Suchergebnisse

Collective security does not have to be utopian, if it is understood as the target value of international relations. A corresponding framework could offer new approaches to conflict handling, by involving institutions whose decisions are based on consultations & compromises & not on arbitrariness. Adapted from the source document.

Ever since the Council of Europe's campaign 'The Bronze Age – The first Golden Age of Europe' was carried out in the 1990s, archaeologists have from time to time expressed concern about periods or interpretations being used as tools for forging a collective identity tied to the geographical, political and ideational entity of 'Europe'. While narratives of a pan-European unity in prehistory have often been disregarded or deconstructed by the research community, discussions on increasing cross-border cooperation and harmonization of practices is still on-going. Both of these directions warrant continuous critical consideration, especially since it is suggested that a future 'Archaeology of Europe' rely in part on the opportunities for financial support offered by the European Commission. European Commission enabling structures, especially within the field of culture, still talks of a common European past. By focussing on 'European added value', the first award criteria for achieving funding under the European Commission Culture programmes, this paper discusses what meanings such a value evoke in relation to archaeology and cultural heritage. It also provides some examples of how such meaningscan become visible in the narratives of co-funded archaeological projects.

Climate changes point to the needs to find sustainable materials for residential multistorey housing as a growing proportion of populations across the world live in urban areas. Despite positive environmental effects, wood has a limited use in multistorey constructions even in countries with a strong tradition to use wood in residential housing, such as Sweden. As new materials, techniques were developed and studies of properties of wood as a construction material were communicated, and legislation was altered in Sweden in the mid-1990s, allowing for the use of wood in multistorey housing. The expected market growth was slow and uneven even when incentivizing programs were developed. This chapter explains consumer perspectives in a town, Växjö, where the tradition of using wood in multistorey construction is strong. It points to the needs of knowing more about consumers' perspectives—in order to communicate added values, that is, environmental benefits, in suitable market channels.

BackgroundThe study asks when does inclusive research add value? The authors argue that this is important, given the additional time and cost of co‐researching with people with intellectual disabilities. The study is situated in debates about a "second generation" of inclusive research which advocates focussing more on outcomes than process. The authors argue that this is premature, rather the authors propose that inclusive research is valuable when it helps to recognize, foster, and above all communicate the contributions people with intellectual disabilities can make.MethodThe authors conducted a literature review of 52 peer‐reviewed journal articles about inclusive research and analysed them..ResultsThe authors conclude that inclusive research adds value when there is a distinctive contribution which only co‐researchers with intellectual disabilities can make, when it highlights the contributions people with intellectual disabilities make, and when it contributes to better lives for the wider population of people with intellectual disabilities.ConclusionsThe authors propose a revised definition of inclusive research to replace that published by Walmsley and Johnson in 2003.

This book is designed to help practitioners and academics to assess the added value of HR practices. It provides hands-on recommendations for choosing effective means to manage HR and specific suggestions aimed at facilitating the measurement of HR practices' impact on value creation. Evidence-based recommendations are made by drawing on thorough empirical research from various research traditions and academic disciplines. It covers a wide variety of tasks faced by the HR function and specifically addresses new challenges such as assessing the added value of work-life balance practices

There is a wide consensus that introduction of technology to the production process contributes to an overall economic value, however, confusion between technology, knowledge and capital often makes value calculations ambiguous and non-objective. The Contribution of Technology to Added Value addresses not only this issue of definition but also provides a production model to assess the value contribution of technology within the production process. A clarification of fundamental semantics provides a significant taxonomy for technology dependence, and allows understanding and modeling of how knowledge, technology and capital individually contribute to production and to value adding. A new technology dependence taxonomy is proposed and assessed following chapters explaining growth models, the KTC model and technology index values. Balancing theoretical knowledge with real-world data and applications The Contribution of Technology to Added Value clarifies the issue of value adding for a range of different viewpoints and purposes; from academic to industry and service across engineering, economics and management.

This article examines why the EU should finance defence research. The answers are found in the role the EU increasingly plays in guaranteeing its own security and providing security in Europe's neighbourhood. Against this backdrop, and to compensate for the steady decline in defence research and technology investment, in 2013 the European Commission suggested undertaking preparatory action in this field. This initiative has received support from the European Council and the European Parliament on several occasions. The Parliament put itself in the driving seat for establishing a pilot project in the fiscal year 2015. All the ongoing efforts serve the purpose of establishing a fully fledged European Defence Research Programme starting in 2021. This programme could have the added value of catalysing future cooperative defence programmes, thus delivering urgently needed capabilities for European armed forces.

This article aims to qualify the skeptical view of many leading methodologists on multi-value Qualitative Comparative Analysis (mvQCA). More specifically, it draws attention to a distinctive strength of this QCA-variant. In contrast to the other QCA-variants, mvQCA is capable of straightforwardly capturing the specific causal role of every category of a multi-value condition. This provides it with an important advantage over both crisp set (csQCA) and fuzzy set QCA (fsQCA). fsQCA is not capable of capturing the causal effect of an intermediate category if, depending on the context, it can have a different impact than the full presence of the corresponding condition. csQCA, in turn, tends to attribute a causal role to the absence of condition values, which in the case of multi-value conditions often encompass very different cases. The article first discusses the comparative advantage of mvQCA with a constructed data set, after which it reanalyzes two published studies to demonstrate these advantages with empirical data. (author's abstract)

This paper takes stock of our understanding of the "architecture" of public sector resource allocation mechanisms. It is a speculative venture & provides a framework for thinking about issues rather than a completed theoretical model. The concept of architecture is borrowed from the design sciences & is used to explore the conditions of performativity within networks of relational contracts. The age-old question of markets vs hierarchy is too simplistic. Instead, the search is for optimal complex network relationships that are based on cooperation & participation rather than competition & control. Within these networks the public sector, it is argued, has a new role of acting as a broker in the creation of value. Judging the public sector's relative effectiveness in the creation of value also requires closer attention to be given to the context within which public sector managers take decisions. In particularj, it is necessary to acknowledge that they confront the "wicked" problems of society that the electorate demand to be solved, which gives renewed interest in the notion of market failure. 1 Table, 1 Figure, 80 References. Adapted from the source document.