Does improvisation lead to outcome deviation? A conceptual framework of improvisation, its antecedents and outcome deviation

Management and organization literature has extensively noticed the crucial role that improvisation assumes in organizations, both as a learning process (Miner, Bassoff & Moorman, 2001), a creative process (Fisher & Amabile, 2008), a capability (Vera & Crossan, 2005), and a personal disposition (Hmielesky & Corbett, 2006; 2008). My dissertation aims to contribute to the existing literature on improvisation, addressing two general research questions: 1) How does improvisation unfold at an individual level? 2) What are the potential antecedents and consequences of individual proclivity to improvise? This dissertation is based on a mixed methodology that allowed me to deal with these two general research questions and enabled a constant interaction between the theoretical framework and the empirical results. The selected empirical field is haute cuisine and the respondents are the executive chefs of the restaurants awarded by Michelin Guide in 2010 in Italy. The qualitative section of the dissertation is based on the analysis of 26 inductive case studies and offers a multifaceted contribution. First, I describe how improvisation works both as a learning and creative process. Second, I introduce a new categorization of individual improvisational scenarios (demanded creative improvisation, problem solving improvisation, and pure creative improvisation). Third, I describe the differences between improvisation and other creative processes detected in the field (experimentation, brainstorming, trial and error through analytical procedure, trial and error, and imagination). The quantitative inquiry is founded on a Structural Equation Model, which allowed me to test simultaneously the relationships between proclivity to improvise and its antecedents and consequences. In particular, using a newly developed scale to measure individual proclivity to improvise, I test the positive influence of industry experience, self-efficacy, and age on proclivity to improvise and the negative impact of proclivity to improvise on outcome deviation. Theoretical contributions and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Greening the city: an ecosystem-based framework to support planning towards urban sustainability and resilience

Cities are small-scale complex socio-ecological systems, that host around 60% of world population. Ecosystem Services (ES) provided by urban ecosystems offer multiple benefits necessary to cope with present and future urban challenges. These ES include microclimate regulation, runoff control, as well as opportunities for mental and physical recreation, affecting citizen’s health and wellbeing. Creating a balance between urban development, land take containment, climate adaptation and availability of Urban Green Areas and their related benefits, can improve the quality of the lives of the inhabitants, the economic performance of the city and the social justice and cohesion aspects. This work starts analysing current literature around the topic of Ecosystem Services (ES), Green and Blue Infrastructure (GBI) and Nature-based Solutions (NBS) and their integration within current European and International sustainability policies. Then, the thesis focuses on the role of ES, GBI and NBS towards urban sustainability and resilience setting the basis to build the core methodological and conceptual approach of this work. The developed ES-based conceptual approach provides guidance on how to map and assess ES, to better inform policy making and to give the proper value to ES within urban context. The proposed interdisciplinary approach navigates the topic of mapping and assessing ES benefits in terms of regulatory services, with a focus on climate mitigation and adaptation, and cultural services, to enhance wellbeing and justice in urban areas. Last, this thesis proposes a trans-disciplinary and participatory approach to build resilience over time around all relevant urban ES. The two case studies that will be presented in this dissertation, the city of Bologna and the city of Barcelona, have been used to implement, tailor and test the proposed conceptual framework, raising valuable inputs for planning, policies and science.

