The article presents the results of a quantitative study. The aim of the article is to identify the factors motivating teachers of the Vilnius City Municipality to work. The questionnaire survey of ...Vilnius city teachers was conducted in April-May, 2020, using the electronic survey tool Qualtrics. Employees of the Vilnius City Municipality Administration distributed the link to the questionnaire to all teachers of the Vilnius city schools by e-mail. 1660 respondents started the questionnaire on this electronic platform, but after eliminating the incomplete questionnaires, a database of 873 respondents who answered all the questions of the questionnaire was created. The survey of teachers of Vilnius city educational institutions has shown that teachers are most motivated by the improvement of teachers' working conditions at school and the reduction of direct control as well as by personal recognition and ensuring favourable opportunities for professional development.
We examine the relevance of suggestive findings and assumptions about immigrant philanthropy to a diaspora from a high-income country of origin, whose members are generally highly educated and ...professionally employed: the Lithuanian diaspora. We investigate whether this immigrant group’s voluntary sector participation, despite these differences, may evolve similar to that of other immigrant groups studied. The study casts doubt on the generalizability of the current claims from the literature—which is largely derived from cases of immigrants migrating from the South to the North—to immigrant and diaspora groups who are highly skilled and originating from relatively more industrialized countries (North–North migration). The findings highlight the need to examine the voluntary sector participation of a greater variety of diasporas and to recognize that not all groups will behave similarly. Some of the differentiated behavior may stem from demographic characteristics specific to North–North migration.
This interdisciplinary article presents a concept of the 21st century and phenomena that are products of the 4th industrial revolution – big data and Artificial Intelligence technologies – as well as ...the opportunities of their application in public governance and social policy. This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of big data, problems of data collection, its reliability and use. Big data can be used for the analysis and modeling of phenomena relevant to public governance and social policy. Big data consist of three main types: a) historical data, b) present data with little delay, c) prognostic data for future forecasting. The following categories of big data can be defined as: a) data from social networks, b) traditional data from business systems, c) machine-generated data, such as water extraction, pollution, satellite information. The article analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of big data. There are big data challenges such as data security, lack of cooperation in civil service and social work, in rare situations – data fragmentation, incompleteness and erroneous issues, as well as ethical issues regarding the analysis of data and its use in social policy and social administration. Big data, covered by Artificial Intelligence, can be used in public governance and social policy by identifying “the hot spots” of various phenomena, by prognosing the meanings of variables in the future on the basis of past time rows, and by calculating the optimal motion of actions in the situations where there are possible various alternatives. The technologies of Artificial Intelligence are used more profoundly in many spheres of public policy, and in the governance of COVID-19 pandemics too. The substantial advantages of the provided big data and Artificial Intelligence are a holistic improvement of public services, possibilities of personalization, the enhancement of citizen satisfaction, the diminishing of the costs of processing expenditure, the targeting of adopted and implemented decisions, more active involvement of citizens, the feedback of the preferences of policy formation and implementation, the observation of social phenomenas in real time, and possibilities for more detailed prognosing. Challenges to security of data, necessary resources and competences, the lack of cooperation in public service, especially rare instances of data fragmentation, roughness, falseness, and ethical questions regarding data analysis and application can be evaluated as the most significant problems of using big data and Artificial Intelligence technologies. Big data and their analytics conducted using Artificial Intelligence technologies can contribute to the adequacy and objectivity of decisions in public governance and social policy, effectively curbing corruption and nepotism by raising the authority and confidence of public sector organizations in governance, which is so lacking in the modern world.
