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The paper investigates the closure mechanisms and strategies of exclusion concerning the establishment and subsequent functioning of the Collegio dei Rasonati, the professional body of accountants that was established in Venice in 1581 and operated until the end of the 18th century.

The research design offers a critical longitudinal explanation of the emergence of the Collegio dei Rasonati as a professional body in the context of Venetian society by relying on the social closure theory elaborated by Collins (1975); Parkin (1979) and Murphy (1988).

The Collegio dei Rasonati was established to overcome the prerogatives of a social class in accessing the accounting profession. However, the pre-existing professional elites enacted a set of social closure strategies able to transform this professional body into a stronghold of their privileges.

As virtually all of the evidence concerning the admission examinations has been lost over time, the investigation is restricted to the study of the few examples that have survived. The main implication of the study concerns the understanding of some dynamics leading to neutralize attempts to replace class privileges with a meritocratic system.

The research investigates the structure of the rules of social closure revealing the possibility of an antagonistic relationship between different co-existing forms of exclusion within the same structure. Moreover, it highlights that a form of exclusion can be made of different hierarchical levels.

Output from the Irish Dairy Industry has grown rapidly since the abolition of quotas in 2015, with processors investing heavily in capacity expansion to deal with the extra milk volumes. Further capacity gains may be achieved by extending the processing season into the winter, a key enabler for which being the reduction of duration of the winter maintenance overhaul period. This paper aims to investigate if Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques can be used to enhance operational maintenance performance, thereby releasing additional processing capacity.

Combining the Six-Sigma Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control (DMAIC) methodology and the structured approach of Turnaround Maintenance (TAM) widely used in process industries creates a novel hybrid model that promises substantial improvement in maintenance overhaul execution. This paper presents a case study applying the DMAIC/TAM model to Ireland’s largest dairy processing site to optimise the annual maintenance shutdown. The objective was to deliver a 30% reduction in the duration of the overhaul, enabling an extension of the processing season.

Application of the DMAIC/TAM hybrid resulted in process enhancements, employee engagement and a clear roadmap for the operations team. Project goals were delivered, and original objectives exceeded, resulting in €8.9m additional value to the business and a reduction of 36% in the duration of the overhaul.

The results demonstrate that the model provides a structure that promotes systematic working and a continuous improvement focus that can have substantial benefits for wider industry. Opportunities for further model refinement were identified and will enhance performance in subsequent overhauls.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the structure and tools of DMAIC and TAM have been combined into a hybrid methodology and applied in an Irish industrial setting.

Logistical facility location decisions can make a crucial difference in the success or failure of a company. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have recently become a very popular decision support system to help deal with facility location problems. However, until recently, GIS methodologies have not been fully embraced as a way to deal with new facility location problems in business logistics. This research makes a framework for categorizing empirical facility location problems based on the intensity of the involvement of GIS methodologies in decision making. This framework was built by analyzing facility location models and GIS methodologies. The research results revealed the depth of the embracement of GIS methodologies in logistics for determining new facility location decisions. In the new facility location decisions, spatial data inputs are almost always coupled with the visualization of the problems and solutions. However, the usage of GIS capability solely (i.e. suitability analysis) for problem solving has not been embraced at the same level. In most cases, the suitability analysis is used together with special optimization models for choosing among the multiple alternatives.

The purpose of this study is to identify sociodemographic factors that are predictive of the level of everyday sadism (SAD) in the business area.

A survey was conducted on 424 graduate and postgraduate students from business schools in Brazil and the USA. SAD was quantified by the assessment of sadistic personality proposed by Plouffe Saklofske and Smith (2017). The variables included age, gender, managing experience, education and nationality.

The average level of SAD was low. SAD was negatively associated with gender, age and nationality and positively associated with managing experience and education.

As individuals ascend professionally and academically, they display higher levels of everyday sadism. Depending on the context, dark personalities can cause either benefit or harm to the company's business and to society. However, the literature shows that seeking pleasure and dominance with no regard for consequences affects the business area directly or indirectly.

