Strategic Planning in the Malawi Public Sector: Potential Tool for Progress or Regression?

The process of developing strategic plans in the public sector is regarded as one indicator of positive reform in the system. The assumption is that strategic planning ensures that (just like in the private sector) public sector organizations’ operations should cost less but deliver better service. Ultimately the argument is that public sector institutional governance and responsiveness to the citizenry is not only seen but felt. However, strategic planning has to be done in an appropriate manner for it to deliver. For instance an analysis of the underlying motives, the role of leadership in the process as well as the relevance or viability of the guiding strategic planning model significantly affect the nature of expected results. In the early 2000s, the Malawi public sector embarked on a serious drive towards strategic planning process as part of its reform package. In order to ascertain it’s potential to transform the Malawi public service, this paper focuses at critically analyzing the strategic planning process in the Malawi public sector by among other things asking: who initiated and led the process? What approach determined the process? What is the possible potentiality of the adopted strategic planning approach in enhancing the reform agenda in Malawi? Based on interviews with senior officers in key Malawi public sector institutions, the paper concludes that the strategic planning process is ‘transitional and fluid’ hence lacks the clout to effectively enhance reforms in this sector. Another finding is that lack of effective leadership has largely contributed to the status quo.     

‘Strong Personalities’ and ‘Strong Institutions’ Mediated by a ‘Strong Third Force’: Thinking ‘Systems’ in Corruption Control

Corruption in public sector is a complex, ‘messy’ and ‘fuzzy’ phenomenon which involves calculus machinations between actors and constantly growing in sophistication. Consequently, an attempt to prevent, control or fight it requires systems thinking that ranges from public officials with integrity and personal ethics [strong personalities]; administrative rules and procedures as well as governments adopting, enforcing and monitoring appropriate systems [strong institutions]. This paper provides a systems approach to enhancing public sector ethics through ‘a corruption control tripod’ in preventing, controlling and combating corruption in all its forms. This framework discusses three overarching pillars and argues that adopting a reductionist approach in corruption control would yield futility; there is a need for synthesis so that each one would reinforce the other.     

Public Multichannel Management – an Integrated Framework of Off- and Online Multichannel Government Services

Government institutions have introduced multichannel environments over time following trends and technological innovations. These public multichannel environments often neglect specific channel characteristics and potentials and thus miss the opportunity to make full use of a strategic channel integration and combination with a focus on customer value creation. This study offers a systematic approach to establish an integrated public multichannel system not only taking into account user preferences, habits and their environment, but also the respective channel issuer and the characteristics of channels and public interfaces. Against this background, the study presents a systematic approach to expand services and channels according to their capacities, and provides academics and practitioners with a framework on public multichannel strategies.     

The Global Wave of Refugees and Migrants: Complex Challenges for European Policy Makers

This article reviews the burdensome problem posed by the arrival in the European countries of large number of refugees and migrants from countries at war or with little economic opportunities. It differentiates the issues of migrants (for economic reasons) and refugees (humanitarian grounds). This wave of refugees currently poses huge challenges to European policy makers. The article suggests some policy initiatives that could solve or at least control the present chaos, disorder, and uncertainty created by the arrival of this unprecedented number of refugees.     

Digital Finance and FinTech: current research and future research directions

Since decades, the financial industry has experienced a continuous evolution in service delivery due to digitalization. This evolution is characterized by expanded connectivity and enhanced speed of information processing both at the customer interface and in back-office processes. Recently, there has been a shift in the focus of digitalization from improving the delivery of traditional tasks to introducing fundamentally new business opportunities and models for financial service companies. Digital Finance encompasses a magnitude of new financial products, financial businesses, finance-related software, and novel forms of customer communication and interaction—delivered by FinTech companies and innovative financial service providers. Against this backdrop, the research on finance and information systems has started to analyze these changes and the impact of digital progress on the financial sector. Therefore, this article reviews the current state of research in Digital Finance that deals with these novel and innovative business functions. Moreover, it gives an outlook on potential future research directions. As a conceptual basis for reviewing this field, the Digital Finance Cube, which embraces three key dimensions of Digital Finance and FinTech, i.e., the respective business functions, the technologies and technological concepts applied as well as the institutions concerned, is introduced. This conceptualization supports researchers and practitioners when orientating in the field of Digital Finance, allows for the arrangement of academic research relatively to each other, and enables for the revelation of the gaps in research.     

Are sponsors blamed for edging off? Consumer reactions to sponsorship terminations

Firms regularly terminate sponsorships, even without publicly known misconduct by the sponsee such as athlete doping. Consumer reactions to these sponsorship terminations by firms have not been studied despite being a regular occurrence. Using a set of experimental studies, this paper analyzes consumer reactions to these sponsorship terminations (i.e., early and non-renewal) that were not caused by a sponsee’s misconduct, the underlying process that causes the reactions, and the role of several moderating factors (trust, power balance, and locus of control). Our findings reveal that sponsorship terminations have a negative effect on sponsors’ brand images—particularly early terminations that occur before the end of a contract—because consumers perceive these sponsorship terminations as unfair. The results also suggest that a termination is particularly harmful for the sponsor’s perceived fairness if the sponsor is powerful and if the termination decision is under the sponsor’s control. Further, the termination effect is particularly strong for firms that consumers trust.     

Coaching und Mentoring

The program “Mentoring for female junior executives at schools” in Hamburg has the goal of recruiting more female executives for schools in Hamburg. As a headmaster of a high school the author has attended this program as a mentor. She discusses the following questions: What are the differences between mentoring and coaching? Where are the limits of mentoring? When is coaching the better method? The main result is, that the mentor has to be very attentively of his position as a member of the organization. He has to decide, if he can advise the mentee for example in conflicts with superiors or if a coach could do a better job. A missing link in the mentoring program is the analysis of the culture of organizations, because this is an important factor for a successful start into the new function.     

Coaching,Training und Co – ist das alles Personalentwicklung?

This paper focuses on coaching and similar types of consulting in the field of personnel development. First the author discusses the current debate concerning personnel development; finally she describes the special goals, target-groups and issues of coaching, clinical supervision, mediation, mentoring and outplacement-consulting within the field of personnel development.