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Humans care about things. The truth of this claim is obvious, yet scholars who have evaluated student interventions and outcomes in higher education have largely neglected how student values might inform their experience with those interventions and outcomes. This chapter will rely on a philosophical conceptualization of a particular type of value known as “caring” to explore what students value as they weigh various collegiate decisions. Elaborating on findings from a qualitative study of 143 college students from eight American universities, I will summarize previous findings related to what students cared about, how those cares were structured, and what the cares and structures meant for students' pathways through college. The categorical and theoretical patterns I share demonstrate how students approached values in ways that have not typically been considered by scholars or institutional administrators. After summarizing my previous findings, I offer a conceptual argument for a “dialectical” approach that considers the mutually formative interaction between student and institutional values. The practical result of naming and understanding the dialectic realities of values in higher education is the opportunity for institutions to use their relatively greater agency to help individual students pursue what is worth pursuing without reducing the agency of those students. Thus, the dialectic places necessary boundary lines on both the institution and the student while also clarifying the opportunity to help students develop moral expertise and navigate their collegiate pathways successfully.

Ecological systems comprise interdependent human and other living beings, along with their life-giving natural environments. The sustainability of such systems has become a critical global concern, both generally and in relation to business practice. This chapter considers the cultivation of care among business students as one important way of fostering engagement with such concern, with particular attention given to a specific and under-attended area in business research and practice: that of human sustainability. In order to overcome potential limitations of diverse and often disparate streams of research on care, this chapter considers Mayseless’ (2016) integrative framework for understanding caring motivation, and builds upon the four points of intervention for cultivating care that were articulated within that framework. Extant pedagogical research within business and management is used to elaborate additional insights and methods for developing caring skills, caring values, caring teaching and learning communities, and a more extensive vision of care that includes those who might be unknown, different from or distant to us. The framework, insights, methods, and examples discussed in this chapter provide a foundation that can help guide future care-related, ecologically focused pedagogical research and practice.

This chapter addresses the grand challenge of an aging society and the subsequent growing demand for in-home care for the elderly – often referred to as homecare. It examines how emergent homecare models in England differ from the “time and task” model and how they are shaping the care market. These models offer new approaches regarding what, how, and when care is delivered at home. Homecare providers face rising demand driven not only by population aging but also by market demand for personalized care, choice, continuity of care, and real-time availability. The landscape presents an opportunity for innovative models to become established, by offering a more inducing service design and value propositions that respond to customers' needs. Using the “business model canvas” to guide data collection, this study presents an ethnographic case analysis of four homecare organizations with distinct emergent homecare models. The study includes 14 months of field observation and 33 in-depth interviews. It finds that providers are becoming increasingly aware of evolving customer needs, establishing models such as the “uberization,” “community-based,” “live-in,” and “preventative” described in the chapter. These models are becoming more pervasive and are mostly market-driven; however, some of their innovations are market shaping. The major innovations are in their value propositions, partnership arrangements, and customer segments. Their value propositions focus on well-being outcomes, including choice and personalization for care users; their workforces are perceived to be a major stakeholder segment, and their networks of partners offer access to complementary services, investments, and specialist knowledge.

People decide what is good or bad, or what they should or should not do, based on the values they cherish. Someone's values create the feeling that something is important for him or her, and then motivate him or her to take action. Therefore, personal values are important psychological aspects that serve as predictors of many types of human behaviour. The use of values to evaluate, to predict or to assess behavioural choices and their outcomes has received increasing attention in psychology in recent years. An important psychological insight is that similarities between personal values and values provided by the context (e.g., not only values cherished by the people who are close to us but also values embedded in the brands that are relevant for us or in the communication messages we are confronted with) have an impact on subjective well-being. This psychological insight makes values relevant for other domains as well. This chapter explores the use of values in communication, and introduces mechanisms through which values can be used to stimulate communication effectiveness.

