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Leadership Case Studies

Here is a sample of three case studies from the book, Leadership Case Studies, that are most instructive and impactful to developing leadership skills.

For the past 30 years, I have conducted seminars and workshops and taught college classes on leadership.

I used a variety of teaching aids including books, articles, case studies, role-plays, and videos.

I recently created a book, Leadership Case Studies that includes some of the case studies and role-plays that I found to be most instructive and impactful.

Here is a sample of three case studies.

Peter Weaver Case Study

Peter Weaver doesn’t like to follow the crowd. He thinks groupthink is a common problem in many organizations. This former director of marketing for a consumer products company believes differences of opinion should be heard and appreciated. As Weaver states, “I have always believed I should speak for what I believe to be true.”

He demonstrated his belief in being direct and candid throughout his career. On one occasion, he was assigned to market Paul’s spaghetti-sauce products. During the brand review, the company president said, “Our spaghetti sauce is losing out to price-cutting competitors. We need to cut our prices!”

Peter found the courage to say he disagreed with the president. He then explained the product line needed more variety and a larger advertising budget. Prices should not be cut. The president accepted Weaver’s reasoning. Later, his supervisor approached him and said, “I wanted to say that, but I just didn’t have the courage to challenge the president.”

On another occasion, the president sent Weaver and 16 other executives to a weeklong seminar on strategic planning. Weaver soon concluded the consultants were off base and going down the wrong path. Between sessions, most of the other executives indicated they didn’t think the consultants were on the right path. The consultants heard about the dissent and dramatically asked participants whether they were in or out. Those who said “Out” had to leave immediately.

As the consultants went around the room, every executive who privately grumbled about the session said “In.” Weaver was fourth from last. When it was his turn, he said “Out” and left the room.

All leaders spend time in reflection and self-examination to identify what they truly believe and value. Their beliefs are tested and fine-tuned over time. True leaders can tell you, without hesitation, what they believe and why. They don’t need a teleprompter to remind them of their core beliefs. And, they find the courage to speak up even when they know others will disagree.

• What leadership traits did Weaver exhibit?
• If you were in Weaver’s shoes, what would you have done?
• Where does courage come from?
• List your three most important values.

Dealing with a Crisis Case Study

Assume you are the VP of Sales and Marketing for a large insurance company. Once a year your company rewards and recognizes the top 100 sales agents by taking them to a luxury resort for a four-day conference. Business presentation meetings are held during the morning. Afternoons are free time. Agents and spouses can choose from an assortment of activities including golf, tennis, boating, fishing, shopping, swimming, etc.

On day 2 at 3:00 p.m., you are at the gym working out on the treadmill, when you see Sue your administrative assistant rushing towards you. She says, “I need to talk to you immediately.”

You get off the treadmill and say, “What’s up?” Sue states, “We’ve had a tragedy. Several agents went boating and swimming at the lake. Randy, our agent from California died while swimming.”

(Background information – Randy is 28 years old. His wife did not come on the trip. She is home in California with their three children).

• Explain what you would communicate to the following people.
• Your Human Resources Department
• The local police
• The attendees at the conference (Would you continue the conference?)
• How will you notify Randy’s wife?
• If Randy’s wife and a few family members want to visit the location of Randy’s death, what would you do?
• What are some “guiding principles” that leaders need to follow in a crisis situation?

 Arsenic and Old Lace Case Study

Review the YouTube video, “ I’ll show them who is boss Arsenic and Old Lace.”   

Background Information

The Vernon Road Bleaching and Dyeing Company is a British lace dyeing business. It was purchased in bankruptcy by the father/son team of Henry and Richard Chaplin. Richard has been acting as “Managing Director” which is the same as a general manager or president of a company.

The company has had 50-to-150 employees with 35-to-100 being shop floor, production employees. The company produces and sells various dyed fabrics to the garment industry.

Gerry Robinson is a consultant who was asked to help transform methods of conducting business to save the company.

Jeff is the factory manager.

• What are Richard’s strengths and weaknesses as a leader?
• What could Richard have done to make the problems of quality and unhappy customers more visible to the workforce?
• What do you think Richard’s top three priorities should be for the next 12 months?
• What could Richard have done to motivate the workforce?
• Evaluate Jeff’s approach and effectiveness as a leader.

The book contains 16 case studies, four role-plays, and six articles. I hope you find some of the content useful and helpful in your efforts to teach leadership.

Click for additional leadership case studies and resources .

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How to Make Different Business Leadership Styles Work (With Case Studies)

Several thought leaders have referred to 2020 as the year of great reset. But if you want to be really strict about it, most of the biggest business shifts started way back at the onset of the 21st century. 

Traditional business leaders who are banking on traditional business leadership styles in this new century needlessly risk losing their businesses to unhealthy age-old leadership practices.

The pandemic just helped reiterate the need for business leaders to change the way they approach business problems primarily due to the following reasons:

• New technologies
• Pace of change
• Changing demographics and employee expectations
• Changing customer expectations

Simon Sinek, in his influential book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action , proposes a powerful framework that emphasizes the importance of a leader’s ‘why’. Sinek argues that leaders who start with why, with their purpose, cause, or belief, are able to inspire and motivate others in a way that transcends simply outlining tasks and goals. This focus on purpose aligns well with the idea that effective leadership is about more than just giving orders; it’s about creating a shared vision and inspiring a team to achieve it.

The chart below gives you a better glimpse of the reasons why there is a difference in the requirements for the kind of leaders we need to have in this era. The data depicted is from Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Survey .

What are these particular requirements? According to the same study by Deloitte, business leaders need to have the following abilities:

• lead through more complexity and ambiguity
• lead through influence
• manage on a remote basis
• manage a workforce with a combination of humans and machines
• lead more quickly

See this second figure below.

According to Forbes , there are three notable leadership skill shifts for 2021 and these are the following:

• Communication to Empathy 
• Emotional Intelligence to Emotional Agility 
• Time Management to Context Management

Leaders are expected to be effective communicators, but the shift is now focused on empathy as a priority for business leaders this year. The Management Research Group found empathy to be the leading positive leadership competency and one of the biggest predictors of senior executive effectiveness . This makes a lot of sense especially now that the recent challenges brought about by the pandemic have highlighted the value of caring while communicating.

Emotional intelligence to emotional agility is another important shift. Susan David , a psychologist and the author of the book “Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life” describes emotionally agile people be the type of people who are not only aware of their feelings but also know how to navigate through them.

Now the shift from time management to context management gives emphasis on how the change in the context of how and where we work requires realignment in managing our time and designing our days around how we work. 

While there are several leadership styles and the specific strategies vary depending on the field or industry, the concepts are basically the same. Let’s take note of these leadership skill shifts mentioned earlier in studying how we can better tailor the different leadership styles to suit the changing times. 

The following are six of the different leadership styles we will tackle further:

• Autocratic Leadership Style
• Democratic Leadership Style
• Laissez-Faire Leadership Style
• Situational leadership style
• Transactional Leadership Style
• Transformational Leadership Style

First off, let’s start with the traditional business leadership styles.

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1. Autocratic Leadership Style

Case Study: Howell Raines of The New York Times

The New York Times under Howell Raines as the Executive Editor decided at one point to only put resources on the stories that he deemed as worth covering. While this led to The New York Times winning a record-breaking seven Pulitzer awards in a single year, several staff members got demoralized.

There is no known theorist behind autocratic leadership so it is considered as an organic leadership style that has developed over the course of time that it has been used. 

Basically, an autocratic leader is the type of leader who would make decisions without proper consultation. You may think that this leadership style is unacceptable for who decides on his own especially if the decision concerns an entire organization, right? 

But, Cleverism articulates three situations where the autocratic leadership style can be used and these are the following:

• The situation requires fast and immediate decision-making
• There is no clarity in the process of the procedure and pushing ahead might only lead people to danger
• There are more inexperienced people in the group and most of them are demotivated

The tendency of most businesses with an autocratic leader is that the subordinates will become passive and mediocre, or conflicts may arise.

In these situations where a business leader must step up and use the autocratic leadership style, it is important to take note of communicating openly and regarding others with respect the entire time.

2. Democratic Leadership Style

Case Study: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google

Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page hired Eric Schmidt to jump-start the Internet search engine. Blending autocratic, laissez-faire and democratic leadership styles, they allowed someone knowledgeable and experienced into Google which would then lead to more democratic teams composed of experienced talent. 

Also known as the participative leadership style, the democratic leadership style in business management is often characterized as the style that encourages collaboration with fellow leaders and team members. In other words, everyone is allowed to participate in the decision-making process. 

While this style of leadership is very motivating for most people as compared to the autocratic leadership style, it works best for businesses that employ experts in their departments so little supervision is required. 

According to St. Thomas University , the following organizations can take advantage of this:

• Biotech R&D divisions
• Housing construction sites
• Universities
• Information technology companies

Furthermore, the university lists the following as the disadvantages of this leadership style:

• Business leaders may become too dependent on their subordinates
• Getting everyone’s input may take a lot of time 
• Missed deadlines are possible 
• Consulting with people who lack accurate data or sufficient knowledge
• Too much burden for business leaders to oversee collaboration

The democratic leadership style can bring forth massive business growth if business leaders are willing to take responsibility for the decisions made and provide support and expertise during collaborations.

Such requires highly productive leaders who know what they do and will take action.

3. Laissez-Faire Leadership Style

Case Study: Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway

Warren Buffett is known for exemplifying the laissez-faire leadership style as he allows people he works with to do their jobs without his supervision or intervention. His great success over several years has been attributed to his style of leadership which allows a culture of motivation and confidence. He, however, sees to it that he only hires people he can trust to do their jobs.

The laissez-faire leadership style emerged from the French word laissez-faire which means “leave alone”. Also called the hands-off approach, this style is based on the concept that leaders can leave their employees or teams alone in coming up with ideas or decisions for the business departments they are part of. 

This used to be a very popular style before the 19th century, but as modernization started, more and more business leaders find the disadvantages of leading teams with no supervision to be detrimental. This is particularly possible for companies that lack expert talent.

What business leaders who employ this leadership style should note is that assuming that subordinates must be free from accountability. This only encourages the company’s people to be complacent.

The business leader must ensure that teams are composed of highly-skilled individuals who can be reliable in achieving business goals under their responsibility.

At this point, we’ve already discussed the three leadership styles that can be highly traditional unless approached with a fresh perspective that takes into account the new leadership needs and skill shifts.

How these three business leadership styles work is illustrated below.

Which leadership style can you resonate with the most?

We now have what we call modern leadership styles or approaches. These styles have emerged as a response to the traditional styles that do not allow much room for innovation. 

Although most of these new approaches are modified versions of the traditional leadership styles, they are identified mainly based on the following types of categories:

• Situational leadership
• Transactional leadership
• Transformational leadership
• Innovative leadership

4. Situational Leadership Style 

This leadership style follows the contingency-based leadership model when responding to situations or making decisions. Business leaders who employ this style are flexible and would normally use varying leadership strategies depending on the situation.

Goleman believes that a situational leader must be able to incorporate the six specific leadership styles given the right circumstances.

5. Transactional Leadership Style

Also known as managerial leadership, transactional leadership is a style that focuses on supervision, organization, and group performance.

Business leaders under this style use rewards and punishments to motivate subordinates in a given task.

According to Verywell Mind , the basic assumptions of transactional leadership are the following:

• When the chain of command is clear, your workforce performs their best
• Rewards and punishments are effective agents of motivation
• Obeying the leader is the most important goal of the subordinates
• Careful monitoring is a must

When giving assignments, the business leader must be clear when it comes to the instructions, rewards and consequences, as well as giving feedback. 

6. Transformational Leadership Style

Business leaders who subscribe to the transformational leadership style serve as inspirations to their subordinates.

They inspire as they lead by example and as they cultivate an environment that welcomes creativity and innovation. This suits employees who have entrepreneurial minds as transformational business leaders seek to inspire just the right amount of intellectual independence in the workplace.

In a roundup article, Harvard Business Review lists the following as the best examples of transformational leadership:

• Jeff Bezos , Amazon
• Reed Hastings , Netflix
• Jeff Boyd and Glenn Fogel , Priceline
• Steve Jobs and Tim Cook , Apple
• Mark Bertolini , Aetna
• Kent Thiry , DaVita
• Satya Nadella , Microsoft
• Emmanuel Faber , Danone
• Heinrich Hiesinger , ThyssenKrupp

The Harvard Business Review refers to this group as the Transformation 10 for exemplifying transformational leadership.

