Everyday Management Practices Research Articles

Functional ecological metrics of good ecological quality – Needs of managers and data from pristine lakes

Anthropogenic eutrophication and overfishing of top predators have put our lakes in danger, and coping mechanisms like The European Water Framework Directive have been put in place to mitigatetheireffects. However, the discussion on the means we employ to monitor lake ecosystems and establish their ecological status is ongoing. Importantly, it has been suggested that universal, functional indicators of healthy reference ecosystems could be identified, measured and used for comparison purposes across ecological types of lakes. An equally important issue is to develop such metrics that can be employed by lake managers, who are the end users of the scientific data when planning everyday management practices. We employed bioenergetic food web approach with Ecological Network Analysis to assess organic matter fluxes and food web structure in 13 lakes in Latvia – including 3 pristine bog lakes - and combined the acquired functional descriptors with simple and well-known ecological descriptors. We conclude that information on the functioning of pristine lakes provides a potentially valuable tool for setting functional reference conditions for lake management. We also found that the ecological parameters - the percentage of piscivorous fish and the abundance of cyanobacteria - correlate well with the functional food web descriptors. Thus, they could be valuable tools to both managers and scientists when evaluating lake ecological status across the boundaries of ecological types.

НАВЧАЛЬНІ ПОТРЕБИ ПЕРСОНАЛУ ПРОБАЦІЇ ЯК ІНДИКАТОР ОРГАНІЗАЦІЙНОГО РОЗВИТКУ. ЕМПІРИЧНЕ ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ

Educational needs of personnel are an important characteristic of the current state of an organizational culture and an indicator of its development directions. The peculiarities of training needs remain traditionally relevant, both for everyday management practice and in the sense of interdisciplinary studies of the nature and causality of organizational phenomena. The purpose of the article is to highlight the empirical results of an experiential-inductive study of training needs in the context of the problems of organizational development of probation. The results. It was found that there has been an internal organizational request for training in a wide range of areas in probation. The most in demand is training in the following thematic areas: psychology of working with clients, information technologies and computer programs, cooperation with other organizations and institutions, professional rights and responsibilities. The peculiarities of the connection of gender, age, status and other characteristics of the respondents with various issues of training are determined. The specifics of the training interests of the employees were also investigated in view of the frequency of their work meetings with subjects of probation. The conducted factor analysis established that the greatest potential for simultaneous satisfaction of personnel needs and organizational development as a result of training is, on the one hand, a certain “psychologicalization” of this process. On the other hand, the training process must be implemented against the background of activated interpersonal relations of employees (group training format). The combination of the specified methodological features determines the expediency of using such an educational format as complex business games along with classic lectures, webinars and seminars. The application of regression analysis made it possible to reach conclusions about the relationship between various educational needs and such variables as job satisfaction, relationships with colleagues, future plans, socio-demographic differences of respondents, etc. In general, the obtained results prove that educational needs are an important indicator not only in the sense of planning and organizing corporate training to improve the professional competence of personnel, but also an effective indicator of management culture, improvement of the general organizational atmosphere, and effective direction of personnel policy. Key words: training needs, organizational development, probation, factor analysis, regression analysis.

We Are Not “Newly Appointed Staff”

In contemporary societies, corporate organisations’ discourses are progressively colonising the everyday practices of individuals or collectives in organisational settings. In Ghana, the government mobilizes state institutions’ technologies for colonising the everyday practices of staff and management of public university organisations. One of such state institutional technologies and practices is the state’s migration of university staff onto the government mechanized payroll. The question is, how do state institutions colonize and control the everyday management practices of public university organisations including employee socialization practices, and what are the ramifications? Data for this study include text in the form of letters and press releases realised from mediated interactions between government institutions and university management and workers’ unions, and talk realised from interview. The data is analysed in relation to the new public universities’ management discourse inspired by dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse studies. This study demonstrates that the discursive practices of the government institutions and the migration of the staff of SDD-UBIDS onto the government mechanized payroll, IPPD2 technology is a political strategy to control public universities. The ramifications are that such institutionalized practices curtail academic freedom and competitiveness of public universities locally and globally as employees’ competing discursive practices, contestations and enactments are ignored. The highlight of this article is that, generally, in preparing the new public university bill and implementing new public universities’ regulations in Ghana, the government and the management of public universities strategically align and go along. However, an inclusive and pluralistic discourse to shape public universities’ regulation and management in Ghana to ensure academic freedom, and a competitive national and global higher education is badly needed.

