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Widespread neoliberal approaches to education consider schools increasingly accountable for self-management and 'client' recruitment, encapsulating economic ideologies that assume privatisation is essential for social progress. With an ever-shifting landscape of market-driven policies and the increasing growth of private education settings, more research is needed to cast light on emerging or under-researched aspects of autonomous schools. Located within a U.S. state that has strict constraints on tax subsidies for religious K-12 education, this paper investigates how an extensive form of decentralisation corresponds with schools' discipline and ethical environment. It analyses teacher interviews and web documents from faith-based, autonomous schools in a state that has devolved power and authority for decision-making to parents and other independent 'agents', having a distanced relationship with its nonstate 'actors'. The paper follows Foucault's use of the metaphor of the panopticon and adopts his power analysis to examine the nature of parental control and its influence on disciplinary and ethical practices. Evidence suggests that these autonomous schools are driven by a 'mini-public' ideology that constrains educators' autonomy and generates particular disciplinary norms; entangling ethical, educational, and social ramifications, including teacher resistance and teacher demoralisation. Implications for policy are discussed in this context of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the workload and lack of a critical mass of trained operational researchers within their ranks, health systems and programmes may not be able to dedicate sufficient time to conducting operational research (OR). Hence, they may need the technical support of operational researchers from research/academic organisations. Additionally, there is a knowledge gap regarding implementing differentiated tuberculosis (TB) care in programme settings. In this 'how we did it' paper, we share our experience of implementing a differentiated TB care model along with an inbuilt OR component in Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India. This was a health system initiative through a collaboration of the State TB cell with the Indian Council of Medical Research institutes and the World Health Organisation country office in India. The learnings are in the form of eleven tips: four broad principles (OR on priority areas and make it a health system initiative, implement simple and holistic ideas, embed OR within routine programme settings, aim for long-term engagement), four related to strategic planning (big team of investigators, joint leadership, decentralised decision-making, working in advance) and three about implementation planning (conducting pilots, smart use of e-tools and operational research publications at frequent intervals). These may act as a guide for other Indian states, high TB burden countries that want to implement differentiated care, and for operational researchers in providing technical assistance for strengthening implementation and conducting OR in health systems and programmes (TB or other health programmes). Following these tips may increase the chances of i) an enriching engagement, ii) policy/practice change, and iii) sustainable implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the geography of bank lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and tests the argument that large institutions with complex organizational structures are better able to filter 'hard' information than 'soft' information. Mortgage lending is used as a control to illustrate the case of 'hard' and 'soft' information. Using data on individual bank lending to SMEs and mortgages by postcode area in Great Britain for the period 2013(2)–2014(4), the paper explains the spatial dispersion of SME lending in the UK in terms of geographical distance and supports the policy of establishing a geographically decentralized financial system as a counterbalance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the responsibilities and membership of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in England in the light of devolution of employment and skills responsibilities. Through the theoretical lens of 'hollowing out' and a direct comparison with the late-Thatcherite Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) of the 1990s, the paper argues that LEPs represent a fresh, market-driven attempt by the government to alter the institutional framework for meeting local labour market needs through 'local business leadership'. However, through a synthesis of publicly available data across all LEPs, the paper shows that while LEPs assume important strategic and practical roles, their structure, resourcing and sectoral affiliations are poorly aligned for the engagement of local employers. Rather, it is argued, LEPs may be characterised as distant business elites, with only weak connections to local employment and skills priorities. Conclusions are drawn about the implications of distant and elite LEPs boards for future employment and skills policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new consensus has emerged which stipulates that the Eurozone problems are caused by a lack of embeddedness of the euro in proper financial and fiscal unions. This paper reviews the debates on the Eurozone's state of disembeddedness and argues that it is not enough to embed the monetary union in scaled-up financial and fiscal unions. For the euro problems to disappear it needs to be embedded in social Europe. The transfer of policy prerogatives at the supranational level does not make the structure embedded, but the substance of the policy measures. From a Polanyian perspective, the extent of the Eurozone dis/embeddedness depends not on the level of centralization of policymaking, but on the interplay between the two forgotten Polanyian principles: improvement and habitation. This paper tries to assess the extent of dis-embeddedness through these two principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During China's reform era, dominant narratives described a transition away from centralised planning in favour of mutually reinforcing processes of liberalisation and decentralisation. Under