Business Clusters in Eastern Europe: Policy Analysis and Cluster Performance

Clusters have increasingly become an essential part of policy discourses at all levels, EU, national, regional, dealing with regional development, competitiveness, innovation, entrepreneurship, SMEs. These impressive efforts in promoting the concept of clusters on the policy-making arena have been accompanied by much less academic and scientific research work investigating the actual economic performance of firms in clusters, the design and execution of cluster policies and going beyond singular case studies to a more methodologically integrated and comparative approach to the study of clusters and their real-world impact. The theoretical background is far from being consolidated and there is a variety of methodologies and approaches for studying and interpreting this phenomenon while at the same time little comparability among studies on actual cluster performances. The conceptual framework of clustering suggests that they affect performance but theory makes little prediction as to the ultimate distribution of the value being created by clusters. This thesis takes the case of Eastern European countries for two reasons. One is that clusters, as coopetitive environments, are a new phenomenon as the previous centrally-based system did not allow for such types of firm organizations. The other is that, as new EU member states, they have been subject to the increased popularization of the cluster policy approach by the European Commission, especially in the framework of the National Reform Programmes related to the Lisbon objectives. The originality of the work lays in the fact that starting from an overview of theoretical contributions on clustering, it offers a comparative empirical study of clusters in transition countries. There have been very few examples in the literature that attempt to examine cluster performance in a comparative cross-country perspective. It adds to this an analysis of cluster policies and their implementation or lack of such as a way to analyse the way the cluster concept has been introduced to transition economies. Our findings show that the implementation of cluster policies does vary across countries with some countries which have embraced it more than others. The specific modes of implementation, however, are very similar, based mostly on soft measures such as funding for cluster initiatives, usually directed towards the creation of cluster management structures or cluster facilitators. They are essentially founded on a common assumption that the added values of clusters is in the creation of linkages among firms, human capital, skills and knowledge at the local level, most often perceived as the regional level. Often times geographical proximity is not a necessary element in the application process and cluster application are very similar to network membership. Cluster mapping is rarely a factor in the selection of cluster initiatives for funding and the relative question about critical mass and expected outcomes is not considered. In fact, monitoring and evaluation are not elements of the cluster policy cycle which have received a lot of attention. Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are the countries which have implemented cluster policies most decisively, Hungary and Poland have made significant efforts, while Slovakia and Romania have only sporadically and not systematically used cluster initiatives. When examining whether, in fact, firms located within regional clusters perform better and are more efficient than similar firms outside clusters, we do find positive results across countries and across sectors. The only country with negative impact from being located in a cluster is the Czech Republic.

Gli assetti proprietari e di controllo nell'agroalimentare italiano

The recent default of important Italian agri-business companies provides a challenging issue to be investigated through an appropriate scientific approach. The events involving CIRIO, FERRUZZI or PARMALAT rise an important research question: what are the determinants of performance for Italian companies in the Italian agri – food sector? My aim is not to investigate all the factors that are relevant in explaining performance. Performance depends on a wide set of political, social, economic variables that are strongly interconnected and that are often very difficult to express by formal or mathematical tools. Rather, in my thesis I mainly focus on those aspects that are strictly related to the governance and ownership structure of agri – food companies representing a strand of research that has been quite neglected by previous scholars. The conceptual framework from which I move to justify the existence of a relationship between the ownership structure of a company, governance and performance is the model set up by Airoldi and Zattoni (2005). In particular the authors investigate the existence of complex relationships arising within the company and between the company and the environment that can bring different strategies and performances. They do not try to find the “best” ownership structure, rather they outline what variables are connected and how they could vary endogenously within the whole economic system. In spite of the fact that the Airoldi and Zattoni’s model highlights the existence of a relationship between ownership and structure that is crucial for the set up of the thesis the authors fail to apply quantitative analyses in order to verify the magnitude, sign and the causal direction of the impact. In order to fill this gap we start from the literature trying to investigate the determinants of performance. Even in this strand of research studies analysing the relationship between different forms of ownership and performance are still lacking. In this thesis, after a brief description of the Italian agri – food sector and after an introduction including a short explanation of the definitions of performance and ownership structure, I implement a model in which the performance level (interpreted here as Return on Investments and Return on Sales) is related to variables that have been previously identified by the literature as important such as the financial variables (cash and leverage indices), the firm location (North Italy, Centre Italy, South Italy), the power concentration (lower than 25%, between 25% and 50% and between 50% and 100% of ownership control) and the specific agri – food sector (agriculture, food and beverage). Moreover we add a categorical variable representing different forms of ownership structure (public limited company, limited liability company, cooperative) that is the core of our study. All those variables are fully analysed by a preliminary descriptive analysis. As in many previous contributions we apply a panel least squares analysis for 199 Italian firms in the period 1998 – 2007 with data taken from the Bureau Van Dijck Dataset. We apply two different models in which the dependant variables are respectively the Return on Investments (ROI) and the Return on Sales (ROS) indicators. Not surprisingly we find that companies located in the North Italy representing the richest area in Italy perform better than the ones located in the Centre and South of Italy. In contrast with the Modigliani - Miller theorem financial variables could be significant and the specific sector within the agri – food market could play a relevant role. As the power concentration, we find that a strong property control (higher than 50%) or a fragmented concentration (lower than 25%) perform better. This result apparently could suggest that “hybrid” forms of concentrations could create bad functioning in the decision process. As our key variables representing the ownership structure we find that public limited companies and limited liability companies perform better than cooperatives. This is easily explainable by the fact that law establishes that cooperatives are less profit – oriented. Beyond cooperatives public limited companies perform better than limited liability companies and show a more stable path over time. Results are quite consistent when we consider both ROI and ROS as dependant variables. These results should not lead us to claim that public limited company is the “best” among all possible governance structures. First, every governance solution should be considered according to specific situations. Second more robustness analyses are needed to confirm our results. At this stage we deem these findings, the model set up and our approach represent original contributions that could stimulate fruitful future studies aimed at investigating the intriguing issue concerning the effect of ownership structure on the performance levels.

