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Transformative learning experiences can expand individual personal and professional capacity. In this work, the meaning and significance of individual growth is viewed through the lens of public value, focusing on the connection between person and place. This chapter details how Nuffield International Farming Scholars perceive public value contributions stemming from their individual development and subsequent engagement in civic life and community development. Voices of program participants provide insight on capacity building experiences as part of sustainable community development efforts, and how perceived outcomes for individuals such as professional and personal benefits, post-program engagement, and a sense of reciprocity are motivators leading to public value contribution.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the notion, measurement, and impact of institutional “public value” in an effort to determine its relevance, origin, and implementable government focus to create, maintain, and stimulate national productivity/wealth.

A literature review is presented along with the conceptualization of the public value thinking; an empirical analysis (in force of accredited official dataset-information) will test research assumptions.

The chapter identifies both the main features of “public value” and the possible impacts of public domain on the quality of private institutions and relating markets functioning (financial, labor, goods, technology), through aggregate statistics.

The public value dynamics may be affected variously by the different context factors/cultures characterizing the international economies/years examined. Nonetheless, global statistics/indicators appear as interesting as significant.

The endeavor of this chapter is to invite scholars, administrators, and practitioners to take into consideration the findings and stimulate the government/management of public value (which is more and more entrepreneurial) also for facilitating doing business.

This study contributes to shed light on the complex mechanisms of accumulation and diffusion of public value addressing future research on the role of property rights, ethicality, undue influence, institutional efficiency, and security.

The hendiadys “Value” and “Public” has been for several years examined mostly from the normative viewpoint. This chapter moves on to the field of practical assessment of public institutions by adopting an econometric model which points to identify concrete drivers and relating effects on productivity.

The Public Sector is usually assumed to have a risk avoidance culture, with a reactive rather than proactive approach towards the management. However, an improved holistic approach seems to be required, especially when considering the complexity and size of the Public Sector, and the challenges it faces to connect the services, clients and the different levels of governance.

Within this chapter, the authors lay out a maturity level evaluation of Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) within the Maltese Public Sector. Through documentation analysis of the available literature on the subject, the authors determine the principal themes required to develop an effective GRC practice across the Public Sector. The authors then design statements based on the identified GRC themes and administer it using an online survey tool to Public employees across different Ministries, Departments, Agencies and Entities, in order to obtain their perception. This is in order to determine gaps, weaknesses or limiting factors towards the implementation of an effective GRC.

The results show that, although, there is a substantial percentage of scepticism and few disagreements towards some of the statements, especially those which related to Risk Management (RM) and Internal Auditing (IA), the majority of Public Sector bodies do in fact show high standards of GRC practices integrated and present in their day-to-day operations and internal environment, showing that there is a well-developed Governance, Compliance and Control structure and Internal Audit function across the Sector.

However, the perception of participants is that the RM function is the least developed area. IA needs some improvement especially where trust on advice is involved.

The creation of public value is a topical debate for Dutch civil society organizations. Over the years, moving from government to governance, they supposedly have gained responsibility and space in meeting public needs. However, meeting the priority public needs and demonstrating actual public value creation has proved difficult. This has led to many discussions on how and if these organizations are creating public value. This study therefore investigated three practical cases to explore and explain how managers of housing associations create public value.

A case study method was employed.

Based on the different cases we can conclude that despite high ambitions, deviating normative views and the will to change displayed by the managers in the cases we investigated, we did not encounter situations where managers actually managed spaces for the creation of public value. The involved managers are still led by formal agendas and policies, rather than engaging in dialogues with their relevant stakeholders. They remain segmented in their approach and offering of services. Managers’ environment and stakeholders are not yet naturally seen as a place for sharing information and reframing boundaries for creating public value.

The opportunity in the investigated cases and for these managers lies in mobilizing and utilizing network relationships. This article provides a public value praxis model that focuses on involving stakeholders in investigating priority needs, collectively (re)designing services that meet these.

Two factors explain why the Serbian privatization experience deserves close attention from outside world. First, Serbia's starting conditions for privatization, with a historical tradition of workers’ management, strong trade unions, and an ambivalent initial attitude toward privatization, have as much in common with circumstances surrounding privatization in the developing countries as with those in the so-called economies in transition. Second, Serbia embarked on a resolute privatization path only in 2001, following more than 10 years of diverse privatization efforts in other post-socialist economies of the region. This makes Serbia a perfect case study of how a country can learn from the experience (both positive and negative) of other reformers.

Today’s society is plagued with a myriad of sustainability-related issues such as poverty, climate change, environmental disasters, shrinking biodiversity, eroding of potential food-producing systems, disease and choking urban population. The nature of the problems requires societies to work collectively to find a solution to end such issues. Research is needed along with a supportive, functional and cohesive leadership across disciplines, sectors and organizations. Sustainability is the strategic imperative that one cannot keep ignoring any longer and time has come to build the momentum toward excellence, quality and reengineering. Institutions of higher education should work as equal partners in this journey toward sustainable development. World’s leading international agencies are promoting and stimulating the intellectual debate toward incorporating sustainability in main stream education with the help of thought leaders. The effort will help learners to take informed decision and responsibility toward creating environmental integrity and economic welfare for all. This volume talks about innovative pedagogy and learning methods that address the current scenario and offer solutions to meet them. The case studies and approaches written by various authors from Malaysia to Australia talk about curriculum development and integrating sustainability with the core philosophy of the university. The authors have elaborated how leadership education needs to innovate for dealing with the current sustainability challenges. This volume is topical and comes at the right time when there is a heightened interest in sustainability education across the globe.

In this paper, we reflect on an expanding literature that links theories of cognition and business models. Managers hold in their mind perceptual constructs or schemas of the business model. These guide the process of distinguishing between options and making choices. Those familiar with business model development will easily recognise that the perceptual construct provides only a summary of the business model, and that a more complex conceptualisation of how business model elements interact is needed. The business model is then much more than a visualisation. It is a schematic model of theorised interaction that is created, shaped, and shared over time. The underlying processes of this creation, shaping, and sharing are cognitive activities taking place at individual, organisational, and inter-organisational levels. Theories of managerial and organisational cognition are thus critical to understanding the acts of business modelling and business model innovation. Here we suggest some of the ways that business model and cognition literatures can be connected, present existing literature, and reflect on future avenues of research to explore the cognitive foundations of business modelling.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.