Strengthening Your Leadership Mindset

About 60% of the executives who participated in the 2021 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends said that what prepared them for the unknown is leadership . This is the kind of leadership that takes into account the unpredictable and incorporates strategies surrounding that through coaching, teaming, and fostering.

But did you know that based on the research of the Corporate Executive Board , about 50%-70% of the new business executives or leaders fail within the first 18 months? Unless you have the right leadership mindset and you solidify that mindset, you will become part of this figure. 

Whenever a major business problem happens, you can either succumb to the pressure and give up, or find a solution to the problem . The most successful business leaders try their hardest to never give up.

Most business leaders would rather grind than get back to their regular jobs of 9-to-5.

In 1519, a Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernán Cortés pursued the treasures of the Aztecs with 11 ships and a crew of 100 sailors and 500 soldiers. His army was vastly outnumbered and some soldiers tried to escape. Cortés gave the order to burn the ships and left no choice but to fight until their last breath.

That wasn’t the end for everyone. Part of the army survived and they got a hold of the treasure.

At first, calmness is a myth. People are emotional by nature and react to any deviations from their plans. With time, those who choose to be in the captain’s spot until the end see problems that have to be solved and suppress the emotional part that is dragging them down.

The role of a business leader isn’t easy in the first place. Constant changes and surprises are not abnormal and at some point, they become a daily routine.

Plenty of problems appear to be critical, but in the end, they should be solved. You don’t run away from them. You step up as a business leader and inspire your teams to follow through.

The most effective leadership style for business is the leadership that inspires.

If being a business leader of a successful company is among your highest priorities, work on your leadership know-how, develop your management soft skills , and make it work for your people.

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Case Studies of Exemplary Leaders

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Discover the inspiring stories of exemplary leaders who have significantly impacted through their visionary leadership and unwavering commitment to driving change. These remarkable individuals have left a lasting legacy in their respective fields, transcending borders and industries. Explore their extraordinary journeys and gain valuable insights into the effective leadership practices and timeless principles that have guided their success.

Barack Obama , the 44th President of the United States, is known for his distinct leadership style characterized by charisma, inclusivity, collaboration, strategic thinking, and a deep commitment to service. His pragmatic approach to problem-solving made him a notable figure in contemporary leadership, marked by his ability to inspire and connect with people through his influential and eloquent speeches. 

He successfully used his oratory skills to articulate a compelling vision, motivate the masses, and foster a sense of hope and unity. Furthermore, he emphasized inclusivity and diversity in his leadership approach, seeking to bring people from different backgrounds and perspectives together, promoting a sense of belonging and unity. His collaborative approach bridged political divides and opened dialogue, negotiation, and compromise to address complex challenges. 

Obama’s calm and composed demeanour under pressure contributed to his capacity to make thorough decisions. His focus on service to others and empathy showcased his compassion towards those facing hardship and his commitment to addressing social and economic inequalities. Obama recognized the power of technology and applied it to engage with the public, fostering transparency and accessibility through digital platforms— Obama’s high level of intelligence garners broad recognition for its sharpness, depth, and sheer brilliance.

Justin Trudeau, his leadership as the Prime Minister of Canada marks his commitment to progressive policies. He has been a staunch advocate for addressing the urgent issue of climate change, implementing a national carbon pricing policy and prioritizing a transition towards a greener economy. Additionally, Trudeau’s government has championed gender equality, promoting inclusivity in government and society by appointing a gender-balanced cabinet and taking steps to ensure diversity. His progressive stance on these issues has garnered attention both nationally and internationally.

In 2015, he made a compassionate pledge to welcome refugees into Canada regardless of ethnicity or faith. This approach showcased Canada’s commitment to humanitarian values and demonstrated leadership in fostering an inclusive society. Trudeau’s emphasis on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples has been a core component of his leadership. He has addressed historical injustices and invested in improving Indigenous education, healthcare, and infrastructure. 

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Trudeau demonstrated clear communication, transparent decision-making, unity, resilience, and trust. His strong leadership has primarily contributed to Canada’s economic growth and recovery.

Tonya Williams is an accomplished leader who has significantly contributed to the entertainment industry, particularly in Canada. Williams is the founder and executive director of the Reelworld Film Festival and Reelworld Foundation. Her dedication to promoting diversity and inclusion in the media has profoundly impacted Canadian film and television.

Williams’ leadership and vision transformed the Reelworld Film Festival into a highly regarded event that celebrates diversity, fosters dialogue, and inspires future generations of filmmakers. Williams has created opportunities for individuals to build a more inclusive and equitable entertainment industry in Canada. The foundation provides mentorship, training, and resources to help artists navigate the industry and overcome barriers to entry.

She exemplifies her relentless commitment to amplifying marginalized voices and advocating diversity in film and television. Her unwavering dedication to creating a more inclusive industry has left an indelible mark, inspiring others to challenge the status quo and work towards a more equitable future in the entertainment world.

Angela Merkel , the former Chancellor of Germany, is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential and respected leaders. Pragmatism, strong analytical skills, and a commitment to democratic values characterize her leadership style. Merkel’s leadership during crises, such as the Eurozone debt and refugee crises, demonstrated her steady and pragmatic approach. She sought consensus, built coalitions, found practical solutions, and emphasized the importance of unity and stability. 

Her ability to navigate political landscapes and find common ground is a hallmark of her pragmatic leadership style. She balances competing interests, builds consensus, and compromises to achieve practical outcomes. Her resilience and stability provide a sense of continuity during turbulent times. Merkel’s leadership is deeply committed to democratic values, human rights, and international cooperation. She advocates for multilateralism, global collaboration, and the European Union, fostering dialogue among nations.

Masai Ujiri plays a crucial leadership role in the basketball community in Canada. Ujiri’s tenure as the President of the Toronto Raptors, a professional basketball team in the NBA, has been particularly noteworthy. Before his time with the Raptors, Ujiri gained recognition as the General Manager of the Denver Nuggets, where he showcased his talent evaluation skills and helped elevate the team’s standing in the Western Conference.

Under his leadership, the team experienced unprecedented success, culminating in the historic 2019 NBA Championship, the first-ever for a Canadian franchise. Ujiri’s strategic decision-making and ability to assemble a championship-calibre roster were pivotal in the team’s achievements. His leadership illustrated a dogged pursuit of excellence and has garnered immense respect in the basketball community. Ujiri’s influence extends beyond the court. 

He is known for his commitment to social justice and community development through his foundation, Giants of Africa, making him an influential figure in Canada and globally.

_____________________________________________________________________________________ 

These case studies and examples of good leadership highlight each leader’s unique characteristics and approaches that have positively impacted their organizations and communities. Through their leadership, these individuals have inspired others, driven innovation and growth, fostered inclusive and supportive cultures, and navigated through challenges with resilience and empathy. 

Jennifer Williams | Editor-in-Chief

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How to Lead: 6 Leadership Styles and Frameworks

Authoritarian leadership (autocratic), participative leadership (democratic).

• Delegative Leadership (Laissez-Faire)

Transformational Leadership

Transactional leadership, situational leadership.

Leadership styles are classifications of how a person behaves while directing, motivating, guiding, and managing groups of people. There are many leadership styles. Some of the most widely discussed include: authoritarian (autocratic), participative (democratic), delegative (laissez-faire), transformational, transactional, and situational.

Great leaders can inspire political movements and social change. They can also motivate others to perform, create, and innovate. As you start to consider some of the people who you think of as great leaders , you can immediately see that there are often vast differences in how each person leads.

Fortunately, researchers have developed different theories and frameworks that allow us to better identify and understand these different leadership styles.

Lewin's Leadership Styles

In 1939, a group of researchers led by psychologist Kurt Lewin set out to identify different styles of leadership.   While further research has identified more distinct types of leadership, this early study was very influential and established three major leadership styles that have provided a springboard for more defined leadership theories.

In Lewin's study, schoolchildren were assigned to one of three groups with an authoritarian, democratic, or laissez-faire leader. The children were then led in an arts and crafts project while researchers observed the behavior of children in response to the different styles of leadership. The researchers found that democratic leadership tended to be the most effective at inspiring followers to perform well.

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Authoritarian leaders, also known as autocratic leaders, provide clear expectations for what needs to be done, when it should be done, and how it should be done. This style of leadership is strongly focused on both command by the leader and control of the followers. There is also a clear division between the leader and the members. Authoritarian leaders make decisions independently, with little or no input from the rest of the group.

Researchers found that decision-making was less creative under authoritarian leadership.   Lewin also concluded that it is harder to move from an authoritarian style to a democratic style than vice versa. Abuse of this method is usually viewed as controlling, bossy, and dictatorial.

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Authoritarian leadership is best applied to situations where there is little time for group decision-making or where the leader is the most knowledgeable member of the group. The autocratic approach can be a good one when the situation calls for rapid decisions and decisive actions. However, it tends to create dysfunctional and even hostile environments, often pitting followers against the domineering leader.

Lewin’s study found that participative leadership, also known as democratic leadership, is typically the most effective leadership style. Democratic leaders offer guidance to group members, but they also participate in the group and allow input from other group members. In Lewin’s study, children in this group were less productive than the members of the authoritarian group, but their contributions were of a higher quality.

Participative leaders encourage group members to participate, but retain the final say in the decision-making process. Group members feel engaged in the process and are more motivated and creative. Democratic leaders tend to make followers feel like they are an important part of the team, which helps foster commitment to the goals of the group.

Delegative Leadership (Laissez-Faire)

Lewin found that children under delegative leadership, also known as laissez-faire leadership, were the least productive of all three groups. The children in this group also made more demands on the leader, showed little cooperation, and were unable to work independently.

Delegative leaders offer little or no guidance to group members and leave the decision-making up to group members. While this style can be useful in situations involving highly qualified experts, it often leads to poorly defined roles and a lack of motivation.

Lewin noted that laissez-faire leadership tended to result in groups that lacked direction and members who blamed each other for mistakes, refused to accept personal responsibility, made less progress, and produced less work.

Observations About Lewin's Leadership Styles

In their book,  The Bass Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications , Bass and Bass note that authoritarian leadership is often presented solely in negative, often disapproving, terms. Authoritarian leaders are often described as controlling and close-minded, yet this overlooks the potential positives of stressing rules, expecting obedience, and taking responsibility.

While authoritarian leadership certainly is not the best choice for every situation, it can be effective and beneficial in cases where followers need a great deal of direction and where rules and standards must be followed to the letter. Another often overlooked benefit of the authoritarian style is the ability to maintain a sense of order.

Bass and Bass note that democratic leadership tends to be centered on the followers and is an effective approach when trying to maintain relationships with others. People who work under such leaders tend to get along well, support one another, and consult other members of the group when making decisions.

Additional Leadership Styles and Models

In addition to the three styles identified by Lewin and his colleagues, researchers have described numerous other characteristic patterns of leadership. A few of the best-known include:

Transformational leadership is often identified as the single most effective style. This style was first described during the late 1970s and later expanded upon by researcher Bernard M. Bass. Transformational leaders are able to motivate and inspire followers and to direct positive changes in groups.

These leaders tend to be emotionally intelligent , energetic, and passionate. They are not only committed to helping the organization achieve its goals, but also to helping group members fulfill their potential.

Research shows that this style of leadership results in higher performance and more improved group satisfaction than other leadership styles. One study also found that transformational leadership led to improved well-being among group members.

The transactional leadership style views the leader-follower relationship as a transaction. By accepting a position as a member of the group, the individual has agreed to obey the leader. In most situations, this involves the employer-employee relationship, and the transaction focuses on the follower completing required tasks in exchange for monetary compensation.

One of the main advantages of this leadership style is that it creates clearly defined roles. People know what they are required to do and what they will be receiving in exchange. This style allows leaders to offer a great deal of supervision and direction, if needed.

Group members may also be motivated to perform well to receive rewards. One of the biggest downsides is that the transactional style tends to stifle creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.

Situational theories of leadership stress the significant influence of the environment and the situation on leadership. Hersey and Blanchard's leadership styles is one of the best-known situational theories. First published in 1969, this model describes four primary styles of leadership, including:

• Telling : Telling people what to do
• Selling : Convincing followers to buy into their ideas and messages
• Participating : Allowing group members to take a more active role in the decision-making process
• Delegating : Taking a hands-off approach to leadership and allowing group members to make the majority of decisions

Later, Blanchard expanded upon the original Hersey and Blanchard model to emphasize how the developmental and skill level of learners influences the style that should be used by leaders. Blanchard's SLII leadership styles model also described four different leading styles:

• Directing : Giving orders and expecting obedience, but offering little guidance and assistance
• Coaching : Giving lots of orders, but also lots of support
• Supporting : Offering plenty of help, but very little direction
• Delegating : Offering little direction or support

Lewin K, Lippitt R, White K. Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created “social climates” . J Soc Psychol. 1939;10(2):271-301.