Self-organising coordination systems

Many research fields are pushing the engineering of large-scale, mobile, and open systems towards the adoption of techniques inspired by self-organisation: pervasive computing, but also distributed artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, social networks, peer-topeer and grid architectures exploit adaptive techniques to make global system properties emerge in spite of the unpredictability of interactions and behaviour. Such a trend is visible also in coordination models and languages, whenever a coordination infrastructure needs to cope with managing interactions in highly dynamic and unpredictable environments. As a consequence, self-organisation can be regarded as a feasible metaphor to define a radically new conceptual coordination framework. The resulting framework defines a novel coordination paradigm, called self-organising coordination, based on the idea of spreading coordination media over the network, and charge them with services to manage interactions based on local criteria, resulting in the emergence of desired and fruitful global coordination properties of the system. Features like topology, locality, time-reactiveness, and stochastic behaviour play a key role in both the definition of such a conceptual framework and the consequent development of self-organising coordination services. According to this framework, the thesis presents several self-organising coordination techniques developed during the PhD course, mainly concerning data distribution in tuplespace-based coordination systems. Some of these techniques have been also implemented in ReSpecT, a coordination language for tuple spaces, based on logic tuples and reactions to events occurring in a tuple space. In addition, the key role played by simulation and formal verification has been investigated, leading to analysing how automatic verification techniques like probabilistic model checking can be exploited in order to formally prove the emergence of desired behaviours when dealing with coordination approaches based on self-organisation. To this end, a concrete case study is presented and discussed.

Antecedents and consequences of individual flexibility in project-based organizations

In the last decades, the increasing significance of “projectivization” (Lundin & Steinthórsson, 2003) has stimulated considerable interest in project-based organizations as new economic actors able to introduce a new logic of organizing work and weakening boundaries in favour of networks of collaborations. In these contexts, work is often delegated to project teams. Deciding whom to put on a project team is one of the biggest challenges faced by a project manager; in particular which characteristics rely on to compose and match effective teams. We address this issue, focusing on the individual flexibility (Raudsepp, 1990), as team composition variable that affects project team performance. Thus, the research question investigated is: Is it better to compose project teams with flexible team members or not flexible project team members to achieve higher levels of project performance? The temporary nature of PBOs involves that after achieving the purpose for which team members are enrolled, they are disbanded but their relationships remain, allowing them to be involved in future projects (Starkey, Barnatt & Tempest, 2000). Pre-existing relationships together with the current relationships create a network of relationships that yields some implications for project teams as well as for team members. We address this issue, exploring the following research question: To what extent is the individual flexibility influenced by the network structure? The conceptual framework is used to articulate the research questions investigated with respect to the Television drama serials production. Their project-team organizing combined with their capacity to dissolve and recreate over time make it an interesting field to develop. We contribute to the organizational literature, providing a clear operationalization of individual flexibility construct and its role on affecting project performance. Second, we contribute to the organizational network literature addressing the effects yielded by the network structure-structural holes and network closure- on the individual flexibility.

