Local strategic partnerships in England: the continuing search for collaborative advantage, leadership and strategy in urban governance

Local Strategic Partnerships are being established in England to provide an inclusive, collaborative and strategic focus to regeneration strategies at the local level. They are also required to rationalise the proliferation of local and micro-partnerships set up by a succession of funding initiatives over the last 25 years. This article explores their remit, resources and membership and discusses how this initiative relates to theoretical work on urban governance, community engagement and leadership. It concludes by debating whether urban policy in England is now entering a new and more advanced phase based on inter-organisational networks with a strategic purpose. But questions remain about whether the institutional capacity is sufficient to deliver strong local leadership, accountability and community engagement.

The effects of conflict in driving forward innovation in shared leadership management consultant teams

It is argued in this study that current investigations of the role of conflict in shared leadership teams and, thus, teams in which all members have the opportunity to participate in its decision-making process are insufficient as they have focused on the downsides of these conflicts. This study demonstrates that task conflict is beneficial in that it can have positive effects on innovation in teams. It shows that particularly in shared leadership management consultant teams task conflict can stimulate innovation. Therefore, this research investigates the relationships among shared leadership, conflict and innovation. The research develops and empirically tests a conceptual model which demonstrates the relationships between these concepts and for which the inclusion of multiple research methods was essential. The sequential explanatory approach included a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the order of which can be adapted for other domains of application. The conceptual model was first tested with a sample of 329 management consultants. This was followed by 25, in-depth, face-to-face interviews conducted with individual survey respondents. In addition, weekly meetings of a management consultant team in action were video recorded over several months. This allowed for an in-depth explanation of the findings from the survey by providing an understanding of the underlying processes. The inclusion of observational methods provided a validating role and explained how and why conflicts contributed to the development of team innovation, through the analysis of subtleties and fleeting disagreements in a real-life management consultant team. The results deliver an assessment of the theoretical model and demonstrate that task conflict can allow for additional innovation in management consultant teams operating under a shared leadership structure. A practical model and guidelines for management consultant teams wanting to enhance their innovatory capacities are provided. In addition, a novel-user methodology which includes video observations is developed, with recommendations and steps aiding researchers aiming to employ a similar combination of methods. An original contribution to knowledge is made regarding the positive effects that task conflict can have towards innovation in shared leadership teams. Collaboration and trust are identified as important mediators between shared leadership and task conflict and significant regarding the development of innovation. The effectiveness of shared leadership in reducing negative relationship conflict and the benefits of both shared leadership and task conflict in enhancing innovation are demonstrated.

Impact of selection and demography on the diffusion of lactase persistence.

The lactase enzyme allows lactose digestion in fresh milk. Its activity strongly decreases after the weaning phase in most humans, but persists at a high frequency in Europe and some nomadic populations. Two hypotheses are usually proposed to explain the particular distribution of the lactase persistence phenotype. The gene-culture coevolution hypothesis supposes a nutritional advantage of lactose digestion in pastoral populations. The calcium assimilation hypothesis suggests that carriers of the lactase persistence allele(s) (LCT*P) are favoured in high-latitude regions, where sunshine is insufficient to allow accurate vitamin-D synthesis. In this work, we test the validity of these two hypotheses on a large worldwide dataset of lactase persistence frequencies by using several complementary approaches. Methodology We first analyse the distribution of lactase persistence in various continents in relation to geographic variation, pastoralism levels, and the genetic patterns observed for other independent polymorphisms. Then we use computer simulations and a large database of archaeological dates for the introduction of domestication to explore the evolution of these frequencies in Europe according to different demographic scenarios and selection intensities. Conclusions Our results show that gene-culture coevolution is a likely hypothesis in Africa as high LCT*P frequencies are preferentially found in pastoral populations. In Europe, we show that population history played an important role in the diffusion of lactase persistence over the continent. Moreover, selection pressure on lactase persistence has been very high in the North-western part of the continent, by contrast to the South-eastern part where genetic drift alone can explain the observed frequencies. This selection pressure increasing with latitude is highly compatible with the calcium assimilation hypothesis while the gene-culture coevolution hypothesis cannot be ruled out if a positively selected lactase gene was carried at the front of the expansion wave during the Neolithic transition in Europe.