The aim of this article is to advance a conceptualization for governance-as-practice, based on current developing streams of processual and practice studies — strategy-as-practice and ...project-as-practice. Although project governance has gained recognition as an important object of inquiry, what is actually done by different actors having to manage those projects has been studied much less. This article presents a qualitative research based on a multiple-case study of four major public infrastructure projects in Quebec, Canada. Considering the role of material artefacts in this process, along with organizational change, the results show how projects performative practices were enacted against the ostensive ones, uncovering a process of multilevel project governing. The main contributions are: 1) to unfold the knowledge articulation process of an institutional project governance framework, as it is translated into projects, and 2) to understand and document governmental practices in order to reflect on them and gain deeper insights about project governance.
•A conceptualization for governance-as-practice is advanced, based on processual and practice studies.•The research strategy is a multiple-case study of four major public infrastructure projects in Quebec, Canada.•Results uncover a process of multilevel project governing, as performative practices are enacted.•The theoretical contribution is to unfold the knowledge articulation process of a project governance framework.•The practical contribution is to understand governmental practices to gain deeper insights about project governance.
Purpose
This study evaluates the effect of transparency measures on public procurement efficiency, focusing on Thailand’s Infrastructure Transparency Initiative (CoST). This study aims to understand ...its impact on the country’s public infrastructure procurement practices.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyses Thailand’s government construction procurement data, focusing on budgetary savings and CoST process participation. Budgetary savings are this study dependent variable, while the main intervention variable is the adoption of the CoST data disclosure standard. This study uses multiple linear regression, fixed-effects model and propensity score matching with the logit model for a comprehensive analysis.
Findings
This study shows that using the CoST data disclosure leads to notable budget savings in Thai public construction procurement. With CoST’s introduction, the savings rose by Baht 9.6m, and even with added controls, the savings remained significant at around Baht 3.3m. The savings consistently stay near 5% across different models. The propensity score matching method confirms these results, consistent with factors such as open bidding and agency categorisation.
Research limitations/implications
This study might not capture all benefits, especially non-financial ones. Thailand’s unique context and potential biases in data sources also need consideration.
Practical implications
CoST evidence backs Thailand’s procurement transparency. This study recommends broadening CoST, streamlining online platforms and promoting digital public engagement. Training stakeholders and partnering with state-owned enterprises and local agencies is vital to align with CoST and mitigate risks.
Originality/value
This study shows a clear link between transparency from information disclosure and budget efficiency in public procurement, using data from Thailand. It highlights the potential of transparency measures in developing countries.
Public infrastructure projects must comply with the divergent and even conflicting demands of multiple institutional logics causing institutional complexity. Despite the increasing interest in ...different forms of complexities in projects, we lack empirical illustrations and rigorous theorizing of mechanisms for responding to institutional complexity. This paper demonstrates how public buyers of a tunnel construction project formed a hybrid organization of a multi-party project alliance to respond to institutional complexity. We delineate a process of temporary hybridization through which the competing logics of a bureaucratic state, corporate market, and multiple professions were combined within the temporary project alliance organization. Such temporary hybridization not only focused on selective coupling with external demands but also mitigated internal tensions. Our findings emphasize a blended organizational structure, jointly formed governance and incentive systems, and the facilitation of social interaction to build a temporary yet sustainable hybrid organization capable of combining conflicting institutional logics.
•Public infrastructure projects face conflicting institutional demands.•Such institutional complexity can be responded by hybrid forms of organizing.•We conceptualize project alliancing as a hybrid form of organizing.•Based on an empirical case study, we delineate a model of temporary hybridization.
This paper examines the social life and sociality of urban infrastructure. Drawing on a case study of land occupations and informal settlements in the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, where the ...staples of life such as water, electricity, shelter and sanitation are co-constructed by the poor, the paper argues that infrastructures – visible and invisible – are deeply implicated in not only the making and unmaking of individual lives, but also in the experience of community, solidarity and struggle for recognition. Infrastructure is proposed as a gathering force and political intermediary of considerable significance in shaping the rights of the poor to the city and their capacity to claim those rights.