Il geografo riluttante. R.K. Narayan e il mondo di Malgudi

Il presente lavoro è dedicato allo studio della geografia immaginaria creata dallo scrittore indiano di lingua inglese R.K. Narayan (1906-2001), allo scopo non solo di indagare la relazione che si stabilisce tra spazio, personaggi e racconto, ma anche di rilevare l’interazione tra il mondo narrativo e le rappresentazioni dominanti dello spazio indiano elaborate nel contesto coloniale e postcoloniale. Dopo un primo capitolo di carattere teorico-metodologico (che interroga le principali riflessioni seguite allo "spatial turn" che ha interessato le scienze umane nel corso del Novecento, i concetti fondamentali formulati nell’ambito della teoria dei "fictional worlds", e i più recenti approcci al rapporto tra spazio e letteratura), la ricerca si articola in due ulteriori sezioni, che si rivolgono ai quattordici romanzi dell’autore attraverso una pratica interpretativa di ispirazione geocritica e “spazializzata”. Nel secondo capitolo, che concerne la dimensione “verticale” che si estende dal cronotopo dei romanzi a quello dell’autore e dei lettori, si procede al rilevamento, all’interno del mondo narrativo, di tre macro-paesaggi, successivamente messi a confronto con le rappresentazioni endogene e esogene dello spazio extratestuale; da questo confronto, la cittadina di Malgudi emerge come proposta autoriale di riorganizzazione sociale e urbana dal carattere innovativo e dallo statuto eterotopico, sia in rapporto alla tradizione letteraria dalla quale origina, sia rispetto alle circostanze ambientali dell’India meridionale in cui essa è finzionalmente collocata. Seguendo una dinamica “orizzontale”, il terzo capitolo esamina infine il rapporto tra lo spazio frazionato di Malgudi, i luoghi praticati dai suoi abitanti e la relazione che questi instaurano con il territorio transfrontaliero e con la figura del forestiero; inoltre, al fine di stabilire la misura in cui la natura dello spazio narrativo influisce sulla forma del racconto, si osservano le coincidenze tra il tema dell’incompiutezza che pervade le vicende dei personaggi e la forma aperta dei finali romanzeschi.

Scienza della sostenibilita' e regolazione: Il caso studio della politica europea in materia di risparmio energetico

Entro l’approccio concettuale e metodologico transdisciplinare della Scienza della Sostenibilità, la presente tesi elabora un background teorico per concettualizzare una definizione di sostenibilità sulla cui base proporre un modello di sviluppo alternativo a quello dominante, declinato in termini di proposte concrete entro il caso-studio di regolazione europea in materia di risparmio energetico. La ricerca, attraverso un’analisi transdisciplinare, identifica una crisi strutturale del modello di sviluppo dominante basato sulla crescita economica quale (unico) indicatore di benessere e una crisi valoriale. L’attenzione si concentra quindi sull’individuazione di un paradigma idoneo a rispondere alle criticità emerse dall’analisi. A tal fine vengono esaminati i concetti di sviluppo sostenibile e di sostenibilità, arrivando a proporre un nuovo paradigma (la “sostenibilità ecosistemica”) che dia conto dell’impossibilità di una crescita infinita su un sistema caratterizzato da risorse limitate. Vengono poi presentate delle proposte per un modello di sviluppo sostenibile alternativo a quello dominante. Siffatta elaborazione teorica viene declinata in termini concreti mediante l’elaborazione di un caso-studio. A tal fine, viene innanzitutto analizzata la funzione della regolazione come strumento per garantire l’applicazione pratica del modello teorico. L’attenzione è concentrata sul caso-studio rappresentato dalla politica e regolazione dell’Unione Europea in materia di risparmio ed efficienza energetica. Dall’analisi emerge una progressiva commistione tra i due concetti di risparmio energetico ed efficienza energetica, per la quale vengono avanzate delle motivazioni e individuati dei rischi in termini di effetti rebound. Per rispondere alle incongruenze tra obiettivo proclamato dall’Unione Europea di riduzione dei consumi energetici e politica effettivamente perseguita, viene proposta una forma di “regolazione per la sostenibilità” in ambito abitativo residenziale che, promuovendo la condivisione dei servizi energetici, recuperi il significato proprio di risparmio energetico come riduzione del consumo mediante cambiamenti di comportamento, arricchendolo di una nuova connotazione come “bene relazionale” per la promozione del benessere relazionale ed individuale.

