On the other hand, the Portuguese and North American studied basin plans presented more descriptive characterizations. However, success of plans is more likely to be determined after applying and obtaining results regarding the qualitative and quantitative aspects of water, as well as other improvements set for the river basin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increasingly, health communication scholars are attending to how hospital built environments shape communication, patient care processes, and patient outcomes. This multimethod study was conducted on two floors of a newly designed urban hospital. Nine focus groups interviews were conducted with 35 health care professionals from 10 provider groups. Seven of the groups were homogeneous by profession or level: nursing (three groups), nurse managers (two groups), and one group each of nurse care technicians ("techs") and physicians. Two mixed groups were comprised of staff from pharmacy, occupational therapy, patient care facilitators, physical therapy, social work, and pastoral care. Systematic qualitative analysis was conducted using a conceptual framework based on systems theory and prior health care design and communication research. Additionally, quantitative modeling was employed to assess walking distances in two different hospital designs. Results indicate nurses walked significantly more in the new hospital environment. Qualitative analysis revealed three insights developed in relationship to system structures, processes, and outcomes. First, decentralized nurse stations changed system interdependencies by reducing nurse-tonurse interactions and teamwork while heightening nurse interdependencies and teamwork with other health care occupations. Second, many nursing-related processes remained centralized while nurse stations were decentralized, creating systems-based problems for nursing care. Third, nursing communities of practices were adversely affected by the new design. Implications of this study suggest that nurse station design shapes communication, patient care processes, and patient outcomes. Further, it is important to understand how the built environment, often treated as invisible in communication research, is crucial to understanding communication within complex health care systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political evolution of Kampala under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) has profoundly affected the fortunes of the city’s street vendors. This article examines the effects of institutional changes brought about by the NRM’s efforts to monopolize power in the city, arguing that the twin forces of democratization and decentralization allowed street vending to flourish while the reversal of these processes precipitated its dramatic decline. Democratization and decentralization initiated a period of intense political competition in which vendors could trade political support for protection from politicians who were more interested in political survival than the implementation of policy. This ability was lost when the central government introduced a new city government that shifted the balance of power from elected politicians to appointed technocrats. The new city government has since sought legitimacy through development and urban management initiatives that aim to transform Kampala into a supposedly modern, well-organized city. In doing so, it has sought to eradicate street vending, a practice it sees as the antithesis of and an obstacle to its ambitions. Lacking the channels for political influence that they previously enjoyed, street vendors have been forced to face the full brunt of government repression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Assessments of sub-Saharan African decentralization processes often overlook change experienced and facilitated by technical institutions operating in recipient countries on behalf of major donor interventions. This change affects public service delivery at different government levels and the decentralization-oriented exchanges between those levels. This article examines these institutions as well as the change they experience and facilitate. It does so from the perspective of program implementing units (PIUs) contracted by donors to support technical public service delivery. The selected PIU cases are those contracted by the Tanzanian operations of the American President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR Tanzania played an instrumental role in the national health sector’s HIV/AIDS policy shift from a focus on prevention of and care for those with the virus to the adoption and implementation of a national treatment policy. Complicating treatment in Tanzania were expectations for homogenous national distribution of HIV/AIDS requiring extensive, consistent service support at every point of care. The government’s decentralization strategy introduced the PIUs as core HIV/AIDS service institutions. The PIUs’ resulting position in decentralization structures facilitated their own institutional change as well as change in relevant decentralization stakeholders’ exchanges that altered the government’s decentralization-by-devolution strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As an emerging media platform, social broadcasting technologies provide users with a decentralized environment for producing and consuming information. This study develops a motivational model based on the cognitive and affective involvements of individuals to explore their intentions to share marketer-generated content (MGC). The model was empirically tested on 481 Sina Weibo users in a scenario-based environment. Results show that ad intrusiveness, anticipated rewards, category brand relevance, and brand attitude play important roles in facilitating cognitive and affective involvements. In turn, both types of involvement positively influence the intention of users to share MGC, but affective involvement yields a greater influence. Product types significantly moderate the relationship between the cognitive involvement of users and their intention to share MGC. Implications for research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Responsibility for immunisation in Nigeria is decentralised to sub-national governments. So far, they have failed to achieve optimal coverage for their populations. We evaluated a pilot intervention implemented between 2013 and 2014 to redesign a vaccine supply chain management system in Kano, Nigeria. The intervention included financing immunisation services from a designated pool of government and donor funds, a visibility tool to track vaccine stock, and a private vendor engaged to deliver vaccines directly to health facilities. The number of local government areas within the state with adequate vaccine stock increased from 21% to 98% after 10 months. To understand how the intervention achieved this outcome, we analysed immunisation coverage for the period and interviewed 18 respondents across different levels of government. We found that the intervention worked by improving ownership and accountability for immunisation by sub-national governments and their capacity for generating resources and management (of data and the supply chain). While the intervention focused on improving immunisation coverage, we identified gaps in the demand for services. Efforts to improve immunisation