White Elephant Research Articles

PALS in Mental Health: White Knight or White Elephant? The South London and Maudsley Experience

PALS in Mental Health: White Knight or White Elephant? The South London and Maudsley Experience

Project management competence in public sector infrastructure organisations

Public sector organisations responsible for infrastructure development in most non‐industrialised countries, which include infrastructure departments/ministries, parastatal organisations and other statutory organisations qualify as project‐oriented organisations (POO). There are strong indications to suggest that these organisations' project management (PM) competencies leave a lot to be desired. At face value they purport to be fully fledged project‐oriented organisations and performing as competent PM organisations, while in reality they are predominantly dependent on accidental project managers. This paper reports on a study that was carried out in one of the large infrastructure departments in South Africa. The focus is on one of the premiere programmes managed by the department. The management of the programme is scrutinised in order to establish the department/ministry's PM competence. An evaluation of the performance of the programme was carried out in relation to the ministry's mandate in order to assess its PM competence. It is found that the programme in its current form could be described as a ‘white elephant’ and a programme that does not have an appropriate organisation structure, nor appropriate and sufficient staff to carry out its objectives. The programme's management system is found to be very poor and at the lowest level of maturity (level 1 out of 5). Recommendations are made that the programme in its current form cannot fulfil its mandate successfully without a fundamental overhaul, addressing its organisational structure, personnel qualifications and programme management system.

Rationality of Investment on White Elephants: The Case of Public Investments in Tourist Facilities in Mexico

In this paper we analyze the rationality that sustains the public investments on white elephants applied to the construction of tourist facilities in Mexico. The main result of this paper is that there exist two kinds of rationalities in the construction of white elephants. One is a similar rationality to that existent in the prisoner's dilemma, there is also a political rationality that involves politicians and social groups of individuals interested in exploiting tourist activities. If the winner of an electoral process is the same party that proposed the white elephant, then the construction is completed. Otherwise it is abandoned. This means that in the construction of white elephants, the political rationality prevails over economic rationality.

FINDING NEW LIFE FOR OLD CARPETS

JUST A FEW YEARS AGO , it looked as if the nascent carpet recycling industry was ready to be rolled up and put in the trash. In 2001, Evergreen Nylon Recycling, a high-profile carpet recycling joint venture, announced that it was unprofitable and closed its doors. Two years later, Polyamid 2000, a large German nylon carpet recycler, declared bankruptcy and shut down. Other firms were knocked back by these closures with the result that overall recycling rates, already lagging, fell well behind industry goals. Since last year, though, the industry has been staging a surprising rebirth. The Carpet America Recovery Effort, or CARE, reports that recycling in 2005 was up 100% over the year before, and it is projecting another doubling this year. Numerous manufacturing companies that consume postconsumer carpet are opening up, and Evergreen Nylon Recycling, once dismissed as a white elephant, is on the verge of reopening under a new owner. Participants in the ...

Emerging issues of disinvesment in public enterprises (PEs)

There has been phenomenal and tremendous growth of PE's in India. They were established to attain the 'commanding heights' of the economy of the country and achieve rapid growth of industrialization and economic development. Some of these PEs later became 'white elephant' and started incurring losses. Several of them became chronically sick industries. The Govt. declared the disinvestment process, which began in 1991 with the sale of minority stakes in some PE's, shifted focus to strategic sales during 1999-2000 to 2003-04. The present UPA Govt. announced that, all disinvestment will be considered on a transparent and consultative case-by-case basis. The Govt. has approved the constitution of a "National Investment Fund" comprising of proceeds from disinvestment. The present paper is an attempt to discuss same important issues such as restructuring, valuation of equity, Mechanism of disinvestment, Application of disinvestment proceeds, Parliamentary approval and political issues.

The Irish Art of Controversy (review)

