Academic literature on the topic 'Student unions – Administration'

Encyclopedia of Public Administration is the first Polish interdisciplinary encyclopedia covering the issues of public administration, both in the theoretical context and with reference to its functioning in practice. The publication, whose idea was developed by researchers from the Institute of Political Sciences at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies of the University of Warsaw, was prepared by scientists from eight Polish universities. Readers seeking knowledge and information on such issues as democracy, the system of public authorities in Poland, including local and regional self-government authorities, rules governing the practice of the functioning of offices, issues regarding officials and professional ethics, and finally forms of citizens’ participation in co-governance and their rights in relations with the public administration system, will appreciate the several hundred entries. Issues related to the functioning of the Polish administration in the structures of the European Union are also taken into account. This list does not exhaust the extensive range of entries. The Encyclopedia is addressed to various readers – the scientific community, students, representatives of public administration or citizens seeking information about the system of public institutions and the rules governing their functioning. The authors of the entries are authorities in the field of law, state systems and political issues of public administration, such as Professors Hubert Izdebski, Robert Kmieciak, Izabela Malinowska, Stanisław Mazur, Andrzej Misiuk, Jacek Sroka, Jacek Wojnicki and scientific editor of the volume Jolanta Itrich-Drabarek, Head of the Department of State Sciences and Public Administration at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw.

This book discusses the provisions and legal principles under the Insolvency Law in Malaysia in face of the issue of abandoned housing projects and its rehabilitation. Apart from the Malaysian Insolvency Law, this book also analyses comparatively between the insolvency legal provisions and legal principles under the United Kingdom and Singapore Insolvency Laws. The approach of this book is by way of legal analyses over the relevant insolvency legal provisions in Malaysia, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Singapore. The discussion is further enriched and collaborated by the case studies conducted over several abandoned housing projects in Malaysia that have been subject to the insolvency administration. In addition, the author also provides relevant official statistics and reports of abandoned housing projects and numerous examples of abandoned housing project cases illustrating the diverse problems, complications, issues and grievances. The outcome and proposals of this book will be beneficial to the legal practitioners, judicial and legal services, insolvency practitioners, housing developers, financial institutions, contractors, housing consultants, technical agencies, land and state authorities, purchasers of units in abandoned housing projects, consumers associations, relevant private and government agencies and Federal and States Ministries, students and policy makers in the insolvency legal administration in Malaysia, particularly for those who are directly involved in abandoned housing projects and its rehabilitation in Malaysia .

European policy exerts a considerable influence on shaping politics in Austria. Vice versa, Austrian policy forms a constitutive element of what is negotiated and decided in Brussels. This book addresses the question of how and under which externally and internally induced framework conditions Austrian ideas, strategies and interests are conceived, coordinated and articulated in the multilevel system of the European Union. What domestic coordination requirements and strategies come into play and when in order to generate Austria’s positions? How do feedback mechanisms function in order to safeguard democratic and transparent decision-making chains? How do Austria’s political system and the EU’s supranational system influence each other? This book is the first to conduct a comprehensive analysis of all the players, institutions and processes involved in Austria’s policy on Europe as well as the policy areas that are particularly important for the country. It will appeal to students and teachers of EU studies and researchers on that subject area, those involved in Austria’s policy on Europe who work in parliament, government, administrative bodies and interest groups, as well as all those interested in comparing the coordination of policies on Europe.

Conservative plans for a coalition government, a snap General Election, Prime Ministers considering whether to resign after an electoral or referendum defeat, and the contemplation of both Labour and Conservative deals with the Liberals, SNP and Northern Ireland Unionist parties, are all aspects readily identifiable in British politics since 2010, and once again following the hung parliament in June 2017. However, secret plans for all these different scenarios were drawn up by British political leaders and advisers in the 1970s. These documents challenge the mythology that dominates historical accounts, documentary films, and television news programmes, in particular, the contention that the minority governments of this era were weak, unthinking aberrations, alien to Britain’s otherwise strong majoritarian political traditions. Using declassified internal party files, this book provides new perspectives of the strategic response to minority government during the Wilson and Callaghan Administrations of the 1970s, reveals a previously unrecognized distinct British tradition of minority government that goes beyond established international minority government theory and practice, and shows how these antecedents might apply to minority government at Westminster in 2017. Employing a new model which includes historical-political interparty comparison, this work examines how both Labour Governments and Conservative Oppositions confronted challenges ranging from legislative management and electoral timing to planning for future minority or coalition governments. This study will be invaluable to all interested in minority government and British political history, from policymakers, students, and journalists to the general public.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