Bass BM.   The Bass Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications . 4th Ed. Simon & Schuster; 2009.

Choi SL, Goh CF, Adam MB, Tan OK. Transformational leadership, empowerment, and job satisfaction: The mediating role of employee empowerment . Hum Resour Health. 2016;14(1):73. doi:10.1186/s12960-016-0171-2

Nielsen K, Daniels K. Does shared and differentiated transformational leadership predict followers’ working conditions and well-being? The Leadership Quarterly . 2012;23(3):383-397. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.09.001

Hussain S, Abbas J, Lei S, Haider MJ, Akram T. Transactional leadership and organizational creativity: Examining the mediating role of knowledge sharing behavior . Cogent Bus Manag. 2017;4(1). doi:10.1080/23311975.2017.1361663

Kark R, Van Dijk D, Vashdi DR. Motivated or demotivated to be creative: The role of self-regulatory focus in transformational and transactional leadership processes . Applied Psychology . 2017;67(1):186-224. doi:10.1111/apps.12122

Hersey P, Blanchard KH. Life cycle theory of leadership . Training and Development Journal . 1969;23(5).

Blanchard KH, Zigarmi P, Drea Zigarmi.   Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership . William Morrow, An Imprint Of HarperCollins; 2013.

Hersey P, Blanchard KH. Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources . Prentice Hall, 1969.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies of 2021

Two cases about Hertz claimed top spots in 2021's Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies

Two cases on the uses of debt and equity at Hertz claimed top spots in the CRDT’s (Case Research and Development Team) 2021 top 40 review of cases.

Hertz (A) took the top spot. The case details the financial structure of the rental car company through the end of 2019. Hertz (B), which ranked third in CRDT’s list, describes the company’s struggles during the early part of the COVID pandemic and its eventual need to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 

The success of the Hertz cases was unprecedented for the top 40 list. Usually, cases take a number of years to gain popularity, but the Hertz cases claimed top spots in their first year of release. Hertz (A) also became the first ‘cooked’ case to top the annual review, as all of the other winners had been web-based ‘raw’ cases.

Besides introducing students to the complicated financing required to maintain an enormous fleet of cars, the Hertz cases also expanded the diversity of case protagonists. Kathyrn Marinello was the CEO of Hertz during this period and the CFO, Jamere Jackson is black.

Sandwiched between the two Hertz cases, Coffee 2016, a perennial best seller, finished second. “Glory, Glory, Man United!” a case about an English football team’s IPO made a surprise move to number four.  Cases on search fund boards, the future of malls,  Norway’s Sovereign Wealth fund, Prodigy Finance, the Mayo Clinic, and Cadbury rounded out the top ten.

Other year-end data for 2021 showed:

• Online “raw” case usage remained steady as compared to 2020 with over 35K users from 170 countries and all 50 U.S. states interacting with 196 cases.
• Fifty four percent of raw case users came from outside the U.S..
• The Yale School of Management (SOM) case study directory pages received over 160K page views from 177 countries with approximately a third originating in India followed by the U.S. and the Philippines.
• Twenty-six of the cases in the list are raw cases.
• A third of the cases feature a woman protagonist.
• Orders for Yale SOM case studies increased by almost 50% compared to 2020.
• The top 40 cases were supervised by 19 different Yale SOM faculty members, several supervising multiple cases.

CRDT compiled the Top 40 list by combining data from its case store, Google Analytics, and other measures of interest and adoption.

All of this year’s Top 40 cases are available for purchase from the Yale Management Media store .

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5.   Search Fund Company Boards: How CEOs Can Build Boards to Help Them Thrive

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Leadership Case Study

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Learn about theories, skills, and the impact of world leaders in this case study about leadership.

Introduction

Leadership theories, steve jobs leadership, skills approach leadership, list of references.

Leadership is one of the concepts in the world, which has received massive coverage and attention. Although there are several reasons behind this trend, the commonest one is the fact that leaders have a significant influence in the society. Not to mention that some people and organizations have become what they are today because of the impact of certain leaders (Grint 2010, p. 1).

Even though there is a wide range of definitions that describe a leader, it has been universally agreed that a leader is a person who gives direction to others in order to attain a common goal (Gallos 2008, p. 1). This is mainly achieved through setting a pace in serving as a role model and creation of a working environment that allows members of the organization or employees to feel honored as part of the advancement process.

Importantly, a leader cannot be viewed as a boss since he or she remains committed to the full course of achieving set goals and objectives. It is noteworthy that there are numerous qualities, which define the character of a good leader. While these factors may vary from one person to another, common traits include being a good listener, focused, organized, available, ready to delegate duties, confident and decisive (Gallos 2008, p. 2).

Twentieth century saw the demand and interest in leadership rise to an advanced stage. While early leaders laid emphasis on existing differences between leaders and followers in terms of their qualities, subsequent leadership theorists approached the issue by considering certain variable like qualifications and situations in establishing an understanding of leadership traits (Grint 2010, p. 1). Some of these theories have been discussed under this segment of the analysis.

The first one is the “great man” theory, which assumes that good leaders are born and that what is considered to be good traits are naturally obtained. In other words, these leaders are born, which is against the notion that favors making of leaders. This school of thought normally depicts leaders to be heroic and ready to take up leadership positions in the corporate world whenever there is need.

It is also paramount to note that the term was developed when the society thought that leadership was strictly meant for males (Bolden et al. 2003). This theory is believed to have been first developed by Thomas Carlyle, a time when gender equality was not being talked about as it is today. Men were therefore given leadership preference as women dominated other domestic areas of society management.

It is also believed that the trait theory resembles the great man philosophy, as it assumes that certain qualities observed among some leaders are inherited, thus making them better than other leaders. This theory generally focuses on a behavior or trait, which is common among leaders. Even though this has been the case, it is hard to explain the existence of some of these qualities among people who are not leaders (Bolden et al. 2003). This is considered as the main obstacle in adopting this theory when explaining the concept of leadership.

On the other hand, contingency theories address certain variables, which are connected to the environment and influence the type of leadership style suitable for a given situation. A very important fact under this theory is that situations in life cannot be addressed by one leadership style.

This is based on a wide range of ways in which the situations are manifested. Basically, success is coupled with leadership styles, different situational aspects and traits carried by followers (Bolden et al. 2003). This leadership theory is closely related to situational theories, which affirm that situational variables are key in influencing the decision made by leaders. It follows that a decision-making process may require several leadership styles to ensure that the best position is reached.

Unlike of the ideas discussed above, behavioral theories of leadership are inclined towards the fact that good leaders are made. It is solely based on behaviorism and the overall manner in which leaders act. In essence, the theory suggests that good leadership can be attained through learning and observation as opposed to being natural traits in human beings (Bolden et al. 2003).

Moreover, participative theories of leadership support the fact good leadership seeks to incorporate the ideas of others in decision-making. They motivate other people to be part of the course of achieving set goals and objectives. Nevertheless, a leader may choose not to consider the input of his or her followers.

Management leadership focuses on concepts of performance, supervision and organization. It is founded on the use of rewards and punishments in ensuring that the course is retained by all parties involved. This is the commonest leadership theory in business, where employees are recognized according to their input.

The last theory of leadership is the relationship theory, which is also referred to as transformational theory. This emphasizes on the bond between leaders and their followers. Through motivation, these leaders show their followers the benefits, which are hidden in the future. As much as they are concerned with performance, exploitation of each person’s potential is always at the heart of their performance. These leaders equally possess high standards in terms of ethics and morality (Bass & Riggio 2006).

The name of Steve Paul Jobs has dominated the world of leadership especially in the 21 st century; at the peak of technological advancements in computer technology. Born in 1955, Steve Jobs was a man of his caliber in terms of innovation of business ideas. Until his death in 2011, Jobs remained an icon of transformational leadership (Peña 2005).

Among other successes and leadership positions, Jobs was well known for as the chairman and co-founder of the famous Apple Inc. Unlike his counterparts who have a clear-cut of their leadership styles, Jobs could not be described by a single style of leadership; he was endowed with several qualities, which helped him to traverse the business world, to achieve such massive success. Importantly, his life experiences right from teenage played a major role in molding his personality, having failed to graduate from college.

In his 2005 address at the Stanford University, Steve Jobs highlighted several life experiences, which had shaped his life and challenged graduates to see success and opportunities in setbacks, which life offers. He believed in having faith, by connecting dots in life even during hard moments and hardly regretted for his decisions, including the selection of an expensive college that became a challenge to his parents in paying tuition fees.

As a result, he dropped out, and registered for calligraphy, which was significant in designing fonts while designing the first Macintosh. The love for his job was unwavering. Together with his friend, they founded Apple and even after being kicked out of the company, he moved on to launch NeXT Software Inc., which was acquired by Apple in 1997, giving a chance to rejoin Apple. His ill-health was a further source of inspiration in life.

After surviving a pancreatic surgery necessitated by cancer, he considered it as a wakeup call; to maximize the use of available time in doing what he loved most (Peña 2005). It is this path that shaped Steve Paul Jobs to become a leader with countless styles and qualities.

Firstly, Jobs was a charismatic leader. He was widely known for his ability to give captivating speeches, a trait that was equally employed in his career. His storytelling skills favored him capturing the attention of not only his audience but also his employees at Apple and other companies (Kramer 2010).

He was able to communicate the benefits of using Apple products as compared to other products by use of metaphors and analogies. His charismatic nature was essential in developing enthusiastic leaders who remained focused towards achieving that which seemed impossible in the eyes of many and convince his customers that his company had the best products in the market.

Jobs inherent and learned traits seemed to define his character and leadership path. Due to this, he earned himself several titles, which mainly described his attachment to perfection (Kramer 2010). His leadership was therefore described as personalized; he sometimes expected too much from an employee.

According to Jobs, he was interested in making people better, a leadership approach that was sometimes misinterpreted as being autocratic and rude especially in meetings. As an autocratic leader, Jobs insisted on being in control and showing people what to do even as a role model. While at Apple, Jobs had over a hundred employees who directly reported to him directly. His degree as a participatory leader was therefore low (Peña 2005).

Importantly, Steve Jobs remains an icon of transformational leadership. Throughout his career, Steve Jobs managed to transform different companies like Pixar. He also led by example, showing employees and other managers what was to be done in order to overcome the challenges of a competitive business world (Kramer 2010). This was essential in bringing out the best in every employee and promoting performance.

He is the founder of Amazon.com, its CEO and chair of the company’s board. Bezos is highly recognized in the money market and was valued at $3.6 billion, according to Forbes’ survey in the year 2006. He was listed as the personality of the year in 1999 by the Time magazine. Besides Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin, with an aim of promoting tourism. He is definitely influential and his leadership style is worth studying to understand his success secrets.

Unlike some of company owners who choose to delegate managerial positions, Bezos runs Amazon.com as its founder and CEO. He therefore battles out by transiting from a small company to the head of thousands of employees.

He is generally overwhelmed with fun and innovations, having carried his laughing character to the company. In analyzing his leadership qualities, Bezos has been described using a wide range of approaches (‘Taking the long view’ 2012).

He is a transformational leader. Based on the path he has used to get Amazon.com where it is today, it is doubtless that he has been instrumental in promoting the company’s performance. He has always made choices based on his desire to move to another level, a reasons he gives for marrying his wife. His visionary has definitely landed him to a place he dreamed, decades ago.

He is also concerned in the performance of managers and other company employees. In order to impact his management team, he organizes weekly meeting, reporting on experiences and answering questions from him. The Just Do It program launched by Bezos was highly applauded for promoting participatory management at Amazon (‘Taking the long view’ 2012).

According to the program, managers are promoted for their innovative ideas, which are aimed at improving the company’s performance. His perfectionism in performance means that he has to higher new managers consistently, who are intelligent and highly skilled.

This approach is mainly leader-centered. In other words, it focuses on certain skills, which can be learned and improve the leadership potential of an individual. It is obvious that knowledge and skills are essential for one to be recognized as a strong leader. Furthermore, skills denote what is achievable by a leader, while traits mainly focus on a leader’s identity ( Leadership Skills Approach 2012). This leadership approach requires a leader to master three important areas, which are conceptual, technical and human.