Xi Jinping, the talk has increasingly been of the recentralisation of authoritarian-state powers and party discipline. Questioning both reform-era transition narratives and equally simplifying claims about their recent reversal, the paper argues for an enriched treatment of party–state spatiality, understood as a polymorphic and multi-scalar process, rather than simply a more complex one. In the emergent Greater Bay Area megaregion, 'new era' zoning strategies are being repurposed as drivers of pathfinding reforms animated by the party–state, in contrast to received readings of zones as single-purpose instruments of liberalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A manufacturer may encroach on his suppliers by developing substitutable components. In the presence of encroachment, the manufacturer could assemble products using (high-end) components purchased from the supplier, and assemble products using (low-end) components produced in-house. Thus, the manufacturer must deliberate on how to manage the expanded organisation consisting of competing product divisions. In this paper, we examine the quintessential organisational structure decision – the centralisation versus decentralisation choice – from the perspective of the manufacturer. Our model assumes that the supplier is a dominant player, moving first by pricing the high-end component, and consumers have a higher willingness-to-pay of the product containing the high-end component. In such a context, we find that the manufacturer may encroach on the supplier even if producing the low-end component costs more than producing the high-end one. The supplier should strategically price to deter or accommodate downstream encroachment contingent on the manufacturer’s organisational structure decision. If the unit cost of low-end components is high enough, product-based decentralisation is preferred to centralisation due to the supplier’s lower wholesale price. Furthermore, the manufacturer’s strategic decentralisation always hurts the supplier, always benefits the customers and could benefit or hurt the entire supply chain under certain conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream approaches in comparative education have paid more attention to trends in donors' priorities than to policy processes in recipient countries, overlooking the agency of national governments in the institutional configuration of vocational education and training (VET) in developing contexts. Drawing on constructivist political economy and historical institutionalist frameworks, the paper analyses the role played by global development paradigms and ideas in the VET policy reforms adopted in Chile during the period between 1964 and 2005. The study shows how the selective adoption of international development ideas in Chile was mediated by the ideological orientation of national government administrations in each historical period. It also shows how the main goals of VET policies evolved as the economy tertiarised and the demand for education grew among lower social classes. Finally, the paper identifies the military dictatorship as a path-shaping moment in the institutional configuration of VET in Chile, as it was able to impose a radical transformation of the system from central planning to decentralised market competition. This profound transformation generated institutional path-dependencies that restricted the capacity of future democratic governments to reverse the market model in VET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve Sustainable Development Goal 5 for gender equality by 2030, it is crucial for health and development professionals and governmental officials to understand how legal systems empower or oppress populations on the basis of gender worldwide, including opportunities and challenges of statutory provisions created by legal pluralism. Using Ethiopia as a case study, this paper examines how local laws applied in Sharia and Customary Dispute Resolution courts impact gender equality and the health of women and girls inspite of the inculcation of human rights statutes into national legislation, including the Constitution. We identify several key issues with the substantive law and its enforcement. First, laws which have been instituted at the national level to improve gender equally have been poorly enforced at the local level. Second, there is a sustained enforcement of laws that oppress women and that protect male perpetrators of gender-based violations. Third, local courts limit female representation and uphold patriarchy. To improve the health of women and girls, stakeholders must take into consideration the ways in which legal systems uphold harmful gender norms and obstruct and/or advance progress towards equal representation, opportunities, and constitutionally-mandated protections for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing literature on the use of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution. Yet, while this literature focuses mainly on single case studies, there remains a gap in our comparative understanding of the workings of federalism as a tool to end violent conflicts, as well as the conditions under which it may succeed in bringing peace to war-torn countries. By discussing core themes that emerge when looking at single case studies and relevant theories on the use of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution, we highlight the importance of three main issues in our understanding of the workings of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution: (1) The role of centralization, decentralization and recentralization in the management of diversity and to accommodate the demands of different groups; (2) Contestation of the state, identity, the idea of federalism and other key issues in societies, in which ownership over the state is contested and fought over; and (3) Third-party intervention, geopolitics, and geoeconomics in the management of diversity. By bringing together existing debates on the topic of federalism and conflict resolution, and positioning the papers in this special issue within these debates, some of the complexities but also promises of the use of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution will be highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a