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Recent reports by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) signal a substantial yet unrealized deficit in patient safety innovation and improvement. With the aim of reducing this dilemma, we provide an introductory account of clinical error resulting from poorly designed systems by reviewing the relevant health care, management, psychology, and organizational accident sciences literature. First, we discuss the concept of health care error and describe two approaches to analyze error proliferation and causation. Next, by applying transdisciplinary evidence and knowledge to health care, we detail the attributes fundamental to constructing safer health care systems as embedded components within the complex adaptive environment. Then, the Health Care Error Proliferation Model explains the sequence of events typically leading to adverse outcomes, emphasizing the role that organizational and external cultures contribute to error identification, prevention, mitigation, and defense construction. Subsequently, we discuss the critical contribution health care leaders can make to address error as they strive to position their institution as a high reliability organization (HRO). Finally, we conclude that the future of patient safety depends on health care leaders adopting a system philosophy of error management, investigation, mitigation, and prevention. This change is accomplished when leaders apply the basic organizational accident and health care safety principles within their respective organizations.

By the 1950s, F. A. Hayek's contributions to a variety of disciplines seemed to be more clearly center around the concept of spontaneous order, or in more contemporary and more general language, “adaptive classifying systems.” In this chapter, I compare two such systems present in Hayek's thought: his contributions to the Austrian theory of capital and his work on the theory of cognition. This comparison reveals a number of very strong analogies between the two theories, which is not surprising as Hayek himself acknowledged that his work on capital influenced his thinking when he returned to theoretical psychology after completing The Pure Theory of Capital. Specifically, I argue that both capital and the mind are adaptive classifying systems characterized by: multiple classification/specificity, the centrality of structure, and a relational concept of order. The chapter concludes with some brief thoughts on the implications of the argument for the theory of the firm and for the place of methodological dualism in Hayek's thinking more generally.

We challenge the belief that people resist change while embracing the idea that change is necessary to lead. Cultivating leaders to orchestrate conflict with deliberate intention is a skill leaders can learn. Yet, skill alone is insufficient to lead. Using three models, Communicative Intelligence, Adaptive Leadership, and Adaptive Schools, we tell the story of how we developed leaders to think adaptively and communicate authentically to collaborate across diverse communities to bring their visions to fruition. This chapter describes the models and their integration from three perspectives illustrating how we focused the cultivation of leaders. First, the personal development of their dispositions related to communication, collaboration, and systems thinking. Second we worked on developing the skills to build relationships and think politically. And third, we focused on identifying and implementing systems to address the critical issues facing their schools.

The fragmentation of the production process is a major theme of research in international business. Trade benefits arise from the “slicing up” of the aggregate value chain, as well as the entry of new countries bearing low labor costs. If, initially, multinational corporations (MNCs) relocated only standardized, low-value manufacturing activities in new emerging economies (exploitative offshoring), now they are also offshoring their knowledge-intensive activities (explorative offshoring). In the past, the literature on internationalization was mainly focused on the characterization of the MNC as a specific monolithic organization active in the international production. In the present, numerous analyses have discussed the international location of R&D activities, mainly in advanced countries. The foreign R&D subsidiaries are still tightly linked to the headquarters, maintaining a controlled position. Future research must address two orders of issues. The first is the progressive autonomy of the foreign subsidiaries, which are more and more developing new and independent lines of research. This process leads MNCs to mobilize and leverage untapped pools of knowledge scattered around the world. The second is the R&D offshoring toward emerging economies. This complex process can be characterized as a move from the smile model discussed extensively by Ram Mudambi (where emerging economies were considered as pools of low-cost labor tout court) to a new model, called here the λ (lambda) model (where emerging economies are also pools of skilled labor). This paper will explore these new trends using some illustrative cases: L'Oréal (FR), Pfizer (US), ST Microelectronics (CH), and Geox (I). The cases reveal the double orientation of MNCs toward emerging economies, where both explorative and exploitative offshoring takes place.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, English local government faced a period of significant budget reduction and uncertainty. Austerity measures were effectively rolled out over several budget iterations, resulting in a 37% real-term reduction in core central government funding, equivalent to a 25% reduction in income/spending power (including council tax) between 2010 and 2011 and 2015 and 2016. At the same time, changes in government policy in a range of areas between 2011 and 2012 and 2015 and 2016 created 164 new burdens on local government, with an estimated value of £11.5 billion, many of which were unfunded. All of this during a period when local government was being encouraged to freeze council tax and when natural pressure on locally collected taxation and services was increasing due to the economic recession.

This chapter reviews the responses of four English local governments to the austerity period triggered by the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007. For the English councils the results develop into two main themes. Firstly, there appeared to be a common set of anticipatory and coping capacities employed both in the lead up to the funding cuts from 2010 onwards and in the way councils subsequently dealt with aspects of the crisis. Secondly, despite this commonality, the specific and local contexts experienced by each council, both internally and externally, determined their overall path to dealing with austerity. These two paths were self-regulation and constrained adaption.

To address the safety concerns generated by truck crashes occurred in big cities, this paper analyzes the zip code tabulation area (ZCTA)-based truck crash frequency across four temporal intervals – morning (6:00–10:00), mid-day (10:00–15:00), afternoon (15:00–19:00), and night (19:00–6:00) in New York City in 2010. A multivariate conditional autoregressive count model is used to recognize both spatial and temporal dependences. The results prove the presence of spatial and temporal dependencies for truck crashes that occurred in neighboring areas. Built environment attributes such as various types of business establishment density and traffic volume for different types of vehicles, which are important factors to consider for crashes occurred in an urban setting, are also examined in the study.

How water is managed is emerging as one of the core challenges of sustainable development and earth system governance (Pahl-Wostl, Gupta, & Petry, 2008a; Biermann et al., 2009). Floods and droughts already have a huge impact on human development and well-being. Adaptation to existing climate variability to reduce water insecurities is already a pressing need (Pielke, Prins, Rayner, & Sarewitz, 2007). Securing access to safe drinking water, allocating sufficient water to grow food, protecting life and property from floods, as well as maintaining river and floodplain ecosystems as countries develop economically, however, is a complex set of interlocking and dynamic challenges.

In this chapter, the authors present a conceptual perspective on resilience that is grounded in self-regulation theory, to help address theoretical, empirical, and practical concerns in this domain. Despite the growing popularity of resilience research (see Linnenluecke, 2017), scholars have noted ongoing concerns about conceptual confusion and resulting, paradoxical, stigmatization associated with the label “resilience” (e.g., Adler, 2013; Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000). The authors seek to advance this domain via presenting a clarified, theoretically grounded conceptualization that can facilitate unified theoretical advancements, aligned operationalization, research model development, and intervention improvements. Resilience is defined here as continued, self-regulated goal striving (e.g., behavioral and/or psychological) despite adversity (i.e., after goal frustration). This self-regulatory conceptualization of resilience offers theoretically based definitions for the necessary conditions (i.e., adversity and overcoming) and outlines specific characteristics (i.e., unit-centered and dynamic) of resilience, distinguishes resilience from other persistence-related concepts (e.g., grit and hardiness), and provides a framework for understanding the connections (and distinctions) between resilience, performance, and well-being. After presenting this self-regulatory resilience perspective, the authors outline additional paths forward for the domain.