Recognition of prior learning in workplaces: exploring managerial practice by the means of a heuristic conceptual framework

ABSTRACT The focus of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) on assessment and credentials has ambivalent implications regarding research on workplace RPL. This article presents and empirically tests a heuristic conceptual framework to support the analysis of workplace RPL and its relation to learning at work. RPL is defined as a practice of workplace pedagogy with two modes of recognition attributed a performance, a developmental, and an occupational orientation. The framework is applied to analyse data from an interview-based study with managers in Austrian wood-processing companies. The analysis reveals a strong orientation towards performance, adaptive learning, and immediate use of skills. A strength-based view of staff development and awareness of the importance of support positively influence occupationally relevant and developmental learning. When recognition is a part of everyday management practice and workplace participation, there are even greater opportunities for developmental learning. This article offers conceptual perspectives and empirical evidence to researchers and practitioners. The implications for practice suggest an intensification of support for managers to help them appreciate the potential benefits of RPL. For future research, it is indicated among others to further develop, strengthen, and empirically validate the heuristic conceptual framework.

Institutional excellence reloaded: a 17-years, two-phase in-depth study of corporate culture change in the health care sector.

This ethnographic revisit of a general hospital aims to critically explore and describe the mechanisms of corporate culture change and how institutional excellence is facilitated and constrained by everyday management practices between 1996/1997 and 2014/2015. A five-month field study of day-to-day life in the hospital's nursing division was conducted by means of an ethnographic revisit, using participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, free conversations and documentary material. Using labour process analysis with ethnographic data from a general hospital, the corporate culture is represented as faceted, complex and sophisticated, lending little support to the managerial claims that if corporate objectives are realised, they are achieved through some combination of shared values, beliefs and managerial practices. The findings tend to support the critical view in labour process writing that modern managerial initiatives lead to tightened corporate control, advanced employee subjection and extensive effort intensification. The findings demonstrate the way in which the nursing employees enthusiastically embrace many aspects of the managerial message and yet, at the same time, still remain suspicious and distance themselves from it through misbehaviour and adaptation, and, in some cases, use the rhetoric against management for their own ends. What are the implications for clinical and managerial practitioners? The recommendations are to (1) develop managerial practitioners who are capable of managing change combined with the professional autonomy of clinical practitioners, (2) take care to practise what you preach in clinical and managerial reality, as commitment, consent, compliance and difference of opinion are signs of a healthy corporate culture and (3) consider the implications between social structures and human actions with different work behaviours on different levels involved. This ethnographic revisit considers data from a labour process analysis of corporate culture change in a general hospital and revisits the ways in which contradictory expectations and pressures are experienced by nursing employees and management practitioners spread 17 years apart.

Public Administration in the Political and Legal Space of Modern Ukraine: European Choice and Effectiveness

The article, which consists of two parts, explores the problems of the political and legal foundations of goal-setting and the effectiveness of public administration in modern Ukraine, assesses the significance of the constructiveness of the implementation outlined in the context of public interest and state growth strategy. An attempt was also made to prove that the existence of scientifically substantiated goals, their systematic nature, strategic and functional validity are the basic features of a state of law and an indispensable condition for the high quality of public administration. It is also taken into account that the concepts of “effective” and “efficiency” are perceived ambiguously in science and everyday management practice. For some, it is effective that it is desirable and expedient, for others, only that allows them to realize their intentions and satisfy their respective needs, for others, it ensures that the desired result is obtained at the lowest cost. It also touches on the difficulties of making effective managerial decisions in the difficult conditions of modern reality, in a situation where there are no strict methodological guidelines and the corresponding legal, organizational, procedural and heuristic algorithms, not populous moral principles dominate, but populist blur. The presence in such conditions of only normatively approved

Realizing appreciative management from the viewpoint of first-line managers in social and health care.

First-line managers are links between an organizations' administration and the workforce. They transmit information from higher managers to workers and vice versa. Their management skills and especially their interaction with staff are a key point in successful management. To describe how first-line managers realized appreciative management in their everyday management practice in health and social care. A quantitative descriptive study was conducted by means of an electronic survey among social and healthcare managers in Finland. Based on the self-evaluations of the managers, appreciative management is well realized. The most recognition was given to equality and the least to appreciative know-how. Connections were seen between appreciative management and gender, education, education level and managers with higher education, and those with fewer work units below them tended to have a better realization of appreciative management. The education level of first-line nurse managers is meaningful when realizing appreciative management in social and healthcare settings. More advanced education levels of first-line managers help to promote appreciative management in social and health care, together with the amount of work units (meaning outpatient and inpatient wards). A first-line manager is responsible for the needs of their workforce and needs to be critically assessed so that they might have more time for managing in an appreciative way. Appreciative management should be given increased focus when educating nurse managers.

