Innovation in Public Management: Is Public E-Procurement a Wave of the Future? A Theoretical and Exploratory Analysis

Project management has become an answer to many traditional organizational structuration and performance shortcomings, while gaining currency in business and public sector organizations. Public procurement systems have evolved into public electronic procurement systems with variations and distinctions in the age of globalization and digitalized complexities. This article examines the development of public e-procurement as an innovation in public management in the contexts of project management, public procurement management, and e-governance. It also links practice to theory—through a fourfold theoretical perspective—with contributions to the knowledge in public procurement, governance, and public administration.     

Power in Global Trade Governance: Is the EU a Unitary Actor,a Tool for Dominance,or a Site of Contestation? GATS and the TTIP Negotiations

The European Union (EU) plays multiple roles within global trade governance as a unitary actor with particular interests to promote, a tool for dominance by powerful interests, and a site of contestation facilitating civil society mobilization. Identifying these roles is key to analyzing the role of the EU particularly in times of crisis in global trade governance where new forms of politics are most likely to emerge. This is investigated through considering two cases of politically sensitive trade negotiation in which the EU played, and continues to play, an active role: the GATS 2000 negotiations and the EU-US TTIP.     

Are civil servants really public servants? a study of bureaucratic attitudes in the U.S., brazil,and korea

The proper role of civil servants in the development of public policy has been the subject of continuous commentary and debate. In the advanced industrial democracies the operation of increasingly complex programs in government has led many commentators to warn of the danger of “technocracy”-- a condition wherein professional career administrators more fully control the direction of public policy than do elected representatives of the people. Likewise, in less developed nations there is concern over the role of public administrators in the development of policy. The charge of indifference to and disregard for public involvement and sentiment is frequently heard. Using data from a survey conducted in the U.S., Korea and Brazil, this paper examines the extent to which civil servants in each country adhere to a technocratic outlook. We find that although societies that are more economically advanced are less likely to adhere to a technocratic view, there is considerable variation within each research setting. Specifically, we find that technocratic orientations are more likely to be held by men, those who hold more materialist value orientations and those holding managerial occupations.     

Tenacious diasporic homelessness in Moroccan Dutch writing: A. Benali's ‘May the Sun Shine Tomorrow’ and H. Bouazza's ‘The Crossing’ as a case of study

The highly estimated reception of Abdelkader Benali's debut Wedding by the Sea and Hafid Bouazza's Abdullah's Feet in the mid-1990s is the hyped celebration of multiculturality by the Dutch establishment. Because of attributed to stories' apparent embedment in the native background (Moroccan exotic village), the writers were hailed as successful models for the Dutch multicultural society that was based on the policy of integration (while retaining one's own cultural identity). This paper argues that those exotic proses are imbedded in the culture of routes rather than the rhetoric of roots which is centered on otherness and ethnicisation. The narrative structure of the debuts is undergirded by a discursive disruption of the centripetal moves toward unified autochthonous belonging. It is suggestive of the precariousness of the migrants' homes and their sense of origins. More importantly, A. Benali's ‘May the Sun Shine Tomorrow’ and H. Bouazza's ‘The Crossing’ are produced in a different context dominated by the New Right nationalist demand for sameness and critique of the pluralist discourse of correctness. Nevertheless, it is contended here that in displaying a persistent accent on migratory experience and full incorporation of foreigners in society as equals rather than identical, the short stories maintain the obstinate immersion of the writers in the poetics of homelessness. As such, Bouazza and Benali are claimed to enunciate a diasporic transnational position which resists social exclusion and sees dialogic cosmopolitanism as an adequate home for identities that are constantly on the process of emerging.