Very few studies have addressed everyday sadism in the business area, let alone evaluated predictive factors and discussed possible implications.

This study aims to explore how human resource (HR) practitioners conceive of their practice, reveal challenges they grapple with in daily work and generate a conceptual framework of HR praxis.

The paper is based on interviews with HR practitioners in Sweden and a review of articles that examine aspects of HR practitioners' work.

The HR practitioners' work is fragmented and reactive, filled with meetings and affords few opportunities to work undisturbed. Operational tasks are prioritised over strategic work, and their work sometimes involves tasks that are not HR's responsibility. The nature of HR practitioners' daily work mimics the work of their main “customer”, i.e. managers within the organisations.

The HR practitioners were working mainly in the service of managers, which suggests that they have an internal focus. Consistent with current, prescriptive HR discourse, HR practitioners should adopt a multi-stakeholder perspective of human resource management (HRM) and a more external focus that is necessary to contribute to wider, organisational effectiveness. The findings could enrich what is taught in higher education by providing students with an account of the reality of HR practitioners' daily work.

The study provides a situated account of the daily work of HR practitioners, which is largely absent from the literature.

This paper aims to critically evaluate contemporary Irish police practice, with an emphasis on emergent procedural innovations, in light of the needs of suspects with intellectual disabilities.

A review of published prevalence data in respect of people with intellectual disabilities in the Irish criminal justice system, of the Irish legal and policy landscape and the results of a recent empirical inquiry are used in critical evaluation.

In line with extant international research, the article identifies three sites of concern with respect to the protocols that exist within An Garda Síochána for identifying and responding to intellectual disability, including: (1) barriers to communication; (2) a need to build awareness and skills for police and persons with intellectual disabilities; and (3) a need for institutional change to secure equal access to justice for people with intellectual disabilities. Progress is being made at a systems level towards a human rights approach in Irish policing.

In representing the first international analysis of its kind, the article locates the barriers confronting suspects with intellectual disabilities in Ireland within a discourse that is sensitive to ongoing research-led, procedural reforms within An Garda Síochána (Ireland's national police service). Owing to the universalised nature of these barriers across policing systems internationally, the format of these reforms from this will be of relevance to many other policing states, in particular the 162 other signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.

Health in low-income countries has become associated with the provision of minimum guaranteed public health services though Essential Health Packages (EHPs). How far do EHPs deliver the human right to health for all? This study addresses this question through qualitative research into access to health care for vulnerable communities, using Malawi as a case study. This study shows that there are significant accountability gaps and perceptions of weak service provision in Malawi’s EHP in relation to some particularly marginalised (and stigmatised) groups that limit the right to health and the promise of “health for all”.

This study extends the body of qualitative work on EHPs in general and on Malawi in particular by exploring the perceptions of key stakeholders in relation to inclusivity and the delivery of health policies to particularly vulnerable groups. To do so, this study adopted an approach based on interpretive epistemologies (Scott, 2014). This study conducted largely unstructured interviews with a range of health stakeholders, speaking to stakeholders individually, rather than through focus groups due to the potentially sensitive nature of the topic.

The findings of this study are as follows: limited inclusion of civil society actors and local communities; local communities and local policymakers feel frustration with the gap between the promises of consultation in the EHP and the reality, and the difficulties of not having effective channels of communication; and exclusionary health practices for particularly vulnerable groups.

There are limitations based on the qualitative methodology, and in terms of the particularly vulnerable groups – the authors studied two such groups (people with disabilities and those who identify as LBTQ) but a wider survey of vulnerable groups is needed to extend and confirm the findings.

Greater attention to the health rights of vulnerable groups would improve access and services, even in the context of resource restrictions. This study suggests that a deeper engagement with human rights-based approaches would pay dividends in terms of increasing access to health in Malawi, even within the constraints of the EHP process. Furthermore, without this, there is the risk that discrimination and exclusion will become more embedded in health policies, rather than progressively minimised.

