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Violent geo-political conflicts are on the rise across the globe, particularly within fragile states. Using path-dependency theory, this paper aims to explore Fiji in the context of its public administrative history examining the legacies of history that have contributed to its ongoing conflicts.

An archival document analysis along with a theoretical thematic analysis was used to collect and assess data. Themes were identified that explain how and when the conflict became path-dependent.

Analysing conflict as path-dependent demonstrates how indirect rule while Fiji was under colonial rule, and the short time it has taken for the nation to transition from a colony to an independent State contributed to the eruption of conflicts in Fiji.

The research makes two key contributions, namely, it develops a theoretical understanding of conflict using path-dependency theory and it uncovers legacies of colonialism that have shaped conflict in Fiji.

The study systematically analyses the path dependency and path-shaping of borrowed education policy, tracing it from the global through the national to individual schools. It also revisits the case schools after five years to map the school level policy paths.

Recently, path-dependency heuristics have drawn attention in predicting educational policy trajectories. However, these studies are primarily theoretical, and those empirical studies do not capture what happens at the school level. This paper fills the research gap by presenting a model that synthesises the research from diverse fields and is informed by findings from a longitudinal case study of educational outsourcing in public schools in Hong Kong and Korea.

The findings highlight path dependency interactions across educational levels diachronically and synchronically, while aptly incorporating the creative ways school leaders exercise their agency therein. The paper concludes with new insights into policy trajectory and education outsourcing.

The study substantiates and extends previously suggested theoretical models on the paths of travelling educational policies and identifies the factors that shape the paths. It also sheds light on how school leaders navigate the structures that constrain their actions or create a new path and pursue their educational goals.

In this study, the authors revisit Alberta's public-private partnership (P3) program after 20 years of field level experience by retracing its historical emergence and institutional evolution given its political context. Specifically, the authors adopt a path dependence perspective to reconstruct and reexamine Alberta's P3 program emergence, reflect on the successes achieved, and articulate challenges that must be overcome to institutionalize P3s as part of Alberta's infrastructure delivery environment in the future.

Adopting a constructivist approach and a case-based methodology, the authors (re)analyze the activities of governmental agents, private industry, and other actors as part of a new infrastructure policy introduced in 2002 to transform the provincial institutional landscape to accommodate P3.

The authors find Alberta's P3 emergence was driven by the necessity of its infrastructure deficits, political expediency, and resource scarcity. Furthermore, with well-entrenched conservative political actors as gatekeepers, Alberta's P3 implementation demonstrated stability and incremental change simultaneously, consistent with core elements of path dependency. Following the introduction of P3 in Alberta, the province lacked formal institutional structures that would transition its P3 program from good to great and enable it to become firmly embedded in the public infrastructure delivery landscape. With the subsequent absence of P3-convinced (political) leadership and uncertainty about its P3 policy direction, Alberta was unable or unwilling to consolidate the progress made at the start of the program.

Most recently, the emergence of new political leadership in Alberta has (re)catalyzed policy progress, pointing toward a more methodical program approach, and suggesting a rediscovered confidence in P3s in the province with the establishment of a P3 Office (P3O), including nascent formal rules for unsolicited bids. These recent changes in our view make for a much more anchored policy and could lead to program sustainability and eventual institutionalization. Given the unpredictability of the recent political change, a more robust analysis of the relationship between political party control, leadership, and P3 stability is required to anticipate future policy and organizational obstacles.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the stages of group development are path‐dependent or whether a stage can have a direct influence beyond an adjacent stage; to test a model that distinguishes between task and process characteristics; and to examine the validity of the Group Development Assessment.

A total of 204 public servants responded to questionnaires pertaining to their respective teams. Their responses to the Group Development Assessment were analyzed through the use of confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation modeling.

This study found that, in general, teams follow a predictable pattern of growth (i.e. they grow up one stage at a time), but their ability to grow is influenced by how well they addressed previous challenges. Path dependency was partly supported since the prior stage was generally the strongest predictor of the subsequent stage. The findings on path dependency are consistent with pendular models since changes in an earlier stage can have significant effects on later stages. Support was found for the separation of tasks and process behaviors. The Group Development Assessment was reasonably reliable, and its items generally classified into their corresponding stages.

The finding that, at a given moment, a variable such as dependency has a strong independent relationship with interdependence is consistent with a short time lag. However, a longitudinal study is needed to assess such lags.

As a group meets the challenges of a stage and moves forward, the assumptions or the foundations laid before need to be supported; otherwise the group may regress.

The study tests a group development model and offers recommendations for group interventions.

This paper, applies the concept of path creation to a historical case. Path creation arose in part as a response to perceived weaknesses regarding the limited role of firm agency in the path dependency literature.