theoretical framework to study collective social capital at the local scale using social network analysis. To do so, it develops a review on empirical research that found evidence regarding the impact of networks on the performance of cities and regions. Eight network topologies are identified with collective social capital: size and composition, connectivity, closeness, clustering, small world, openness, centralization and heterophily. The paper inquires into the effects of these properties concluding that they influence two aspects that are highly relevant for territorial development: they facilitate the diffusion of information and they foster cooperation among actors. Results help tracing roots among three different academic fields: literature on social capital, local and regional economics, and social network analysis. Furthermore, the article suggests a framework to obtain relevant conclusions regarding political and economic aspects of territorial capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most corporate research has focused on (i) dimensions of governance that are relatively easy to measure (e.g., ownership structure, boards of directors, and executive compensation) and (ii) the role that governance arrangements play in mitigating agency costs. This paper takes an evolutionary perspective to corporate governance in which the concept of corporate agility, i.e., the ease with which firms adapt to changes in their respective environments, plays a prominent role. I argue that decentralization, which is understudied in the literature, promotes agility and predict that it is directly related to corporate performance and survival during periods of rapidly changing environments. The paper also discusses how some governance features that often are viewed through the lens of either mitigating or exacerbating agency costs are cast in a different light when their effects on corporate agility are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments worldwide face the difficult task of how to decentralise fiscal means across regions and cities and it is even more challenging when governments are under pressure, such as some post-communist economies in eastern Europe and Asia. A case in point is Georgia, a diverse Caucasian country with internal pressures from regions with independence tendencies and external pressures from Russia. How Georgia's government decentralises is what we provide new evidence for in this paper using two data sets. First, we use internationally comparable data to evaluate how decentralised the Georgian public finances are. We find that Georgia is in fact one of the least decentralised transition countries and has become less decentralised recently. Second, we use detailed municipality-level data for Georgia to determine the effects of equalisation transfers focused on fiscal decentralisation. We discuss the unequal nature of these transfers and we evaluate three reform proposals for changing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few years, China has made a drastic switch to a more centralized approach to institutional change, thus vastly reducing the decades-old problem of local non-compliance. Using the recent judicial personnel reforms (员额制改革) as a case study, this paper examines the functioning of this new top-down model. Based on field research, the paper finds that the reforms have drastically reduced judge headcounts, placing tremendous burden on those remaining. In addition, they have made it much harder for new recruits to rise to the rank of judge, forcing them to remain as 'judicial assistants' who are not allowed to adjudicate cases independently. These changes have driven many judges to resign and have significantly diminished the appeal of judicial posts to new talent, especially in developed regions where caseloads are heavier and alternative career options more lucrative. Furthermore, such problems have continued to plague the judiciary despite long-standing widespread acknowledgment of them within and outside the judiciary. These developments highlight a critical disadvantage of the new top-down approach: unlike the previous decentralized system, under which powerful local actors could often de facto reject institutional changes they deemed flawed or unsuitable to local circumstances, the new centralized approach provides little effective check against design defects in the center's reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effects of public agency relocation on the growth of local employment. The South Korean government has recently relocated 154 public agencies from the Seoul Metropolitan Area to local cities, called "Innovation Cities." This policy was formulated to foster decentralization and regional development. However, only a few studies have examined the impact of this relocation. The innovation cities seem to be suffering from a lack of innovation, and the effects of decentralization. In this study, we evaluated the effects of relocation by using the synthetic control method and applying panel data gathered from 2006 to 2018. The unit of analysis is the small tier of local authority, and the outcome variable is the number of workers within each regional jurisdiction. To investigate counterfactuals, we determined control groups by selecting specific covariates of local employment. The results show that the increase in local employment was mostly caused by the migration of public agency employees to the destination areas. Spillovers are limited and influenced by regional characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides empirical evidence for the association between fiscal decentralisation and income distribution for a panel of 11 economies from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during 1992-2016. We focus on three research topics: the effect of decentralisation on income inequality; the effects of the structure of subnational government finance on income inequality; and the validity of the Kuznets hypothesis. The main findings from the empirical exercise are as follows: first, we provide firm evidence on the presumed favourable effects of fiscal decentralisation on income distribution in the CEE countries; second, our empirical model suggests that the effects of fiscal decentralisation on income