Reviewed by: The Irish Art of Controversy Julian Hanna The Irish Art of Controversy. Lucy McDiarmid . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii + 280. $29.95 (paper). "Great hatred, little room / Maimed us at the start," Yeats mourned in "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" (1). But, as Lucy McDiarmid argues in her delightful and meticulously researched book, the Irish have taken the curse of controversy and remodeled it as a blessing. Controversy has become "a type of dúchas or heritage," a form of "national cultural capital" (211). Moreover, controversy has remodeled Ireland: the national disputes described in these five chapters are disputes over national identity, and "not Irish Ireland or English Ireland, but whose Irish Ireland? Whose version of Ireland would dominate when independence was finally achieved?" (3). McDiarmid discovers the drama of national identity enacted on the "small site[s]" of particular [End Page 580] controversies (7). Her case, built on finely detailed examples that blend fieldwork and archival study, is extremely compelling. "The available evidence is enough for an entire book on any single controversy," (8) she admits, and at times the book reads like a sampler of Irish history. The book transcends its putative subject matter, however, to take on the larger history of modern Irish identity, eventually finding "the Ireland of Mary Robinson and Sinéad O'Connor" in the pre-1916 Ireland of Casement, Yeats, and others (199). The compact timeline of the controversies' origins, 1908–1916, belies a project of far greater scope. In most cases, the controversy outlives the controversialist, and McDiarmid traces the posthumous history of each case right up to the present day. This pattern gives the chapters a slightly predictable feel, but it allows new light to be shed on old arguments, and indeed much of the book's freshest research is to be found in these "afterlives." The book begins with the story most likely to be familiar to readers: the Hugh Lane bequest of paintings for a municipal gallery in Dublin. In this first chapter, the controversy surrounds proposals for a suitable building to house the paintings. Lane stipulated that it had to be somewhere central, to attract passersby; a corner of St. Stephen's Green was suggested, but after that fell through Lane grew more stubborn, insisting on a plan by Sir Edwyn Lutyens to build the gallery over the Liffey, no less. This move turned an initially welcoming public against him and lost him the support of Sinn Féin and other organizations, and the project became a white elephant. When Lane went down with the Luisitania in May 1915, the already eventful history of the thirty-nine impressionist paintings was just beginning. A codicil to his will reversed the rash (or strategic?) decision to send the paintings back to London, but the document, though initialed on each page by Lane, was never witnessed. (Even without this formality it would have been legal in Scotland, or if Lane had been killed at the Front instead of torpedoed at sea.) When the British government officially refused to return the paintings in 1926, Lane's unlikely journey to Irish sainthood was underway. Unlikely, because at the height of the controversy many Dubliners saw Lane, a fussy aesthete whose only "militancy" was his taste, as a snobbish title-seeker at best, and a neocolonial landlord figure at worst. De Valera sang Lane's praises in his introductory remarks to a state-commissioned biography in 1932. Then in 1956, one of the paintings, Berthe Morisot's Jour d'été, was temporarily "liberated" by two Irish students, who arranged to have their photograph taken with the national treasure on the steps of the Tate Gallery. Complicated arguments for joint custody of the paintings finally settled the matter in 1959, and the first paintings were returned to Dublin in 1961. By 1991, the year Dublin was voted European City of Culture, Lane's vision of a cosmopolitan capital inhabited by "Irish Europeans" had come true (18). Readers will find themselves reluctant to leave the Lane controversy behind, but other chapters reveal a similar depth of research and strong sense of narrative. The book progresses through an overlapping chronology of provocations, public martyrdoms...

NHS hospitals will challenge nursing organization

The NHS is building more hospitals than the rest of the G7 nations put together, claims a report in the Times (2006). The Government's justification for this is that for many years there was very little investment in new hospitals. The billions of pounds which are now being spent on hospitals may not be as effective nor as economical as first thought. There is a danger that such new buildings may become ‘white elephants’ according to a new report (Bosanquet, 2006). The sheer cost of such developments is a major reason for the deficits in many NHS units around the country. What is needed, says the report, is a more flexible approach to developing large numbers of buildings, which in the future may not be required as the nature and time patients spend in hospital is reduced.

Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, and the Great Gatehouse of Dunstanburgh Castle

Abstract Is Dunstanburgh Castle on the Northumberland coastline the whitest of white elephants? This article looks at the architecture of the gatehouse built by Edward II's cousin and rival, Thomas, earl of Lancaster, in particular the upward extension of the front walls, to give the false illusion that the building was five storeys high. It notes that the gatehouse does not face either of the possible approach routes, but out to sea, above what has recently been identified as a man-made harbour. With royal castles within sight along the coast, the author concludes that Earl Thomas's gatehouse was simply an exercise in vanity, a rebellious gesture by an over-mighty subject who was shortly to be brought down.