Technical skills determine a leader’s proficiency in performing certain tasks. For instance, Steve Jobs’ skills as a computer scientist were paramount in navigating through the world of computers. Despite his lack of a college degree, he had relevant knowledge in the world of technology (Peña 2005).

He also had innovative skills, which transformed several companies including Apple Inc. Mr. Bezos equally has computer skills in science and business, which have been significant in internet business, marketing and cloud computing. Bezos has experience in garage operations, having been a garage inventor during his early years of entrepreneurship.

Skills approach of leadership further emphasizes on human skills, which are vital in dealing with people ( Leadership Skills Approach 2012). Although Steve Jobs was sometimes considered to be rude autocratic in handing employees, his sense of charisma made him an outstanding leader in handling people. He was a role model and encouraged his employees to exploit their potential. On the other hand, Bezos enhances his human skills through weekly training and hiring of intelligent and smart employees.

The last aspect is having conceptual skills, which are necessary in making long-term decisions ( Leadership Skills Approach 2012). Steve jobs had a long-term vision and remained focused on the course despite his failure to graduate from university. While serving with various companies, he invested in getting higher.

He transformed Apple, making it one of the leading technological companies in the world. Similarly, Amazon culture is dominated with long-term strategies. Since its inception, Amazon always invests its short-term profits for long-term benefits. Bezos takes risks, venturing into fields, which are less considered. These included cloud computing and the Blue Origin.

The question we need to ask is how Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos would lead a conservative industry like banking or construction. As mentioned before, the contingency theory of leadership focuses on external and internal factors, which determine the kind of leadership necessary. In other words, it may require the application of several styles in order to achieve reputable skills.

The success of the two would not be limited, by the fact that their leadership styles are more diverse. For instance, Steve Jobs had several leadership styles, which would be important in taking a contingent approach. However, they would be limited in innovation; their success stories revolve around innovative ideas, which might not have a place in a conservative environment.

While starting a company like Apple or Amazon with five employees, it would be important to apply transformational leadership in order to realize success. This is because transformational approach focuses on having a vision to advance to higher levels in future. It further nurtures talents and skills among employees for maximum performance (Bass & Riggio 2006).

Transformational leadership was highly employed by Jobs and Bezos. This helped in changing their small businesses into multinational companies. Nevertheless, this styles wastes a lot of time since leaders have to share their goals with follower. It can also be misused especially by dictatorial leaders.

From the above report, it is clear that leadership is a major concept in the society. Additionally, the success of leaders largely depends of their leadership qualities and styles. Leadership theorists argue that every leader can be grouped into a particular class of leadership. In this case study, it was revealed that several leadership styles contributed to the success of Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, to become world leading CEOs in the 21 st century.

To thrive in this competitive environment, they adopted several leadership styles. Moreover, transformational leadership qualities were key in developing their success story. It is worth noting that different companies may require varying leadership styles for their success.

Bass, B & Riggio, R 2006, Transformational Leadership , Routledge, London.

Bolden et al. 2003, A Review of Leadership Theory and Competency Frameworks . Web.

Gallos, J 2008, Business Leadership: A Jossey-Bass Reader , John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey.

Grint, K 2010, Leadership: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford University Press, London.

Kramer, D 2010, Leadership Behaviors and Attitudes of Steve Jobs . Web.

Leadership Skills Approach . 2012. Web.

Peña, M, 2005, Steve Jobs to 2005 graduates: ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish . Web.

‘Taking the long view’ 2012 The Economist (US), vol. 402, p. 1-3.

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• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, April 6). Leadership Case Study. https://ivypanda.com/essays/leadership-case-study/

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Marissa mayer: a case study in poor leadership.

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In March of 2013 I authored an article predicting the demise of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer . Here's the thing - not every talented, successful executive is CEO ready; Mayer is a textbook example of this. It was obvious from the early days, at least to those paying attention, that Mayer didn't have the leadership chops to pull off the admittedly tough assignment of turning around the once iconic Yahoo brand. A question worth asking is, why didn't the Yahoo board of directors recognize this?

Just this week, Miguel Helft authored a meaty article chronicling Mayer's tenure at Yahoo . Helft was fair in his analysis, pointing out that anyone who assumed the helm at Yahoo had an almost impossible task in front of them. Breathing life back into a company whose business model was built for an era that has long since passed is no easy task. That said, Helft was also fair in highlighting Mayer's dismal track record of making questionable, if not altogether poor decisions at virtually every turn.

There's much that can be learned about leadership in any real world case study, and the Mayer/Yahoo saga is no exception. Just about any company can be reinvented and reinvigorated with sound leadership - the obvious missing ingredient for Mayer and for the Yahoo board. If there's a silver lining here, it is this: it's never too late to lead better. While that certainly applies to Mayer, my belief is that it also applies to the Yahoo board. Both Mayer and the board are culpable of poor leadership.

Much of my personal practice deals with CEO succession, and the misadventures of Mayer represents the classic case of picking the wrong CEO, and then compounding the error with a poor transition into the role. From day one, Mayer could have talked less and listened more. She could have taken the time to learn before acting (solutions that precede understanding usually don't end well). She could have mended fences rather than building walls. She chose to pontificate, posture and spin rather than listen, learn and understand. One of the first things a newly seated chief executive needs to tackle is building trust across all constituencies, but particularly with the workforce. There's an old Roman saying, "He who control the army wins" - Mayer lost this battle in the early days.

Culture is often talked about but rarely understood. It's the glue that holds all businesses together. By all accounts, culture at Yahoo is broken, if not altogether toxic under Mayer's stewardship. I've always said that a toxic culture is code for failed leadership. What Mayer has failed to grasp is that you cannot transform a culture you do not understand. A corporate culture is a fragile ecosystem with many interdependent mechanisms that must be nurtured in order to thrive. A strong culture is a performance accelerant capable of creating huge shifts in momentum. Mayer has completely missed the biggest lever a CEO has to pull - culture.

Mayer's leadership seems to be more about Mayer than those she is responsible for leading. I don't begrudge anyone a fair wage, but as the highest paid female CEO at $42.1 million dollars, it's fair to question whether Mayer is worth the investment. Mayer would be well served to take the spotlight off herself, and shine it on those she leads. If you dismiss the opinions of your team, don't be shocked when they stop sharing their insights. If the people you lead are afraid to make mistakes  you '  ll never see their best work. And if you consistently tell people they're not leaders, don't be surprised when they start to believe you. Another leadership miss for Mayer - but for the people there is no platform. 

Another completely unavoidable mistake was not having a cohesive, crisply articulated strategy. Mayer has attempted to ideate her way to the future by implementing any number of disparate initiatives that felt like a series of one-off imposed mandates. What she should have done was build alignment around a well conceived, collaborative effort based upon an a clear vision for the future. She has experienced only tepid buy-in on her vision, and her execution has been flawed as a result. Setting expectations is gamesmanship - aligning them is leadership.

Perhaps Mayer's biggest failure is the ability to unlearn.  Many leaders are very skilled at challenging the thoughts and opinions of others, but are woefully inept when it comes to challenging their own thinking. The reality is that it takes no effort to cling to your current thinking; however to change your mind requires you to challenge your mind. I’ve believed for quite sometime the most profound and commonly overlooked aspect of learning is recognizing the necessity of  unlearning.

Mayer consistently rebuffs dissenting and/differing opinions and exhibits a close-mindedness that rarely serves a leader well. She has had trouble understanding there's  a big difference between standing on conviction versus just wanting to win an argument. When evaluating a position on any given topic, smart leaders must ask themselves, are they trying to learn something, or are they just trying to justify their opinion? Having strong convictions is a healthy thing so long as you’re convicted by the truth and not your pride or your ego.

Being a CEO is tough, and no doubt, being a CEO leading a major business transformation is even tougher. I actually don't fault Mayer for the Yahoo debacle as much as I do the Yahoo board for not recognizing what type of leader they needed for this assignment. That said, without an Alibaba miracle, or a massive change in leadership Yahoo is simply going to die a very slow and painful death.

Follow me on Twitter @MikeMyatt

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Table of Contents

Azure case study- rbac (role based access control) using microsoft entra id.

Aditya Chouhan

August 08, 2024

C onfidentiality, I ntegrity, and A vailability, or CIA, form the foundation of information security practices. Confidentiality ensures that information is accessible to authorized individuals only. Integrity ensures information is accurate, while Availability ensures information is available to intended individuals whenever they need it without any disruptions.

Access Control is one of the fundamental ways to implement Confidentiality. It governs the who (authentication) and what (authorization) part of any security system. Access control systems are vital as they reduce the security risk in any organization by ensuring that data and resources are accessible to authorized entities using a set of predefined access policies.

These are different access control models, and these models differ from each other based on how they control access to resources. A few models are listed below:

• Discretionary Access Control (DAC), where the owner of the resource, controls who can access it and what permissions they have. Access control is at the resource owner's discretion, so this model is considered more flexible but less secure.
• Mandatory Access Control (MAC) defines system-wide access policies governed by central authority (administrators). MAC is considered more secure as it has consistent and rigorous enforcement of access policies.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) grants access to entities based on their organizational roles rather than individual identities.
• Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) grants access to entities based on certain attributes associated with the individual. These attributes could be user attributes like department or location or resource attributes like type, metadata, and so on. ABAC policies are defined based on the combination of these attributes.

This blog focuses on Role-Based Access Control. We are going to cover an interesting case study from one of Encora's recent projects where we implemented RBAC using Microsoft Entra ID as the Identity and Access Management platform.

R ole Based Access Control

RBAC (Role Based Access Control) is an access control model where accesses are defined based on organizational roles. Users are grouped into roles and permissions are assigned to these roles. These groups/ roles could be created based on job functions and responsibilities. The best part is the flexibility to add a user to multiple groups, thus granting cumulative access to the user based on all the groups that they are a part of. This is extremely popular model because of the below advantages:

• Simple and easy maintenance- Onboarding and offboarding of users becomes easy.
• Scalable & flexible- IT Administrator can remove or add users to multiple groups or roles.
• Centralized policies: Centralized control allows organizations’ IT teams to have consistent, standardized, non-discretionary IT security policies.

RBAC Implementation

Implementation of RBAC has four stages-

• Role Identification: Analyzing user roles and responsibilities based on business functions.
• Role Assignment: Mapping roles to users based on their job functions. Users can have multiple roles.
• Permission Assignment: Defining what actions each role can perform. Best practice is to follow the principle of least privileges.
• Role Administration: This is the last stage of managing roles and permissions over time. IT Administrators need to ensure users, roles and assigned permissions are updated periodically.

There are several ways for RBAC (Role Based Access Control) implementation. Specialized RBAC management tools, hybrid implementation of ACL (Access Control List) & RBAC, RBAC using IAM (Identity and Access Management) tools are a few of the popular ways. All popular IAM tools like Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, One Login, Ping Identity etc. have RBAC frameworks built in. IAM based RBAC implementation offers various advantages:

• Centralized Identity Management
• Scalable & Agile
• Built-in RBAC frameworks and policies
• Enhanced security using advanced features like MFA etc.
• Strong risk management of IAM tools

Let us now see a case study where we implemented IAM-based RBAC with Microsoft Entra ID as Identity and Access Management for an enterprise application.

Enterprise Case Study

Encora designed and implemented an Azure cloud-based scheduler for automating work scheduling   in the utility operations space. This scheduler application was built in-house for the Electric Operations department to be used by the client’s internal work managers. This application was successfully deployed to production and hundreds of users began using it for their day-to-day work of job scheduling. Later, we received another request from the PMO department of the client. They had a manual ‘legacy’ process to manage and schedule the transformer’s inspection work which they were handling manually on Excel sheets. Encora suggested automating this manual process by adding a new module to the existing application instead of creating a new application. This decision was made because of below advantages:

• Reuse scheduling algorithm
• Code reusability; the idea was to reuse existing APIs and avoid base code setup
• Leverage existing Azure infrastructure; no need to provision new Azure resources

Thus, this approach optimized costs and saved a lot of time as well. The client was happy and satisfied with Encora’s suggested solution of adding a new module to the existing application. Since all the users of this application were internal, we implemented Single Sign On using Open ID Connect SSO protocol and Client’s Microsoft Entra ID as Identity Provider. Please refer to this blog Implementing SSO in Enterprise Applications Using OpenID Connect if you want to read about OIDC SSO protocol. The current task was to add a new module to the existing application, and to leverage and extend Entra ID as IAM tool.

Challenges Faced

The biggest challenge here was that after the login, any user with a valid identity token issued by Microsoft Entra ID received full access to our application.