This essay uses the path creation methodology to explain why and how specific features of the American brewing industry's regulatory framework were devised during prohibition (1920‐1933) and implemented upon the repeal of prohibition in 1933. The study draws upon a series of primary sources, including firm publications and government reports.

It shows that path creation is a useful way to examine the design and implementation of industry‐level regulatory systems. It argues that rather than passively waiting and hoping for a beneficial set of rules, the largest national breweries in America actively set about to shape the regulatory environment in which they and their competitors operated.

The study is valuable on two levels. First, it helps explicate how and why the brewing industry's current regulatory system emerged. Second, and more broadly, it shows how the path creation thesis can be usefully adopted to interpret firm and managerial actions across time periods and industries.

Changing scattered and dynamic business rules in business workflow systems has become a growing problem that hinders the use and configuration of workflow-based applications. There is a gap in the existing research studies which currently focus on solutions that are application specific, without accounting for the universal logical dependencies between the business rules and, as a result, do not support adaptation of the business rules in real time. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

To tackle the above problems, this paper adopts a bottom-up approach, which puts forward a component model of the business process workflows and then adds business rules which have clear logical semantics. This allows incremental development of the workflows and semantic indexing of the rules which govern them during the initial acquisition.

The paper introduces an event-driven model for development of business workflows which is purely logic-based and can be easily implemented using an object-oriented technology, together with a model of the business rules dependencies which supports incremental semantic indexing. It also proposes a two-level inference mechanism as a vehicle for controlling the business process execution and the process of adaptation of the business rules at real time based on propagating the dependencies.

The framework is strictly logical and completely domain-independent. It allows to account both synchronous and asynchronous triggering events as well as both qualitative and quantitative description of the conditions of the rules. Although our primary interest is to apply the framework to the business processes typical in the construction industry we believe our approach has much wider potential due to its strictly logical formalization and domain independence. In fact it can be used to control any business processes where the execution is governed by rules.

The framework could be applied to both large business process modelling tasks and small but very dynamic business processes like the typical digital business processes found in online banking or e-Commerce. For example, it can be used for adjusting security policies by adding the capability to adapt automatically the access rights to account for additional resources and new channels of operation which can be very interesting ion both B2C and B2B applications.

The potential scope of the impact of the research reported here is linked to the wide applicability of rule-based systems in business. Our approach makes it possible not only to control the execution of the processes, but also to identify problems in the control policies themselves from the point of view of their logical properties – consistency, redundancies and potential gaps in the logics. In addition to this, our approach not only increases the efficiency, but also provides flexibility for adaptation of the policies in real time and increases the security of the overall control which improves the overall quality of the automation.

The major achievement reported in this paper is the construction of a universal, strictly logic-based event-driven framework for business process modelling and control, which allows purely logical analysis and adaptation of the business rules governing the business workflows through accounting their dependencies. An added value is the support for object-oriented implementation and the incremental indexing which has been possible thanks to the bottom-up approach adopted in the construction of the framework.

Does history matter in strategy? The lack of attention given to historical perspectives in the mainstream literature suggests that it does not. Recently, however, authors have argued that historical forces do affect the strategic management of organizations, and have highlighted their importance through the concept of “path dependence”. I review the literature on path dependence and argue that a conception of the complexities of historical understanding is required in a dynamic understanding of organizations. To highlight these complexities, I review an important theme in twentieth century historiography: the possibilities and problems presented by counterfactual analysis. Despite some serious objections to counterfactual thinking, this method may yield benefits for both managers and theorists. I conclude that to do justice to the importance of history in organizations, we must follow Collingwood in engaging, not with the question “Shall I be a historian or not?”, but rather with the question, “How good a historian shall I be?”.

The purpose of this paper is the study of the causal relationship. The concept called “naive” causality can be stated more generally as the belief (or knowledge) that results follow actions, and that these results are not random, but are consistently linked with causes. The authors have thus formed a very general and precarious concept of causality, but one that appropriately reflects the meaning of causality at the level of common sense.

Mathematical and logical development of the causality in complex systems.

There are three aspects of rationality that give the human mind a unique vision of reality: quantification: reduction of phenomena to quantitative terms; cause and effect: causal relationship, which allows predicting; and the necessary and valid use of (deterministic) mechanical models. This work is dedicated to the second aspect, that of causality, but at present leaves aside the discussion of possibility-necessity, proposing a modification to philosophical synthesis of causality specified by Bunge (1959), with contributions made by Patten et al. (1976) and LeShan and Margenau (1982).

Causality is an epistemological category, because it concerns the experience and knowledge of the human subject, without being necessarily a property of reality.