Balk argues that most professionals in government agencies are underutilized. He proposes an operational approach, called public agency democracy, that should help reduce costly and disconcerting errors. The book will interest those who wish to better understand the frustrations of public service and how to turn these to motivate change.

Well over two million very qualified individuals mediate between high-level managers and other members of public agencies. These grossly underutilized intermediary professionals must become more empowered to reduce waste, malfeasance and other costly errors. Balk proposes an applied theory of public agency democracy designed to liberate the potential of its highly trained experts.

The book begins by discussing professionals as power intermediaries and their necessary tensions with authority around matters of reform. Recognized dilemmas in the field of public administration are reviewed to demonstrate the need to resolve issues concerning public agency democracy. A model is then developed to incorporate democratic action with responses ranging from routine to whistle-blowing activities. The second part of the book shows why existing management orientations are not receptive to the need for agency democracy. Conventional orientations reject the paradoxical realities of government environments; therefore, ingrained beliefs about effectiveness and management authority are at times inappropriate. Management approaches to public service motivation lack sophistication. Four final chapters are devoted to techniques and approaches on the part of professionals to initiate change. These involve techniques to assess organizational predicaments, design resolutions and become constructively involved in processes of agency reform. Ways are proposed for professionals and others to institutionalize public agency democracy in government environments.

This book takes the reader through real-world examples for how to characterize and measure the productivity and performance of NFPs and education institutions-that is, organisations that produce value for society, which cannot be measured accurately in financial KPIs. It focuses on how best to frame non-profit performance and productivity, and provides a suite of tools for measurement and benchmarking. It further challenges the reader to consider alternative and appropriate uses of quantitative measures, which are fit-for-purpose in individual contexts. It is true that the risk of misusing quantitative measures is ever-present. But does that risk outweigh the benefits of forming a more precise and shared understanding of what could generate better outcomes? There will always be concerns about policy and performance management. Goodheart's Law states that once a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a good measure. This book helps to strike a meaningful balance between what can be measured, what cannot, and how best to use quantitative information in sectors that are often averse to being held up to the light and put on a scale by outsiders.

Primarily an introduction to the theory of stochastic processes at the undergraduate or beginning graduate level, the primary objective of this book is to initiate students in the art of stochastic modelling. However it is motivated by significant applications and progressively brings the student to the borders of contemporary research. Examples are from a wide range of domains, including operations research and electrical engineering. Researchers and students in these areas as well as in physics, biology and the social sciences will find this book of interest.

The book offers a comprehensive survey of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets. It reports on cutting-edge research carried out by the founder of the intuitionistic fuzzy sets, Prof. Krassimir Atanassov, giving a special emphasis to the practical applications of this extension. A few interesting case studies, such as in the area of data mining, decision making and pattern recognition, among others, are discussed in detail. The book offers the first comprehensive guide on interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets. By providing the readers with a thorough survey and important practical details, it is expected to support them in carrying out applied research and to encourage them to test the theory behind the sets for new advanced applications. The book is a valuable reference resource for graduate students and researchers alike.

This book aims to provide new research methods, theories and applications from various areas of management and engineering. In detail, the included scientific papers analyze and describe communication processes in the fields of logistics, informatics, service sciences and other related areas. The variety of the papers delivers added value for both scholars and practitioners. Information and communication technologies have been providing an effective network infrastructure and development platform for logistics and service operations. To meet the needs of consumers and to promote core competences, many institutions and firms have been developing new types of services. This proceeding focus on "AI and data driven technical and management innovation in logistics, informatics and services." In detail, the included scientific papers analyze the latest fundamental advances in the state of the art and practice of logistics, informatics, service operations and service science. This book is the documentation of the conference "11th International Conference on Logistics, Informatics and Service Sciences," which took place at the Shandong University. Due to the impact of COVID-19, LISS 2021 took place online as a virtual conference.

The book offers a comprehensive, practice-oriented introduction to the field of fuzzy mathematical programming (FMP) as key topic of modern analytics. FMP plays a fundamental role in dealing with a varied range of problems, such as those concerning smart cities, sustainability, and renewable energies. This book includes an introduction to the basic concepts, together with extensive information on the computational-intelligence-based optimization models and techniques that have been used to date. Special emphasis is given to fuzzy transportation problems. The book is a valuable resource for researchers, data scientists and practitioners dealing with computational-intelligence-based optimization models for analytics.