As you can see in the above diagram, both work managers and the PMO group had access to each other's modules. The client’s expectation was that specific groups should have access to only their module.

Solution Implemented

Encora decided to implement Role Based Access Control to ensure that the right role/ group had access to their own modules only. The picture below gives a high-level understanding of implementation-

All popular IAM solutions including Microsoft Entra ID have in-built support for RBAC (Role Based Access Control). We had to make minor configuration changes on Entra ID and a few lines of code changes on the API side to implement RBAC in an enterprise application within a few hours.

Entra ID Changes

• Created necessary groups on Client’s Microsoft Entra ID. These groups were created based on business functions and departments.

• Based on users’ department and business function, they were then added to these groups.

• The next step was to make some changes in the Manifest section of the client application. The above step of adding group as additional claim will ensure that the below highlighted line gets added to the manifest section.

We have flexibility to control the inclusion of roles as optional claims in different token types. In the above screenshot we have added “emit_as_roles” to all three types of tokens-- Identity, Access and SAML.

We are done with Microsoft Entra ID changes. Four simple steps which could be done within a few minutes. These configuration changes will ensure that any identity or access token issued by this Microsoft Entra ID for this application will have an additional claim “group” property.

Please check the Entra ID generated sample Identity token for this application. You can see the highlighted part where Microsoft Entra ID included all the roles/ groups that the logged-in user is part of.

Code Changes

Microsoft Entra ID is doing its job by including roles/ groups inside issued Identity token. The next task is to validate these roles on the API side. Please note that this group validation code would vary with programming languages, but below C# code snippets will give you a high-level idea.

• The first step is to extract roles/ groups from the identity token of the authenticated user.

• You can pass these extracted roles to your front-end application to implement role-based UI/ layout. These values could be used to show/ hide the content on screen.
• Also, you can control the accessibility of API controllers by using [Authorize] filter which is in-built in .NET framework.

This ensures that this controller could be accessed only if the ‘groups’ claim of access token has any one group out of listed list.

The Entra ID configuration changes and backend (API) side code changes are done. Now, let us see the third and last step--Changes on the front-end side. We had used Microsoft-recommended MSAL (Microsoft Authentication Library) for implementing SSO in our Angular application as it provides all the security best practices for OIDC implementation in web applications. The screenshot below gives you a high-level idea about how we used Role Guard for implementing RBAC on the Angular side.

Based on the extracted roles from the Identity token, we can control the accessibility of different routes and modules in Angular application.

The best part about this above RBAC implementation was that the entire solution was done in three days: one day for research & analysis, and two days for the actual implementation. That is the beauty of using modern authentication techniques like Single Sign-On, OIDC, OAuth etc. Imagine the amount of effort and time we would have spent to implement RBAC if this were traditional username-password authentication, where we would have maintained users and roles in our database.

Also, this RBAC implementation is flexible and scalable for upcoming modules and users. Recently, we added another module to this application. All we had to do was to add a new group on Entra ID and make two lines of code changes to accommodate the newly added Entra ID business group.

In this blog, we covered different access control models and delved more deeply into Role Based Access Control and its advantages. There are several ways of RBAC implementation, and the Identity & Access Management based RBAC is most popular because of advantages like centralized access management, enhanced security and risk management. All popular IAM tools have built-in RBAC framework and policies. We also saw a case study where we implemented IAM based RBAC using Microsoft Entra ID as IAM tool for one of the utility and operations clients of Encora. This access control implementation was done within a short amount of time with minimal code and configuration changes on the Entra ID side.

Author Bio                                                                                            

Aditya Chouhan has ~15 years of IT industry experience. He has expertise in Microsoft technology stack, Azure Cloud, Application Security, and Identity & Access Management. Currently, he is working as AVP Engineering at Encora. He is also one of the Innovation leaders of Encora in Cloud Services. He holds master's degree in management of information systems from University of Nebraska, Omaha, and bachelor's in computer science from Indore, India. As part of his job at Encora, Aditya drives delivery of multiple business initiatives and provides technical assistance to multiple global engineering teams. He loves to speak and write about technology.

About Encora

Encora accelerates enterprise modernization and innovation through award-winning digital engineering across cloud, data, AI, and other strategic technologies. With robust nearshore and India-based capabilities, we help industry leaders and digital natives capture value through technology, human-centric design, and agile delivery.

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• Published: 05 August 2024

Public participation in the conservation and management of canal cultural heritage worldwide: a case study of the Rideau Canal and Erie Canal

• Zhengqing Gu 1 &
• Dexin Tian   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7361-5140 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  1005 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Business and management
• Cultural and media studies
• Development studies

To shed light on the conservation and management of canal cultural heritage worldwide, this paper examines the relevant experience and implications acquired from the US Erie Canal and Canadian Rideau Canal from the perspective of public participation in terms of four dimensions: subject, concept, content, and horizon. The study findings are fourfold: first, the factors such as residents of the Heritage Corridor, non-governmental organizations, non-profit enterprises, private forces, tourists, and individual volunteers constitute the subject of public participation. Second, both sides concur that extensive public involvement is the driving force behind the success of cultural heritage conservation and management. This wide involvement is conducive to promoting education and shaping national identity. Third, for both sides, public participation is integral to the Heritage Corridor project management plan, spanning the entire process of drafting, revising, implementing, and evaluating. Finally, both sides have been leveraging modern information technology and social media, such as web home pages, databases, virtual discussions, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to promote public participation, and achieving double the results with half the effort. The implications of the findings lie in four aspects: first, the canal community committees assume leadership responsibilities with relevant laws and regulations in place as legal backup; second, both the US and Canadian sides take effective measures to organize, recognize, and appreciate participants; third, they demonstrate the spirit of democratic participation and exemplary deliberation throughout the cultural heritage canal conservation and management process; and finally, both sides maximize the use of modern information technologies for efficient conservation and management of their respective Canal Cultural Heritage Corridors.

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Introduction.

In the information age featuring digitalization, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI), public participation has become increasingly essential in all social sectors, including the conservation and management of cultural heritage worldwide. Public participation, which is used interchangeably as public engagement, public involvement, citizen participation, or public democracy in this paper, refers to “any of the several mechanisms intentionally instituted to involve the lay public or their representatives in administrative decision-making” (Beierle and Cayford, 2002 , p. 6). As Kumpu ( 2022 ) notes, “civic engagement, public participation, and public involvement” all underscore the significance of “involving citizens, customers, employees, and stakeholders in the activities of governments, businesses, scientific and arts institutions, and organizations of various kinds in policy making processes” (p. 306). Pierroux et al. ( 2020 ) also remark that “at the crux of all citizen projects are the volunteers…who dedicate their senses, passions, and knowledge to ongoing research in natural, cultural, and science heritage” (p. 5). Thus, we not only understand what public participation means but also appreciate its significance.

Regarding the significance of public participation in environmental conservation, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) adopted the convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters at its fourth Ministerial Conference in Denmark from 23 to 25 June 1998 (Economic Commission for Europe Secretariat, 1998 , p. 3). Specifically, concerning the significance of conserving and managing cultural heritage, UNESCO ( 2022 ) rules that “within the framework of its safeguarding activities of the intangible cultural heritage, each country shall endeavor to ensure the widest possible participation of communities, groups and, where appropriate, individuals that create, maintain and transmit such heritage so as to involve them actively in its management” (p. 12). Since the beginning of the 21st century, with the rapid development of modern civil society, the “public participation community” composed of governments, citizens, experts, and the media has initially emerged. It can be seen that the effect of public participation in the conservation and management of cultural heritage has received attention from all parties.

However, while the concept of heritage conservation continues to evolve, the content of heritage conservation is also becoming increasingly complex, and it is challenging for government-led static management to meet today’s dynamic conservation needs. In the overall management system of conservation, inheritance, and utilization of canal tangible and intangible cultural heritage in the world, the overall degree of community participation in some developing countries is not high enough, and the dominant position of communities in the intangible cultural heritage conservation system has not yet been established. In the case of China, the lack of public participation makes the conservation of the cultural heritage of the Grand Canal insufficiently supervised, coupled with its development bottlenecks and “destructive construction” pressure, resulting in the excessive commercial development of the Grand Canal heritage and serious loss of original residents (Fu, Cao and Huo, 2021 ). Clearly, in the conservation and management of canal cultural heritage worldwide, establishing an effective path and mechanism of public participation has become an urgent issue and responsibility of relevant government departments, academic circles, and the general public.

Since public participation in the conservation and management of cultural heritage is still in its infancy in quite a number of developing countries, lessons and experience can be drawn from those developed countries that have witnessed hundreds of years herein. Meanwhile, little has been written about the experience and implications of advanced countries in their conservation and management of cultural heritage for the sake of shedding light on other canals in the rest of the world, especially those listed on the World Heritage List. Therefore, this paper first summarizes the cultural heritage content of the Heritage Canals of the World and then elaborates on the theoretical basis and conceptual evolution of public participation. Furthermore, the significance of public participation in environmental issues is discussed. Finally, this paper investigates the experience and implications that can be learned from the Erie Canal in the US and the Rideau Canal in Canada from the four dimensions of subject, concept, content, and horizon. To this end, the following research questions (RQ) are raised:

RQ1: What experience can be drawn from the Erie Canal in the US and the Rideau Canal in Canada in their respective conservation and management of canal cultural heritage?

RQ2: What implications do the above experience hold for the bottleneck issues in the conservation and management of canal cultural heritage worldwide?

Literature review

Research on the world heritage canals.

Globalization is creating new perspectives on social and cultural spaces, which leads to changes in the expression of culture, identity, and belonging, as well as the role of heritage today (Colomer, 2017 ). In the preface to the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, UNESCO ( 1972 ) emphasizes that those “parts of the cultural or natural heritage of outstanding interest…need to be preserved as part of the world heritage of mankind as a whole”, and “it is incumbent on the international community as a whole to participate in the protection of the cultural and natural heritage” (p. 1). The 2005 Faro Convention underscores the importance of citizens’ responsibilities in assigning heritage values, thereby introducing the concept of “heritage communities” that encompass individuals who cherish particular elements of cultural heritage and aspire to preserve and pass them down to future generations through public action (Council of Europe, 2005 ). Based on the information from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre ( 2022 ) and the research results of scholar Liu ( 2020 ), the names of the eight World Heritage Canals, their location countries, the time of inclusion in the World Heritage List, the standard serial number, and the evaluation summary of the World Heritage Committee can be listed as follows:

In Table 1 , except for Iran, China, and Mexico, the other five World Heritage canals are all located in western developed countries and belong to the products of industrial civilization. According to the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention issued by UNESCO ( 2023 ), all heritage sites listed in the World Heritage List must have long-term and sufficient legislative and normative measures to ensure the conservation of the heritage sites. From the practice of its legislation, most western world heritage canals have formulated a relatively exemplary heritage conservation law system. For instance, Canada has issued the Historic Sites and Monuments Act, which has played a substantial role in the effective management of the Rideau Canal by the coordination of the Parks Canada Agency and other relevant authorities. The other four Western countries have established similar working mechanisms in their respective conservation and management of the cultural heritage of their world heritage canals. This study has singled out the Erie Canal in the US as a representative of the non-world heritage canals and the Rideau Canal in Canada as a representative of the world heritage canals for detailed explorations.

At present, there are >520 canals in the world, distributed across >50 countries, involving >3000 cities along the route. Carrying the history and culture, the canals, as a unique living cultural heritage, have always been the spiritual home of people from all over the world, and have accumulated profound and long cultural deposits (Fan and Shi, 2022 ). As important cultural heritage globally, the canals have garnered the general attention of scholars at home and abroad with their unique historical and cultural connotations and tourism development values. In the process of conserving, managing, and developing tourism for canal cultural heritage worldwide, a series of problems have emerged. For instance, in the early development of the European canal cultural heritage, there were many problems such as single canal tourism products, lack of tourism image brand, and uneven distribution of interests (Gfeller and Eisenberg, 2016 ). Flemsæter et al. ( 2020 ) use the rhythm analysis to explore the rhythm of the tourist experience of the Telemark Canal in Norway and believe that the lack of connection between tourists and the host community has caused a serious disorder in local and regional economic, social, and cultural development. Through research on the Amsterdam Canal, Pinkster and Boterman ( 2017 ) have found that as more tourists arrive, the dissatisfaction of residents living in the canal area is growing, but in the face of many troubles brought by tourism, residents are unable to change the status quo. As a world heritage canal, the Grand Canal of China is a large-scale linear multi-functional cultural ecology with the largest space-time span, the highest technical content, and the most colorful content among all canals in the world. However, the awareness and concept of the general public to participate in the conservation of canal heritage is still in its embryonic stage, which cannot provide sufficient human, material, and financial support for organized development at a higher level (Chu, 2016 ).

