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Rethinking Corruption in the Czech Republic: A Mixed-Methods Approach to a Systemic Problem
Gawthorpe, Steven ; Frič, Pavol (advisor) ; Sičáková Beblavá, Emília (referee) ; Pavel, Jan (referee)
Systemic corruption is a common term amongst scholars and practitioners, yet there is sparse conceptual agreement and substantive analysis within the discourse. Regardless of the current deficit, there is considerable pioneering space and advantages to contrast against the overwhelming emphasis on individuals. This paper aims to broaden the conceptual scope of systemic corruption research through a pattern-to-process mixed-methods design. The design combines empirical data from the public procurement sector analyzing the spatiotemporal patterns of network behavior with a descriptive account of processes from in-depth interviews. The empirical approach statistically distinguishes the performance differentials of public procurement awards amongst firms that exhibit the characteristics of political influence from those that do not. This paper operationalizes that political influence is corruption when a public official would not have made the same decision without the special consideration of political affiliation, contribution, or network connection. After stripping away explanatory factors for firm competence, the data reveals that firms with influence characteristics win substantially more and more often performing similar work. The usage of geospatial cluster analysis, in conjunction with field...
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The Historical Imagination of Late Enlightenment.
Smyčka, Václav ; Činátl, Kamil (advisor) ; Maur, Eduard (referee) ; Tinková, Daniela (referee)
The dissertation deals with the transformations of historiography and perception of the historical time in the last third of 18th and at the beginning of the 19th centuries. The central questions it investigates are: How has the way of locating (Czech) society in time changed? How did representations of past fundamentally change between 1760s and 1820s, in the era of the so-called "Sattelzeit"? What is the relationship between these changes and the way in which history was represented? What impact did the changes of media, book markets, and culture of reading have in this time? What are the political and aesthetic consequences of these changes? The answer to these questions is found in five fundamental innovations of Enlightenment historiography. These innovations (understood according to Niklas Luhmann's system theory in order to reduce complexity) - fundamentally influenced the way in which late Enlightenment thinkers conceptualized the flow of historical time and the praxis of historiography. It is about the spread of cumulative concepts of knowledge in historia litteraria related to the growth of book markets, narrativisation of the historical experience (as a result of emergence of the newly incoming fictional genres of the historical novels),, philosophy of history as a new idealistic...
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Application of system theory on webdesign process
Pařízek, Jan ; Čermák, Radim (advisor) ; Smutný, Zdeněk (referee)
This diploma thesis applies the principles of systemic thinking to the current web design process. It focuses on dealing with the issues related to conflicts and diversity of opinions among individual members of the team working on web design. In the theoretical part, this thesis deals with topic areas and activities relevant for modern approach to web design and the overall role of the user during the design process. In the practical part, the team responsible for web design is viewed as a soft complex system, to which Checklands soft system methodology is applied as a problem-solving tool.
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A Systems Approach to Health Care Financing
Jankůj, Miroslav ; Střítecký, Rudolf (advisor) ; Kandilaki, Daniela (referee)
This diploma thesis deals with the Czech healthcare system. Healthcare is generally reffered to as system but not always healthcare problems are solved systematically. Therefore systems theory, theory of complex adaptive systems and other notions, that are often used in healthcare, were described in this thesis. The objective of this thesis was analysis of impacts of patient's financial participation (20 %, 25 % and 30 %) on health care to their financial situation in the complex adaptive healthcare system. In this thesis four indicators were used -- poverty line, household subsistence spending, impoverished households, catastrophic health expenditure. The World Health Organization defined this indicators for World Health Survey in different countries. The indicators were applied to a sample of Czech households and some impacts of increased participation were calculated. It results from this calculation that the increased participation of households has virtually only small impacts to their financial situation. By the indicators of poverty just few households would be on the poverty line. Nevertheless, this results aren't generalized to the whole Czech population. With this indicators we should further work and develop them in order that they could serve as tool to evaluation of state's intervetion into healthcare system.
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Economics and Information
Nohejl, Jiří ; Rosický, Antonín (advisor) ; Šíma, Josef (referee)
Thesis "Economics and Information" advances a consistent theoretic concept of information as part of economic theory. In contrast of contemporary semantic confusions about information in economics this thesis tries to build a meaningful theory based on classical economic studies and conception of information in system theory. The first part is concerned with methodological foundation and contemporary methodological problems of information in economic theory. These issues are crucial for presenting methodological individualism and subjectivism as fundamental approach to understanding role of information in social sciences. This leads to human action as basic framework for studying information. Next part of the thesis describes few basic approaches to information in economics. In comparison with neoclassical views like information asymmetry this thesis propose own praxeology based concept of information. This concept shows information in its duality as a resource of human activities, but also as objective of human action. This duality as resource and objective connect information to concepts of interpretation, knowledge and dynamic processes. The final part of the thesis applies theoretical concepts to economic policy issues and institutional problems.
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