■ Abstract In this review article, I identify the key questions raised by the treatment of electoral systems not as causal influences on party systems but as effects or byproducts of party systems. Framing these questions in the context of the classic consequences-oriented study of electoral institutions, I first review the classic approach, which treats electoral systems as causes, and explore...

In both academic and practically oriented literature as well as on the Internet, knowledge management is used much more frequently with respect to the business world, often in conjunction with "e-business" and "virtual organizations." It has been slow for higher education to adopt knowledge management. There is no doubt that higher education is both scholarly and operationally knowledge rich. E...

— Collaborative learning models are widely used in educational institutions. These models require a high interaction level among students and are mainly oriented towards in-class scenarios. But when collaborative models are deployed in a distant scenario, user expressiveness is significantly reduced thus creating a gap that hinders the effectiveness of this collaboration. A computer-supported m...

Norms guide multi-agent systems away from being potentially anarchic towards a coordinated and collaborative society. Institutions provide an explicit, external representation of norms as well as the means to detect violations and other conditions. Each institution can be crafted individually to capture their designers’ goals, but this creates a challenge at higher levels of authority in guidin...

Purpose: Stakeholder theory (ST) is a reconceptualization of the firm that seeks to change business culture from being focused solely on profit and loss to being focused on creating value for the various stakeholders that are affected by or can affect the firm. Total Quality Management (TQM) is a philosophy that focuses the firm on satisfying the customer by improving organizational processes t...

The Highly Indebted Poor Countries’ (HIPC) Initiative provides debt relief to a group of highly indebted poor countries. The capacity of the multilateral financial institutions (MFIs) to manage this programme is analysed and the conclusion is drawn that it is unlikely to achieve the purposes for which it has been established. Criticism is based upon the MFIs’ own policy advice as well as that o...

Jaime Vargas for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Inter-American Development Bank. Foreword This paper is important because it seeks to enlighten a complex and often polemical debate about public and private education. It argues that the distinction be...

Positioning the organization in the strategic environment of its industry is one of the first and most important phases of the organizational strategic planning and in today knowledge-based economy has its importance been duplicated for higher education institutes as the centers of education, knowledge creation and knowledge worker training. Up to now, various models with diverse approaches hav...

developmental crime prevention: legal and juridical analyses of iran and england niyoosha ghahramani afshar [1] ghodrat-allah khosroshahi [2] mohammad reza shadmanfar [3]   abstract in a crime policy based on scientific doctrines, how to deal with children and adolescents’ conflicts is different from the delinquencies committed by adults. detection of crime and deviance, and the attempts to red...

CONTEXT Research-oriented cancer hospitals in the United States treat and study patients with a range of diseases. Measures of disease specific research productivity, and comparison to overall productivity, are currently lacking. HYPOTHESIS Different institutions are specialized in research of particular diseases. OBJECTIVE To report disease specific productivity of American cancer hospital...