Enabling Human Centric Smart Campuses via Edge Computing and Connected Objects

Early definitions of Smart Building focused almost entirely on the technology aspect and did not suggest user interaction at all. Indeed, today we would attribute it more to the concept of the automated building. In this sense, control of comfort conditions inside buildings is a problem that is being well investigated, since it has a direct effect on users’ productivity and an indirect effect on energy saving. Therefore, from the users’ perspective, a typical environment can be considered comfortable, if it’s capable of providing adequate thermal comfort, visual comfort and indoor air quality conditions and acoustic comfort. In the last years, the scientific community has dealt with many challenges, especially from a technological point of view. For instance, smart sensing devices, the internet, and communication technologies have enabled a new paradigm called Edge computing that brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed, to improve response times and save bandwidth. This has allowed us to improve services, sustainability and decision making. Many solutions have been implemented such as smart classrooms, controlling the thermal condition of the building, monitoring HVAC data for energy-efficient of the campus and so forth. Though these projects provide to the realization of smart campus, a framework for smart campus is yet to be determined. These new technologies have also introduced new research challenges: within this thesis work, some of the principal open challenges will be faced, proposing a new conceptual framework, technologies and tools to move forward the actual implementation of smart campuses. Keeping in mind, several problems known in the literature have been investigated: the occupancy detection, noise monitoring for acoustic comfort, context awareness inside the building, wayfinding indoor, strategic deployment for air quality and books preserving.

Seeing emotions in others: Improving cognitive and neuronal mechanisms of facial expression processing

In the conceptual framework of affective neuroscience, this thesis intends to advance the understanding of the plasticity mechanisms of other’s emotional facial expression representations. Chapter 1 outlines a description of the neurophysiological bases of Hebbian plasticity, reviews influential studies that adopted paired associative stimulation procedures, and introduces new lines of research where the impact of cortico-cortical paired associative stimulation protocols on higher order cognitive functions is investigated. The experiments in Chapter 2 aimed to test the modulatory influence of a perceptual-motor training, based on the execution of emotional expressions, on the subsequent emotion intensity judgements of others’ high (i.e., full visible) and low-intensity (i.e., masked) emotional expressions. As a result of the training-induced learning, participants showed a significant congruence effect, as indicated by relatively higher expression intensity ratings for the same emotion as the one that was previously trained. Interestingly, although judged as overall less emotionally intense, surgical facemasks did not prevent the emotion-specific effects of the training to occur, suggesting that covering the lower part of other’s face do not interact with the training-induced congruence effect. In Chapter 3 it was implemented a transcranial magnetic stimulation study targeting neural pathways involving re-entrant input from higher order brain regions into lower levels of the visual processing hierarchy. We focused on cortical visual networks within the temporo-occipital stream underpinning the processing of emotional faces and susceptible to plastic adaptations. Importantly, we tested the plasticity-induced effects in a state dependent manner, by administering ccPAS while presenting different facial expressions yet afferent to a specific emotion. Results indicated that the discrimination accuracy of emotion-specific expressions is enhanced following the ccPAS treatment, suggesting that a multi-coil TMS intervention might represent a suitable tool to drive brain remodeling at a neural network level, and consequently influence a specific behavior.

