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The needs of complex patients with chronic conditions can be unpredictable and can strain resources. Exploring how tasks vary for different patients, particularly those with complex needs, can yield insights about designing better processes in healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to explore the tasks required to manage complex patients in an anticoagulation therapy context.

The authors analyzed interviews with 55 staff in six anticoagulation clinics using the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) work system framework. The authors qualitatively described complex patients and their effects on care delivery.

Data analysis highlighted how identifying complex patients and their effect on tasks and organization, and the interactions between them was important. Managing complex patients required similar tasks as non-complex patients, but with greater frequency or more intensity and several additional tasks. After complex patients and associated patient interaction and care tasks were identified, a work system perspective was applied to explore how such tasks are integrated within clinics and the resulting implications for resource allocation.

The authors present a complex patient management framework to guide workflow design in specialty clinics, to better support high quality, effective, efficient and safe healthcare.

The complex patient framework presented here, based on the SEIPS framework, suggests a more formal and integrated analysis be completed to provide better support for appropriate resource allocation and care coordination.

Three difficulties confront researchers in the resilience arena. At the conceptual level, there is the need to identify resilient actions, including those that may seem to violate established norms, such as rational behavior. At the operational level, it may be difficult to model individual, group, and community behavior in a single framework. At the empirical level, it is especially difficult to gather data on resilience to specify models. The purpose of this paper is to summarize progress on all three planes. First, defines several important dimensions of economic resilience to disasters. Second, shows how computable general equilibrium modeling represents a useful framework for analyzing the behavior of individuals, businesses, and markets. Third, summarizes recent progress in the conceptual and empirical modeling of resilience, including the incorporation of disequilibria and the recalibration of key behavioral parameters on the basis of empirical data. Fourth, uses the results of a case study to illustrate some important issues relating to the subject.

Many of today’s information and technology systems and environments facilitate inquiry, learning, consciousness-raising and knowledge-building. Such platforms include e-learning systems which have learning, education and/or training as explicit goals or objectives. They also include search engines, social media platforms, video-sharing platforms, and knowledge sharing environments deployed for work, leisure, inquiry, and personal and professional productivity. The new journal, Information and Learning Sciences, aims to advance our understanding of human inquiry, learning and knowledge-building across such information, e-learning, and socio-technical system contexts.

This article introduces the journal at its launch under new editorship in January, 2019. The article, authored by the journal co-editors and all associate editors, explores the lineage of scholarly undertakings that have contributed to the journal's new scope and mission, which includes past and ongoing scholarship in the following arenas: Digital Youth, Constructionism, Mutually Constitutive Ties in Information and Learning Sciences, and Searching-as-Learning.

The article offers examples of ways in which the two fields stand to enrich each other towards a greater holistic advancement of scholarship. The article also summarizes the inaugural special issue contents from the following contributors: Caroline Haythornthwaite; Krista Glazewski and Cindy Hmelo-Silver; Stephanie Teasley; Gary Marchionini; Caroline R. Pitt; Adam Bell, Rose Strickman and Katie Davis; Denise Agosto; Nicole Cooke; and Victor Lee.

The article, this special issue, and the journal in full, are among the first formal and ongoing publication outlets to deliberately draw together and facilitate cross-disciplinary scholarship at this integral nexus. We enthusiastically and warmly invite continued engagement along these lines in the journal’s pages, and also welcome related, and wholly contrary points of view, and points of departure that may build upon or debate some of the themes we raise in the introduction and special issue contents.

This paper aims to present the salient features of Smith's argument of the falling rate of profit. This theory has usually been interpreted as a result of the intensification of competition in the markets of goods and services of the factors of production. This aspect of Adam Smith had been initially posed by Ricardo and subsequently was widely adopted by the major economists of the past as well as from the majority of the modern historians of economic thought.

