Areas of Engineering

The areas of engineering are broad, such as manufacturing machineries, construction of large scale plants, environmental issues, or development of information systems.

Analysis on railroad sector of Britain seems interesting because of its orgin of invention of locomotives, and current rather ineffective operations.
In Britain, railways company, which used to be owned by the Government was anyway privatised in the midst of New Public Management movements.
In this process, it seems that only inadequate consideration was paid to importance of well coordinated operation systems, such as diagrams.
Thus, privatisation has resulted in independently operating several railways companies.
Despite the purpose of realising more efficient operation, each company is considered operating less efficiently in terms of maintenance of physical assets, or ways of organising diagrams.

Although the reform by privatisation was decided by politicians and public administration, my attention is paid to comparative advantages within fields of engineering.
In my opinion, if there existed rigorous competencies in soft-side engineering, such as traffic systems or customer services, quality of railways services must have been different regardless of political decisions...

Underground Economy

There exist underground economies all over the world.
Does the existence (or flourish) of underground economies relate to strength of formally legitimised governing institutions?

In the case of Italy, the boundaries between formal and informal seem obscure.
It means that some distinctive figures originated in informal sectors have acquired influential positions in formal sector.

For Japan, they sustain themselves especially in entertainment or amusement businesses as determining facilities of market prices.

In African countries, organised crimes are often committed supported by people who have generally seized formal resources of power.

Chinese mafia seems active because of its survival. In other words, it operates as if it were running its businesses.

In sum, there seem to be some causal relationships between formal and informal powers.

When we look at the situation of Britain, dominant organisations acting in underground economies seem less evident. From my personal impression, it stems from historical facts that very strong (even strongest in the world at some points of the history) formal authorities have ruled out informal entities which could influence formal power relationships.

I assume that necessity of underground economies could be categorised into roughly three:

1. those necessary for maintaining overall social stability;
2. those active as remnants left as historical discourse; and
3. those only occasionally operating.

I am going to look up some academic literature which analyses the issues related to underground economies...

What is "effective aid"?

The research questions of my dissertation will be:
What does constrain donors' change efforts at translating their officially stated commitments into effective aid outcomes?How can it be overcome?
I know donors have been busy discussing "more effective aid". But, "what is effective aid?" I assume that would be operationalised by measuring to what extent donors' intervention has improved livelihoods of targeted beneficiaries. However, that does not look straight forward at all... "How can we measure the improvement of livelihoods?" by income? by infant mortality rate? by unemployment rate??? or whatever. "How can we define 'target beneficiaries'?"
Shouldn't we consider secondary (indirect) impact considered to be brought by development intervention???
I am at the moment totally at a loss how to construct my argument in my dissertation... Possibly, I may pay attention to "process", that is, the ways how development interventions are being conducted, or what the primary stakeholders are learning because of those interventions. A point which is clear is that my analysis will put an emphasis on donors' perspectives. This would be due to my experience as one of the staffs of a donor agency, and something "sad" I felt while I engaged in my task... Development practitioners must have been motivated by something humanistic at least at the beginning. But, I saw large part of my colleagues get more and more inclined to rules rather than their own original motivation, feeling or anything lively. Practices of an organisation seem discrete from HQ, international donor community, to local levels. What I am taking seriously is not existing structural issues, but lack of something enthusiastic, or imagination about what other people are doing, and why.

Studying social science would provide me with opportunities to investigate enormously messy world of humanbeings... Of course, it is hard as well as exciting...

Individual or Structure?

Kurt Lewin seems to assume that individuals' behaviour cannot be analysed in isolation from groups to which individuals belong. This might be true because it is almost impossible for us to consider any individual living without any interaction with other people than her-/himself.
However, does it mean that individuals are not responsible for how she/he organises her/his behaviour???

What Lewin, or philosophy of OD, implies may be that we should not pursue ultimate responsibility within individuals' attributes, rather seek to identify and establish structures or institutions which lead individuals to as much psychosocially fulfilled situation as possible.

However, both empirical evidence and theories seem to have shown that our daily lives are filled with situations sacrificing individuals' satisfaction for oraganisational benefits as well as very humanistically managed situations.

I cannot but concluding (only temporarily) that this is the modern world in which we live.
We have to make decision and take actions even though we are not so sure whether it is right or wrong. (Another question is "what the right thing, or the wrong thing, should be?")
What we should be aware of is that results derived from those decisions and actions tend to sustain (not disappear instantly). In order not to inclined too much to organisational benefits, it would be critical to think of to what extent constituent individuals are psychosocially fulfilled.