Search results

Today most public sector purchasing processes are in transition. In the face of growing uneasiness by elected officials, service delivery managers, and citizens about rule-driven processes, inefficient systems, and poor management of resources, purchasing professionals are being challenged to develop new dynamic, adaptable structures. In this article, the current state of decentralization is examined and the roles of purchasing professionals in the purchasing process are presented. Specifically, this research attempts to answer the following questions: What changes have governments implemented in policy making, organization structure, personnel recruitment and training, expenditure authorization levels, review and oversight as they decentralize purchasing authority? And, what are the projected trends that will impact the success or failure of the decentralization issues over the next decade?

Government procurement has been a neglected area of study in higher education and research. This symposium is one of the first efforts in examining government procurement. This article will provide a brief overview of government procurement developments and summarize major themes of manuscripts included in the symposium.

The purpose of this study is to narratively explore the influence of leader narcissism on leader/follower social exchange. Moreover, while researchers acknowledge that narcissistic personality is a dimensional construct, the preponderance of extant literature approaches the concept of narcissistic leadership categorically by focusing on the reactive or constructive narcissistic extremes. This bimodal emphasis ignores self-deceptive forms of narcissistic leadership, where vision orientation and communication could differ from leaders with more reactive or constructive narcissistic personalities.

The authors argue that they encountered a compelling example of a communal, self-deceiving narcissist during archival research of Robert Owen’s collective experiment at New Harmony, Indiana. To explore Owen’s narcissistic leadership, they utilize an analytically structured history approach to interpret his leadership, as he conveyed his vision of social reform in America.

Approaching data from a ‘history to theory’ perspective and via a communicative lens, the authors use insights from their abductive analysis to advance a cross-paradigm, communication-centered process model of narcissistic leadership that accounts for the full dimensional nature of leader narcissism and the relational aspects of narcissistic leadership.

Scholars maintaining a positivist stance might consider this method a limitation, as historical case-based research places greater emphasis on reflexivity than replication. However, from a constructionist perspective, a focus on generalization might be considered inappropriate or premature, potentially hampering the revelation of insights.

Through a multi-paradigmatic analysis of the historical case of Robert Owen and his visionary communal experiment at New Harmony, the authors contribute to the extant literature by elaborating a comprehensive, dimensional and relational process framework of narcissistic leadership. In doing so, the authors have heeded calls to better delineate leader narcissism, embrace process and relational aspects of leadership and consider leader communication as constitutive of leadership.

Prisons can utilize effective business process, operations management and continuous improvement techniques to provide an opportunity to support the rehabilitation of inmates. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Iowa Prison Industries (IPI) work training program offered for incarcerated individuals under the supervision of the Iowa Department of Corrections (IDOC).

The IPI developed an Operational Excellence (OpEx) apprenticeship program that has worked with approximately 800 incarcerated “associates” to help them acquire skills necessary to obtain gainful employment upon release. This includes skills and belt level assessment in Lean Six Sigma as well as 6S/5S events and training. These techniques have been deployed by 22 teams at seven locations across the state of Iowa (USA). These sites have established objectives and goals and provided significant security-related benefits in the correctional industries environment.

Findings and success outcomes have been encouraging as those who completed the IPI apprenticeship program had lower recidivism, higher wages and more employability compared to the general prison population.

The rehabilitation of incarcerated individuals is critical to society. This novel and unique case study reviews one approach to providing work and life skills (such as esteem-building professional and personal skill sets) to support this process within the prison system.

This OpEx program has provided numerous benefits to both IPI and the incarcerated individuals. We feel that these findings could be beneficial to other correctional institutions and better prepare more inmates for a successful return to the workforce and to society.

To clarify our analysis, we start with a conceptual explanation of synarchy and the key terms that we need to use in this chapter. Synarchy is a neologism that combines synthesis with anarchy. We will first look at how these two contrasting ideas are linked. In juxtaposition, they provide a basis for understanding contemporary public administration in a global and comparative context.