The conceptions about managing coordination in Iranian governmental machinery: a Q methodology study

Alignment among governmental organizations is one of the major national concerns in all political systems. The origin of this concern is the weakness of “horizontal management” which refers to horizontal coordination among all organization that exercise national governance. One of the important influences on horizontal management is the attitudes and perceptions of governing elites. This paper focuses on perceptions of barriers to coordination in government among public administrators, programming elites, politicians and academics involved in the government system. The authors use the inductive research technique Q-methodology, which is a research method used to study people’s “subjectivity”, to investigate the views of of 50 members of the governing elite about barriers to coordination of the Iranian government web. The results show that these elite members have seven distinct conceptions about managing coordination in government which are based on how they perceive these barriers. The authors labeled these conceptions as: goal-orientation, unification-orientation, policy-orientation, reality-orientation, equilibrium-orientation, performance-orientation and architecture-orientation. The seven conceptions are examined in more details and are interpreted based on existing theories in the final section of this paper.     

Measuring cycling accessibility in metropolitan areas

Different measures of cycling accessibility have been widely introduced in transportation planning. However, those measurements are mainly restricted by the availability of travel behavior data. In addition, there has been limited comprehensive research on the importance of cycling accessibility to destinations based on the travel time or distance. In this paper, a new index for measuring bikeability in metropolitan areas is introduced. A Cycling Accessibility Index (CAI) is developed for quantifying cycling accessibility within local areas in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. CAI is defined according to gravity-based measures of accessibility. This index measures cycling accessibility levels in terms of diversity of different land uses, number of activities in statistical areas, and the travel impedance between origins and destinations. The Victorian Integrated Survey of Travel and Activity (VISTA) dataset was used to evaluate the index and investigate the association between the cycling accessibility levels and the number of bicycle trips in local areas. The index is assessed by investigating the association between levels of cycling accessibility and the number of bicycle trips in statistical areas. Key findings indicate that there is a significant positive association between bike trips and the CAI.