coverage and vaccine supply systems should streamline decentralised structures, empower sub-national governments with financial and technical capacity, and promote strategies to improve the demand and use of services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on political memoirs as an important source, the article deals with the ruling party and governance in the Arab republics, whether they had a one-party system such as Iraq and Syria, or a multi-party system such as Egypt and Tunisia. However, one country among the republics, Libya, annulled political parties and parliament and created its own unique system of governance. Through memoirs of party members, parliamentary opponents, and ministers, the article analyses the substantial role of the ruling parties in perpetuating the regimes. While the triangular relationship between the leadership, the party, and the bureaucracy differed from one republic to another, the overall structure of governance did not vary widely, except in the case of Libya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A shift in manufacturing paradigms from centralised to decentralised IT architectures has seen the advancement of cyber physical manufacturing systems towards more interoperable ecosystems with service-oriented architecture (SOA) through ubiquitous and cloud technology. Sociologically decentralised interoperability between systems enables collaboration for local goal satisfaction and global system operation, where synergies can be created by parallel computation and interaction. Economically, SOA technology promotes dynamic reconfigurability, providing manufacturers quick responsiveness to market changes and disturbances, and ultimately enabling enterprises to stay competitive in the marketplace. This reconfigurable nature in decentralised systems is paramount, as entities are no longer bound by strict proprietary peer-to-peer interactive relationships, as data is freely replicable and dispersible throughout a network. Subsequently, from reconfigurability comes the flexibility to provide for environment change, promote system extensibility and allow for the incorporation of legacy technology and the integration of future technology. The focus of this research is to capture the state-of-the-art in field-level SOA approaches in the context of enabling a foundation for ubiquitous and cloud enterprise for manufacturing. The reviewed systems include; the industrial standard OLE for process control–unified architecture (OPC-UA), the emergent universal factory floor communication protocol MTConnect, the National Instrument Shared Variable Engine (SVE) and the data interoperability specification DPWS. The aim of this work is to provide an introduction to SOA systems, modelling techniques and enterprise integration; to provide a comparative topological review of the different field-level manufacturing SOAs; and outline state-of-the-art developments in manufacturing SOA research, contextualised under ubiquitous and cloud enterprise for manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2013, more than seventy per cent of Norwegian reception centres for asylum seekers were decentralized or partly decentralized, meaning that the residents lived in ordinary homes dispersed around the town or local area, instead of in a centralized institution. The article presents results from a research project aiming to document and identify how localization, type of buildings and housing quality of asylum centres influence the asylum seekers’ well-being. The main focus of the article is on decentralized asylum centres. The results are based on qualitative case studies of seven selected centres. The housing standard in the case studies varied, but there was generally a lack of maintenance of the buildings. Even if decentralized accommodation was seen as improving the well-being of the residents, empowering them, making them more independent and reducing conflicts, there is a danger that poor housing quality turns it into a symbol of outsidedness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Global work–life initiatives present unique challenges for HR departments in multinational enterprises (MNEs) because of the complexity of implementing policies that require sensitivity to local issues such as cultural traditions and legislation. A tension-centered approach to analyzing these complexities, not utilized in previous research on the topic, is applied here. Three generic sources of tensions are developed: strategic/policy versus operational considerations, centralization versus decentralization and contextual/institutional versus organizational demands. Earlier research yields four potential responses to tensions: opposition, spatial separation, temporal separation and synthesis, with a fifth option added for no recognition of tension. The framework is applied to global work–life initiatives using data from 27 qualitative interviews with regional and global HR managers employed by 13 MNEs. There is evidence supporting the prevalence of each of the three generic sources of and five responses to tension, and of overlap across categories and responses. For managers, the analysis provides useful insights for constructing global work–life initiatives that are effective and responsive to local conditions. For researchers, the tensions approach yields a relevant tool for analyzing global work–life initiatives. For both, the findings suggest it is important to guard against biases related to Western notions of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Politicians use a variety of expectations to justify the delegation of public services to public, semi-public or private organizations. This article reveals expectations of delegation, as well as its correlates. Empirical evidence is drawn from a systematic review of 250 peer-reviewed articles published in leading public administration journals between 2000 and 2012. This study identifies a discourse with three main categories of justifications: scientists and practitioners expect economic, political, and organizational benefits. The effects associated with delegation are not in line with these expectations. Delegation has inconsistent correlations to outcomes when governments maintain a role in service delivery. Complete privatization is associated with negative outcomes. These results have important implications for the study and practice of delegation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International policy trends are always transformed and translated to fit the political and administrative systems in which they are introduced. An international trend of decentralization has resulted in conservation management systems in Sweden and Norway that differ, both in the choice of institutional solution and in the scope of change. This is surprising, as conservation management in the two countries was originally very similar. Nature conservation was managed through hierarchical systems dominated by bureaucratic experts. While Sweden has introduced co-management in a few protected areas only, Norway has devolved powers in all large conservation areas to intermunicipal management boards. Through document studies, we investigate how decentralization interacts with the broader systems of political actors and institutions of which nature conservation is a part. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]