Projects as communicating systems: Creating a culture of innovation and performance

Although often downplayed and instrumental, there is evidence that communication in projects is essential in achieving value creation. Our main interest in this paper is on temporary continuity, a situation where the temporary becomes a permanent condition in social systems. The question that we have address is: What characterizes project communication in a situation with temporary continuity?We argue for the need to transform communication processes into communication capabilities. In a situation with temporary continuity, there is a need to connect to a large number of value-creating processes, and communicating capabilities need to be a part of a communication system, where the aim is to bind together value-creating processes and communication capabilities. We construct a viable system consisting of five sub-systems. To become a viable system, projects in the form of temporary continuity, must handle the potential conflict between a culture of performance and a culture of innovation. This involves developing social mechanisms for coordination and interaction, with a focus on developing communication capabilities, in parallel with focusing on all of the five value-creation processes.     

Competence Profile School Management (CPSM) – an inventory for the self-assessment of school leadership

The professional demands on school leaders have changed drastically and have become highly complex in the last few years. The professionalization of school leaders is high on the agenda. Human resource management includes different aspects of professionalization. One major domain is the preparation, induction and continuous professional development of individual leaders and leadership teams. Another is personnel marketing and selection, which includes the question of attracting capable future leaders and of appointing the right candidates. However in Europe there is a need for standardised tools which provide systematic feedback to professionals interested in assessing their strengths and individual development needs. Suitable instruments are still scarce. The Competence Profile School Management CPSM (German: KompetenzProfil SchulManagement; KPSM) is the first online-based self-assessment in the German language which has been designed to fit the school context and is based on psychometric principles. It offers participants the possibility to reflect their strengths and weaknesses in different requirement areas of school leadership; and to compare their individual results with peers from the school context, thus gaining valuable information on their individual profiles when planning their professional development and careers. After sketching the theoretical and empirical background, this article presents information about the aims and purpose of CPSM, the tool’s development, its test scales and test formats, the results of the pilot study and those of the evaluation study. Then, the further development of the tool in terms of modifications and add-ons are outlined, before, finally, the tool’s contribution to practice and research is discussed.     

The Devil’s Advocate

Science & Education - While dissent is recognized as a necessary component of scientific knowledge production, in school settings, it is a double-edged sword that can disrupt and undermine...     

Moralerziehung. Eine Notiz aus Schulen in Hamburg

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Ethics and economics: A comment on Narvaez‘s “Revitalizing human virtue by restoring organic morality”

This paper comments on Darcia Narvaez's Kohlberg Memorial Lecture, published in this issue, with respect to her contrasting ethics and economics, or morality and market. My basic claim is that ethics and economics, properly understood, are just two sides of the same coin. One main point is that all morality solves cooperation problems and includes positive and negative sanctions to uphold it. The second claim is that competition in market economies is, in principle, ethically justified, and where it creates a problem, it is not just an ethical problem, but by the same token an economic one with which economists are concerned.     

The 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science presented to Rob Van der Voo

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science to Rob Van der Voo for his outstanding contributions to the field of paleomagnetism and his reconstruction of ancient continental positions that have lead to a better understanding of plate tectonic processes for the past billion years of Earth history.     

e-Government services for faith-based organizations: Bridging the organizational divide

In this paper, we examine the challenges faced by faith-based institutions in a low-income, predominantly Black community seeking to take advantage of grants provided through the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives (FBCI). FBCI is an e-Government program that assists nonprofit organizations in competing for Federal dollars with fewer bureaucratic barriers. Informed by the design-actuality framework, we interviewed clergy at seven faith-based organizations. The intent of this analysis is to juxtapose the design intentions of the government officials with the actualities expressed by the intended benefactors of the initiative. Our findings suggest that this e-Government initiative may unwittingly exacerbate existing disparities in the strategic use of information and communication technologies (ICT).     

e-Government Adoption Model (GAM): Differing service maturity levels

This research has as its objective the discovery of the critical factors that enable citizens to adopt e-Government (e-Gov) at different stages of service maturity. To accomplish the objective, this research has explained the related concepts and theories and developed a research framework grounded on a strong theoretical and literature review background. The empirical study was conducted in Canada, which is a leader in providing mature e-Gov services. From our results, we have observed two ontological differences from the present literature in the adoption behavior of e-Gov where organizational and financial perspectives have distinct implications over parsimonious technology adoption behavior. First, technology adoption model (TAM), diffusion of innovation theory (DOI), and theory of planned behavior (TPB) cannot capture and specify the complete essence of e-Gov adoption behavior of citizens. Second, e-Gov adoption behavior also differs based on service maturity levels, i.e., when functional characteristics of organizational, technological, economical, and social perspectives of e-Gov differ. Our findings indicate the critical factors that enable citizens to adopt e-Gov at different stages of service maturity. Public administrators and policy-makers have potential implications from the findings of the adoption behavior of e-Gov at different maturity levels.