inequality are dependent on the source of finance of subnational governments, i.e. intergovernmental transfers may have a role in income equalisation; third, we cannot confirm the validity of the Kuznets hypothesis in CEE countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the turbulent times facing trophy hunting in Tanzania, East Africa. It reviews the industry’s contentious history, and illustrates the ominous politics that are emerging out of the country’s recent neoliberal schemes, Wildlife Management Areas. Through the decentralisation that comprises WMAs, the rural communities who co-inhabit trophy hunting spaces are finding new ways to limit, resist, and sometimes, eliminate it. As argued in this paper, trophy hunting in Tanzania faces a momentous convergence of aggrieved histories, and neoliberal reforms that shift authority to rural communities. It amounts to turbulent times and what I call, fighting history today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impacts of exogenous government subsidies on recycled material flows in decentralised reverse supply chains where players behave according to their own interests. We present a four-tiered network equilibrium model consisting of the sources of electronic scrap products and the collectors, processors and demand markets. We mathematically transform the players’ optimality conditions governing players’ behaviours into a variational inequality formulation. We investigate the impact of alternate schemes of government subsidies on the equilibrium amount, subsidy effectiveness and subsidy elasticity. The real-world case study shows that subsidising the tier of processors demonstrates the superiority of the investigated performance measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an approximation-based nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) approach for decentralised adaptive tracking of uncertain interconnected pure-feedback nonlinear systems with unmatched time-delayed nonlinear interactions and external disturbances. Compared with the existing approximation-based NDO approach for uncertain interconnected nonlinear systems where the centralised design framework was proposed, the main contribution of this paper is to develop a decentralised and memoryless NDO-based adaptive control scheme in the presence of unknown time-varying delayed interactions and disturbances unmatched in the control inputs. The recursive design methodology is derived to construct the decentralised NDO and controller where the function approximators used in the decentralised NDO are employed to design the decentralised adaptive controller. From the Lyapunov stability theorem using Lyapunov--Krasovskii functionals, it is shown that all signals of the closed-loop system are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded and the tracking errors converge to an adjustable neighbourhood of the origin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Novice principals experience intense work situations and various solutions have been suggested to handle them. This paper explores western Swedish novice principals' attitudes toward support in their leadership. Specific questions addressed are whether the principals believe that two approaches, the so-called heroic and distributed approaches, could improve their job satisfaction, pedagogical leadership and relationships within their schools. The research provides novel contributions as it combines a scenario-based experiment with follow-up interviews to provide new insights regarding school leadership. The results clearly demonstrate that novice principals experience intense working situations. Moreover, they show that the principals significantly favor the heroic leadership approach for promoting job satisfaction and facilitating relational aspects of their work. However, for mitigating the loneliness associated with a leadership role, the principals significantly favor the distributed leadership approach. Thus, the results raise questions about previous suggestions that distributed leadership is a panacea for principals' intense work situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a mixed-method, multiple-site study of teacher deployment in Indonesian primary schools. Results from a sample of 23 districts were analysed at district and national level. Substantial disparities in teacher distribution were found in all districts, between schools, between sub-districts and between specialist subjects. Two main issues emerged: uneven teacher distribution and small schools. The study found that a policy research approach which addresses political and cultural, as well as technical, dimensions at sub-national level can succeed in improving teacher deployment where previous efforts have failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new scheme for the coordination of dynamic, uncapacitated lot-sizing problems in two-party supply chains where parties' local data are private information and no external or central entity is involved. This coordination scheme includes the following actions: At first, the buyer generates a series of different supply proposals using an extension of her local lot-sizing problem. Then the supplier calculates his cost changes that would result from the implementation of the buyer's proposals. Based on these information, parties can identify the best proposal generated. The scheme identifies the system-wide optimum in different settings-for instance in a two-stage supply chain where the supplier's costs for holding a period's demand in inventory exceed his setup costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The administrative reform launched in 2010 ("Kallikratis" programme) in Greece stands out as a major decentralization initiative. Notably, amalgamations at the local level were set at the forefront of the reform. This paper aims at shedding light on the issue of decentralizing governance by examining the implications of the "Kallikratis" reform programme on local authorities in terms of their domestic financial mobilization. Drawing empirical evidence from their implementation in European structural programmes, it is argued that the decentralization effort had an asymmetrical impact on local institutions, favouring principally the small-sized local authorities