Their top-down management styles, combined with the rush of news in the last 21 months, wore down and alienated many on the staff.
Dictatorship is not desirable, but at least East Asian dictatorships, such as South Korea and Taiwan, used their top-down authority to build dynamic export-led economies and to educate all their people — men and women.
Although the idea of local participation in development has been explored since the 1980s, efforts to build local ownership have been consistently hampered by the demands of external actors (donors and other implementing NGOs) and their top-down systems of accountability and control.
Smart cities are known for their top-down focus on technology.
Seen from this angle, the literature going back to Weber's theory of the state indicates civil order and the correlated security policies as a fundamental objective of modern state organisations, meant in their top-down, centralised configuration.
Such work is worthwhile because it also satisfies the need to provide feedback mechanisms for neuroscientists to examine how their top-down models of cognition fare in ecologically situated contexts.
Several experiments on children's participation in urban planning in Finland, Norway, Switzerland and Italy have demonstrated that young people are sharp analysts of their settings and creative producers of ideas for planning but the authorities are reluctant to expand their top-down, expert-based mode of urban planning to include new groups, such as young people.
Although this theory indicates civil order as a fundamental objective of modern state organisations, understood in their top-down, centralised configuration, it is a model that seems nowadays to lose an explanatory capacity, where new participatory forms of a pactional and contractual type are observed that delegate important crime prevention and control functions to local powers.
As a further sign of their top-down control of every aspect of the convention, or maybe just a tight budget, none of the concession booths were open.
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