For any university to become successful in producing new knowledge it must invest heavily in graduate education. The developing world has dwindling resources investment in graduate training, yet countries cannot develop without graduate programmes. The challenge is that most postgraduate students do not receive adequate support from programme administration. There are no deliberate efforts to understand the cause of high dropout or delayed completion schedule of most graduate students. Providing tailored administrative and supervision support to graduate units is vital in reducing high attrition rates. This chapter provides key challenges facing graduate education in a resource-poor and culturally challenging environment. It proposes innovative remedies on student engagement, focusing on the need to develop tailor-made programmes to support student success at graduate level. The focus is on preparing, supporting, and enabling graduate students to successfully complete their studies.

This chapter provides an overview of the educational system from the founding of the country to today. Like Australia and Canada, the governmental structure involves the national government with smaller units in the form of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. This structure means variation of educational systems across governmental units. The authors provide an overview of the influence of conceptions of teaching effectiveness including the development of professional organization standards, passing of national legislation aimed at defining teacher effectiveness in terms of student outcomes, and standards-based teacher evaluation systems. Unique features of the United States perspective include a focus on differentiation to include getting to know the needs of individual students and meeting those individual needs. The authors describe the cultural basis for these unique features.

Barely noticed that summer, the Clabaugh Act was struck down, as time had moved on. Project 500 began with a setback, as new black students meeting in the Illini Union to air grievances were rounded up and arrested even before the school year had begun. David Eisenman, foreseeing the program’s problems, suggested the chancellor could have resolved it amicably. The Chicago Tribune falsely inflated the situation into a riot, legislators loudly demanded answers, and the Black Student Association (BSA) blamed the administration. In the end the trustees supported the program; with most charges dropped grievances negotiated, classes began.

In 2011 the Chancellor at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (UNL) charged each department and academic unit within the university to create programs and strategies to increase student enrollment within the next six years. The UNL Libraries embraced this goal by becoming more involved in the first-year experience programs and the first-year learning communities. This chapter will outline how the UNL Libraries gained library administration support to hire a Learning Communities/First-Year Experience Librarian and describe how they applied the theory of threshold concepts to develop a series of workshops and e-booklets to teach information literacy skills to students affiliated with the William H. Thompson Scholars Learning Community. These two initiatives will demonstrate how UNL Libraries built connections with campus units and services to become actively involved in student enrollment and retention.

Chapter 4 turns to efforts to transform the material and visual cultures of consumer capitalism during the 1930s and early 1940s. One of the most important of these endeavors was the Design Laboratory, which opened in 1935 in New York City as the country’s first comprehensive school of modernist design. Initiated under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the Laboratory attracted left-leaning faculty and students who disapproved of the streamlined style that typified much of the material culture of consumer capitalism at the time. In contrast, they developed a functionalist modernism that reflected their social-democratic ideals of utility, affordability, and sustainability. White-collar unions in New York as well as Consumers Union promoted this aesthetic of social consumerism as well. Public patronage for cultural initiatives like the Design Laboratory proved unreliable, however, especially as the federal government turned its attention from the Great Depression to the Second World War.

Informal organizations in education are those groups or unions that are spontaneously formed within the educational institutions by the members of staff, students and tradesmen for the realization of their identified goals. Those groups, in spite of their advantages, are chaotic and complex in nature as they are bound to bringing about frustration to the top or line mangers of the schools, encourage negativism, generate inter-personal and group rivalries, resist changes, cause harassment to certain employees, promote rumor mongering and promote dissatisfaction among employees. All of these deter the smooth operation and management of schools which if care is not properly taken may result to institutional entropy. The chapter puts forward some future trends for managing complexity of informal organizations by contending that, educational managers should employ approaches of cooptation, divide and rule, control of information, control of reward, displacement and control of meeting for the management of those groups.

There are many different benefits that a government can obtain from encouraging the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in its public sector delivery frameworks. Utilization of ICTs as a socio-economic stimulant has long been recognized by governments the world over. Electronic government utilizes ICTs to provide all the access to a wide range of public services. Today, different government departments and/or units at all levels of the governance hierarchy respond to millions of citizen demands electronically. The rising interest of many stakeholders in e-Government calls for a conceptual model that will guide implementation regardless of context. This chapter argues that several key success factors are appropriate and need to be considered for successful e-Government implementation. About one hundred e-Government Websites were examined upon those key success factors. Sixty-one university students took part in this investigation. Using t-test, the chapter investigates the appropriateness of the proposed model.