Interest Groups, Veto Points, and Electricity Infrastructure Deployment

In this article we examine the effects of interest group pressure and the structure of political institutions on infrastructure deployment by state-owned electric utilities in a panel of seventy-eight countries during the period 1970–94. We consider two factors that jointly influence the rate of infrastructure deployment: (1) the extent to which the consumer base consists of industrial consumers, which are capable of exerting discipline on political actors whose competing incentives are to construct economically inefficient “white elephants” to satisfy the demands of concentrated geographic interests, labor unions, and national engineering and construction lobbies; and (2) veto points in formal policymaking structures that constrain political actors, thereby reducing these actors' sensitivity to interest group demands. A higher fraction of industrial customers provides political actors with stronger incentives for discipline, reducing the deployment of white elephants and thus the infrastructure growth rate, ceteris paribus. Veto points reduce political actors' sensitivity to interest group demands in general and thus moderate the relationship between industrial interest group pressure and the rate of infrastructure deployment.Both authors contributed equally and list their names alphabetically on this joint work. Both authors acknowledge funding for this research from the University of California Energy Institute. Zelner acknowledges additional funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Edgar F. Kaiser Chair at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. Henisz acknowledges additional funding from the Reginald H. Jones Center for Management Policy, Strategy, and Organization at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Thanks to Severin Borenstein, Rachel Croson, Jose de la Torre, Alexander Dyck, Tom Gilligan, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Edward Mansfield, Mathew McCubbins, Will Mitchell, David Mowery, Jeffrey Nugent, Dennis Quinn, George Tsebelis, Joel Waldfogel, Oliver Williamson, and Jan Zabojnik for their comments on previous drafts. Any errors are the responsibility of the authors.

From white elephant to Nobel Prize: Dennis Gabor's wavefront reconstruction

ABSTRACT Dennis Gabor devised a novel concept for optical imaging in 1947 that went by a variety of names over the following decade: holoscopy, wavefront reconstruction, interference microscopy, diffraction microscopy, and Gaboroscopy. A well-connected and creative research engineer, Gabor worked actively to develop, publicize and exploit his concept, but the scheme failed to capture the interest of many researchers. Gabor's theory was repeatedly deemed unintuitive and baffling and his technique of dubious practicality and limited applicability. By the late 1950s, Gabor's subject had been assessed by its handful of practitioners to be a white elephant. Nevertheless, other researchers in America and Russia later rehabilitated the project. What had been judged a failure was recast as a success during the 1960s as the foundation of the new and distinct subject of holography. This re-evaluation gained the Nobel Prize for Physics for Gabor in 1971. This paper focuses on the difficulties experienced in constructing a meaningful subject, a practical application, and a viable technical community from Gabor's ideas during the decade 1947-1957.

Time for an additional paradigm? The community-based catalyst approach to public health.

Introduction Governments, major foundations, and international organizations sometimes shift the focus on development initiatives in a fad-like manner, even changing in mid-course. They may also rely on single approaches for tackling complex problems rather than employing multiple strategies. An additional paradigm for public health could bridge the divide between building systems and focusing on a specific disease. A community-based catalyst approach appears to be useful in some situations; the approach presented here is based on ten essential elements and five criteria for using local volunteers in community-based initiatives. Fads and single-mindedness Governments, major foundations and other organizations tend to change focus roughly in unison, suggesting that they are vulnerable to fads, perhaps more so because of the often destructive tension that has existed since the 1800s between "horizontal" and "vertical" approaches (1). Also, they frequently select one principal approach to complex problems, although complexity generally demands multiple strategies. In the middle of the twentieth century, large projects were in Favour among those seeking to facilitate development, but in the 1970s, bad press about "white elephant" projects (e.g. big hospitals in poor countries) helped to drive a dramatic switch to low-technology infrastructure in peripheral localities. In 1970 "traditional birth attendants" (who assist with normal births after limited training) became a focus of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), with little back-up for obstetric complications. The Declaration of Alma-Ata in 1978 reinforced the heavy focus on local (under-supported) health workers. Subsequently, education and the goal of developing "civil society" (enhancing social structures outside government) gained favour, as bilateral donors, and especially the major foundations, largely abandoned support for health. Now, with the exception of Japan and the USA, the favoured avenue for bilateral assistance is budget support via ministries of finance for health and other "soft" development areas, though not for airports, harbours and similar "hard" development areas. Massive shifts from one primary strategy, to another have numerous disadvantages. For instance, successful activities being carried out under an approach no longer favoured may be terminated. At The World Bank, most loans for distinct health projects have been cancelled following a shift to budgetary support through "poverty reduction support credits" (PRSCs), a "sector-wide approach". AbouZahr showed how "cautious champions", including well-intentioned international agencies, had even changed their approach several times during a single initiative as they tried to reduce the persistent and scandalously high rates of maternal mortality (2)--equivalent to the number of people who would be killed if one jumbo jet crashed every 4 hours. Contrasting realities Considerable funding for health infrastructures since the Declaration of Alma-Ata has arguably brought relatively little improvement in the provision of adequate health care to poor populations in some contexts. "For a decade, the figure of 500 000 maternal deaths a year has been part of the statistical liturgy" (3). Meanwhile, several disease eradication efforts have been singularly successful in the face of severe corruption, poverty, weak health infrastructures, political chaos and war, using limited resources. The eradication of dracunculiasis (guinea-worm disease) has received less funding since its inception than the poliomyelitis campaign uses each year. Yet the incidence of dracunculiasis has been reduced by more than 99.5%, from an estimated 3.5 million cases in 1989 to 15 522 cases, of which only 1479 were outside Ghana and Sudan, provisionally reported in 2004. The Onchocerciasis Control Programme (which was not an eradication programme) enjoyed similar success for 28 years (1974-2002). …

