Suchergebnisse

PURPOSE: (i) to ascertain and analyze the funding of the Central Cooperative Fund (CCF); (ii) to assess whether the CCF has achieved its intended role of utilizing its funds optimally and why, or why not, this is so, and (iii) to evaluate and recommend ways on how the role of the CCF may be improved. ; METHODOLOGY: The study made use of a mixed-methods research methodology. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four CCF representatives, seven co-operative experts and nine cooperative representatives. These were followed by a review of the financial statements of the CCF for the period 2012-2019. ; FINDINGS: The findings indicate that over the years, the CCF has managed to accumulate a substantial amount of funds. The financing role of the CCF is essential for the co-operative movement in Malta. Despite the numerous financial difficulties faced by Maltese cooperatives, the use of CCF financing by co-operatives as against other non-CCF financing has been relatively poor. The study concludes that the Maltese CCF is adequately funded via the 5% annual cooperative contributions. With respect to its utilization of funds, the CCF has clearly not achieved this objective optimally in that it has not played its expected role in the financing of Maltese co-operatives. The study concludes that the CCF has potential for a much-increased role than it has at present in assisting co-operatives in their financing requirements. ; ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This study is meant to raise public sector awareness on the need to improve Maltese CCF practices with respect to their definability, formulation and monitoring. It is hoped that the recommendations of this study support the competent authorities in addressing the identified existing deficiencies, thus enabling them to enhance CCFs and render them improved vehicles for sector development. Ultimately, an improved CCF would aid in the financing difficulties faced by Maltese co-operatives. This, in turn, would support the growth and development of the Maltese cooperative movement. ; peer-reviewed

Scholars have long argued that delinquency is a group phenomenon. Even so, minimal research exists on the nature, structure, and process of co‐offending. This investigation focuses on a particular void, namely the stability of 1) co‐offending and 2) co‐offender selection over time, for which divergent theoretical expectations currently exist that bear on issues central to general and developmental/life‐course theories of crime. By relying on individual‐level, longitudinal data for a sample of juvenile offenders from Philadelphia, we find that distinct trajectories of co‐offending exist over the course of the juvenile criminal career. This inquiry also develops an individualized measure of co‐offender stability, which reveals that delinquents generally tend not to "reuse" co‐offenders, although frequent offenders show a greater propensity to do so. The discussion considers the theoretical and policy implications of these findings as well as provides some avenues for future research.

In recent years, the evolution of urban environments, jointly with the progress of the Information and Communication sector, have enabled the rapid adoption of new solutions that contribute to the growth in popularity of Smart Cities. Currently, the majority of the world population lives in cities encouraging different stakeholders within these innovative ecosystems to seek new solutions guaranteeing the sustainability and efficiency of such complex environments. In this work, it is discussed how the experimentation with IoT technologies and other data sources form the cities can be utilized to co-create in the OrganiCity project, where key actors like citizens, researchers and other stakeholders shape smart city services and applications in a collaborative fashion. Furthermore, a novel architecture is proposed that enables this organic growth of the future cities, facilitating the experimentation that tailors the adoption of new technologies and services for a better quality of life, as well as agile and dynamic mechanisms for managing cities. In this work, the different components and enablers of the OrganiCity platform are presented and discussed in detail and include, among others, a portal to manage the experiment life cycle, an Urban Data Observatory to explore data assets, and an annotations component to indicate quality of data, with a particular focus on the city-scale opportunistic data collection service operating as an alternative to traditional communications. ; This work has been partially funded by the research project OrganiCity, under the grant agreement No. 645198 of the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

How do Argentina's found grandchildren experience knowing the truth about their biological origins, and how does this influence their identity? Their identification, restitution and reconstruction of identity has been and will continue to be closely linked to Argentina's transitional justice process. We need more knowledge about how victims of political violence experience transitional justice measures. Therefore, one of the purposes of this thesis is to contribute to a more profound understanding of what such processes imply for a society and its individuals through the context-specific study of one particular aspect of a transitional justice process. For all of my informants, getting to know the truth about their biological origins has been experienced as what Giddens (1991) refers to as a fateful moment that would change their lives. Each individual has a unique story, yet, I find that the found grandchildren have all gone through three different phases; identification – restitution – reconstruction of identity. I consider the identification and restitution as events limited in time, whereas I view the reconstruction of identity as an ongoing and continuous process in which each person is trying to restore a sense of coherent identity.