Management of supply chains has been evolving rapidly over the last few years due to the inception of Industry 4.0, where businesses adopt automation technologies and data exchanges leading to dynamic and interconnected supply chain systems. Emphasizing on analytical approaches such as predictive and prescriptive modeling, this book presents state-of-the-art original research work dealing with advanced analytical models for the design, planning, and operation of the supply chain to provide faster and smarter decisions in the era of digitization. In particular, the book integrates machine learning and operations research models for faster and smarter decisions, presents prescriptive analytics models for strategic, tactical, and operational decision making in the supply chain, and addresses recent challenges such as sustainability in the supply chain, supply chain visibility, and supply chain digitalization. Key concepts are illustrated using real-life case studies, making the book a valuable reference for researchers, technical professionals, and students.

Implementing a food safety management system (FSMS) is a regulatory requirement for every firm in global food supply chains. At any scale, it could be influenced by many factors since the global food supply chains consist of a large number of stakeholders involved with an enormous variety of structures, the logistics of which will undoubtedly change rapidly, scale-up and diversify continuously. This book contains five chapters that aim to give an in-depth exploration of critical success factors (CSF) for food safety management in global supply chains. To fill the identified research gaps, the authors present empirical evidence from their research to verify critical success factors and their relationships with FSMS. Furthermore, the impact of supplier selection and supply chain relationships on food safety management in global supply chains are explored to identify Best Practice in FSMS implementation. This book will appeal to scholars working in food safety management, supply chain management and the impact of globalisation.

This book offers a concise introduction to the field of financial economics and presents, for the first time, recent behavioral finance research findings that help us to understand many puzzles in traditional finance. Tailor-made for master's and PhD students, it includes tests and exercises that enable students to keep track of their progress. Parts of the book can also be used at the bachelor level.

Cognition-driven decision support system (DSS) has been recognized as a paradigm in the research and development of business intelligence (BI). Cognitive decision support aims to help managers in their decision making from human cognitive aspects, such as thinking, sensing, understanding and predicting, and fully reuse their experience. Among these cognitive aspects, decision makers situation awareness (SA) and mental models are considered to be two important prerequisites for decision making, particularly in ill-structured and dynamic decision situations with uncertainties, time pressure and high personal stake. In today s business domain, decision making is becoming increasingly complex. To make a successful decision, managers SA about their business environments becomes a critical factor.

This book presents theoretical models as well practical techniques of cognitiondriven DSS. It first introduces some important concepts of cognition orientation in decision making process and some techniques in related research areas including DSS, data warehouse and BI, offering readers a preliminary for moving forward in this book. It then proposes a cognition-driven decision process (CDDP) model which incorporates SA and experience (mental models) as its central components. The goal of the CDDP model is to facilitate cognitive decision support to managers on the basis of BI systems. It also presents relevant techniques developed to support the implementation of the CDDP model in a BI environment. Key issues addressed of a typical business decision cycle in the CDDP model include: natural language interface for a manager s SA input, extraction of SA semantics, construction of data warehouse queries based on the manger s SA and experience, situation information retrieval from data warehouse, how the manager perceives situation information and update SA, how the manager s SA leads to a final decision. Finally, a cognition-driven DSS, FACETS, and two illustrative applications of this system are discussed."

This book focuses on the adoption of a Dynamic Performance Management (DPM) approach to support the planning and management of urban transportation systems. DPM allows one to embrace a dynamic and systemic perspective and, as a result, to frame the contribution of different stakeholders, in terms of outcome-based performance, at an inter-institutional level. The discussed DPM approach allows one to focus on the causal relationships and feedback processes that characterize urban transportation systems' governance. Particularly, through the adoption of such an approach, it is possible to identify outcome-based performance measures that help to monitor and drive the governance network toward the creation of public value for the reference communities.Strategic Planning for Urban Transportation: A Dynamic Performance Management Approach begins with an examination of urban transportation, highlighting the main criticalities and future challenges of managing it. Next, the book examines the governance of urban transportation including how to identify and engage stakeholders. Finally, the book introduces the main application of DPM and system dynamics to urban areas, with specific regards to transportation. The framework is outlined, and a case study is provided as a practical example of how to apply the model. This book should be useful to urban transportation decision-makers at both the managerial and political level.