A White Elephant? ? Appraising the Applicability of Modified Disciplinary and Dismissal Procedures Introduced by the Employment Act 2002

A White Elephant? ? Appraising the Applicability of Modified Disciplinary and Dismissal Procedures Introduced by the Employment Act 2002

The White Elephant in the Room: Race and Election 2004

The White Elephant in the Room: Race and Election 2004

Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. By SHEILA MELVIN and JINDONG CAI. [New York: Algora Publishing, 2004. x+362 pp. ISBN 0-87586-179-2.

This is a delightful book. It opens up a cultural arena much neglected in scholarship on China. Nine engagingly narrated chapters take us through the history of Sino-foreign musical contact since the late 19th century, with one digression, which goes back to encounters since the 16th century (chapter two). The book follows the life story of three important institutions (the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, the Shanghai Conservatory and the Central Conservatory) and three important men: violinist Tan Shuzhen, who was the first Chinese to join the orchestra in colonial Shanghai; conductor Li Delun, who was trained in Moscow and managed to serve the government before, during and after the Cultural Revolution; and composer He Luting, one of the most outspoken protagonists in China's music world and long-time principal at the Shanghai Conservatory. The authors' approach of choosing “white elephants” to present the history of classical music in China, although unfashionable since Jauss, brings much cohesion and structural elegance to the volume.The book is at its best when using material from interviews conducted by the authors. Based on this evidence, the book comes to one important conclusion: contact between Chinese and foreign musicians in China was generally not antagonistic, either before or after 1949. Foreign musicians did not behave in a condescending manner, as “imperialists” and Chinese musicians hardly ever perceived them to do so. For obvious reasons, few Chinese (and, surprisingly, few foreign studies) on China's classical music scene have acknowledged this fact.The authors have done a beautiful job in telling their story. They must be lauded for having gone through a great variety of sources including contemporary newspaper articles, propaganda magazines, Party documents, as well as films, recordings and some of the very recent, and mostly biographical, secondary literature on the subject published in China. Since the book is conceived as a collective biography, it lacks detailed musical and historical analysis and it would have benefited from a few closer readings. For example, what precisely is the meaning of “national style” for people as different as Tcherepnin, Mao Zedong or Guo Wenjing? Musical analysis would have provided an answer. Why do the authors not make more of the fact that Jiang Qing advised the musicians writing a model symphony to watch – and, more importantly, listen – to music in Hollywood films in order to improve their compositional skills? A more explicit engagement with the technical and musical styles of the model works (the term model opera should really be reserved for the operas in the set and not all of the pieces which also comprised ballets and symphonic compositions) would have been illuminating here, for it would have shown how indebted they were to the same principles of music-making as Hollywood film music on the one hand and the Butterfly Violin Concerto on the other – both officially condemned during the Cultural Revolution. It is sad, too, that the balanced account of the Cultural Revolution years – which describes both the pain it caused to many an intellectual and the benefits it brought for Chinese musical life generally – focuses almost entirely on the first set of eight model works and leaves out the second, equally important set of ten produced later (chapter seven). There are a number of non sequiturs in this book that are inevitable in any pioneering work of this size.

