EU Social and Labour Rights and EU Internal Market Law: Study for the EMPL Committee

EU Social and Labour Rights have developed incrementally, originally through a set of legislative initiatives creating selective employment rights, followed by a non-binding Charter of Social Rights. Only in 2009, social and labour rights became legally binding through the Charter of Fundamental Rights for the European Union (CFREU). By contrast, the EU Internal Market - an area without frontiers where goods, persons, services and capital can circulate freely – has been enshrined in legally enforceable Treaty provisions from 1958. These comprise the economic freedoms guaranteeing said free circulation and a system ensuring that competition is not distorted within the Internal Market (Protocol 27 to the Treaty of Lisbon). Tensions between Internal Market law and social and labour rights have been observed in analyses of EU case law and legislation. This study explores responses by socio-economic and political actors at national and EU levels to such tensions, focusing on collective labour rights, rights to fair working conditions and rights to social security and social assistance (Articles 12, 28, 31, 34 Charter of Fundamental Rights for the European Union). On the basis of the current Treaties and the CFREU, the constitutionally conditioned Internal Market emerges as a way to overcome the perception that social and labour rights limit Internal Market law, or vice versa. On this basis, alternative responses to perceived tensions are proposed, focused on posting of workers, furthering fair employment conditions through public procurement and enabling effective collective bargaining and industrial action in the Internal Market.

Sharing services, saving money? Five risks to cost saving when organizations share administrative services

Shared services are a popular reform for governments under financial pressure. The hope is to reduce overheads and increase efficiency by providing support services like HR, finance and procurement once to multiple agencies. Drawing on insights from organization theory and political science, we identify five risks that shared services won’t live up to current expectations. We illustrate each with empirical evidence from the UK, Ireland and further afield, and conclude with suggestions on how to manage these risks.

Knowledge Management Techniques to Augment Textual CBR (PhD Thesis)

The past decade had witnessed an unprecedented growth in the amount of available digital content, and its volume is expected to continue to grow the next few years. Unstructured text data generated from web and enterprise sources form a large fraction of such content. Many of these contain large volumes of reusable data such as solutions to frequently occurring problems, and general know-how that may be reused in appropriate contexts. In this work, we address issues around leveraging unstructured text data from sources as diverse as the web and the enterprise within the Case-based Reasoning framework. Case-based Reasoning (CBR) provides a framework and methodology for systematic reuse of historical knowledge that is available in the form of problemsolution
pairs, in solving new problems. Here, we consider possibilities of enhancing Textual CBR systems under three main themes: procurement, maintenance and retrieval. We adapt and build upon the stateof-the-art techniques from data mining and natural language processing in addressing various challenges therein. Under procurement, we investigate the problem of extracting cases (i.e., problem-solution pairs) from data sources such as incident/experience
reports. We develop case-base maintenance methods specifically tuned to text targeted towards retaining solutions such that the utility of the filtered case base in solving new problems is maximized. Further, we address the problem of query suggestions for textual case-bases and show that exploiting the problem-solution partition can enhance retrieval effectiveness by prioritizing more useful query suggestions. Additionally, we illustrate interpretable clustering as a tool to drill-down to domain specific text collections (since CBR systems are usually very domain specific) and develop techniques for improved similarity assessment in social media sources such as microblogs. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we illustrate the improvements that we are able to
achieve over the state-of-the-art methods for the respective tasks.

Adaptive utilitarianism, social enterprises and urban regeneration

Social enterprises have been placed at the centre of Big Society politics and an emphasis on the local as a site for experimentation and service delivery. Nationally, this has been supported by legislation in community transfer and procurement, social finance and new intermediaries to strengthen skills and loan readiness. This paper examines the role of social enterprises involved in urban development in Northern Ireland and highlights the multiple ethics, legitimation strategies and modalities that are necessary for sustainable forms of progressive regeneration. The paper concludes by stressing the possibilities of a more independent and reformist social economy and how this offers some practical alternatives to the enthusiasm for neoliberal policies in the local state.

Continuing the fight in reducing the risk of surgical site infections in the perioperative environment

Assessing risk has become part of the process of supporting patients andmaintaining safety in the healthcare setting. The risk of healthcare associatedinfections (HCAIs) has long been well documented and surgical site infection (SSI)is recognised as one of the most prevalent (Tanner & Khan 2008, Wilson 2013a).

Policy Transfer and the Sustainability of Public Private Partnership in Ireland::A conceptual analysis

There has been private sector involvement in the delivery of public services in the Irish State since its foundation. This involvement was formalised in 1998 when Public Private Partnership (PPP) was officially introduced. Ireland is a latecomer to PPP and, prior to the credit crisis, was seen as a ‘rapid follower’ relying primarily on the UK PPP model in the procurement of infrastructure in transport, education, housing/urban regeneration and water/wastewater.  PPP activity in Ireland stalled during the credit crisis, and some projects were cancelled, but it has taken off again recently with part of the Infrastructure and Capital Investment Plan 2016 – 2021 to be delivered through PPP showing continuing political commitment to PPP.  Ireland’s interest in PPP cannot be explained by economic rationale alone, as PPP was initiated during a period of prosperity. We consider three alternative explanations: voluntary adoption – where the UK model was closely followed; coercive adoption – where PPP policy was forced upon Ireland; and institutional isomorphism – where institutional creation and change was promoted to aid public sector organisations in gaining institutional legitimacy. We find evidence of all three patterns, with coercive adoption becoming more relevant in recent years. Ireland’s rapid uptake of PPP differs from other European countries, mostly because when PPP was introduced in 1998, the Irish State was in an economic position where it could have directly procured necessary infrastructure. This paper therefore asks why PPP was adopted and how this adoption pattern has affected the sustainability of PPP in Ireland.  This paper defines PPP; examines the background to the PPP approach adopted in Ireland; outlines the theoretical framework of the paper: transfer theory and institutional theory; discusses the methodology; reports on findings and gives conclusions.   