30th European Symposium on Computer Aided Chemical Engineering, Volume 47 contains the papers presented at the 30th European Symposium of Computer Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE) event held in Milan, Italy, May 24-27, 2020. It is a valuable resource for chemical engineers, chemical process engineers, researchers in industry and academia, students, and consultants for chemical industries.

This book discusses corporate citizenship, corporate responsibility and business ethics across Africa generally, and Botswana specifically. It begins by contextualizing Botswana within the broader context of Africa, using nine other countries - Angola, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe - to provide a comparative perspective, examining the common factor: that weak legalization makes it challenging for corporate social responsibility to be actualized.From this background, the book then discusses Botswana as a key study. Botswana has been described as 'Africa's economic miracle' due to its growing economy since independence This puts it in a unique position for the implementation and study of corporate social responsibility. The interdisciplinary team of authors employ various research methods to examine the complex relationship between business, society, corporations and social justice issues.This book will be valuable reading for any academic working on corporate social responsibility in Africa, and will present an interesting insight to an often neglected area of study. France Maphosa is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Botswana. His research interests include migration and transnationalism, the sociology of entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, urban and rural livelihoods, labour studies and alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Langtone Maunganidze is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe. His research interests include industrial sociology, business and society, rural livelihoods and sustainable development, and entrepreneurship.

This volume is the third (III) of four under the main themes of Digitizing Agriculture and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The four volumes cover rapidly developing processes including Sensors (I), Data (II), Decision (III), and Actions (IV). Volumes are related to 'digital transformation" within agricultural production and provision systems, and in the context of Smart Farming Technology and Knowledge-based Agriculture. Content spans broadly from data mining and visualization to big data analytics and decision making, alongside with the sustainability aspects stemming from the digital transformation of farming. The four volumes comprise the outcome of the 12th EFITA Congress, also incorporating chapters that originated from select presentations of the Congress. The focus of this book (III) is on the transformation of collected information into valuable decisions and aims to shed light on how best to use digital technologies to reduce cost, inputs, and time, toward becoming more efficient and transparent. Fourteen chapters are grouped into 3 Sections. The first section of is dedicated to decisions in the value chain of agricultural products. The next section, titled Primary Production, elaborates on decision making for the improvement of processes taking place with the farm under the implementation of ICT. The last section is devoted to the development of innovative decision applications that also consider the protection of the environment, recognizing its importance in the preservation and considerate use of resources, as well as the mitigation of adverse impacts that are related to agricultural production. Planning and modeling the assessment of agricultural practices can provide farmers with valuable information prior to the execution of any task. This book provides a valuable reference for them as well as for those directly involved with decision making in planning and assessment of agricultural production. Specific advances covered in the volume: Modelling and Simulation of ICT-based agricultural systems Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) Planning for unmanned aerial systems Agri-robotics awareness and planning Smart livestock farming Sustainable strategic planning in agri-production Food business information systems

This book summarizes years of research in the field of fuzzy relational programming, with a special emphasis on geometric models. It discusses the state-of-the-art in fuzzy relational geometric problems, together with key open issues that must be resolved to achieve a more efficient application of this method. Though chiefly based on research conducted by the authors, who were the first to introduce fuzzy geometric problems, it also covers important findings obtained in the field of linear and non-linear programming. Thanks to its balance of basic and advanced concepts, and its wealth of practical examples, the book offers a valuable guide for both newcomers and experienced researcher in the fields of soft computing and mathematical optimization.

Understanding the concept of Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) is of critical importance as organizations and individuals manage a world that is defined by increasing uncertainty and complexity. The need for organizations of all types and sizes to survive and thrive in such an environment demonstrates a clear need for both managers and academics to really understand EO. Building upon this foundational need to better understand EO and with both a scholarly desire to synthesize and the practical need to execute, this volume convenes some of the world's leading experts on EO to address some of the most pressing issues facing scholars and leaders in the world of practice. Within this volume, you'll discover cutting edge insights ranging from theorizing on the future of EO to an empirical investigation of its measurement. There are chapters that focus on international ventures and EO and a detailed call for a global, multidimensional view of EO. Other contributions provide contextual views of EO that examine its connections to digital work environments, family business, and more. Taken together, this volume provides readers with an overview of the current state of EO research and sets a compelling agenda for its future.

