Evaluating Dispute Resolution as an Approach to Public Participation

Public participation has become an integral part of environmental policymaking. Dispute resolution—with its focus on deliberation, problem solving, and consensus seeking among a small group of people—is one of the alternatives decisionmakers increasingly turn to for involving the public. This paper evaluates dispute resolution as a form of public participation by measuring its success against five “social goals”: incorporating public values into decisions, increasing the substantive quality of decisions, resolving conflict, building trust, and educating the public. The data for the analysis come from a “case survey,” in which researchers read and coded information on more than 100 attributes of 239 published case studies of public involvement in environmental decisionmaking. These cases describe a variety of planning, management, and implementation activities carried out by environmental and natural resource agencies at many levels of government. The paper demonstrates that dispute resolution processes typically do much better than other forms of public participation in achieving social goals, but only among the small group of actual participants. The dispute resolution cases do far worse in extending the benefits of participation to the wider public. Many dispute resolution cases lack significant outreach, either to inform the wider public or to draw the wider public’s values into decisionmaking. The benefits of conflict resolution or trust formation also often do not extend beyond a small group of participants. The findings have normative implications for the desirability of dispute resolution in certain types of environmental decisions. They also have practical implications because the exclusion of the wider public from decisionmaking can come back to haunt project proponents in the implementation stage.dispute resolution, public participation, conflict resolution, evaluation

Wages, training, and voluntary labor turnover: Comparing IT workers with other professionals: Working paper series--02-12

Job turnover among IT workers has been an important issue for employers and employer concern about turnover was heightened during the IT boom of the late 1990s. Job satisfaction studies have suggested that IT professionals are most satisfied when they have new and challenging work that allows them to acquire new skills. However, the application of computing technology may cause skills to become more generally-valued and less firm-specific. This, in-turn, may contribute to a new labor contract between employer and employees which places less value on loyalty and places more of the responsibility for skill management on the worker

Finding and verifying all solutions of a system of nonlinear equations using public domain software: Working paper series--02-14

Economic models are often stated as systems of nonlinear equations, for example general equilibrium models, game theory models, and macroeconomic models. The existence and uniqueness of solutions to the model are critical issues. Interval arithmetic is an arithmetic that operates on interval values rather than point values. It can be used to find all solutions of a system of nonlinear equations over a specified region and to determine if a solution is unique. We present arguments demonstrating that this arithmetic is capable of determining existence and uniqueness. We then use a public domain software package to find all roots of several simple economic example problems

Employed women's well-being: The global And daily impact of work: Working paper series--04-05

Using the 1993 wave of the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) Young Women's Cohort, this paper develops and tests a two-equation model of women's well-being. The model conceptualizes and measures well-being at both a global level and a daily level. A priori, distinct antecedent individual, family, and work variables are postulated to affect global and daily well-being. Ordinal regression and OLS regression are used to estimate the global and daily equations, respectively. In addition to various individual and family variables, it is found that having supervisory capacity, receiving a recent promotion, and government employee status significantly increase women's global well-being, while union membership decreases it. It is also found that working an irregular shift, paid leave, and telecommuting in current job significantly decrease women's daily well-being

Building a High-Performance Collective Communication Library

We report on a project to develop a unified approach for building a library of collective communication operations that performs well on a cross-section of problems encountered in real applications. The target architecture is a two-dimensional mesh with worm-hole routing, but the techniques are more general. The approach differs from traditional library implementations in that we address the need for implementations that perform well for various sized vectors and grid dimensions, including non-power-of-two grids. We show how a general approach to hybrid algorithms yields performance across the entire range of vector lengths. Moreover, many scalable implementations of application libraries require collective communication within groups of nodes. Our approach yields the same kind of performance for group collective communication. Results from the Intel Paragon system are included

A Phenomenological Examination of Church Leaders\u27 Perceived Impact of Executive Coaching on Organizational Culture

The trajectory of the seminary training curriculum has evolved pedagogically at projecting adequate church leadership education and hands-on development. However, empirical research reveals that the seminary struggles with preparing generations of church leaders for modern church responsibilities including executive leadership, tactical performance, administration, and church organizational culture (Crowson, 2021; Costin, 2008). Hicks (2012), as cited by Smith (2017) states, “Recent studies have begun to explore the need for management training for pastors” (p. 2). Graduates as well as current church leaders report feeling ill-equipped for the increasing duties for today’s church culture. This qualitative, phenomenological study evaluated mid-to-senior level Christian leaders’ perceptions of executive coaching\u27s impact on church organizational culture. Four research questions were utilized to guide this study: 1) What are Christian church leaders’ perceptions of how executive coaching impacts leadership effectiveness? 2) How do Christian church leaders perceive how executive coaching improves church managerial performance? 3) What are church leaders’ perceptions of how executive coaching improves congregational relationships? 4) How do Christian church leaders’ perceive how executive coaching influences administrative skillsets? Fourteen Christian leaders participated in virtual interviews using an expert coach-vetted questionnaire. The researcher discovered that leadership coaching impacts church organizational culture through new skillsets and personal growth integrated into their leadership. Church leaders perceive that leadership coaching significantly influenced leadership effectiveness, managerial performance, and administrative skillset with minimal impact on congregational relationship building

When Rider Is Hope

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Social Justice autobiography on: Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd; I can’t breathe!; Ku Klux Klan; Criminal Justice system; All-white jury; religionhttps://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/writingbeyondtheprison/1013/thumbnail.jp

Chief Information Security Officers Strategies for Minimizing Cybersecurity Attacks

Cyberattacks pose a significant threat to corporate operations that depend on computer networks to carry out everyday operations. Technology leaders are concerned about the growing use of ransomware, social engineering, and phishing by cybercriminals to steal data and engage in identity theft, along with the negative impact of cyberattacks on business sustainability. Grounded in protection motivation theory, the purpose of this pragmatic inquiry was to identify and explore the cybersecurity strategies technology leaders used to mitigate cyberattacks that could disrupt their business operational services. The project participants were six technology leaders who used their cybersecurity strategies to mitigate cyberattacks that could disrupt their business operational services. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and the use of a reflective log to ensure credibility. Through thematic analysis, three themes emerged: threat appraisal, coping appraisal, and self-efficacy. A key recommendation is for technology leaders to provide regular cybersecurity training, with a focus on employee behavior, password protection, and social engineering. The implications for positive social change include the potential to improve cybersecurity measures while also improving business sustainability for job creation, which may benefit local communities by providing long-term stability for consistent products and services offered to them