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Russian Abstract: Связность системы государственного управления обеспечивается процессами управления социально-экономическим развитием страны, реализующими управленческий цикл от прогнозирования и планирования до анализа исполнения. Обеспечение этой связности требуют интеграция большого количества разных процессов системы государственного управления. В повседневной практике управления отдельные задачи разбросаны между разными ведомствами и уровнями государственного управления, с различной степенью полноты и качества исполнения. Наиболее целостно и организовано исполняются задачи, относящиеся к краткосрочному планированию. Однако управление таким объектом как государство, где горизонт управленческих решений составляет десятилетия, не может эффективно осуществляться в рамках ни краткосрочного, ни среднесрочного управления. Основой государственного управления должен быть процесс долгосрочного – стратегического – управления, который в настоящее время находится в фазе становления. Это ставит исследования и разработки в сфере проблем стратегического управления в разряд ключевых работ, направленных на оптимизацию и развитие государственного управления. Несмотря на значительный опыт стратегических разработок, накопленный на сегодня, проблемные вопросы разработки и реализации соответствующих стратегий не уходят из повестки дня. Высокий интерес к проблематике стратегического управления требует серьезного внимания к методологическим основаниям соответствующей практики, к анализу которых и обращена данная работа. English Abstract: The connectivity of the public administration system is ensured by the processes of managing the country's socio-economic development that implement the management cycle from forecasting and planning to performance analysis. Ensuring this coherence requires the integration of a large number of different processes of the public administration system. In everyday management practice, individual tasks are scattered between different departments and levels of government, with varying degrees of completeness and quality of execution. The tasks related to short-term planning are most holistically organized and organized. However, the management of such an object as a state where the horizon of management decisions is decades, can not be effectively implemented in the framework of neither short-term nor medium-term management. The basis of public administration should be the process of long-term - strategic - management, which is currently in the phase of formation. This puts research and development in the field of strategic management issues in the category of key works aimed at optimizing and developing public administration. Despite the considerable experience of strategic developments, accumulated for today, the problematic issues of developing and implementing relevant strategies do not go away from the agenda. High interest in the issues of strategic management requires serious attention to the methodological foundations of the relevant practice, to which analysis this work is addressed.

Sustainability Assessment in Wine-Grape Growing in the New World: Economic, Environmental, and Social Indicators for Agricultural Businesses

Indicators have been used in many sustainability assessment methods, however, disagreements over a common definition and scope for the sustainability concept have led to many distinct assessment methods, which are not often directly comparable. Before developing a sustainability assessment, it is essential to: define sustainability and specify the viewpoint of the assessor, the purpose of the assessment, and the context and time frame of the assessment. This article presents a short list of indicators and a method that can be readily adopted by any agricultural business or region to assess sustainability, making any organization, region or crop qualitatively comparable. These indicators were proposed by 83 top-level executives in 14 group interviews conducted using our adapted nominal group technique (ANGT). Executives were sourced from wine-grape growing organisations from New World wine-producing countries that also owned vineyards, and they considered everyday management practices of farms. These indicators, grouped within three categories (economic, environmental, and social) were ranked by their importance. The method defines qualitative indicators that, in the context of distinct wine regions or crops should be quantified to maintain their relevance and usefulness.

Problems and Pitfalls in ICZM Implementation: Lessons from Some Selected Mediterranean and Black Sea Cases

Integrated Coastal Zone Management is widely recognised as a set of principles, approaches and tools for the sustainable development of coastal zones. However, while its importance as a theoretical framework for approaching the complexity of coastal governance is not opinable, the problem of translating ICZM principles into every-day management practice still represents a basic point to deal with. This paper aims at clarifying the most important elements that hinder ICZM adoption and implementation. To this purpose, it critically evaluates the results of the EU FP7 Project PEGASO (People for Ecosystem-based Governance in Assessing Sustainable development of Ocean and coast). The project considered ICZM efforts and initiatives in 10 case studies, 7 in the Mediterranean Sea and 3 in the Black Sea. The study confirms that dealing with the multi-scale nature of coastal governance, the poor coordination of policies and administrative fragmentation, the dictatorship of sectoral approaches, the difficulty to promote integration, both thematic and geographic, the complex relationship between voluntary agreements and statutory frameworks, the difficult relationship between science and decision making, and the problem of the sustainability over time of ICZM initiatives and efforts still represent the main factors that hamper a wider adoption of ICZM in the considered cases.