Without addressing these issues, there is the risk that discrimination and exclusion will become more embedded in health policies, rather than progressively minimised.

This paper makes an important contribution to the growing literatures on EHP in sub-Saharan Africa and Malawi in particular and to the importance of listening to stakeholder perceptions. It provides original data on stakeholder perspectives of the challenges associated with universalising health care in resource-constrained countries. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is one of the first papers to focus on the rights of disabled and LBTQ people in relation to EHPs.

The purpose of this study is to review the extant literature on chatbots and stakeholder interactions to identify major trends and shed light on knowledge gaps.

A systematic literature review was conducted combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. A code book based on early systematic literature reviews was developed and used to extract information from 62 discrete peer-reviewed English articles. An inductive approach was used to analyse definitions of chatbots, topics, metrics, perspectives and implications.

Chatbots have been studied by many different disciplines, but not much from organizational, stakeholder and corporate communication perspectives. Existing studies focus on the technical developments of chatbots and chatbot language and conversations skills. Research has remained anchored at the micro-level understanding of the phenomenon, that is, the nature of chatbots, but has not yet taken into consideration the meso (organizational) or macro (societal) levels.

This study focused only on academic peer-reviewed papers in English and excluded conference proceeding, books, book chapters and editorials that may have offered other important and relevant reflections. The limited number of studies in communication-related disciplines shows that corporate communication scholars could contribute more to the discussion of chatbot–stakeholder interactions.

This is the first research in the field of corporate communication that examines organizational chatbot–stakeholder interactions. Results of this review offer important information on chatbots' organizational capabilities and affordances, which, arguably, must be taken into consideration when stakeholder engagement strategies are set.

This study proposes and validates an integrated theoretical model involving the theory of planned behavior (TPB), health belief model (HBM), personal norms and information privacy to understand determinants of acceptance and resistance to the use of mobile contact tracing app (MCTA) in a pandemic situation.

This study draws on online surveys of 194 research respondents and uses partial least squares structural equation modeling (PL-SEM) to test the proposed theoretical model.

The study establishes that a positive attitude towards MCTA is the most important predictor of individuals' willingness to use MCTA and resistance to use MCTA. Furthermore, barriers to taking action positively influence resistance to the use of MCTA. Personal norms negatively influence resistance to the use of MCTA. Information privacy showed a negative and positive influence on willingness to use MCTA and use the resistance of MCTA, respectively, but neither was statistically significant. The authors found no significant influence of perceived vulnerability, severity, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control on either acceptance or use resistance of MCTA.

The study has been one of the first in the literature to propose an integrated theoretical model in the investigation of the determinants of acceptance and resistance to the use of MCTA in a single study, thereby increasing the scientific understanding of the factors that can facilitate or inhibit individuals from engaging in the use of a protection technology during a pandemic situation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2021-0533

A decade after Powell et al.’s (2011) seminal article on behavioral strategy, which called for models to solve real-world problems, the authors revisit the field to ask whether behavioral strategy is coming of age. The purpose of this paper is to explain how behavioral strategy can and has been used in real-world settings.

This study presents a conceptual review with case study examples of the impact of behavioral strategy on real-world problems.

This study illustrates several examples where behavioral strategy debiasing has been effective. Although no causal claims can be made, with the stark contrast between the negative impact of biased strategies and the positive results emerging from debiasing techniques, this study argues that there is evidence of the benefits of a behavioral strategy mindset, and that this should be the mindset of a responsible strategic leader.

This study presents a demonstration of analytical, debate and organizational debiasing techniques and how they are being used in real-world settings, specifically military intelligence, Mergers and acquisitions deal-making, resource allocation and capital projects.

Behavioral strategy has broad application in private and public sectors. It has proven practical value in various settings, for example, the application of reference class forecasting in large infrastructure projects.

A conceptual review of behavioral strategy in the wild.