Neo-Weberianism is a modern direction of public administration reform, the expression of which, to varying degrees, is increasingly being observed in various states. This direction is particularly ...relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of the administration of the COVID-19 pandemic shows that coherence between vertically integrated management, a professional civil service, and the influence of civil society and communities on public decision-making is at the heart of neo-Weberianism, and becomes particularly important in the event of an emergency of this nature. Many countries choose similar or identical anti-crisis measures to combat the threat of a pandemic. However, differences in applying the principles of neo-Weberian governance can also be observed between countries. The authors of this article selected three Central European countries (EU member states) – Poland (large), Hungary (medium), and Lithuania (small) – for a more detailed analysis of pandemic management. In Poland, in order to manage the pandemic and its financial consequences in perspective, redundancies or pay cuts to some civil servants and other public sector employees in public sector organizations were modeled. Hungary had the strictest anti-pandemic quarantine of the three countries selected for analysis, and at first glance it seems that the country inspection we see that the Hungarian government used population surveys and tried to take into account citizens’ views on the deadlines for overcoming the pandemic. In Lithuania, by coordinating strict pandemic quarantine, the aim was to ensure the provision of high-quality information to the population.
The article provides the theoretical analysis of co-production phenomenon. The interests in co-production and related concepts are examined applying the methods of Google Trends statistical analysis ...and information visualization. The activity of business, government, society and research sectors during the last five years are compared, the trends of interest change and the balance of inter-sectoral interest in co-production is assessed. The relative evaluation of interest in co-production indicates that the situation in different sectors is not the same – the asymmetry in interest in co-production prevails. The article concludes that cooperation between public sector organizations with private sector organizations and society in providing public service as well as cooperation between scientific research, methods and technologies is developed at a different rate thus hindering breakthrough on a larger scale.
Mokytojų senėjimas ir trūkumas Vilniaus miesto savivaldybėje skatina ieškoti šio reiškinio priežasčių. Straipsnyje nagrinėjami mokytojų motyvacijos veiksniai ir pristatomi Vilniaus miesto mokytojų ...motyvacijos tyrimo (873 respondentų anketinės apklausos) rezultatai. Tyrimas parodė, kad mokytojus labiausiai motyvuoja mokytojų darbo sąlygų mokykloje gerinimas ir tiesioginės kontrolės mažinimas bei asmens pripažinimas ir profesinio tobulėjimo galimybių užtikrinimas. Tyrimas taip pat parodė, kad pagrindiniai motyvaciniai veiksniai, tokie kaip atlyginimas, papildomi finansiniai priedai, pagarba, kūrybinė atmosfera, per pastaruosius dešimtmečius nepasikeitė ir yra ypač svarbūs motyvuojant mokytojus jų karjeroje. Vilniaus miesto ugdymo įstaigų mokytojų apklausa atskleidė, kad mokytojus labiausiai motyvuoja mokytojų darbo sąlygų mokykloje gerinimas ir tiesioginės kontrolės mažinimas bei asmens pripažinimas ir palankių profesinio tobulėjimo galimybių užtikrinimas.
Diasporas participate in the home country's development through remittances, philanthropy, knowledge transfer, investment, and political engagement. Based on the theoretical perspective of network ...governance, this paper argues that governments can enhance diaspora contributions by offering incentives to engage with the homeland. The paper then applies this perspective to assess the effectiveness of Lithuania's diaspora engagement policy. Based on successful strategies adopted by other countries, the paper makes recommendations on how to strengthen the incentives for the diaspora to participate in Lithuania's political, social, economic, and cultural life, and on how to create a better environment for the diaspora's contributions.
The article develops normative assumptions about what the political
ideologies, democracy and political parties ought to be and advocates a reconsidered version
of liberalism, which is perceived as ...an alternative to the prevailing modern political
ideologies. Assumptions of reconsidered liberalism about the role of ideologies in democracy
are generalized in the concept of ideological pluralism. The article also presents a concept
of comprehensive democracy as an alternative to representative, direct, deliberative, civic
and other modern conceptions of democracies. In this perspective democracy is perceived as
a mode of collective decision-making process. Normative criteria for the basic elements of a
collective decision making process, i.e.: participants of decision-making processes, decisionmaking
procedures, content of decisions and implementation of decisions, are formulated.
Assumptions about the alternative role of political parties in democracy are derived from
the conception of the comprehensive democracy. It is proposed to assign to political parties
functions such as civic education, organizing and moderating public deliberations, monitoring
policy implementation.
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