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In today’s markets, many organizations feel pressure to become more responsive to their customers. Managing your business to deliver superior value to targeted customers may provide a strong avenue to improved performance. The route from value-based strategies to share holder value can be complicated, however. These strategies have the most direct impact on performance with your customers in the form of customer satisfaction, word of mouth and loyalty. Successful customer performance should translate into higher market performance, as evidenced by a supplier’s higher customer retention rates and sales. Finally, market performance provides the engine for increasing company performance or shareholder value. Attaining shareholder value through customer value strategies requires committing major management attention to how best to create, deliver and communicate superior value to targeted customers.

Scholars and activists working both within and outside the massive health-related machinery of government and the private sector and within and outside communities of color address the same fundamental questions: Why do health disparities exist? Why have they persisted over such a long time? What can be done to significantly reduce or eliminate them?

In this chapter, we have proposed that an important approach to understanding occupational stress and well-being among racial and ethnic minority workers is to integrate the occupational health disparities paradigm into work stress research. As such, the current chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of the existing literature on occupational health disparities for Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. Each of the three sections has highlighted the unique occupational health problems encountered by the specific racial and ethnic group as well as the research and policy gaps. We end with a series of recommendations for future research.

We study changes in age-specific diabetes-related mortality and annual health care utilization. We find that half of the estimated 16% increase of diabetic mortality falls within employable age groups. We estimate that disease combination-specific increase in case fatality has resulted in premature diabetic mortality costing $3.2 billion annually. The estimated annual direct cost of treating high-risk diabetics reaches $36 billion, of which Medicare and Other Federal Programs compensate 54%. Respiratory conditions among diabetics comprise the same proportion of high-risk diabetics as do the disease combinations including coronary heart diseases. Treating of general diabetic conditions has become more efficient as indicated by the estimated declines in per unit health care costs.

Purpose – To examine potential sex differences among American Indian and Alaska Native peoples (AIANs) in diabetes prevalence, comorbidities, healthcare utilization, and treatment costs within the Indian Health Services (IHS).

Methodology/Approach – Data were drawn from the IHS Improving Healthcare Delivery Data Project with 437,608 persons in our analytical sample. We described sex and age differences in diabetes, comorbidities, healthcare utilization, and treatment costs among the adults with diabetes. We evaluated the statistical differences between men and women using confidence intervals calculated at the 95% level, with nonoverlapping confidence intervals indicating statistical significance.

Findings – The prevalence of diabetes among females was somewhat higher than that of males (10.82 vs 9.16%, respectively, p < 0.05). Among adults with diabetes, males had statistically higher prevalence of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and substance use disorders and fewer mental health disorders compared to females. Although males had overall lower average cost of services than females, males had higher utilization for hospital inpatient services than females, and females used more outpatient services.

Research limitations/implications – We are limited to one fiscal year of data and thus cannot predict the influence of healthcare utilization patterns on the overall health of this population. Although a large sample, the findings are only generalizable to the active users of the participating IHS Service Units.

Originality/Value of Paper – This study fills a major gap in our knowledge of sex differences in diabetes prevalence, comorbidities, healthcare utilization, and treatment costs among AIANs. Differences in the comorbidities that characterized the AIAN adult males and females with diabetes in this sample have important implications for mortality and cost of care. Diabetes management that addresses such gender-specific comorbidities, particularly substance use disorders among men and mental health disorders among women, promises to reduce these comorbidities and related complications.

The mid-1990s marked a paradigm shift in the way physical activity is promoted, and walking is now considered the most suitable type of physical activity for widespread promotion. Accurate measurement underpins public health practice, hence the aims of this chapter are to: (1) provide a typology for the measurement of walking; (2) review methods to assess walking; (3) present challenges in defining walking measures; (4) identify issues in selecting instruments for the evaluation of walking and (5) discuss current efforts to overcome measurement challenges and methodological limitations. The taxonomy of walking indicates that secondary purpose walking is a more complex set of behaviours than primary purpose walks. It has many purposes and no specific domain or intensity, may lack regularity, and therefore poses greater measurement challenges. Objective measurement methods, such as accelerometers, pedometers, smartphones and other electronic devices, have shown good approximation for walking energy expenditure, but are indirect methods of walking assessment. Global Positioning System technology, the ‘Smartmat’ and radio-frequency identification tags are potential objective methods that can distinguish walkers, but also require complex analysis, are costly, and still need their measurement properties corroborated. Subjective direct methods, such as questionnaires, diaries and direct observation, provide the richest information on walking, especially short-term diaries, such as trip records and time use records, and are particularly useful for assessing secondary purpose walking. A unifying measure for health research, surveillance and health promotion would strongly advance the understanding of the impact of walking on health.

In this paper, we aim to understand why consumers often prefer products made using traditional practices even when products made using new practices are not of lower quality. We argue that this resistance, which we call “production process conservatism,” is heightened when the product is used in the performance of a social ritual.

We develop this argument in the context of diamond jewelry, as consumers have generally been resistant to diamonds that are produced in laboratories, i.e., lab-created diamonds. Hypotheses were tested using experiments conducted with an online sample (Experiment 1) and with an MBA student sample (Experiment 2).

In Experiment 1, we find that married female respondents significantly prefer mined diamonds to lab-created diamonds when they are used as part of an engagement gift as opposed to a more routine gift. In Experiment 2, we find the same effect among women; in addition, the perceived risk associated with the ritual is found to mediate this production process conservatism.

This paper contributes to the understanding of a macrosocial phenomenon – acceptance of an innovation – by examining microinteractive processes in groups.

This paper develops an original theory that when individuals deviate from traditional aspects of rituals, they risk signaling a lack of commitment or cultural competence to the group even when such aspects are not explicitly stated.