Thus, we observe such issues in most developing countries as the lack of collaboration between tourists and host communities on both sides of the canals, the increasing dissatisfaction of residents living in canal areas, and the general public’s weak awareness of canal heritage protection. All this has made public participation in the conservation and management of canal cultural heritage worldwide an important topic for further research.

The theoretical basis and conceptual evolution of public participation

The theoretical basis.

In the process of social governance, the public is the most critical interest subject. Therefore, public participation in the management of public affairs is not only the basic right of citizens but also an important way to realize democratic politics. Specifically, public participation refers to “the ability of individual citizens and groups to influence environmental decisions through (1) access to relevant information, (2) public comments to the agency responsible for a decision, and (3) the right, through the courts, to hold public agencies and businesses accountable for their environmental decisions and behaviors” (Cox, 2006 , p. 84). Three rights can be delineated from Cox’s definition: the right to know as transparency, the right to comment as direct participation, and the right of standing as accountability (Walker, 2007 ). In the Internet age, the information transmission chain and transactional model of communication constructed by the mobile Internet, mobile phone SMS, blog, microblog, WeChat, APP client, etc., are profoundly changing the traditional political ecology and the logic of social operation (Ni, 2017 ). The term “public participation” originates from the West. Traditional public participation refers to the activities of civic voting, while public participation in the modern sense refers to the social behavior that individuals or social organizations outside the government are trying to influence the decision-making and governance of public affairs by law (Cheng, 2017 ). In the city-state society of ancient Greece, democracy is mainly the direct participatory management of public life. As a representative of classical democratic theory, Rousseau believes that civic participation in the political decision-making process could not only make the democratic system possible but also promote individual responsible social action and political action (Wang, 2008 ). In modern social governance, Spanish scholar Barnes has proposed the concept of the third generation of administrative procedures for national governance in the context of risk society. The third generation of administrative procedures emphasizes: first, to improve the quality of decision-making and implementation by enhancing the understanding of real risk and risk decisions; second, the decision with multiple subjects has a higher formal rationality for the public; third, the public’s deep participation in the process of risk decision consultation also has a declaration and educational effect. Compared with traditional administrative procedures, the third generation of administrative procedures is more open, multi-orderly, and consultative (Wu and Zhang, 2023 ).

In the digitalized information age of media generalization, technology empowerment makes the relationship between the communication subject and the object tend to generalize. The generalization of information production and consumption participants activates the user’s autonomy and selectivity. The direct conversion from behavioral data to content production clearly shows that user production tends to be subjective. As Castells ( 2018 ) believes, one of the reasons for the transformation of the traditional social power model to the network social power model is the “presence” of people’s spatial power, that is, the development of the Internet and wireless communication supports and strengthens the audience’s independent practice, including uploading user-created content on the Internet. In the era of digital artificial intelligence, the logic of information is user-based, and the starting point of the collection, processing, generation, and dissemination of all data is the network behavior of the public. The information sharing will be continuously improved and iterated along the logic of user needs (Lv and Huang, 2022 ). To give full play to the utility of network technology innovatively, the public network participants can ensure the essence and effect of their public participation from the aspects of public opinion expression, technology drive, and system guarantee. Besides, Roberts ( 2004 ) emphasizes that public participation may involve deliberation, which means that the involved parties make their decisions through dialog, exchange of ideas, and mutual learning. It can be seen that public network participation is not only a political phenomenon involving state power and interest relations but also an act of citizens carrying out political complaints and participating in social management through interactive communication and mutual learning.

As the integrator of the theory of public participation, the ladder of citizen participation proposed by the American scholar Arnstein in 1969 still has guiding significance in the digital age of technology empowered. Specifically, Arnstein ( 1969 ) divides the public participation ladder into three levels, namely, from low to high, including no participation model, representation participation model, and active participation model. It goes without saying that under the no-participation model, the public does not enjoy the right to participate or passively participate in governance activities in social governance. Under the representation participation model, public participation behavior is more of a form of amusement. And only under the active participation model, the public has gained more rights to participate, reflecting the overall participation and substantial participation effect.

Evolution of the concept of public participation

As a historical category, public participation has undergone a process of evolution, enrichment, and expansion. Because public participation encompasses a wide range of fields, its definition varies across different fields. To Friedmann ( 1987 ), public participation refers to the fact that the public participates in the decision-making process in the form of groups. Glass ( 1979 ) interprets it as a process or opportunity for the public to participate in government decision-making and planning.

In the “Internet +” era, public participation is characterized by the following features: First, in terms of the subjects, government agencies, the general public, including individuals, experts and scholars, social organizations, non-governmental organizations, and non-profit enterprises constitute the main body of public participation. Second, in terms of the concept, from the obligation standard to the right standard, citizens in modern society bear not only the duty to participate in the management of state and social affairs but also the due right. Third, in terms of the content, public participation is expanded from state affairs to social affairs. This means that the public has shifted from pure political participation to involvement in various public affairs. Finally, in terms of the horizon, it extends from real life to the virtual world. In today’s digital information age, the development of the Internet has provided an unprecedented free and equal communication public space for public participation, making it shift from “absence” to “presence”, and then through the “legal and orderly” path, to ensure the “civilized and effective” virtual public participation activities (Cheng, 2017 ). Therefore, public participation essentially comprises such components as the subject, concept, content, and horizon.

In short, with the drastic changes in social structure and profound changes in ideas, non-profit enterprises, the general public, and non-governmental organizations consciously participate in public governance in various forms, which is becoming a norm, and public participation is also becoming a trend in the conservation of cultural heritage worldwide. Some developed countries, such as the US and Canada, have a history of hundreds of years of protecting cultural heritage, which can provide a lot of valuable experience worth learning from. Now that the research on public participation in the conservation of cultural heritage is still in its infancy, it is not comparable in many aspects. The main body of public participation in the US and Canada is mostly the same; however, the situation is somewhat different in China. The public in the US and Canada refers to tourists, indigenous people, volunteers, related experts and scholars, and technical personnel, but the public of the Grand Canal of China refers to the canal coast residents, relevant experts, professional and technical personnel, users or consumers, and volunteers (Zhang and Qiu, 2019 ).

To sum up, public participation has shifted from the political field to a wider range of social public affairs such as legislation, urban planning, environmental governance, and heritage conservation. The period from 1970 to 1990 has been the embryonic stage of the public value concept of heritage. The Amsterdam Declaration , issued in 1975, has emphasized that the survival of architectural heritage depends on public attention, particularly among young people. In 1976, the Nairobi Proposal , adopted by UNESCO, encourages individuals, groups, and heritage users to contribute to heritage conservation. Since 1990, it has been the rise and application stage of the public value concept of heritage. Through the reflection of authoritative heritage discourse, people begin to explore the transformation of heritage conservation power from authority to the public, thus giving birth to the emergence of the public value concept of heritage. This concept links heritage with daily public life and pays attention to effective interaction between them, so that more people care about and protect heritage, promoting the formation of the heritage conservation force and conservation mechanism (Fu et al. 2021 ). This is why, in 2007, the World Heritage Committee has added “community involvement” to the original “4C” principles of credibility, conservation, capacity-building, and communication to highlight the importance of community people in heritage conservation and sustainable development, thus forming the ground and strategic framework for heritage conservation in the 21st century (Wei, 2022 ). In this paper, we adopt the four dimensions of subject, concept, content, and horizon of public publication as the theoretical framework.

Cultural heritage value and significance of public participation

Adopted by the Australia International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a non-governmental organization that focuses on cultural heritage conservation, the Burra Charter “provides guidance for the conservation and management of places of cultural significance” (ICOMOS Australia, 2013 , p. 1). In terms of conservation principles, the Burra Charter has stressed the importance of public participation in Article 12, namely “conservation, interpretation and management of a place should provide for the participation of people for whom the place has significant associations and meanings, or who have social, spiritual or other cultural responsibilities for the place” (ICOMOS Australia, 2013 , p. 5). In the conservation processes and practice, the cultural heritage value has been fully considered in ICOMOS New Zealand Charter. The cultural heritage value means “possessing esthetic, archeological, architectural, commemorative, functional, historical, landscape, monumental, scientific, social, spiritual, symbolic, technological, traditional, or other tangible or intangible values, associated with human activity” (ICOMOS New Zealand, 2010 , p. 9). The conservation plans and projects about different aspects of cultural heritage value are intertwined with public participation, involving “interested parties and connected people” (ICOMOS New Zealand, 2010 , p. 5). The ICCROM report means that particularly “artistic, historic, and typological value” could be taken into account as the outstanding universal value of cultural heritage (Jokilehto and Cameron, 2008 , p. 11). The ICOMOS report notes that cultural heritage should also include properties “with great potential for esthetic, educational and scientific value” (Jokilehto and Cameron, 2008 , p. 11). The social value of cultural heritage is shaped by the combined efforts of people and non-human factors, such as technology, through the use of social media platforms (Bonacchi et al. 2023 ).

Among the various aspects of cultural heritage values, authenticity is of great importance in the process of conservation. According to the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, to be of outstanding universal value, a cultural property must meet the requirement of authenticity in “design, materials, workman ship and setting” (Jokilehto and Cameron, 2008 , p. 43). The Nara document provides a full discussion of the concept of authenticity and has a profound impact on modern conservation history and conservation practices (Stovel, 2008 ). The research on the comparative analysis of China and Scotland shows a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between authenticity and heritage conservation (Gao and Jones, 2021 ). Besides emphasizing material authenticity, people’s experience of authenticity is also necessary for heritage conservation and heritage management. Another essential element for identifying the significance of cultural heritage is the requirement of integrity. Integrity is defined as “a measure of the wholeness and intactness of the natural and/or cultural heritage and its attributes”, including “the social-functional integrity”, “the historical-structural integrity”, and “the visual/esthetic integrity” (Jokilehto and Cameron, 2008 , p. 44). Both authenticity and integrity form the pivot of cultural heritage values and provide guidance for public participation in cultural heritage conservation.

Adopted on 25 June 1998, at the meeting of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) held in the Danish city of Aarhus, the Aarhus Convention has come into effect on 30 October 2001. As a legally binding global instrument on environmental democracy, the Aarhus Convention gives the public more rights, including the ability to seek justice, access information, and participate in environmental decision-making (UNECE, 2023 ). Kumpu ( 2022 ) argues that public participation underscores the involvement of “citizens, customers, employees, and stakeholders in the activities of governments, businesses, scientific and arts institutions, and organizations of various kinds” (p. 306) in the process of policy-making. Pierroux et al. ( 2020 ) note that “this movement promoting public participation and engagement is built around the concept of deliberative democracy” (p. 51) which is “based on the equality of interlocutors and the reciprocity of their exchanges as well as a greater transparency” (p. 56).

With an eye toward communication-centered research, Norton ( 2017 ) has theorized a structuration model for environmental public participation, highlighting in particular issues of agency, “which involves ontological security and ontological competence, social systems, and various elements within duality of structure” (p. 146). Walker ( 2007 ) highlights participatory communication as a crucial strategy for public participation and stresses Collaborative Learning (CL) as an important approach in participatory communication. He uses the case of the 2006 Region 10 EPA Tribal Leaders Summit to illustrate the worksheet technique in the CL community workshops. In addition, Martin ( 2007 ) holds that increasing public participation can enhance the democratic nature, legitimacy, and quality of environmental decisions and believes that the involvement of citizens in both “how decisions are made” and “what decisions are made” are “meaningful public participation” (p. 12). Thus, public participation is seen as an essential aspect of democratic governance in a collaborative way or in other words “deliberative democracy” (Nabatchi, 2010 ). Accordingly, the need for collaborative efforts should give special importance to “an integrated approach among civil society organizations (CSOs), news media, research institutions, and the public” (Ittefaq and Kamboh, 2023 , p. 49).

