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This paper aims to explore the lived experiences of key stakeholders working with homeless people during the implementation of universal credit during the austerity years.

The literature on austerity reveals welfare reforms’ impact on support services staff. Service providers’ perceptions of the impact of austerity-led policies and welfare reform via nine interviews with people working in homelessness organisations in Brighton and Hove in the UK. Service providers see the situation for their service users has gotten worse and that the policies make it more difficult to extricate themselves from their current situation. Three central themes relating to the impact of austerity-led welfare reforms were, namely, Universal Credit: the imposition of a precarious livelihood on welfare claimants; a double-edged sword: “If people are sanctioned: people can’t pay”; and “Hard to maintain my own mental equilibrium”.

More precisely, this paper captures service providers’ perceptions and experiences of the impact of austerity-led policies on their services and how they believe this, in turn, impacts their clients and their own lives.

The dimension cuts across service provision to vulnerable people and is intertwined with health and well-being outcomes. Austerity is detrimental to the health of service users and their clients. It is known that when it comes to the health and well-being of the most vulnerable, who have suffered most from the impacts of austerity policies. However, in times of open austerity, it falls also on those trying to ease their suffering.

The data suggest that policies were developed and accentuated by austerity, which led to the stripping of welfare support from vulnerable people. This process has impacted the people who rely on welfare and service providers.

This study aims to explore the configuration of a public university service innovation: the phenotypic evaluation of self-declared black and brown applicants for access to college undergraduate courses through racial quota in a Brazilian federal higher education institution (HEI).

By using qualitative methods and collecting data through semistructured interviews, this case study raises new explanatory aspects about service innovation in a noncommercial context.

Diversity in team composition and users’ sense of belonging emerged as unprecedented aspects of service innovation. The present study also coined another concept not verified in the literature: service cross-coproduction.

Regarding the limitations of the study, the technological dimension, despite having been shown to underlie the political–administrative process of innovations in services, given its importance reinforced by the literature and the current temporal context itself, did not emanate from the data collected. In addition, the fact that the service innovation investigated has occurred recently prevented longitudinal research that could detail the effects of phenotypic evaluation on institutional performance indicators.

The ethical–methodological care used in the interaction and preservation of the psychological integrity of the users in the case study proved to be subject to systematization and has great potential to enhance the service experience of the users through the humanization of the service delivery process. The linkage of the user’s perception to the phenotypic diversity of people working in the new service provision highlights the importance of incorporating themes such as the diversity of teams’ composition and representative bureaucracy to the scientific production of service innovation and their role in coproduction. The findings suggest that the resource allocation supply of basic goods and services needed to provide the new service reduces the individual risk of academic community members involved with innovation. Further studies could explore this relation.

Among the internal factors that influenced the configuration of service innovation, the idea of diversity in the team’s composition stood out. It based the phenotypic evaluation commission’s diverse constitution on gender, race, occupation and even nationality. It conferred greater legitimacy on service innovation, increasing the representation of groups that may not feel represented in public service delivery processes.

The results of the phenotypic evaluation case point to a new coproduction form emanating from the constitutive diversity of the phenotypic evaluation board members. This new type of coproduction is directly related to the complex, integrated and interdependent nature of the services that complement each other to enable the achievement of the objectives of a public university.

Knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial firms (KIE) strongly rely on scientific and strategic research and development (R&D) capabilities to achieve higher performance levels. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to disentangle the effects of scientific capabilities and strategic R&D on KIE performance; and how the constituent elements of these dimensions can be configured to generate conditions for high performance.

The authors’ empirical setting involves companies that submitted projects to the Innovative Research in Small Businesses (PIPE) program in Brazil. The authors then run partial least square structural equation modeling to verify how scientific and strategic R&D capabilities influence the performance construct. Second, the authors apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify configurations that are equifinal in terms of generating superior performance.

Findings indicate a strong association between scientific capabilities and KIE performance. The configurational approach outlines the existence of multiple paths to success, but human capital stands as a core condition throughout estimations.

The authors’ assessment has implications for how KIE firms are managed according to their organizational profiles and trajectories. Also, it advances the authors’ comprehension on how entrepreneurship policies can better target these distinct profiles.

The authors’ analysis provides new evidence on the inherent complexity behind the generation of high performance in KIE when addressing their portfolios of knowledge-related capabilities. More than that, the authors were able to identify the existence of heterogeneous profiles that can equally lead to higher levels of performance.

