Zoekresultaten

Governance of urban collectives in Amsterdam

Across European cities local entrepreneurs are joining forces in new ways, forming collectives to stimulate business growth and innovation and to create a more attractive business environment. The value of such collectives is increasingly recognized by local governments and policy measures to stimulate these initiatives are being developed. Amsterdam hosts different collaborative initiatives, including 39 business improvement districts (BIDs).The Knowledge Mile is such a collective in which shopkeepers, other local SMEs, residents work together to collectively improve a large retail area. The city of Amsterdam is also a stakeholder. Government can fill an important role in enabling the creation of collective resource management in urban settings. However, if effective regulation is missing, citizens and governing bodies have to look for incentives to find new means of addressing governance. As such, the potential for collective management of urban commons may be greater than realized so far, as there is still a lack of knowledge in this area. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap. By means of an embedded case study approach, we analyze the interaction between the stakeholders in their development of a green zone, the Knowledge Mile Park, in the Wibautstraat. In the coming years, roofs, facades and ground level will be changed through a collaboration of residents, entrepreneurs, researchers, civil servants and students in a metropolitan Living Lab. In this Living Lab, solutions for a healthy and social environment, climate resistance and biodiversity are jointly developed, tested and shown. In our study, we will analyze the role of the governing bodies in such initiatives, and make recommendations how collectives can become more mainstream with new kinds of institutions, without an undue burden on the community.

An accountability challenge

More than 80 % of all information in an organization is unstructured, created by knowledge workers engaged in peer-to-peer networks of expertise to share knowledge across organizational boundaries. Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) do not integrate unstructured information. At best, they integrate links to unstructured information connected with structured information in their databases. The amount of unstructured information is rising quickly. Ensuring the quality of this unstructured information is difficult. It is often inaccessible, unavailable, incomplete, irrelevant, untimely, inaccurate, and/or incomprehensible. It becomes problematic to reconstruct what has happened in organizations. When used for organizational policies, decisions, products, actions and transactions, structured and unstructured information are called records. They are an entity of information, consisting out of an information object (structured or unstructured) and its metadata. They are important for organizational accountability and business process performance, for without them reconstruction of past happenings and meaningful production become an impossibility. Organization-wide management of records is not a common functionality for EIS, resulting in [1] a fragmentation in the management of records, where structured and unstructured information objects are stored in a variety of systems, unconnected with their metadata; [2] a fragmentation in metadata management, leading to a loss of contextuality because metadata are separated from their information objects; and [3] a declining quality or records, because their provenance, integrity, and preservation are in peril. Organizational accountability is based on records and their context to reconstruct the past. Because records are not controlled by EIS, they can only marginally be used for accountability. The challenge for organizational accountability is to generate trusted records, fixed and contextual information objects inseparately linked with metadata that capture context to regain evidential value and to allow for the reconstruction of the past. The research question of this paper is how to capture records and their context within EIS to regain the evidential value of records to allow for a more robust organizational accountability. To find an answer, we need to pay attention to the concept of context, on how to capture context in metadata, and how to embed and manage records in EIS.

Port governance revisited: How to govern and for what purpose?

This review paper investigates and presents generalized answers to the two basic questions of port governance, namely how to govern and for what purpose. The study is based on a total sample of 118 studies on port governance. The results from the analysis of these studies show that port devolution and port re-centralization are the main governance tools at the institutional level. At the strategical level, the main governance tools are port co-opetition, port regionalization, port integration, stakeholder management strategy, and corporate governance. While at the managerial level, the main governance tools are port pricing, port concession, port user/customer relationship management, monitoring and measuring, regulatory control, port security management, and information and communication technologies. The institutional governance tools are generally used by governmental organizations to set the fundamental regulative rules for the port governance system, while strategical tools are applied by port organizations in gaining competitive advantages and increasing market share in the long term. Managerial tools are related to the port business operations and management. Furthermore, The study clearly shows that the main objective of port governance is the improvement of port efficiency and port effectiveness. However, the choice of efficiency-oriented or effectiveness-oriented configuration is largely determined by the port organization's external operating environment, strategies and structures.

Contemplating ‘Quality Street’

Een holistisch perspectief op binnenstedelijke herontwikkeling Spatial Planning http://www.uu.nl/agenda/promotie-een-holistisch-perspectief-op-binnenstedelijke-herontwikkeling Promovendus Rien van Stigt onderzoekt waarom het moeilijk is om milieukwaliteit een prominente plaats te geven in de besluitvorming over ruimtelijke plannen. In zijn proefschrift ontwikkelt hij een holistisch perspectief op het complexe proces van compacte binnenstedelijke herontwikkeling. De kwaliteit van de stedelijke leefomgeving is essentieel in duurzame stedelijke ontwikkeling. Die kwaliteit staat met name bij compacte binnenstedelijke herontwikkeling onder druk, en daarom is milieukwaliteit een belangrijke factor in het plannen van zulke ontwikkelingen. Uit de literatuur over de integratie van milieubeleid blijkt dat dit, vooral op lagere bestuurlijke niveaus, niet altijd goed lukt. Er is nog geen overtuigende verklaring waarom dit zo is. Promotor(es): Prof.dr. P.P.J. Driessen en Prof.dr. T.J.M. Spit

Expecting the unexpected

HRM implementation levers

A qualitative study of HRM programmes in eight different organizations was set up in order to identify factors, called implementability levers, that contributed to the implementability of those programmes. Three types of those levers were found, related to, respectively, the proces of the programme implementation (example: the involvement of line managers in the programme development), the content of the programme (example: the adaptibility of the programme) and the programme’s context (example: the accessibility of the HRM department for involved line managers). Levers in each of the categories appeared to have, as regards their impact on the programme’s implementability, a bright as well as a dark side: they tended to promote, in some specific way, as well as to hamper, in another specific way, the implementation of programmes. Taking care of programme implementability thus shows up as a doable, but puzzling, change management-like task of HR managers.