Search results

The objective of this study is to assess the role of differentiated hospitality services considering the perspective of Brazilian accredited private hospitals.

In-depth interviews were applied to 10 hospitals top management executives (C-Suite level) having as support unstructured data collection routine exploring the issues: main client of the hospital, differentiated hospitality services (DS), hospital board expectation about DS, brand building, service charging policies and nonfinancial results.

Results indicate the interviewed institutions are adopting gradually a new business model in healthcare, in which an empowered patient and his/her needs and satisfaction is gaining relevance. This new conception having hospitality services as a base is transforming a former medical focused sector into a competitive business-oriented approach.

The nonprobabilistic nature of the sample does not permit statistical inference of results to the population; they are valid only for healthcare management exploratory insights.

Coming from the hotel sector, hospitality amenities are turning into strategic instrument and provoking competition in a segment of hospitals targeting upper-middle-class clients, able to afford higher healthcare insurance premiums.

In the new business approach, the patient that in recent past was passive is increasingly getting attention and bargaining power.

The main contribution is centered on the comprehension of an international dynamic in Brazil of a new business model that is changing a traditional sector, once focused in medicine and healing into a market-oriented business.

This paper analyzes affirmative action policies that include racial and socioeconomic criteria in order to enhance the opportunity of access of underrepresented groups in Brazilian elite universities. It focuses on the public system of higher education since research universities in Brazil are mainly public and are free of charge. This renders them very competitive and highly selective. Emphasis is given to issues related to racial quotas, as the latter has been the subject of great controversy in Brazilian society. The experiences of three universities are analyzed.

For the past 20 years, Latin American countries have gone from being a low-cost region to significant players in the world economy, with five of its countries ranked among the world’s 50th largest by gross domestic product. This paper aims to study the contribution of Latin American researchers in the field of supply chain management (SCM) to aid an understanding of the Latin American impact within global supply chains (SCs).

The authors present a study which includes a bibliometric analysis of the papers authored by Latin American researchers in the SCM field and which were exclusively published in journals included in the Journal Citation Reports. In addition, the authors conducted a survey to Latin American researchers and consultants to gain greater understanding of the main difficulties, which in their opinion, have negatively affected the SCM area in Latin America within the past five years, and identify possible misalignment between Latin American research and the challenges for SC in the region.

The results show that Latin American research on SCM in the past nine years is not significant for the field considering the number of papers, citations and the papers published in top journals. Another interesting finding is the lack of collaboration among researchers from different Latin American countries, as well as with corporate. Finally, survey results reveal significant differences regarding the main difficulties each country perceived as relevant.

Comparing results from both analyses, relevant misalignments stand out between published research and the main difficulties detected. These suggest a challenging opportunity for Latin America, emphasizing the need to increase research contribution of the scientific community, through collaboration and alignment toward overcoming the most troublesome difficulties for Latin America. Therefore, the authors suggest future regional research directions which could also help global companies to tackle the challenges faced and optimize performance of their Latin American SCs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous research on the quality and impact of Latin American research in SCM has been conducted. Also, misalignments between researchers and practitioners in the region, which allow identifying weaknesses of Latin American SCs, have not been studied before.

Many future research proposals of Lean Manufacturing (LM) are presented in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to determine these future research proposals of LM which are country-related and classify them.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of peer-reviewed journal articles in LM was conducted. A total of 145 articles published in 34 journals during 2010–2020 were collected from four major management science publishers namely, Emerald Online, Elsevier/Science Direct, Springer Link and Taylor and Francis. The country-related future research proposals of LM identified in the literature were classified according to, firstly, the continent of the country of reference, and secondly, some form of natural affinity of these proposals creating meaningful themes. The quality tool “affinity diagram” was applied to classify the country-related future research proposals of LM.

The country-related future research proposals of LM, which are increasing in the literature over time, refer mostly to studies to be conducted in several continents/countries and to multinational studies. Conducting studies specifically in Asia, Europe, South and North America, Africa and Australia–New Zealand is also suggested. The plethora of the country-related future research proposals of LM were classified, based on the affinity of their content, into 18 meaningful themes. These themes were also classified based on their affinity into two broad categories, namely “themes concerning the LM approach itself” and “themes concerning factors outside the LM approach”.

The restricted number of the databases searched and the subjectivity of classifying the large number of the country-related future research proposals into themes are the main limitations of the present SLR. Based on these limitations, future literature review studies can be carried out.

Useful proposals are provided to researchers of several countries for conducting original and country-specific research studies which can enrich the knowledge of the implementation of LM under the specific circumstances of a country for the benefit of practitioners.

This study goes beyond previous literature review studies on LM by focusing exclusively on the LM future research agenda which is country related. The analytical presentation of the country-related future research proposals as well as the formulation of clusters of these proposals make the present SLR study substantially different from those carried out worldwide so far.