Managing the Maternal Body: A Comprehensive Review and Transdisciplinary Analysis

This paper comprehensively reviews transdisciplinary and critical perspectives on the employed maternal (pregnant and post-birth) body in the context of management studies. It highlights the disparities between equal opportunities policies and everyday management practices in relation to pregnancy and new motherhood. In so doing, the review examines the contradictions between equal opportunities policies aimed at protecting pregnant and newly maternal employees and the discouraging treatment that such women receive in practice at work. In analysing the disparity between policy and practice, the review identifies gaps within the field of research on the employed maternal body. It then shows how perceptions about the pregnant and newly maternal body are based more on myth than on evidence. In keeping with policies encouraging family friendly working practices and aimed at enhancing parental health, the paper argues that research on the maternal body is integral to management studies.

“It really works like this”: Hybrid forms of management culture in Thailand and Israel

Interviews with Thai and Israeli managers of two global corporations headquartered in Sweden and the US show how these managers negotiate their own everyday management practices in relation to the corporate practices. Through this negotiation, the local managers, keeping highly regarded management practices of their own while adopting values and practices from the corporations’ management cultures, produce new hybrid forms of management culture. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications of the negotiation and hybridization of the two corporations’ management cultures by the local managers.

Gerência intercultural, diferença e mediação nas empresas transnacionais

This article investigates the concept of “interculturality as it is being constructed by transnational companies through everyday management practices. Based on analysis of intercultural training materials produced in three countries – United States, Germany, and Brazil – the article is part of a broader research project on mechanisms of difference construction and cultural mediation. The goal is to identify the different ways through which cultural difference, cultural communication, and cultural mediation are constructed in the examples analyzed here, which we take as “models” only for purposes of analytical precision. We suggest that, while the “North American model” still employs a notion of culture that is mainly homogeneous, inclusive and excluding, the “German model” considers difference from a political perspective founded on morality and ethics. At the same time, it is in the (still incipient) “Brazilian model” – still under construction – that one notices the greater potential for the production of consensus and mediation, both of which we take as key aspects of “interculturality.” This is because, since it is founded on the perception that difference is but another piece of data intrinsic to Brazilian society itself, this “model” does not pose the issue of difference as a problem to be solved, but as a fundamental step towards cultural mediation.

Green structure and sustainability — developing a tool for local planning

Local authorities face a great challenge in translating officially announced sustainability commitments into everyday management practices. With the objective of developing a tool for supporting such goal-to-practice translation processes, three primary tool criteria were formulated, and used to develop a guide on how to apply the tool. Subsequently, the tool was applied and evaluated in an interactive study involving the local authority of a Danish municipality. The first tool criterion concerns the organisation of the translation process. It states that in order to obtain a clear understanding of the unique local conditions, the tool shall be able to act as a bridge between different disciplines, and allow for direct collaboration between experts with context-independent knowledge and local administrators with context-dependent knowledge. The second criterion concerns the identification of sustainable management strategies. It states that the tool shall secure a thorough two-sided analysis of society’s claims on one side, and on the other side the ability of available resources to meet these claims in a sustainable way. The third criterion concerns the distribution of the results of the analysing phase. It states that in order to support dialogue and decision making across professional and societal boundaries, the identified claims and resources as well as the associated obstacles shall be presented in simple and preferably visual overviews. In testing the tool we focused on the ability of the municipality’s urban green structure (the resource) to contribute to sustainable management of organic waste, surface runoff and biodiversity (the claims). Based on the outcome of the test, and an interview survey with the participating local administrators, it is concluded that the tool criteria are sound. This is despite the fact that the test of the tool was not applied in full accordance with the tool guidelines. It is anticipated that the application of this tool can increase the speed and extent with which local authorities absorb and employ the concepts of sustainable development in their everyday management and planning tasks.

Risk management: new initiatives

Explain clearly to a facilities manager the meaning of risk management and the response will be instantaneous — ‘I do that!’ The more cynical among them will say that they have done it for years, and there is no need to invent fancy jargon to describe what is to them a commonplace activity. But there is a need, because the rise of risk management is a further example of how management science is pervading everyday management practice, carrying with it quantification, analysis and modelling into the more subjective and intuitive world of commonsense management.

Management is a Science.

The article presents information on the implementation of management science to everyday management practice and describes the evolution of scientific thinking and the structural design of humans a...

Management is a Science

The article presents information on the implementation of management science to everyday management practice and describes the evolution of scientific thinking and the structural design of humans a...