This paper reviews the major interpretation of the argument from Ricardo and Marx as well as from major historians of economic thought, and then attempts to reconstruct Smith's argument, which is scattered throughout the Wealth of Nations. The authors present some indirect empirical evidence based on the evolution of interest rates on annuities lending support to Smith's insights of the falling rate of profit.

In the author's view, Smith's analysis of the falling tendency in the rate of profit is by far more complex than usually presented and that the intensification of competition is the result of the falling rate of profit rather than its cause which is the capitalization of the production process.

This paper presents a review of existing literature and an interpretation of Adam Smith's original model of the falling rate of profit.

Tsunamis, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods are a constant threat to society. Where in the past the population at risk had to react on the consequences of disasters, at present society wants to be more in control. Due to the high costs of restoration, of the stress and of the loss of family and friends, a proactive policy in order to prevent disasters or at least to minimize the impact is required. Such a policy asks for a framework to decide on the risk society wants to take. Moreover, it is mandatory to agree on the way instruments preventing disasters are evaluated on their effectiveness. This special issue accounts for the contributions on the methodology of damage estimation by leading European and American economists. Introduces the subject and presents an overview of all papers.

Encourages the saving of distressed stucco and fibrous plaster ceilings of merit and shows that repairs are able to be carried out in nearly all cases by use of traditional materials, all of which are available in one form or another. These ceilings are able to be reinstated/ conserved using plaster firms and conservationists, with specialist advice available supported by many years of experience. Such ceilings are to be found throughout the UK, ranging from small residences to theatres, historic houses and palaces. It is indicated that repair of the ceilings must be carried out as soon as possible by the use of qualified artisans and conservators using methods, some being described, with emphasis on calling in experts at an early stage.

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature in the domain of maritime disruption management, upon which future research framework and agenda are proposed. Two review questions, i.e. the measures that are employed to manage disruptions and how these contribute to resilience performance, were pursued.

The systematic literature review procedure was strictly followed, including identification and planning, execution, selection and synthesis and analysis. A review protocol was developed, including scope, databases and criteria guiding the review. Following this, 47 articles were eventually extracted for the systematic review to identify themes for not only addressing the review questions but also highlighting future research opportunities.

It was found that earlier studies mainly focused on measures, which are designed using mathematical models, management frameworks and other technical support systems, to analyse and evaluate risks, and their impacts on maritime players at the levels of organisation, transport system and region in which the organisation is embedded. There is, however, a lack of research that empirically examines how these measures would contribute to enhancing the resilience performance of maritime firms and their organisational performance as a whole. Subsequently, a Digitally Embedded and Technically Support Maritime Disruption Management (DEST-MDM) model is proposed.

This review is constrained by studies recorded by the Web of Science only. Nevertheless, the proposed research model would expectedly contribute to enhancing knowledge building in the specific domain of maritime disruption management and supply chain management overall while providing meaningful managerial implications to policymakers and managers in the maritime industry.

This research is perhaps one of the first studies which presents a systematic review of literature in maritime disruption management and proposes a future research framework that establishes the link between disruption management and resilience and organisational performance for empirical validation.

The purpose of this paper is to present the three guiding ideas of the social foresight course, namely, the difference between abstract and concrete futures (i.e. the difference between risk and uncertainty); the three levels of futures studies (forecast, foresight and anticipation); and an overview of the early signs of the incipient shift of human and social sciences from their so-far predominant past-orientation to a new, still unfolding, future-orientation.

This paper is a reconstruction of the guiding ideas that have been used for designing the social foresight course.

As far as anticipation is concerned, the authors’ understanding of anticipation is still cursory, and the novelty of the perspective may conceal the difficulty implied by this otherwise refreshingly new vision. The theory is at such an early phase of development that it still lacks a unified conceptual language for theorizing and operationalizing anticipation to facilitate cross-disciplinary conversations.

The ability to anticipate in complex environments may improve the resilience of societies under threat from a global proliferation of agents and forces by articulating insecurities through anticipatory processes. However, to achieve this end, the joint expertise and theoretical awareness of both the futurists and the human and social scientists is needed.