Research methods

This paper has adopted the research methods of online field observation and comparative case study. As for the online field observation, the two authors have visited and revisited the home pages of the Erie Canal in the US and the Rideau Canal in Canada, as well as the relevant websites in the forms of homepage introductions, online survey results, and official documents, etc., on and about the two said canals. In this way, we have satisfactorily collected our first-hand data. Regarding the comparative case study, Sturman ( 1997 ) defines a case study as “the exploration of an individual, group, or phenomenon” (p. 61). Similarly, but further, Hartley ( 2004 ) holds that case study has been recognized as more than merely a research method, but as a design in its own right. The case study allows researchers to explore complex issues and their underlying mechanisms by focusing on the unique characteristics and context of the studied case. Yin ( 2014 ) believes that case study research preserves “the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events” while enabling an in-depth examination of novel or ambiguous phenomena. He argues that case studies are particularly useful for exploring “what works” in real-world settings and for generating new theoretical insights. Case studies are often examined using a qualitative approach, a quantitative approach, or a mixed methodology, relying upon the cases’ accessibility and the goals of the study. In this paper, a qualitative comparative case study has been conducted to compare and contrast the main features of the two canals by the four dimensions of subject, concept, content, and horizon of public participation.

Experience and implications in the conservation and management of canal cultural heritage in the US and Canada

As a combination of water bodies and the birth of the US, the Erie Canal has transformed from the management model of “government → community → aboriginals” to “community →aboriginals→ government”, which can be a classic example. As one of the World Heritage canals, the Rideau Canal has formulated a short-term, medium-term, and long-term action plan for the strategic objectives of public participation in heritage management plan, which has achieved remarkable results. By following the rules of authenticity and integrity to cultural heritage values, the remainder of the paper explores the fruitful experience and insightful implications of public participation in the cultural heritage conservation and management of the above two canals from the four dimensions of subject, concept, content, and horizon. In the process of comparative case analysis, public participation contributes to unfolding these cultural spaces and their values and revealing their influence on conservation.

The subject

The public participants of the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor (ECNHC) in the US are mainly composed of corridor residents, local communities, regional representatives, political leaders, private or non-profit heritage resource managers, as well as tourists, volunteers, non-governmental organizations, non-profit enterprises, and civil society organizations related to the Erie Canal. Under the ECNHC Act, published in December 2000, the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor Committee (ECNHCC) was established. The committee consists of 27 members, 19 of whom are local people from within the scope of the ECNHC. While receiving consultations from the National Park Service (NPS), the committee is responsible for coordinating partnerships between relevant federal and state government agencies, municipalities, university research centers, nonprofit organizations, and citizens, and actively organizing their joint participation in the conservation and management of the ECNHC Act (Goodstadt et al. 2020 ). According to the above Act, the groups and persons of the public participants should have relevant knowledge and experience in tourism, economic and community development, regional planning, historical conservation, cultural or natural resource management, conservation, entertainment, education, or museum services. Participant diversity embodies “the multivocality of the stakeholders involved in the heritage management process in an effective way” (Pastor and Colomer, 2024 , p. 226).

At the same time, the New York State Historic Preservation Plan stipulates that the ECNHC project should be open to the public from planning to implementation and evaluation. In determining the direction and scope of the corridor project, discussion and review of the plan, and the implementation and completion of management planning, there has been public participation throughout the entire process. According to statistics, the number of public participants in the ECNHC project has been increasing. Since 2000, institutions have participated in the project as partners, from fewer than 50 people at the beginning to >200 people in 2007, 400 in 2018, and 2901 formal partners as well as 5,102 informal partners in 2021. Individual public participation has increased from single digit starting in 2011 – 400 visits in 2018, and then increased to 21,803 in 2021 (National Parks Service, 2021 ). It can be seen that the scale of public participation in the ECNHC project has soared from 50 in 2000 to 21,803 in 2021, giving great impetus to the driving force of community cultural heritage conservation. On one hand, national and state governments have issued relevant bills and programs to legally ensure public participation in cultural heritage conservation. On the other hand, the project is open and transparent in planning, implementation, evaluation, and other relevant links, and public participation occurs throughout the process, as an essential component of the mechanism.

Likewise, the public participants in the conservation and management of the Rideau Canal in Canada are composed of individuals, experts, scholars, social organizations, non-governmental organizations, and non-profit enterprises. Parks Canada Agency is responsible for the mutual liaison and normal operation of its members. The Agency builds the natural, cultural, shipping, and community resources related to the Rideau Canal into an interdependent, coexisting, and symbiotic mechanism. In order to ensure the orderly, normal, and efficient operation of the cooperation among the members, a review team for the cultural heritage of the Rideau Canal was established in 1995. According to the operation rules and management plans for the conservation and inheritance of canal heritage, the opinions of relevant people have been extensively considered, and eight implementation rules have been formulated. Among the eight rules, the following ones concern public participation:

(4) An advisory committee should be formed immediately for each canal. It should report to the superintendent and advise on subjects of mutual concern. (5) Membership should be drawn from business and community leaders, and the group should be convened a minimum of four times a year. (6) It is suggested that the committees should be voluntary and be provided with administrative support. (7) The terms of reference for committees, their membership, tenure, and size should be developed in consultation with interest groups on each canal. (8) The advisory committee should monitor the implementation of the corridors of change report. (Keenan et al. 1995 )

It can be seen that, as the competent department of the Rideau Canal, Parks Canada Agency creatively coordinates all forces, actively solicits opinions from grassroots people and tourists, and regularly updates the activities related to cultural heritage. At the same time, the original residents and stakeholders around the Rideau Canal have signed agreements with the government, so that they can actively participate in various volunteer activities involving the public. In short, the public participants of the US and Canada are much the same, mainly composed of residents of the Heritage Corridor, non-governmental organizations, non-profit enterprises, private forces, tourists, and individual volunteers. However, the former emphasizes the role of grassroots partners, while the latter relies on the phased goals of the Heritage Corridor program. Participatory processes are considered “a democratic tool in the field of cultural heritage” (Pastor and Colomer, 2024 , p. 226), where democratizing participation creates spaces for negotiation and interaction among stakeholders. The participating subjects of the US and Canada reflect that democracy, especially deliberative democracy is placed in a very important position in the process of public participation. Deliberative democracy strives to empower citizens in the decision process of public participation and redirect decision-making processes toward core ethical and social principles (Bohman and Rehg, 1997 ). One of the key elements of deliberative democracy stipulates that the participants should represent all sectors of the community (Dryzek, 2000 ). The diversity of public participants and their actual decision rights in the process of legislation, regulation, and report drafting demonstrate apparent and typical deliberative democracy in the public participation of the Erie Canal and the Rideau Canal.

The concept

As the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 explained: “The preservation of our irreplaceable heritage is in the public interest so that its vital legacy of cultural, educational, esthetic, inspirational, economic, and energy benefits will be maintained and enriched for future generations of Americans” (Bsarnum et al. 2021 ). Based on this concept, the ECNHC Committee reiterated that heritage conservation is both a movement and a land use law. It maximizes the interests of the masses and their communities when it inspires the masses to find a relationship with historical sites, natural resources, or cultural traditions. This is the best embodiment of the trend that public participation is “changing from obligation standard to right standard, and citizens in the modern society bear not only the duty to participate in the management of state and social affairs but also the due right” (Cheng, 2017 ) as pointed out in the above theoretical framework.

Therefore, the formulation of the New York State Historic Preservation Plan (2021–2026) focuses on the importance of public participation, based on extensive surveys and interviews. Given the partnership and the education and publicity of the public, the plan has introduced clear goals and measures, which to a large extent guarantee the public’s right to know, participate in the government, and supervise the conservation and management of the cultural heritage. In short, to reflect the rooted opinions of the community group, academic institutions, non-profit enterprises, or local government agencies, the management of the ECNHC project adheres to the consistent and clear concept to ensure that the public has the opportunity to understand the project, actively participate in related heritage conservation work, and creatively shape the spiritual world of the present and future of New Yorkers, and even of Americans.

Similarly, as the national wealth and living cultural heritage of Canada, the Rideau Canal is not only a waterway but also a part of the identity construction of Canadians in coastal communities. To this end, the Parks Canada Agency and its liaison members, such as the Friends of the Rideau organization hope to work together “to enhance and conserve the irreplaceable charm of the Rideau Corridor and to increase public awareness and enjoyment of the Rideau Corridor and to develop strong public support for the long term well-being of the Rideau Corridor” (Thomson, 2009 ). To implement the above concepts, the Agency has been developing the Rideau Canal National Historic Site of Canada Management Plan since 1990 and re-evaluating and updating it every 6 years. According to the existing plan, there are the following four concepts related to public participation:

(1) Canadians, residents, and visitors cherish the Rideau Canal as a symbol of Canada’s identity and take pride in their contribution to preserving this national treasure for future generations. (3) Residents of the Canal corridor value and protect the unique cultural and natural heritage character and scenic beauty of the Canal corridor through the cooperative efforts of stakeholder groups, government agencies, public and private sector partnerships, municipal land use policies, and private stewardship. (4) The Canal’s tradition as a fully functional navigable historic waterway is maintained. (7) The values of the Rideau Waterway, Canadian Heritage River, are widely understood and protected through public and private stewardship. (8) The staff of the Rideau Canal are proud of their stewardship role and, through their actions, display leadership in resource conservation, sustainable use, and heritage presentation. (Chief Executive Officer of Parks Canada, 2005 )

Thus, it can be seen that there is a consensus among Canadians on their concept, which states that by passing on the cultural heritage to future generations, they can receive education, appreciate, and identify with the splendid culture of their own country, and the cultural heritage can be more effectively valued and protected. Public participation becomes not only an asset that needs to be protected and valued but also an effective means of promoting and enhancing social-cultural identity and cohesion (Parks Canada Agency, 2016 ). Just as Martin ( 2007 ) remarks, meaningful public participation requires (1) access to information, education, and technical assistance; (2) possessing civic legitimacy so that public concerns can be given authentic consideration; and (3) having the real potential to affect the decision-making process because “who decides usually determines what is decided” (p. 172). In short, both the US and Canada believe that extensive public participation is the driving force for the successful conservation and management of cultural heritage in their concepts. However, the former pays more attention to the role of heritage conservation in shaping the identity of Americans, while the latter places more emphasis on the inheritance and educational function of heritage.

The content

With regards to content, first of all, there are two relevant articles in the ECNHC Act on the US side:

(1) The information on the scale, construction blueprint, management plan, and other information of this corridor (see Fig. 1 ) is subordinate to the NPS, but remains open and transparent and subject to public supervision at all times; (2) In the process of formulating its management plan, conservation plan, and evaluation report, the committee must extensively solicit public opinions through the form of hearings and interviews. (Goodstadt et al. 2020 )

Then, among the six objectives of the ECNHC Preservation and Management Plan, there are also two relevant aspects of content: (4) The Corridor’s current and future generations of residents and visitors will value and support the preservation of its heritage; (6) The Corridor will be a “must do” travel experience for regional, national, and international visitors (Goodstadt et al. 2020 ). Finally, among the eight goals of the New York State Historic Preservation Plan (2021–2026), the relevant content includes: (1) Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access; (7) Partnerships; (8) Public Outreach and Education (Bsarnum, 2021 ). The specific implementation measures include: (1) advisory groups; (2) public meetings; and (3) round-table meetings or academic seminars. As can be seen, there have been particular articles in the relevant Federal, state, and local laws, to conserve and manage the Erie Cultural Heritage Corridor well. Thus, the scope of conservation and management is clear and specific, and the legitimacy and authority of the laws ensure the expected implementation of what has been stipulated or planned.

The Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor ( 2006 ).

Apart from the legal stipulations and strategic plans, there have been practical measures to promote the prosperity and development of the corridor community and cultural tourism. The Corridor Committee holds >400 cultural and tourism promotion activities every year, attracting >500,000 people to participate in various activities of the corridor heritage conservation. At least 40 venues have been set up in the corridor for residents and invited experts to display and share the special exhibits, programs, and stories related to the corridor’s cultural heritage. About 35,000 primary school students from 110 school districts have been sponsored to visit the corridor heritage sites to experience the beauty of the corridor and the cultural connotation of the heritage. At the same time, more than 400 people from Europe and the US have attended the World Canal Symposium held in Syracuse, New York, to discuss research projects and innovative arguments leading to the discovery and transformation of the canal in the world (Goodstadt et al. 2020 ). Public participation is explicitly stipulated in both federal laws and state government documents in the US, so whether it is a non-profit organization in a partnership, an academic group, or an individual, their respective responsibilities are very clear. As a result, they can achieve duty-bound and voluntary participation, fully reflecting the multiple attributes of obligations, rights, and responsibilities that public participation possesses.

Regarding content on the Canadian side, Canada’s Rideau Corridor (see Fig. 2 ) project was officially launched in 2006, aiming to develop, package, and market the cultural tourism experience along the Rideau Canal and its coastline from Ottawa to Kingston. The concept of the Heritage Corridor originated in the US by integrating special cultural resources into a linear landscape. It is an approach to regional heritage conservation, characterized by a clear economic center, thriving tourism, reuse of old buildings, and environmental improvement (Flink and Searns, 1993 ).