This book introduces readers to an evolutionary learning approach, specifically genetic programming (GP), for production scheduling. The book is divided into six parts. In Part I, it provides an introduction to production scheduling, existing solution methods, and the GP approach to production scheduling. Characteristics of production environments, problem formulations, an abstract GP framework for production scheduling, and evaluation criteria are also presented. Part II shows various ways that GP can be employed to solve static production scheduling problems and their connections with conventional operation research methods. In turn, Part III shows how to design GP algorithms for dynamic production scheduling problems and describes advanced techniques for enhancing GP's performance, including feature selection, surrogate modeling, and specialized genetic operators. In Part IV, the book addresses how to use heuristics to deal with multiple, potentially conflicting objectives in production scheduling problems, and presents an advanced multi-objective approach with cooperative coevolution techniques or multi-tree representations. Part V demonstrates how to use multitask learning techniques in the hyper-heuristics space for production scheduling. It also shows how surrogate techniques and assisted task selection strategies can benefit multitask learning with GP for learning heuristics in the context of production scheduling. Part VI rounds out the text with an outlook on the future. Given its scope, the book benefits scientists, engineers, researchers, practitioners, postgraduates, and undergraduates in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence, evolutionary computation, operations research, and industrial engineering.

This volume presents techniques and theories drawn from mathematics, statistics, computer science, and information science to analyze problems in business, economics, finance, insurance, and related fields. The authors present proposals for solutions to common problems in related fields. To this end, they are showing the use of mathematical, statistical, and actuarial modeling, and concepts from data science to construct and apply appropriate models with real-life data, and employ the design and implementation of computer algorithms to evaluate decision-making processes. This book is unique as it associates data science - data-scientists coming from different backgrounds - with some basic and advanced concepts and tools used in econometrics, operational research, and actuarial sciences. It, therefore, is a must-read for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in a better understanding of the techniques and theories of these fields.

Fund Custody and Administration provides an overall perspective of investment funds without limiting its analysis to specific fund structures, as other books do. Since governance and oversight of investment funds are now major regulatory requirements, administrators and custodians must place greater emphasis on the custody and safekeeping of fund assets, on the independent and robust valuation of the assets, and on collateral management. By focusing on both the asset transactions made by the investment manager for the portfolio and on the transactions in the shares or units of the fund itself, it gives readers insights about the essential elements of investment fund management and administration, regardless of their geographical backgrounds.

This book demonstrates that innovative ideas are systematically constructed in the creative space spanned by the dimensions of systems thinking and knowledge management. Readers will be introduced to this proposition in the final chapter, after learning about the key innovation theories, design thinking, systems thinking, and idea creation methods in systems science and knowledge science. The content provided throughout the book supports knowledge creation in various fields, the management of research and business projects, and the creation of promotion stories for products and services. Practitioners who are seeking to create innovative ideas can systematically learn the minimum theories and methods required, while graduate students will be equipped to link their research to innovation by learning the essence of systems science and knowledge science and considering selected issues. Lastly, the book includes suggestions for future research directions in knowledge science.

This book analyses decision-making in dynamic economic environments. By applying a wide range of methodological approaches, combining both analytical and computational methods, the contributors examine various aspects of optimal firm behaviour and relevant policy areas. Topics covered include optimal control, dynamic games, economic decision-making, and applications in finance and economics, as well as policy implications in areas such as pollution regulation. This book is dedicated to Christophe Deissenberg, a well-known and distinguished scholar of economic dynamics and computational economics. It appeals to academics in the areas of optimal control, dynamic games and computational economics as well as to decision-makers working in policy domains such as environmental policy.