Shifting Perspectives: Holography and the Emergence of Technical Communities

In November 1964, a bemused magazine journalist recorded this scene in a crowded Boston hotel suite: A few dozen normally sedate scientists and engineers were playing with a toy locomotive, a toy train-conductor and other such items. The train wasn't really there at all. But if you stood in exactly the right place and looked into a piece of equipment you would have seen it, real as life. The toys had been "reconstructed" by a technique that looks simple, yet is one of the most sophisticated developments in modern science. The "reconstruction" was done with a gas laser made by Perkin-Elmer Corp., and a "hologram," a special photographic plate made by researchers at the University of Michigan.1 The hotel gathering mirrored the surprise of optical specialists at a remarkable paper given at a conference in Washington, D.C., eight months earlier. As the paper's coauthor, Emmett Leith, recalled of that first demonstration: "There was a big exodus of people from the meeting room. . . . We went up and found a line that stretched down the hall as far as you could see. They would look at the hologram, and even though most of them were optical scientists, they did not understand what was going on. They assumed it was [End Page 77] a projection system done with mirrors, and that the little toy train was hidden somewhere."2 The members of the expert audiences at these 1964 meetings struggled to fit this stunning new type of image into their understanding of optics. Their varying success in doing so illustrated a gradual process of intellectual adaptation and cultural mutation. This extraordinary new technology, sprouting in a quiet disciplinary backwater, was taken up by existing technical communities and gave rise to new ones. Technology and technical communities grew together, mutually shaping and stabilizing each other. During its first fifty years, the itinerant subject latterly known as holography was repeatedly reconceptualized in new intellectual and geographical territories. Conceived in 1947 by Dennis Gabor, an émigré Hungarian research engineer at British Thomson-Houston in England, as a means of improving image quality in electron microscopy, it was variously dubbed "holoscopy," "wave front reconstruction," and "diffraction microscopy," as a handful of researchers pursued it over the ensuing decade.3 As an "improved" form of microscopy it was eventually judged to have severe limitations: electron microscopes proved too unstable to yield the necessarily long photographic exposures, and the optical technique itself was marred by an undesired "conjugate" image. By 1958 research had ceased, and the sole industrial laboratory pursuing the technique had categorized it as a white elephant.4 Holography was revitalized unexpectedly in the early 1960s by electrical engineers and physicists combining findings in information theory and coherent optics with newly available lasers.5 The novel principle behind the invention of holography is a two-step imaging process. First, an interference pattern (the "hologram") is recorded by superposing two beams of light, one reflected from the subject and the other traveling directly from the light source. The light must have a high degree of coherence, that is, a well-defined wavelength and stability of phase. Since 1963, holograms have almost exclusively been recorded using lasers, but other light sources, such as filtered mercury lamps, have adequate coherence for some purposes. The interference pattern of the hologram [End Page 78] is recorded on a photosensitive material such as high-resolution photographic film. Because these materials are very insensitive to light and must record patterns finer than several thousand lines per millimeter, the long exposure normally restricts the technique to inanimate objects. Nevertheless, methods of synthesizing holograms from cinema film allow images of outdoor scenes and living subjects to be reconstructed in three dimensions and with limited animation. The second step of the imaging process is the reconstruction of the wave front of light by illuminating the hologram with a suitable light source. Until the end of the 1960s, most holograms had...

The long, slow death of the fast flux facility

The Fast Flux Test Facility was supposed to underpin an ambitious U.S. breeder reactor program. But after the idea of the plutonium economy was abandoned, it became another of Energy's white elephants.

White elephant spotted in Sri Lanka

White elephant spotted in Sri Lanka

White elephants

Underdevelopment is thought to be about lack of investment, and many political economy theories can account for this. Yet, there has been much investment in developing countries. The problem has been that investment growth has not led to output growth. We therefore need to explain not simply underinvestment, but also the missallocation of investment. The canonical example of this is the construction of white elephants—investment projects with negative social surplus. In this paper we propose a theory of white elephants. We argue that they are a particular type of inefficient redistribution, which are politically attractive when politicians find it difficult to make credible promises to supporters. We show that it is the very inefficiency of such projects that makes them politically appealing. This is so because it allows only some politicians to credibly promise to build them and thus enter into credible redistribution. The fact that not all politicians can credibly undertake such projects gives those who can a strategic advantage. Socially efficient projects do not have this feature since all politicians can commit to build them and they thus have a symmetric effect on political outcomes. We show that white elephants may be preferred to socially efficient projects if the political benefits are large compared to the surplus generated by efficient projects.

04/01935 Thailand's solar white elephants: an analysis of 15 yr of solar battery charging programmes in northern Thailand: Green, D. Energy Policy, 2004, 32, (6), 747–760

The literature on creating consumer awareness and acceptance of solar water heating systems for marketing purposes is sparse. This paper discusses some of the sophisticated marketing techniques available and some results.Selling solar water heating systems in Northern European latitudes requires a degree of persistence and commitment that is probably not required in what are regarded as the “sunny climes” around the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia and Australasia.

Staking Every Thing on It: A Stylistic Analysis of Linguistic Patterns in "Hills Like White Elephants"

The essay performs a statistical analysis of the grammatical patterns in "Hills Like White Elephants" as a means of opening new avenues for its interpretation. The story's careful deployment of pronouns and use of repetition bridge its disparate themes. In addition, the ambiguous, repetitious language deepens the significance and raises the stakes of the couple's argument. These linguistic patterns underscore the emotional violence, broaden the significance, and complicate the closure of that argument.