Canada’s Rideau corridor (Whytock, 2013 ).

Authenticity is an indispensable factor when it comes to the management and conservation of cultural heritage. In September 1994, an expert World Heritage meeting was held to discuss how the authenticity of heritage canals might be best measured. An annex to the technical analysis of authenticity in the meeting report was submitted to the World Heritage Committee (UNESCO, 1994 ). The goal of this Rideau Corridor project is to position Ottawa, Kingston, and the entire Rideau area as a cultural destination to promote authenticity in the region, offering art, heritage, cuisine, agricultural tourism, and natural history experiences. This corridor project aims to promote the development of a diversified market for the Rideau tourism industry in the short and long term, increasing visitors and incomes for corridor suppliers and local communities. In order to provide tourists with a tourism experience that embodies the unique elements of the region of the Rideau Canal Cultural Heritage Corridor, the Parks Canada Agency and relevant organizations, including public participation groups and personnel, brainstormed and finally identified and launched seven themes closely related to the corridor:

(1) Tell regional or national stories based on the Canal; (2) experience adventures related to home stay, fishing, camping, hunting, and adventure; (3) spend various festivals of towns and villages; (4) enjoy the music and art feasts of dozens of theaters, concert halls, and dance pools; (5) visit nearly 100 art galleries, studios, and exhibition halls with strong art color; (6) enjoy the natural scenery along the canal; (7) enjoy “peaceful” trips of 16 gardens, botanical gardens, and wetland parks. (Flink and Searns, 1993 )

From the above, it can be seen that the Rideau Cultural Heritage Corridor integrates the world’s top art and heritage experiences, focusing on exploring, integrating, and showcasing the marketable art, heritage, cuisine, agricultural tourism, and natural history of the Rideau Canal itself and its adjacent towns, villages, and nature. It also provides visitors with unique cultural tourism resources from the American continent. In summary, public participation runs throughout the entire process of drafting, modifying, implementing, and evaluating the management plan for the Heritage Corridor project between the US and Canada. Just as Cheng ( 2017 ) notes, in the present day, public participation has expanded from state affairs to social affairs, or from pure political participation to involvement in various public affairs. The above accounts of the Cultural Heritage Corridors of both the Erie Canal and Rideau Canal well match the development trajectory. However, the former tends to present a management trajectory that starts from top to bottom and then from bottom to top, while the latter is more expansive, diverse, and local.

The horizon

By horizon, we mean that public participation extends from real life to the virtual world in today’s digital information age, which makes public participation from “absence” to “presence” in an unprecedented free and equal communication public space via the Internet-connected social media (Cheng, 2017 ). Social media creates a new sphere of participants and provides a new platform for public participation (Papacharissi, 2010 ). For heritage research, the use of social media and big data helps digital heritage transform “from a more informational web to a more interactive and collaborative one” (Bonacchi, 2022 , p. 9). Cameron ( 2021 ) describes digital cultural heritage as “composed, conjoined and transformed by the co-evolving interrelatedness of a broad range of actors from people to technologies, algorithms, materials, infrastructures, energy systems, ideas and so forth” (p. 129). The process of creating digital cultural heritage involves more than just human effort; it is a collaborative endeavor that encompasses a variety of actors and elements. This perspective affects the way we understand and investigate the values that are inherent in this type of heritage.

In the case of the US, firstly, the Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor has a dedicated ARCBridge database, which provides services for the collection, analysis, and management of a large amount of information and materials in the management of natural and cultural heritage in the region, especially the access to video records of experts and scholars and other promotional activities as well as the retrieval of information from corridor committee partners. Secondly, the network homepage ( www.eriecanalway.org ) of the corridor project regularly updates the content, images, and interactive maps of heritage conservation and management. At the same time, the home page provides an average of tens of thousands of tourists and public volunteers with detailed corridor tour resources, in-depth explanations of the historical evolution of corridor heritage, corridor heritage conservation and inheritance of the rich and colorful aspects of pictures, game interactions, audio-visual materials, and other multi-modal display content. Finally, the Corridor project also uses popular new social media and we-media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to maintain interaction and communication with various stakeholders, partners, corridor visitors, and individual public participation volunteers (Goodstadt et al. 2020 ).

With the assistance of the ever-updated technology, the management team of the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor Project can keep up with the times, fully utilizing databases, online homepages, and trendy social media to ensure smooth communication of information on corridor heritage conservation and management, and effective question-and-answer (Q&A) interaction between project management and corridor visitors. In fact, in addition to participating in activities such as on-site visits and research, attending meetings, and conducting academic exchanges, the corridor management team has also completed important tasks related to the drafting, modification, implementation, promotion, and evaluation of corridor heritage conservation and management plans through the operation of internet platforms with high efficiency. Therefore, the conservation and management of the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor has been becoming increasingly standardized, clear, and systematic, presenting a management model that transitions from government → community → aboriginals to community → aboriginals → government. Through the accumulation of practical experience, the management model of the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor illustrates the gradual transition from initial government leadership to the dominant roles of the residents’ committees along the canal, assisted by the government with various non-profit or extensive participation of civil organizations. Given public participation in the conservation and management of canal cultural heritage, the relevant departments of other countries have issued a series of canal management regulations and implementation measures, which to some extent reflect the importance of national competent departments to public participation. However, most of them are led by the government to promulgate various regulations and decrees, which usually make it difficult to fully implement cultural heritage conservation and management measures in the jurisdiction, due to the lack of extensive, voluntary, and systematic public participation. Therefore, the management model of the Erie Canal provides a timely and valuable practical reference.

In the case of Canada, the Parks Canada Agency ( 2022 ) released What We Heard—Management Plan Review, Public Consultation Report (hereinafter referred to as the Report), which divided the public participation in the management of the Rideau Cultural Heritage Corridor into two phases. The first phase is from 2016 to 2019, and the main forms of public participation include open days for cultural heritage conservation, and evaluation discussions held four times a year, cultural heritage conservation seminars attended by all stakeholders three times a year, and occasional consultation meetings with indigenous peoples to seek advice on improving the management plan of the Rideau Cultural Heritage Corridor. The second phase is from 2020 – 2021, during which the form of public participation mainly consisted of virtual meetings of stakeholders for public consultation, via email, social media, and other online platforms (Parks Canada Agency, 2022 ).

It can be seen that in the management of the Rideau Cultural Heritage Corridor, public participation has shifted from face-to-face contact and communication in real life to the trend of online virtual meetings and consultations, ensuring that more relevant individuals move from “absence” to “presence” and then to legal, orderly, civilized, and effective “participation” (Cheng, 2017 ). The following is a summary of public participation on the online platform for the conservation and management of the Rideau Cultural Heritage Corridor from January 2021–May 2021 (see Table 2 ):

From Table 2 , it can be seen that Parks Canada Agency attaches great importance to the long-term, stable, and efficient cooperation and participation of cooperating institutions, non-profit organizations, stakeholders, indigenous peoples, and the relevant public in the development and implementation of the Rideau Cultural Heritage Corridor Project. In just 3–4 months, over 9,145 relevant people participated in different forms of public activities through online platforms. Among them, 50% of the respondents live along the Rideau Canal, while 89.1% of the respondents are over 30 years old. Thus, it can be seen that only with broad and active public participation can the management plan and implementation goals of projects similar to the Rideau Cultural Heritage Corridor Project be implemented and become a reality. In short, both the US and Canada can fully utilize modern information technologies and social media, such as online homepages, databases, simulation seminars, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to promote public participation efficiently.

Discussion and conclusion

In this study, through online field observations and comparative case studies, we have explored the experience and implications of public participation that can be learned from the Erie Canal in the US and the Rideau Canal in Canada from the four dimensions of subject, concept, content, and horizon. To this end, we raised two research questions. As the answer to the first question: What experience can be drawn from the Erie Canal in the US and the Rideau Canal in Canada in their respective conservation and management of canal cultural heritage? The relevant experience of the US and Canada can be summarized in four dimensions: first, from the subject dimension, the public participation subjects on both sides are similar, mainly composed of Heritage Corridor residents, non-governmental organizations, non-profit enterprises, civil forces, tourists, and individual volunteers. However, the former emphasizes the role of grassroots partners, while the latter relies more on the phased goals of the Heritage Corridor plan. Second, in terms of the concept dimension, both sides firmly believe that broad public participation is the driving force for the success of cultural heritage conservation and management. However, the former focuses more on the role of heritage conservation in shaping American identity, while the latter focuses more on the inheritance and educational functions of heritage. Third, in terms of the content dimension, public participation runs through the whole process of drafting, modification, implementation, and evaluation of the conservation and management plan in both the US and Canadian Heritage Corridor projects. However, the former presents a more top-down and then bottom-up management trajectory, while the latter is more expansive, diverse, and local. Finally, regarding the horizon dimension, both countries can fully utilize modern information technologies and social media, such as online homepages, databases, simulation seminars, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to efficiently promote public participation.

As the answer to the second question: What implications do the above experience hold for the bottleneck issues in the conservation and management of the canal cultural heritage worldwide? The canals in this paper refer to those world heritage canals in developing countries such as Iran, China, and Mexico, as well as other canals mainly in less industrialized countries and regions. Since the experience has been drawn from four dimensions, the implications can be discussed accordingly about the bottleneck issues with canals worldwide. First, in the dimension of subject, most developing countries still tend to rely on the roles of governments at various levels, which have been generally top-down, one-way, and thus ineffective. With implications from both the US and Canada, on the one hand, the initial leadership role of the government proceeds to be shifted to community committees, and the composition of public participants aims to be diverse and inclusive, targeting not only residents along the canals but also visitors or even tourists from home and abroad. On the other hand, necessary national legal acts or local regulations are in place to make public participation both a duty and an obligation for the involved individuals and organizations in the conservation and management of canal cultural heritage.

Second, in the dimension of concept, cultural heritage conservation and management have constantly been updated, deepened, and refined. Therefore, the static management model led by the government has been becoming increasingly difficult to adapt to new and challenging needs. To face the challenge, both the US and Canada have successfully revitalized the role of public participation in close association with the shaping of national identity and the functioning of school education. In other words, both sides keep the concept of their respective Canal Cultural Heritage Corridors abreast with the developmental trajectories of the modern age by getting the relevant public participants organized, their positions recognized, and, most importantly, their critical voices heard and constructive suggestions taken.

Third, in the dimension of content, in most developing countries and regions, public participation is still at the initial stage; the educational content of public participation tends to be outdated, and the dissemination is often one-way with little or insufficient feedback. Although the US and Canada have adopted different approaches in this regard, one common feature here is that both sides have fully demonstrated the spirit of democratic participation and exemplary deliberation with major decisions made through dialog, exchange, and mutual learning throughout the whole process of drafting, modification, implementation, and evaluation of the conservation and management plans.

Finally, in the dimension of horizon, it is true that in the digitalized information age, the conservation and management of canals worldwide have witnessed various applications of Internet-connected media platforms, including social media or new media. Nevertheless, due to the differences in the construction of the overall management system for the conservation, inheritance, and utilization of the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of canals worldwide, access to modern information technologies for public participation is surprisingly insufficient. Moreover, issues with the above three dimensions of subject, concept, and content have resulted in further obstacles to popularize up-to-date information technologies. Fortunately, the experience of the US and Canada in their extensive utilization of online homepages, databases, simulation seminars, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for public participation can shed light on this regard.

The limitations of this study are twofold: first, this study has relied on only two cases, so the findings may not be representative enough. Second, the two authors both come from China. Although they have studied and lived in the US and Canada for some years, the two authors may have revealed some subjectivity in their analyses of and discussions about the primary data. For future research, more cases of both the world heritage canals and other categories of exemplary canals can be targeted, and more authors from the host countries of the selected canals can be invited for a more representative and triangulated study.

Data availability

Data sharing was not required to this research as no data were generated or analysed.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Social Science Fund Project “Research on the Path to Enhance the International Image of the Grand Canal of China from the Perspective of Cultural Game” under Grant No. 18BGJ086; and Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province “A Study on the Path of Constructing China’s Image in the Discourse of International Chinese Friends from the Perspective of Discourse Analysis” under Grant No. KYCX23_3486.

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Gu, Z., Tian, D. Public participation in the conservation and management of canal cultural heritage worldwide: a case study of the Rideau Canal and Erie Canal. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 1005 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03516-1

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Received : 21 November 2023

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03516-1

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