This chapter introduces and describes an innovative model for a thorough, organized and systematic analysis of the educational context – the MICRA model (model for identifying and classifying Competencies and Learning Outcomes), based on the official documents of the Course Units (syllabus and assessment components). The MICRA model was validated by means of a case study. Competencies and Learning Outcomes were identified in the Computer Science Course Units of the Accounting and Business Administration degree at the Institute of Accounting and Administration of Porto (ISCAP/IPP).We are aware that the adoption of this model by different institutions will contribute to the interoperability of learning outcomes, thus enhancing the mobility of teachers and students in the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) and third countries.

There are only a few countries in the world in which education is not the responsibility of national governments but the responsibility of smaller units—provinces and territories in Canada and states in Australia and the United States. Canada has 10 provinces and three territories; hence, there are 13 systems of public education with about 5.5 million students and over 450,000 teachers (Canadian Education Statistics Council, 2020). Consequently, there is considerable variability across the country in the quality of education and in the way it is managed and delivered.

Ragging is a deep-seated long-lasting social practice found in the state university system of Sri Lanka. Considering the negative, damaging impacts on physical, psychological, social, cognitive and behavioural aspects of undergraduates, it has been identified as a punishable offence under the Prohibition of Ragging and other forms of violence in educational institutions Act, No. 20 of 1998. Despite the array of harmful effects, ragging has evolved during the past five decades and sustained thus far amidst severe punishments imposed. The objective of the current study was to identify the underlying deep-rooted reasons behind sustenance of ragging in state universities with reference to a selected university (UOX) in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In-depth interviews were conducted with a heterogeneous sample (n=20) of volunteers. The study exposed an interconnected feeding system comprised of a minority of significant personnel among freshers, seniors, student unions, staff, administration, industry and political parties who play a decisive role in justifying the need and thereby support the sustenance of ragging. These findings may enable university authorities to find creative and innovative solutions to combat this menace to create a conducive academic environment for the future student community of State Universities in Sri Lanka.

In a teaching-learning process, it is essential that the evaluation is summative and formative, from an analytical and holistic basis so that the process is comprehensive and integrates the work that the student has developed throughout the course, for example, a portfolio of evidence. Van der Schaaf and Stokking (2008) state that a portfolio of evidence integrates elements that must be related to each other, in order to be considered valid and reliable to evaluate the teaching-learning process, the elements are: a) the teacher model, b) the task model, c) the scoring model and d) the interpretation model. The objective of this research is to analyze the use of the portfolio of evidence as an evaluation tool within the teaching-learning process, for the Competency-Based Educational Model of the University of Guanajuato. This is a quantitative research with descriptive scope. A 22-item questionnaire was used considering the instrument developed by Romero and Crisol (2011) called "Opinion, satisfaction, usefulness and feelings of students about the use of the portfolio in learning and self-evaluation". The instrument was applied to a sample of 183 students of the Bachelor's Degree in International Commerce of the Economic-Administrative Sciences Division of the University of Guanajuato, distributed in four different Learning Units. The results indicate that students consider important the use of the portfolio of evidence as part of their teaching-learning process. In the part of satisfaction, usefulness and feelings, the students consider that the use of the portfolio is very important as a pertinent and adequate tool, and it is considered useful for learning, since besides serving as reinforcement, it implies a free and creative exercise. As conclusions of the study, the importance of the portfolio of evidence as a method of evaluation in accordance with the Educational Model by Competencies of the University of Guanajuato, which has also been well received at least by the sample of this study, is manifested. As future lines of research, it is expected to expand the sample to other careers and learning units to verify the applicability of the results of the study.

