Invenire – serie

Proceedings of the international symposium, “Language Planning in Capitals and Urban Environments,” held March 25–26, 2010 at the University of Ottawa, with sponsorship from the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute, Canadian Heritage, the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages and the City of Ottawa.The Language Planning in Capitals and Urban Environments Symposium brought together administrators and researchers from Canadian and European cities to discuss language planning in urban environments. Two important concepts emerged from the proceedings: municipal bilingualism as an asset that deserves to be promoted, rather than merely a question of regulation; and bilingualism as a symbol of openness and inclusion that cities can use to advantage to distinguish themselves from their competitors.

Much of the waste in public administration is ascribable to the displacement of the primary concern for performance and coordination by a primary concern for redistribution. In each sphere of activities, it has led to unreasonable rules inspired by egalitarianism that have triggered permanent allocational malefits. The failure to confront the progressivist ethos and culture has rendered any action on the managerial front ineffective. First, the authors underscore the seemingly unanimous diagnosis of waste and dysfunctions in Canada’s federal public service and show that efforts to correct the situation have failed. This failure is ascribable to a fundamental incapacity to deal concurrently with the ill-advised managerial decisions of governments and the perverse progressivist philosophy inspiring them. Second, an MRI of the human resource (HR) regimes has been sketched as a guide to the detoxing and modernization of the HR regimes. It was used to spell out some guidelines for the modification of management structures and competencies, and to probe the cultural underground of moral contracts that would need to underpin the new arrangements.