Crowdsourcing systems do more than get information work done. This paper argues that microwork systems produce the difference between “innovative” laborers and “menial” laborers, ameliorating ...resulting tensions in new media production cultures in turn. This paper focuses on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) as an emblematic case of microwork crowdsourcing. Ethical research on crowdsourcing has focused on questions of worker fairness and microlabor alienation. This paper focuses on the cultural work of AMT’s mediations: divisions of labor and software interfaces. This paper draws from infrastructure studies and feminist science and technology studies to examine Amazon Mechanical Turk labor practice, its methods of worker control, and the kinds of users it produces.
A novel paradigm for vehicular traffic in the era of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) is proposed, which includes two combined principles: lane-free traffic and vehicle nudging; the latter ...implying that vehicles may be "pushing" (from a distance, using communication or sensors) other vehicles in front of them. This traffic paradigm features several advantages, including: smoother and safer driving; increase of roadway capacity; and no need for the anisotropy restriction. The proposed concept provides the possibility to actively design (rather than model or describe) the traffic flow characteristics in an optimal way, i.e. to engineer the future CAV traffic flow as an efficient artificial fluid. Options, features, related prior work, application domains and required research topics are discussed. Preliminary simulation results illustrate some basic features of the concept.
This paper examines the politics of open defecation by focusing on everyday intersections of the body and infrastructure in the metabolic city, which produces profoundly unequal opportunities for ...fulfilling bodily needs. Specifically, it examines how open defecation emerges in Mumbai's informal settlements through everyday embodied experiences, practices and perceptions forged in relation to the materialities of informality and infrastructure. It does so by tracing the micropolitics of provision, access, territoriality and control of sanitation infrastructures; everyday routines and rhythms, both of people and infrastructures; and experiences of disgust and perceptions of dignity. It also examines open defecation as embodied spatial and temporal improvisations in order to investigate the socially differentiated efforts and risks that it entails. More broadly, the paper seeks to deepen understandings of the relationship between the body, infrastructure and the sanitary/unsanitary city.
The future of energy systems is one of the central policy challenges facing industrial countries. This challenge is complex and multifaceted. Energy systems are among the largest human enterprises, ...comprising 9 of the 12 most heavily capitalized companies in the world. They form the heart of the technological arrangements around which contemporary industrial economies are organized. Efforts to transform energy systems involve changes, therefore, not only to energy technologies and prices but also to the broader social and economic assemblages that are built around energy production and consumption. Yet energy planning and policy rarely account for these broader dimensions of energy change. Two recent US energy reports illustrate this trend: the US National Academy of Engineering's study, America's Energy Future, and the US Department of Energy's recent review of its programs (NAE, 2009; DOE, 2012). These reports form the most comprehensive analyses of the US energy policy in the past decade. Yet both reduce energy systems to remarkably narrow configurations of energy technologies, the prices at which these technologies can deliver energy in a useful form, and the carbon emissions they release. The result is stunted energy debates that systematically underemphasize the meaning and consequences of energy systems and their changes for human societies and provide limited opportunities for people other than energy engineers, bureaucrats, and economists to make influential contributions to energy policy deliberations. Reprinted by permission of Carfax Publishing, Taylor & Francis Ltd.
Despite the prevailing view in the studies on public private partnerships (PPPs) on the potentiality of PPP models for stimulating innovation, existing studies fail to provide a full understating of ...the relationship between PPP characteristics and innovation, namely they do not explain whether and to what extent some characteristics of PPP are more likely to foster innovation rather than others. This paper aims at providing answers to the following key research questions: Which are the PPP features that favour innovation? How should a PPP be properly structured in order to foster innovation? With this aim, drawing upon the main streams of studies on innovation, we develop a conceptual framework on the relationship between PPP and innovation and formulate the research hypotheses. An econometric analysis is then applied to empirically test the hypotheses using a dataset of 290 PPP projects spanning different countries and sectors, extracted by the World Bank PPI Database. Findings reveal that the arrangement of PPP projects; the market, contract and network structure, as well as government supports, may affect innovation. These results provide foundations to elaborate managerial implications for the future implementation of PPP projects, showing how PPP features have to be structured in order to foster innovation.
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