Higher education programs need to prepare their graduates for the practical challenges they can expect to face upon entering the workforce. Students can be better prepared if their academic learning is reinforced through authentic workplace experience, where the link between theory and professional practice can be realized. Increasingly, such learning in the workplace is being seen as an integral part of the university curricula as evidenced through the implementation of the Learning the Workplace & Community (LiWC) Policy at Victoria University, Australia. This policy mandates a minimum of 25% content and assessment of all academic programs be related to work-integrated learning. Recognizing the need for authentic workplace experience in the IT undergraduate program, a review found that the existing work-related learning component accounted for only half the required 25% LiWC commitment. Currently, the LiWC component is an industry-based capstone project that spans two semesters in the final year of study. These projects allow students to work on real-life software development tasks where they experience the practical challenges of building software systems whilst appreciating the needs of a business client. In a search of the literature, campus-located industry projects were identified as one of the two most common work-related learning experiences in IT programs, the other being internships sited in the workplace. By retaining the current project-based component, it was decided to add an internship to the program to further bolster the student learning experience and graduate outcomes. This paper details the existing program structure and explores two possible implementations for the achievement of the LiWC policy. The first approach necessitates the addition of one academic year of cooperative education internship to be placed strategically between the current second and third years. Alternatively, the second proposal sacrifices several elective units to accommodate a final semester internship experience. The paper discusses both alternatives against various issues under consideration: staffing and administration, assessment, industry partnerships, professional accreditation and its impact upon differing cohorts of students.

Export education forms a major part of the Australian economy. Australian universities are now not only accepting overseas students into Australian campuses; they are setting up overseas-based campuses. This is often through an arrangement with a local educational institution or organisation. Subjects in these institutions are delivered by a combination of Victoria University Australian-based staff and local faculty. One of the primary programs being delivered overseas by many Australian institutions is the Master of Business Administration (MBA). This paper examines the delivery of the core information technology units, Management Information Systems (MIS), by Victoria University in Australia and overseas (in Bangladesh). The structure of the MBA at Victoria University in Australia and overseas is examined and the MIS subject explained. Results of a survey of MBA students’ views of the content of MIS, conducted in Australia (1997-2000) and Bangladesh (2001) are reported. There is little difference in the attitudes of students of both countries in relation to the topics covered in the subject, nor on the breakdown of the subject between ‘hands-on’ applications and more formal instruction. There are some differences in relation to the level of Internet and e-mail usage, with Australian students tending to use these technologies on a greater basis as a proportion of their overall computer usage.

There is no doubt that prior to Covid-19 outbreak the issue of migration had been one of the top priorities across the European Union, especially after so-called ‘’refugee crisis’’ of 2015-2017. However, the situation rapidly changed since Covid-19 outbreak, when migration has fallen off the radar as a political issue. The aim of this paper is to analyse students' attitudes towards migrants, in the period before COVID-19, and our initial thesis is that the fact that attitudes towards migrants are rooted in individual values and when established can be resistant to change. The paper consists of three parts. In the first part of the paper, we give an overview of available reports on the impact of Covid-19 to public attitudes towards migrants. Although is too early to make some general conclusions about it, the surveys made so far show that external factors, such as Covid-19, does not make important changes to public attitudes towards migrants. Having this in mind, in the second part of the paper we present the results of our research which was developed as a part of the project ''Creating Welcoming Communities'' of the Association ''MI''. The purpose of this research was to identify the attitudes of students of the Faculty of Law Osijek for the acceptance and integration of migrant into society. The target group of survey participants covered by the research was defined so as to include students of different levels (Intergrated Undergraduate and Graduate Study Programme, Professional Administrative Study Programme, University Undergraduate Study of Social Work) and the sample of students included 300 persons. Finally, in the third part of the paper we give a synthesis of our research and a review of the topic from the perspective of human rights and social work in the community.

[The final form of this paper was published in the journal Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology.] Project work forms a large part in work undertaken by graduates when they enter the workforce, so projects are used in higher education to prepare students for their working lives and to enable students to apply creativity in their studies as they present a solution to a problem, using technical skills they have learned in different units of study. Projects, both at work and in higher education, may be completed in teams, thus providing experience and the opportunity to develop team working skills. The team projects presented in this paper have been provided by external organisations, so that students work in a team on a real life problem, but with the support of their tutors, in the university setting. In this way the projects more closely resemble the sorts of problems they might encounter in the workplace, giving an experience that cannot be gained by working on tutor devised problems, because the teams have to communicate with an external client to analyse and solve an authentic problem. Over the three years that the Live Projects have been running, feedback indicates that the students gain employability skills from the projects, and the organisations involved develop links with the university and benefit from output from the projects. A number of suggestions for improving the administration of the Live Projects were suggested, such as providing clients with information on timescales and providing students with more guidance on managing the projects.