On the role of Computational Logic in Data Science: representing, learning, reasoning, and explaining knowledge

In this thesis we discuss in what ways computational logic (CL) and data science (DS) can jointly contribute to the management of knowledge within the scope of modern and future artificial intelligence (AI), and how technically-sound software technologies can be realised along the path. An agent-oriented mindset permeates the whole discussion, by stressing pivotal role of autonomous agents in exploiting both means to reach higher degrees of intelligence. Accordingly, the goals of this thesis are manifold. First, we elicit the analogies and differences among CL and DS, hence looking for possible synergies and complementarities along 4 major knowledge-related dimensions, namely representation, acquisition (a.k.a. learning), inference (a.k.a. reasoning), and explanation. In this regard, we propose a conceptual framework through which bridges these disciplines can be described and designed. We then survey the current state of the art of AI technologies, w.r.t. their capability to support bridging CL and DS in practice. After detecting lacks and opportunities, we propose the notion of logic ecosystem as the new conceptual, architectural, and technological solution supporting the incremental integration of symbolic and sub-symbolic AI. Finally, we discuss how our notion of logic ecosys- tem can be reified into actual software technology and extended towards many DS-related directions.

The European legal approach to Open Science and research data

This dissertation proposes an analysis of the governance of the European scientific research, focusing on the emergence of the Open Science paradigm: a new way of doing science, oriented towards the openness of every phase of the scientific research process, able to take full advantage of the digital ICTs. The emergence of this paradigm is relatively recent, but in the last years it has become increasingly relevant. The European institutions expressed a clear intention to embrace the Open Science paradigm (eg., think about the European Open Science Cloud, EOSC; or the establishment of the Horizon Europe programme). This dissertation provides a conceptual framework for the multiple interventions of the European institutions in the field of Open Science, addressing the major legal challenges of its implementation. The study investigates the notion of Open Science, proposing a definition that takes into account all its dimensions related to the human and fundamental rights framework in which Open Science is grounded. The inquiry addresses the legal challenges related to the openness of research data, in light of the European Open Data framework and the impact of the GDPR on the context of Open Science. The last part of the study is devoted to the infrastructural dimension of the Open Science paradigm, exploring the e-infrastructures. The focus is on a specific type of computational infrastructure: the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility. The adoption of HPC for research is analysed from the European perspective, investigating the EuroHPC project, and the local perspective, proposing the case study of the HPC facility of the University of Luxembourg, the ULHPC. This dissertation intends to underline the relevance of the legal coordination approach, between all actors and phases of the process, in order to develop and implement the Open Science paradigm, adhering to the underlying human and fundamental rights.

The conceptualisation of music in ancient Greek thought (V century B.C. – II century B.C.)

The focus of this dissertation is the analysis of the music-related philosophical passages from the 5th century B.C. to the 2nd century B.C. It aims to provide a multifaceted view towards music as a cultural phenomenon, which is based primarily on the philological and culturological explorations instead of the technical-musicological approach. The texts from our selected period attest that mousikē had an extremely broad conceptualisation which led to the attribution of the different, sometimes completely opposite value: from an insignificant performative practice to an activity which corresponds to the divine laws and directly affects the human soul. The discussed testimonia provide evidence of defining music both as an exclusively acoustic phenomenon and as a philosophically significant concept that oversteps the sonic definition. Our sources clearly demonstrate that mousikē was a polysemous term: it was understood as an interdisciplinary form of art (as the arts of the Muses), though it was also used to indicate the exclusively instrumental music or a philosophical concept, which does not necessarily define sound as its essential quality. The aim of this dissertation is to clarify the arguments behind each of these positions, to analyse whether such different modes of conceptualisation are compatible among themselves, and to see how they fit together into explaining what was understood as music in Antiquity. In this thesis we explore the conceptual framework of mousikē and analyse what enabled the musical thought to be worthy of the attention of the greatest philosophical minds. We will demonstrate that it was not the sound or the artistic practices that were central in the philosophical thought on music, but instead the embedded structural qualities that have correspondence to the universal proportions of the cosmic world and which are perceptible to the listeners through the medium of sound.