This book has resulted from the activities of IFAC TC 5.2 "Manufacturing Modelling for Management and Control". The book offers an introduction and advanced techniques of scheduling applications to cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0 systems for larger audience. This book uncovers fundamental principles and recent developments in the theory and application of scheduling methodology to cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0. The purpose of this book is to present recent developments in scheduling in cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0 and to systemize these developments in new taxonomies and methodological principles to shape this new research domain. This book addresses the needs of both researchers and practitioners to uncover the challenges and opportunities of scheduling techniques' applications to cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0. For the first time, it comprehensively conceptualizes scheduling in cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0 systems as a new research domain. The chapters of the book are written by the leading international experts and utilize methods of operations research, industrial engineering and computer science. Such a multi-disciplinary combination is unique and comprehensively deciphers major problem taxonomies, methodologies, and applications to scheduling in cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0.

This book tackles the perplexing problem of how to capture the qualitative differences that exist in entrepreneurship at any given point in time or across time, by presenting a novel qualitative index: Entrepreneurship Quality Index (EQI). This comprehensive composite index is based on recognized interactions among different factors affecting intensity and types of entrepreneurial activity, which in turn is impacting the well-being. It brings qualitative differences in entrepreneurship depending on time and space into calculation of the composite index. Besides, EQI is the missing piece of the entrepreneurship puzzle, and the quality of entrepreneurship is a significant factor that shows why less developed countries do not achieve higher levels of economic growth, despite their high rate of entrepreneurial activities. This book does a masterful job in explaining the diversity of existing perspectives, their contributions, and their shortfalls. It applies rigorous tools of mathematical statistics and quality engineering, such as Bayes' rule, maximum likelihood estimation, six sigma algorithm, and standardization equation, to derive and introduce EQI, as a novel operations research model. It offers a number of important ideas and insights as to how the quality of entrepreneurship can be measured more accurately. It also illustrates the proposed approaches showing their efficacy across time. The proposed solutions are logical and empirically sound; they represent an important leap in thinking about the quality of entrepreneurship. Its contribution is crucial and timely - one that will be well recognized by researchers worldwide. They give a much-needed framework along with the necessary tools to evaluate and measure entrepreneurial activities.

This work prepares current and future managers and consultants focused on health care delivery systems to improve the efficiency of processes that deliver care. This material will help you manage capacity, improve patient flow, estimate process costs, and conduct experiments that lead to process improvement. Essential tools covered include process mapping and measurement, data collection and analysis, and the use of discrete event simulation as a tool for virtual experimentation and improvement. Tools are introduced with no assumption of prior training. Many examples of settings, problems, and solutions are presented, along with a generalized approach to process improvement that is specifically tailored to health care settings. Readings, exercises, and cases suitable for discussion or end-course projects are also provided. Writing is based on a decade of experience teaching at the MBA and MS levels, managing dozens of improvement processes, and a host of our prior scholarly publications, book chapters, and case studies.

The second edition of Leadership offers a unique, highly-applied academic treatise on leadership, uniquely blending a chronological analysis of the last 100 years of leadership theory with exclusive CEO interviews. The case studies, expert insights and other teaching aids are timely and hard hitting, making this textbook relevant, insightful and informative, while a research chapter empowers the reader to competently question the leaders that shape our world. The world has turned on its political and corporate axis since the first edition of Leadership was published, and it became necessary to produce a second edition that fully encapsulated, respected and observed these changes. Numerous new case studies, discussion starters and examples subsequently reflect today's volatile technological, political, financial and social shifts, while exclusive interviews with successful CEOs powerfully blend theory with practice. Readers will learn the importance of navigating leadership in the most testing of times. A new chapter, 'Researching leadership', offers the reader the opportunity to develop significantly as a leadership researcher and to ably question reality in a post-truth world. A self-leadership chapter equips the reader to develop their own leadership capabilities, while retaining the ability to avoid destructive leadership. Ultimately, readers will become empowered to appreciate the complex, intersectional nature of leadership and to learn what it takes to lead in today's politically, technologically and socially tumultuous world. This book will be particularly engaging for students and educators at secondary school, college, undergraduate and postgraduate level, and for leadership/management consultants. While the book's primary role remains as a core text for leadership, management and business modules, it will also be of interest to students on many other courses (e.g. psychology, politics, sociology). Packed with teaching resources which educators will find particularly useful, Leadership is the only textbook of its kind to offer such an applied view of this subject via the inclusion of 12 (mostly CEO) expert insights. The first edition was an "Amazon Hot New Release", so this second edition might also hold interest for a general readership.