This chapter seeks to advance the neglected debate on the ethical issues between formal organization and practice arising from innovation in an organization. To that end, the chapter discusses the sources of possible moral dilemmas for practitioners who belong to a practice with a shared identity, values, and standards of excellence, and who need to conform to new rules of formal organization. While formal organization ideally strives for generalized fairness principles for all organizational members when introducing an innovation, the contextualized nature of practices may lead to particular needs and goals of the practice which can only be recognized as such by practitioners and not by formal management, and to which procedural justice cannot respond. The chapter proposes how practitioners may interpret moral dilemmas, aligned with their practice-based identity and ethical values, and what options for action they may seek. The discussion is illustrated with examples of innovation in the field of information systems design.

Purpose – This chapter argues that health care is best conceptualized as a complex adaptive system. Sustainable health care depends on harnessing the complexity of the system by building aligned purpose, flexible pathways to connect people, knowledge and resources, and the capacity for self-organization.

Design/methodology/approach – The case study of the Southern California Region of Kaiser Permanente is based on three years of interviews and archival data collection examining the system's transformational change that began in 2004 and has been aimed at building a sustainable health care system with the guiding principles of value and prevention. The case focuses primarily on the medical care delivery system designed by the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, the capabilities that have been built into the system to continually improve the quality of care and the outcomes of the system, and the results that have been achieved.

Findings – During the period from 2004 to 2011, the region improved significantly in slowing cost acceleration by significantly improving medical care. The implementation of an electronic medical records system and its integration with other clinical information technology systems have enabled: (1) truly integrated, well defined, and easily navigated care delivery systems that are based on evidence; (2) upstream focus on prevention, disease control, patient education, and population health; and (3) management accountability and organizational improvement systems based on transparency of data and feedback. Physician leadership and partnering with the region's administrative and hospital leadership have been critical change enablers.

Originality/value – Embracing the complexity of the system has led to the crafting of pathways and linkages that enable patients to move through the system to flexibly and efficiently connect to the knowledge and resources required to optimize their health. This requires continual self-organization based on well-defined roles and connections. Previous health care improvement approaches have stressed initiatives and organizational changes that may further fragment the health care system.

We argue that in order to address the contemporary challenges that organizations and societies are facing, the field of organization development (OD) requires frameworks and skills to focus on the eco-system as the level of analysis. In a world that has become economically, socially, and technologically highly connected, approaches that foster the optimization of specific actors in the eco-system, such as individual corporations, result in sub-optimization of the sustainability of the natural and social system because there is insufficient offset to the ego-centric purposes of the focal organization. We discuss the need for OD to broaden focus to deal with technological advances that enable new ways of organizing at the eco-system level, and to deal with the challenges to sustainable development. Case examples from healthcare and the agri-foods industry illustrate the kinds of development approaches that are required for the development of healthy eco-systems. We do not suggest fundamental changes in the identity of the field of organizational development. In fact, we demonstrate the need to dig deeply into the open systems and socio-technical roots of the field, and to translate the traditional values and approaches of OD to continue to be relevant in today’s dynamic interdependent world.

Access can be understood as the spatial dimension of social inclusion and exclusion. It is from this understanding that the authors incorporate the gender perspective when analysing the possibilities of mobility in the city. This research focusses on a specific moment in the life cycle of men and women: childbirth and the presence of children in the household. The aim is to elucidate how much the presence of children in the household impacts the urban mobility of the people responsible for the household, comparing data of men and women responsible for households with or without cohabiting children. The authors used descriptive statistics and correlation analysis based on data from the Origin–Destination Survey 2012 of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The authors analysed the travel motivations, the ratio of journeys by trips and the means of transportation used, in addition to some indicators of immobility. The results of the research show the impact of the presence of children in an unequal way considering the gender of those responsible for the household, with women in all scenarios carrying out a greater frequency of trips associated with care, but in a specific way according to their degree of schooling and their children’s ages.