The role of the National Audit Office in Private Finance Initiative endurance

The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has become one of the UK’s most contentious public policies. Despite New Labour’s advocacy of PFI as a means of achieving better value for money, criticisms of PFI have centred on key issues such as a lack of cost effectiveness, exaggerated pricing of risk transfers, excessive private sector profits, inflexibility and cumbersome administrative arrangements. Nevertheless, PFI has persisted as a key
infrastructure procurement method in the UK and has been supported as such by successive governments, as well as influencing policy in the Republic of Ireland and other European Nations. This paper explores this paradoxical outcome in relation to the role played in the UK by the National Audit Office (NAO). Under pressure to justify its support for PFI, the Blair government sought support for its policies by encouraging the NAO to investigate issues relating to PFI as well as specific PFI projects. It would have been expected that in fulfilling its role as independent auditor, the NAO would have examined whether PFI projects could have been delivered more efficiently, effectively or economically through other means. Yet, in line with earlier research, we find evidence that the NAO failed to comprehensively assess
key issues such as the value for money of PFI projects, and in so doing effectively acted as a legitimator of PFI policy. Using concepts relating to legitimacy theory and the idea of framing, our paper looks into 67 NAO private finance reports published between 1997 and 2011, with the goal of identifying the preferences, values and ideology underpinning the
NAO’s view on PFI during this period. Our analysis suggests that the NAO sought to legitimise existing PFI practices via a selective framing of problems and questions. Utilising a longitudinal approach, our analysis further suggests that this patterns of selective framing persisted over an extended time period during which fundamental parameters of the policy (such as contract length, to name one of the most important issues) were rarely addressed.
Overall the NAO’ supportive stance toward PFI seems to have relied on 1) a focused on positive aspects of PFI, such as on time delivery or lessons learned, and 2) positive comments on aspects of PFI that were criticised elsewhere, such as the lack of flexibility of underlying contractual arrangements. Our paper highlights the possibility that, rather than providing for a critical assessment of existing policies, national auditing bodies can
contribute to the creation of legitimatory environments. In terms of accounting research we would suggests that the objectivity and independence of accounting watchdogs should not be taken for granted, and that instead a critical investigation of the biases which can characterise these bodies can contribute to a deeper understanding of the nature of lobbying networks in the modern state.

Sound Art and Public Engagement in the Built Environment: Reflections from an Architecture Center

This article explores the deployment of sound in architectural-curatorial and community engagement contexts through the work of PLACE, a multidisciplinary not-for-profit architecture center in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The author, who worked with PLACE and contributed to the projects discussed here, contextualizes architecture centers and their relationship with sound before examining the specific case of sound and sound art in Northern Ireland and case studies of projects delivered by PLACE. Specifically, the article evaluates two sound installation artworks and three community engagement projects for young audiences. As a means of curating urbanism and architecture, sound-art-as-public-art affords useful strategies to examine, describe or critique the environment as alternatives to traditional architecture exhibition formats. Sound’s temporality and materiality allow sound art works to exist as temporary sculptural interventions in the urban sphere, with attendant implications for public art procurement and urban acoustics. Rich territories of engagement are opened when using sound in a community participatory context.

Setting the Rules of the Game: Mega-Regionals and the Role of the WTO

Faced with a WTO in a state of paralysis, large developed trading nations have shifted their attentions to other fora to pursue their trade policy objectives. In particular, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are now being used to promote the regulatory disciplines that were previously rejected by developing countries at the multilateral level. These so-called ‘deep’ or ‘21st century’ PTAs address a variety of issues, from technical norms, procurement, investment protection and intellectual property rights to social and environmental protection. Moreover, recently, developed countries have sought to negotiate PTAs which are large in scale, both in terms of economic size and geographical reach, including the so-called ‘mega-regional’ PTAs, such as the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the EU-Japan PTA, the Transpacific Partnership, and the China-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. These mega-regional PTAs are distinctive not just in terms of their sheer size and the breadth and depth of issues addressed, but also because some of their proponents readily admit that one of the central aims pursued by such agreements is to design global rules on new trade issues. In other words, these agreements are being conceived as alternatives to multilateral rule making at the WTO level. The proliferation of 21st century trade deals raises important questions concerning the continued relevance of the WTO as a global rule-making venue, and the impact that the regulatory disciplines promoted in such agreements will have on both developing and developed countries. This paper discusses the emerging features of an international trading system that is increasingly populated by large-scale PTAs and discusses some of the points of tension that arise from such practice. Firstly, it examines instances of horizontal tension resulting from the proliferation of PTAs, particularly the extent to which such PTAs represent a threat or multilateral trade governance. Secondly, it looks at an example of vertical tension by examining the manner in which the imposition of regulatory disciplines through trade agreements can undermine the ability of countries, especially developing countries, to pursue legitimate public interest objectives. Finally, the paper considers a number of steps that could be considered to address some of the adverse effects associated with the fragmentation of the international trading system, including the option of embracing variable geometry within the WTO framework and the need to develop mechanisms that provide flexibility for developing countries in the implementation of regulatory disciplines.