Peer reviewed journal articles are one way in which scholars communicate with each other and the public. Such publications create networks of collaboration. This study uses social network analysis techniques and theory to examine the network of collaborations that occur in public administration. Social network analysis is a perspective that takes into account the structure of relationships that can exist among individuals, organizations or other entities (Wellman, 2008). The small world theory is the specific theoretical framework that guides this study. The small world theory is based on the notion that despite a population being very large, individuals in that population are still connected with each other within a few steps. The author constructs a scientific network of research collaborations by assigning a relationship to two actors who have co-published an article together in the Public Administration Review, American Review of Public Administration, or The Review of Public Personnel Administration during the time periods of January 2003- December 2011. The results of this analysis reveal that the public administration network consists primarily of faculty members. The network also exhibits a high degree of clustering and several cliques. On average, individuals in the network are only slightly farther apart from each other than what would be expected in a small world network. This research contributes to public administration by introducing scientific networks of collaboration to public administration. The field has not ignored who publishes in its journals, but it has not used network analysis techniques to examine such publications. This study demonstrates how network analysis techniques and methodology can be used to examine a large network. Finally, this research contributes to the small world theory by applying it to scientific networks in public administration.

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The goal of this paper is to describe the relationship between a non-governmental organisation and the government. The paper is a case study of the non-governmental organization Meta o.p.s. which works in the field of integrating foreigners and focuses on the issue of educating pupils who speak various mother tongues. The paper deals with the development of relationships, the roles within these relationships the organization fulfils with regards to the government, and the influence these relationships with the government have on the organization's goals and development. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the persisting barriers which prevent these relationships from being created and developed. The relationships between Meta o.p.s. and the government are observed on individual levels of the public administration (national, regional, municipal). The paper consists of 4 parts. The theoretical part introduces basic theoretical starting points, namely models of relationships between the government and non-governmental organizations, and the roles fulfilled by non-governmental organizations in the society. The next part presents the methodology and chosen strategy of the research, i.e. case study. The empirical part monitors the development and nature of the relationships on individual levels of the public...

The traditional pen-paper sketching is extensively used in the early stages of product design as it supports creative exploration of product concepts and provides a fluidic mode for the expression of ideas. The Computer Aided Design (CAD) models support the later stages of design and manufacturing process. Faithful conversion of the designer’s ideas from concept sketches to the CAD models is a skill intensive and time consuming exercise which reduces the overall productivity of the organization. Providing computer based support can help the designer, in several ways, by reducing demand on the skill and allow focusing more on creative exploration of the concepts. Towards that, the thesis presents methodologies to understand the product concept sketches, support cognitive activities like perceiving the composition and behaviour, and create and interact with the sketches, directly in 3D. To begin with, traditional 2D sketches of product concepts are studied mainly to explores the psychological (cognitive) and physiological (musculoskeletal) activities of the designer in the context of the product being designed. A sketching application is created for capturing the sketches created using a tablet in digitized form. The captured data is analyzed based on the identified parameters. A grouping methodology is devised to group the stroke based on the observations which are akin to Gestalt laws of perceptual organization. This functional grouping or segmentation is used to identify the mental model of the product concept and the design rationale behind it. In concept sketches, annotations carry information like behaviour, functionality and usage. These wishful declarations need to be verified through simulation! To simulate the behavior of the components identified by the functional segmentation method, a kinematic model is defined where the designers interactively describe the constituents like joints, fixed links, inputs, etc. The interactive simulation changes the underlying kinematic model and makes the sketches to move to show the behavior. This system also provides methods to verify boundary constraints and allows creating patterns. Traditional 2D sketching suffers from several deficiencies. To overcome these, a novel direct 3D sketching methodology is proposed with stereo vision and haptic feedback. Different types of strokes creations like curves, strips and sweep surfaces, directly in 3D space, are demonstrated. Further, to provide control over stroke creation process, visual and haptic feedbacks are studied. Haptic rendering schemes for stroke generation are explored based on mechanics of sketching. Using the curve generation methods, surface generation schemes are devised. Mainly two types of schemes are explored (a) sweep surface and (b) Hatching surfaces. To support constrained concept exploration, two types of haptic constraints are modeled and their application is demonstrated in constraining a sketch within a boundary and outside a boundary. Motion constraints are implemented by simulating the behaviour of identified components’ motions. Two types of motion are implemented (a) Linear translation and (b) Rotation about an axis. Finally, a sketch based distributed collaboration method is presented to enable design interaction in the context of global product development. Several issues related to the realization of a sketch based collaborative conceptual design system are explored and, one such instance is demonstrated through experiments.