vis-à-vis the bigger in population local bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many examples of collaborative action research being used to promote school change. Reflecting on evidence gathered as a result of collaborative inquiry led by a teacher in a primary school in Cyprus over a 3-year period, this paper examines what is involved in using such an approach within a centralised education system. In so doing, it exposes the social and political challenges involved, whilst at the same time throwing light on possibilities for overcoming these problems in order to facilitate school-led change. In this context, frequent staff changes presented particular barriers, and recent increases in migration into the country were seen to add further challenges, whilst at the same time opening up new possibilities for stimulating innovations through collaborative action research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We build a model to analyse the benefit of upward channel decentralization for a firm choosing service outsourcing and integration. The key findings of this paper are as follows. First, we formulate an upward channel decentralization problem as a game incorporating consumer behaviour of willingness to pay in a channel duopoly. Our model considers (i) service quality, (ii) consumer marginal willingness to pay (MWTP), and (iii) consumer perceivable difference. A supply chain firm's preference of outsourcing strategy depends on the monotonicity of both the failure rate (or Mills Ratio) and CDF-PDF ratio of MWTP distribution function. Second, we use this model to explore the benefit of retailer strategy of upward channel decentralization. An equilibrium can be achieved by benefiting the low-label product with low quality service but deteriorating the high-label channel product with high quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sustainable, integrated, and representative management of water is one of the main challenges faced by governments worldwide, especially where water resources are not abundant, such as the Ebro River basin in Spain. The Spanish state has granted powers in matters related to water that has adhered river basins. The main objective of this study is to examine the specific case of water management in Catalonia, a region within the Ebro basin, through literature review and interviews conducted with key informants in water organizations operating in Catalonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2004 to 2012, 37 well-preserved Byzantine shipwrecks were discovered during construction of two underground train stations at Yenikapı, Istanbul. Despite its complexity, archaeology is rarely studied through organisational and management lens. This paper investigates the Yenikapı rescue excavations using two innovative analytical frameworks for archaeology – the Heritage Chain and Structure Conduct Performance analysis – which highlight the crucial but too often overlooked role of practices (or emerging strategies) in public policy, helping identifying strengths and weaknesses of the project. In this sense, two elements of the system seem fundamental: its extreme centralisation and its ongoing process of decentralisation. The research, based on a phenomenon-driven approach to management of archaeological and cultural heritage projects, highlights how Turkey's uncertain legal environment for rescue archaeology led to emergent, ad hoc management and funding solutions that mixed state and private involvement in novel ways through a multi-level outsourcing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case study on the implementation of the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan in the Royal Docks, a regeneration project in the East of London. On paper, the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan advances the shift from traditional flood control to flood resilience, because of its long-term horizon, estuary-wide approach, and emphasis on floodplain management. In practice, however, we identify three frictions between vision and reality: a lack of local ownership of the plan, a lack of clear guidance for floodplain management, and limited capacities with local authority. These frictions suggest an ongoing 'public-public divide' in decentralized governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limited information exists on funding models for interprofessional education (IPE) course delivery, even though potential savings from IPE could be gained in healthcare delivery efficiencies and patient safety. Unanticipated economic barriers to implementing an IPE curriculum across programs and schools in University settings can stymie or even end movement toward collaboration and sustainable culture change. Clarity among stakeholders, including institutional leadership, faculty, and students, is necessary to avoid confusion about IPE tuition costs and funds flow, given that IPE involves multiple schools and programs sharing space, time, faculty, and tuition dollars. In this paper, we consider three funding models for IPE: (a) Centralized (b) Blended, and (c) Decentralized. The strengths and challenges associated with each of these models are discussed. Beginning such a discussion will move us toward understanding the return on investment of IPE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper tackles the interoperability problems of enterprise information systems by presenting a distributive model-driven platform for parallel coordination of multiple negotiations in data-intensive collaborative working environments. The proposed model was validated and verified by an industrial application scenario within the European research project H2020 C2NET (Cloud Collaborative Manufacturing Networks). This real scenario developed data-intensive collaborative and cloud-enabled tools that allow the optimisation of the supply network of manufacturing SMEs, proposing a negotiation solution based on a model-driven interoperable decentralised architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the plans for, and outcomes of, police organizational reforms in the Scandinavian countries. The reforms share a number of similarities, among them drastic reductions in the number of police districts, more Governmental oversight, increased reliance