Austria has not yet established a single national organisation for research management and administration (RMA). Various research related institutions are organised in individual professional networks within their categories of organisational structure – public, private, and industry. Hence, the creation of a joint RMA association is a good aim to target in the near future. The obvious need of a strong networked community of RMAs across disciplines and organisational structures, especially in a setting of a growing global research arena, shall exemplify the development of such an Association of Research Managers and Administrators-Austria (ARMA-T). Furthermore, external factors play an increasingly important role in research development and RMAs. It depends on how their home organisations – universities, industry, and intermediaries – will understand the need for cooperation, platform building, and continuous development and professionalisation. Vision and foresight from several constituents and stakeholders will have to play a starring role as well as supporting the whole community. On top of it, international knowledge exchange helps to create those necessary conversations and networks for such a development.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how individuals seek to reduce the occurrence of unethical requests at work and the effects of such strategies.

The authors built a grounded theory through semi-structured interviews with 65 individuals who worked for companies involved in the Brazilian corruption scandal called Operation Car Wash.

The interviewees reported that they use two central strategies to avoid unethical requests: explicit moral communication (directly stating that they are not willing to adhere to an unethical request) and implicit communication (expressing such a refusal through moral symbols). Both strategies signal the morality of the communicator and lead the possible proponent of an unethical request to perceive a greater probability of being reported and, thus, avoid making such an unethical request. However, while explicit moral communication affects the perceived morality of the individual who would possibly make an unethical request, implicit (symbolic) moral communication does not. As a consequence, the risks of retaliation for making a moral communication are greater in the case of explicit moral communication, entailing that implicit moral communication is more effective and safer for the individual who wants to avoid unethical requests.

This paper broadens the literature on business ethics and moral psychology by shifting its focus from what organizations and leaders can do to prevent unethical behavior to what leaders can actively do to protect themselves from unethical requests.

The introduction of digitalisation in the shipping industry has fundamentally transformed traditional business models. This necessitates an investigation of its impact on customer satisfaction. This study aims to adapt the technology acceptance model in its survey instrument design to understand and evaluate customer satisfaction of shipping lines’ digital platforms.

This study used a mixed-methods approach, incorporating quantitative and qualitative research techniques. Primary data were collected through an online survey designed to measure customer satisfaction in relation to the digitalisation initiatives implemented by the shipping lines. Survey respondents comprised professionals who were online platform users, particularly in the instant spot quotation process and blockchain bill of lading.

The results for both instant spot quotation process and blockchain bill of lading revealed digital trust to be the most influential determinant of customer satisfaction, followed by perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. There was also a very strong correlation between perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness as well as between digital trust and perceived ease of use. The managerial implications of digitalisation are also discussed.

The adoption of digital tools is gaining traction in the container shipping sector, and there exists a need to investigate the correlation between digitalisation and customer satisfaction. This study offers significant insights to stakeholders in the shipping industry, particularly in designing and implementing user-friendly digital platforms.

In 2011, Brazil introduced a national pay-for-performance (P4P) scheme called the National Program for Improving Primary Health Care Access and Quality (PMAQ), rolled out over three cycles and reaching more than 5,000 municipalities and 40,000 family health teams (FHTs). There is little evidence on how the PMAQ was implemented locally and whether this variation in implementation affects performance, particularly, in terms of work process indicators. This study compared different cases of municipal-level PMAQ implementation (bonuses paid or not to FHTs) over the last two program cycles to analyze the quality of the work processes, actions and services of FHTs.

This was a cross-sectional analytical study using secondary data from an external evaluation of the Brazilian PMAQ. In total, 27,500 FHTs participated in the evaluation. They were divided into four clusters based on whether or not municipalities paid bonuses to workers during cycles 2 and 3 of the program (2013–2019). Variables regarding work processes, actions and services were classified as “Quality Assurance – QA” or “Continued Quality Improvement – CQI”, and an individual score was assigned based on the average score of each variable.

The four clusters displayed an increase in overall QA and CQI scores between the two program cycles; though this increase was small between the set of primary health care teams that received bonuses and those that did not.

This paper contributes to bridging the gap in the scientific literature for evaluative studies on the relationship between direct payment for performance to health professionals and better quality actions and services in low and middle-income countries.