Multi-Principal Agency and the Compliance with Professional Guidelines in Health Systems: Economic and Regulatory Perspectives

Amid the trend of rising health expenditure in developed economies, changing the healthcare delivery models is an important point of action for service regulators to contain this trend. Such a change is mostly induced by either financial incentives or regulatory tools issued by the regulators and targeting service providers and patients. This creates a tripartite interaction between service regulators, professionals, and patients that manifests a multi-principal agent relationship, in which professionals are agents to two principals: regulators and patients. This thesis is concerned with such a multi-principal agent relationship in healthcare and attempts to investigate the determinants of the (non-)compliance to regulatory tools in light of this tripartite relationship. In addition, the thesis provides insights into the different institutional, economic, and regulatory settings, which govern the multi-principal agent relationship in healthcare in different countries. Furthermore, the thesis provides and empirically tests a conceptual framework of the possible determinants of (non-)compliance by physicians to regulatory tools issued by the regulator. The main findings of the thesis are first, in a multi-principal agent setting, the utilization of financial incentives to align the objectives of professionals and the regulator is important but not the only solution. This finding is based on the heterogeneity in the financial incentives provided to professionals in different health markets, which does not provide a one-size-fits-all model of financial incentives to influence clinical decisions. Second, soft law tools as clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are important tools to mitigate the problems of the multi-principal agent setting in health markets as they reduce information asymmetries while preserving the autonomy of professionals. Third, CPGs are complex and heterogeneous and so are the determinants of (non-)compliance to them. Fourth, CPGs work but under conditions. Factors such as intra-professional competition between service providers or practitioners might lead to non-compliance to CPGs – if CPGs are likely to reduce the professional’s utility. Finally, different degrees of soft law mandate have different effects on providers’ compliance. Generally, the stronger the mandate, the stronger the compliance, however, even with a strong mandate, drivers such as intra-professional competition and co-management of patients by different professionals affected the (non-)compliance.

Influencable autonomy and predictable freedom in the IoE

This thesis investigates how individuals can develop, exercise, and maintain autonomy and freedom in the presence of information technology. It is particularly interested in how information technology can impose autonomy constraints. The first part identifies a problem with current autonomy discourse: There is no agreed upon object of reference when bemoaning loss of or risk to an individual’s autonomy. Here, thesis introduces a pragmatic conceptual framework to classify autonomy constraints. In essence, the proposed framework divides autonomy in three categories: intrinsic autonomy, relational autonomy and informational autonomy. The second part of the thesis investigates the role of information technology in enabling and facilitating autonomy constraints. The analysis identifies eleven characteristics of information technology, as it is embedded in society, so-called vectors of influence, that constitute risk to an individual’s autonomy in a substantial way. These vectors are assigned to three sets that correspond to the general sphere of the information transfer process to which they can be attributed to, namely domain-specific vectors, agent-specific vectors and information recipient-specific vectors. The third part of the thesis investigates selected ethical and legal implications of autonomy constraints imposed by information technology. It shows the utility of the theoretical frameworks introduced earlier in the thesis when conducting an ethical analysis of autonomy-constraining technology. It also traces the concept of autonomy in the European Data Lawsand investigates the impact of cultural embeddings of individuals on efforts to safeguard autonomy, showing intercultural flashpoints of autonomy differences. In view of this, the thesis approaches the exercise and constraint of autonomy in presence of information technology systems holistically. It contributes to establish a common understanding of (intuitive) terminology and concepts, connects this to current phenomena arising out of ever-increasing interconnectivity and computational power and helps operationalize the protection of autonomy through application of the proposed frameworks.