on performance indicators, and claims that these reforms are to be understood as decentralizations that will increase police ability to service citizens and meet the demands of local communities. The paper argues that the reforms are primarily to be understood as examples of centralization, and that local policing has suffered as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The deployment of wind power induces deep changes in landscapes and territories. The politicization of wind power generates new ad hoc collectives. In the French case, because of the institutional framing resulting from landscape and wind power policies (centralization, feed-in tariffs, private developers), collectives of emerging wind power landscapes are regularly set apart from wind power planning processes. This paper explores the extent to which these recompositions and new collectives could be part of emerging wind power potentials. The empirical evidence stemming from our case studies shows that wind power technology, like any other technology, is not endowed with a potential per se. Wind power potentials differ - 'capitalistic', 'controversial', 'negotiated', 'conditional' - depending on planning processes and inherited configurations. The notions of striated space and smooth space enable us to adopt a relational perspective on these emerging collectives and to account for the role of inherited sociogeographical configurations and planning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces a decentralized approach to optimizing the flood reduction efficiency of multiple detention reservoirs in urban areas. The flood reduction effects of a detention reservoir system were regionally assessed, and a new model was then created using an optimization technique which involved coupling extraordinary particle swarm optimization with a flood simulation engine, Storm Water Management Model, EPA-SWMM, to identify optimal outlet designs for a detention reservoir system. When applied to the To Lich drainage network (Hanoi, Vietnam) the proposed method outperformed the present design, reducing flooding under the design flood event. The performance of the approach was verified by comparing it with the overall objective function of total flooded volume for different design floods. The better performance of the decentralized optimization approach described here, in terms of local and regional flood management, illustrated its effectiveness for urban flooding reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are a number of arguments for implementing public service Lean in a decentralized fashion, characterized by employee participation and local adaptions of the concept. This paper reports on a longitudinal case study of decentralized Lean implementation in a large Norwegian public service provider. The analysis points to unintended consequence of communication and co-ordination difficulties. The authors suggest ways of striking a reasonable balance between centralized and decentralized strategies of Lean implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mobilization of teacher leadership, simultaneous decentralization of power, and centralization of support for teacher-led initiatives is seen as important to educational improvement in post-Soviet Kazakhstan where hierarchical cultures and structures still prevail. The current study reports on results from the Teacher Leadership in Kazakhstan (TLK) initiative, which was based on the internationally recognized Teacher-led development work strategy that enabled teachers to lead individual development projects throughout one academic school year. The TLK initiative involved 16 principals, 32 school-based facilitators, and 150 teachers. Using a mixed-methods design, research for the initiative was conducted over one academic year and collected a wide range of data through questionnaire surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Analysis using structural equation modeling suggested that improved teacher program experience resulted in enhanced teacher leadership capacity, and that teachers from more collaborative school cultures enjoy more impactful initiatives. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups provide further insights into these findings. Implications for policy and practice and future directions are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a decentralised tracking control (DTC) scheme is developed for unknown large-scale nonlinear systems by using observer-critic structure-based adaptive dynamic programming. The control consists of local desired control, local tracking error control and a compensator. By introducing the local neural network observer, the subsystem dynamics can be identified. The identified subsystems can be used for the local desired control and the control input matrix, which is used in local tracking error control. Meanwhile, Hamiltonian-Jacobi-Bellman equation can be solved by constructing a critic neural network. Thus, the local tracking error control can be derived directly. To compensate the overall error caused by substitution, observation and approximation of the local tracking error control, an adaptive robustifying term is employed. Simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DTC scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses teacher autonomy in the case of the Swedish teaching profession since the 1980s. It is argued that deregulation, decentralization, and marketization reforms of the 1990s have indeed increased teacher autonomy, but in some respects also led to a increase of complexity in the Swedish school system. In order to handle this complexity, the state intensified a standardization of schooling, which restricts teacher autonomy today. Relevant the paper's understanding is that teacher autonomy is always about control, exerted internally by the profession itself and facilitated externally by state standards. The article argues that the restriction of teacher autonomy in recent times is also related to a simplified understanding of the phenomenon in the reforms of the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying innovative employee behaviours within knowledge-intensive public sector organizations (KIPSOs) might seem an odd thing to do given the lack of competitive pressures, the limited identification of the costs and benefits of innovative ideas and the lack of opportunities to incentivize employees financially. Nevertheless, KIPSOs require innovations to ensure long-term survival. To help achieve this goal, this paper explores the role of supervisors in supporting innovative work behaviour (IWB) by considering the unique challenges of KIPSOs and the conditions and characteristics of IWB in this context. Based on our rich qualitative data of a single case study in the Netherlands Fire Services, we demonstrate the ability of public-sector supervisors to engage employees in innovative behaviours. On the downside, implementation failures and a lack of radical innovation projects seem to be the result of loosely coupled bottom-up and top-down innovation projects and decentralization in the KIPSO which requires situational leadership that emphasizes networking activities and lobbying with public managers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The primary objective of this study was to ascertain, through analysis of accessibility and development potential, which activity centres should be prioritised to support decentralisation of jobs, encourage better integration of transport and land use and ultimately aid the evaluation of a more compact, consolidation and connected city. In doing so, this study evaluated and compared the existing accessibility of different geographic units across the city, including the 34 activity centres identified by the Government of Australia, by the two most frequently use transport modes, namely – public transport and car. The analysis of this study has two parts. Firstly, an isochrone-based measure of accessibility was used for an accessibility modelling across the Perth Metropolitan Area in Western Australia. Secondly, using six node-place based indicators, this paper also endeavoured to prioritise the geographic units that are already better served by public transport, as indicated by the accessibility analysis. Multi-criteria weighed scoring method was applied to calculate a score out of 100 for each of the geographic units. The results of this analysis could help to identify activity centre(s) and other areas in Perth, if any, with higher potentials of being a Transit Oriented Development (TOD) supportive activity centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether information technology (IT) and decentralized and incentive-based workplace organization are complementary only for large firms or also for smaller firms. Previous empirical evidence suggesting complementarity between IT and decentralization is mainly based on large firms. Using data from a sample of 3,288 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and 595 larger firms from the manufacturing and service sector in Germany, it appears that SMEs with decentralized and incentive-based work practices tend to use IT more intensively. Moreover, for the sample of SMEs, IT and workplace organization are individually associated with higher productivity, but the combination of IT and decentralization does not yield a productivity premium. In contrast, the productivity of IT depends positively on decentralization for large firms. The findings suggest that combining IT and decentralized workplace organization seems only to be a successful strategy for larger firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local autonomy is a highly valued feature of good governance. The continuous efforts of many European countries to strengthen the autonomy of local government show the importance given to decentralization and the transfer of far-reaching competences to the lowest units. Measuring and comparing local autonomy, however, has proven to be challenging. Not only are there diverging ideas about the core elements of local autonomy, there are also considerable difficulties applying specific concepts to different countries. This paper outlines a comprehensive methodology for measuring local autonomy. It analyses 39 European countries and reports changes between 1990 and 2014. A network of experts on local government assessed the autonomy of local government of their respective countries on the basis of a common code book. The 11 variables measured show an overall increase of local autonomy but significant variation between the countries. The variables also add up to an overall measurement of local autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Manufacturing companies are confronted with increasing dynamics and complexity. Commonly used central planning approaches provide a high planning accuracy, but are predominantly suitable for the application in rather static production environments. In contrast, autonomous control methods are a promising approach to cope efficiently with dynamic influences. These methods are based on decentralised decision-making of single logistic objects dependent on the current system state. A possibility to make use of the advantages of both approaches is the integration of autonomous control methods into existing, central planning systems. Up to now there is a knowledge deficit concerning the interrelations between central planning and autonomous control. Therefore, this paper describes an evaluation approach for the identification of promising couples of central planning methods and autonomous control methods. The evaluation considers the methods’ suitability for the application in specific production environments and their potential for coupling by the investigation of the methods’ compatibility. The evaluation approach is introduced and exemplarily applied with an evaluation of the coupling of several autonomous control and central planning methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, many universities have been moving in the direction of a more hierarchical and centralised structure, with top-down planning and reduced local autonomy for departments. Yet, the management literature over this period has stressed the numerous benefits of flatter organisational structures, decentralisation and local autonomy for sections or departments. What might explain this paradox? And why have academics remained strangely quiet about this, meekly accepting their fate? This proposition paper critically examines the dangers of centralised top-down management, increasingly bureaucratic procedures, teaching to a prescribed formula, and research driven by assessment and performance targets, illustrating these with a number of specific examples. It discusses a number of possible forces driving these worrying developments, and concludes by asking whether academics may be in danger of suffering the fate of the boiled frog. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Explanations for the sharp difference in the economic growth performance of Russia and China under economic reform vary widely. There is a debate over which institutional characteristics are conducive to good growth performance: decentralization and competition among local governments or centralization of control over performance targets. Yet there has been little systematic empirical effort to test the implications of these theories for the behavior of firms. This paper uses data from surveys of firms conducted by the World Bank in 2012 to analyze differences in business–government relations in Russia and China. The findings suggest that differences in levels of administrative decentralization help account for differences in business–government relations in the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Diagnosability property ensures that a predefined set of faults are diagnosable by a centralized diagnoser built using a global model of the system, while co-diagnosability guarantees that these faults are diagnosed in decentralized manner using a set of local diagnosers. A fault must be diagnosed by at least one local diagnoser by using its proper local observation of the system. The aim of using decentralized diagnosis approaches is to overcome the space complexity and weak robustness of centralized diagnosis approaches while at the same time preserving the diagnostic capability of a centralized diagnosis. However, co-diagnosability property is stronger than diagnosability property. If a system is co-diagnosable, then it is diagnosable, while a diagnosable system does not ensure that it is co-diagnosable. Therefore, the challenge of decentralized diagnosis approaches is to perform local diagnosis and to verify that it is equivalent to the centralized one without the need for a global model. In this paper, an approach is proposed to obtain co-diagnosable decentralized diagnosis structure of discrete event systems without the use of a global model. This approach is based on the synchronization of local diagnosis decisions in order to solve the ambiguity between local diagnosers. This synchronization allows obtaining local diagnosis equivalent to the global one without the use of a global model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, digital redesign (DR) techniques are presented for a decentralised controller of large-scale sampled-data systems. To improve the performance of the previous DR technique, the state-matching error is defined and directly minimised by using the state-matching error cost function. Also, the discretisation error of the interconnection term is eliminated through an exact discrete-time design approach. Sufficient conditions of the proposed DR techniques are obtained in the Lyapunov sense and are converted into optimal problems with linear matrix inequalities. Finally, two numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Health care costs incurred prior to the appropriate patient–provider transaction (i.e., transaction costs of access to health care) are potential barriers to accessing health care in low- and middle-income countries. This paper explores these transaction costs and their implications for health system governance through a cross-sectional survey of adult patients who received their first diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) at the three designated secondary health centres for TB care in Ebonyi State, Nigeria. The patients provided information on their care-seeking pathways and the associated costs prior to reaching the appropriate provider. Of the 452 patients, 84% first consulted an inappropriate provider. Only 33% of inappropriate consultations were with qualified providers (QP); the rest were with informal providers such as pharmacy providers (PPs; 57%) and traditional providers (TP; 10%). Notably, 62% of total transaction costs were incurred during the first visit to an inappropriate provider and the mean transaction costs incurred was highest with QPs (US$30.20) compared with PPs (US$14.40) and TPs (US$15.70). These suggest that interventions for reducing transaction costs should include effective decentralisation to integrate TB care with services at the primary health care level, community engagement to address information asymmetry, enforcing regulations to keep informal providers within legal limits and facilitating referral linkages among formal and informal providers to increase early contact with appropriate providers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The efforts in sustainable natural resource management have given rise to decentralization of forest governance in the developing world with hopes for better solutions and effective implementation. In this paper, we examine how spatially sensitive participation is realized from policy to practice in the process of establishing participatory forest management in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Our policy–practice analysis shows that the policies in Zanzibar strongly support decentralization and local level participation has in practice been realized. However, the policy does not emphasize participatory process design nor address the possibilities of using spatial information and technologies to ensure wider participation. Thus, the practices fall short in innovativeness of using site-sensitive information with available technologies. Reflecting the Zanzibari Community Forest Management Agreements (CoFMA) context with examples of participatory use of spatial information and technologies in other parts of the world, we discuss ways to improve the Zanzibari CoFMA process towards increased participation, communication, local sense of ownership and more sustainable land management decisions, and argue for the future implementation of CoFMA as a spatially sensitive participatory process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]