Search results

The purpose of this paper is to identify the influential agents that led to the successful acceptance and diffusion of the Concerto clinical workstation at the Northern District Health Board.

The paper draws on Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory to interpret and analyse the factors that enabled acceptance and successful implementation of the innovative Concerto clinical workstation.

The authors conclude that human factors (clinicians) and non-human factors (the software package) simultaneously influenced the ready acceptance of the innovation. The reason for the positive acceptance and full diffusion of Concerto as compared to iHealth is the increased functionality it offers and its ability to provide clinicians with comprehensive patient records over a period of time, which assists in making informed decisions regarding the treatment, discharge, hospitalisation and recommendations for the future well-being of patients.

The study focused on only one district health board (DHB); therefore, the outcomes may not be representative of all DHBs.

The study has practical implications for clinicians, DHB members and public health regulators. The outcomes illuminate the “agents” that positively influenced the diffusion of Concerto. The regulators and the DHBs can use this as a benchmark to determine how to lead the successful diffusion of information technology (IT) innovation in the public health sector.

The impact on society is evident in the paper, as the use of an innovation, such as Concerto, saves time taken by clinicians to make more informed decisions regarding their patient care.

This study contributes to new knowledge by investigating the diffusion process of IT innovation with an intention of establishing the factors that enabled this process.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a case study where student peer mentors were employed to motivate and assist undergraduates to secure optional professional placement positions.

The paper describes the reasons for establishing the project, the recruitment and work carried out by the mentors. It explains a survey of students who had not undertaken placements the previous year to try to identify the activities that would be most effective on the part of the mentors. The mentors, together with the placement co‐coordinator, devised support ranging from one‐to‐one mentoring, drop in “clinics”, online support and large group talks. It discusses the results of this work and evaluates the responses of both mentors and mentees.

Those mentees who took part in the mentoring were typically those who were already enthusiastic about placement opportunities. The majority of students did not take advantage of mentoring support, including support on a drop‐in basis or one‐to‐one basis or support available online through a social network. It was found that the mentoring scheme did not significantly affect the proportion of students seeking or securing placements. However, the mentors themselves gained tremendous benefits from the mentoring scheme, in particular developing their communication skills and confidence.

A thorough survey of potential mentees was not carried out after the project to ascertain the reasons for their lack of engagement.

There are two separate implications of this project. First, the mentoring scheme was valuable primarily for the mentors and not the mentees; and second, the level of support provided by the University is not the main factor in the low take up of optional placement opportunities. If these are felt to be sufficiently valuable for the student learning experience they need to be compulsory with appropriate support available – a mentoring scheme might then be of far more value to mentees.

There is very little published concerning the use of mentoring to facilitate work‐based learning so this paper is valuable for that alone. Furthermore, most published work on mentoring is located in the “best practice” school of pedagogical research where it is implicitly assumed that one must report on the success of an intervention. Frequently it is more valuable to examine more unexpected results of an intervention. This paper however shows much greater benefits achieved by the mentors than the mentees.

Service researchers have been tasked with improving the well-being of consumers experiencing vulnerability. The current research aims to demonstrate how these consumers can experience empowerment through transformative service improvements to the traditional microfinance model.

To ground the research in a real-world setting with consumers experiencing vulnerability, the research team worked with a nonprofit microfinance organization offering loans to communities of Indigenous women entrepreneurs. The research team worked in six communities and conducted over 25 borrower interviews and 14 staff and volunteer interviews totaling 1,200 min of recorded content.

The present investigation of a unique approach to microfinance offers a new theoretical model, the service empowerment model (SEM), which illustrates how empowerment emanates from processes and outcomes at three distinct levels: micro, meso and macro. Recognizing that change occurs individually and also at familial and societal levels begins to challenge deeply rooted structural and cultural norms involved in the services ecosystem.

Originating from the microfinance service setting, the SEM can be explored, tested and implemented as a pilot program in a variety of service settings that involve transformative service initiatives (e.g. homelessness, refugees, etc.).

As society pursues solutions to the pressing problems of consumers experiencing vulnerability, the present research offers critical insights into how services should be designed.

The present research defines a new term, service empowerment, and creates a new theoretical model, the SEM, to aid in improving transformative service initiatives.

Rural welfare is more than addressing problems of ‘poverty’. As we argue here, social policy initiatives are also conceived by governments as solutions to geographical problems about uneven regional development and population distribution. What these problems were, and how welfare provision could solve them, has varied from generation to generation and takes shape in place-specific ways. That welfare provision has operated as de facto geographical development and population policy is particularly the case in Australia, in its context of massive continental size and heterogeneous rural places. In Australia, the ‘rural’ means much more than just the ‘countryside’ surrounding or between networks of cities and towns (in the traditional European sense; see Gorman-Murray, Darian-Smith, & Gibson, 2008). ‘Rural Australia’ is inserted into national politics as a slippery geographical category, coming to encompass all of non-metropolitan Australia (each of Australia's states only having one major city), within which there is great diversity: broadacre farming regions involving the production of cash crops at scales of thousands of squared kilometres; regions producing rice and cotton with state-sponsored irrigation; coastal agricultural zones with smaller and usually older land holdings (often the places of traditional ‘family farming’ communities); single industry regions focused around minerals extraction or defence (many of Australia's major defence bases being located outside state capitals either in sparsely populated regions in Australia's north or in smaller ‘country towns’ in the south, where they dominate local demography); semi-arid rangelands regions dominated by enormous pastoral stations leased on Crown land (single examples of which rival the United Kingdom in size); and remote savannah and desert regions many thousands of kilometres from capital cities, supporting Aboriginal communities living on traditional country mixing subsistence hunting and gathering with government-supported employment and food programmes. In this context, rural welfare performs a social policy function, but also becomes a means for government to comprehend, problematise and manage geographical space.

This study contributes to the management accounting (MA) literature by exploring the effect of managers’ perception of justice in the budgeting process (as a subsystem of MA) on their satisfaction and motivation to achieve organizational objectives. Drawing on the Habermasian concept of deliberative democracy, which underscores the importance of gaining legitimacy to achieve desirable outcomes, our analysis focuses on seven constructs related to situational and intrinsic participation, procedural and distributive justice, and attitude on two outcome constructs: satisfaction and motivation. We surveyed managers with an accounting background who are directly involved in the budgeting process and analyzed our data using partial least squares-based path analysis–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results of this study indicate that both dimensions of justice – distributive and procedural – are positively associated with participation, and in turn, positively impact satisfaction and motivation. Contrary to expectations, managers’ influence on the final budget does not seem to be as important as we expected. Budgeting is an important managerial function that involves setting targets based on an organization’s strategy and allocating resources for its execution. Such a fundamental process requires managers’ participation at various levels to ensure that the process is fair and just. Our study’s findings imply that justice perceptions are an essential fabric of organizational processes that drive human behavior. Specifically, our findings reveal that perception of justice influences participation and satisfaction and motivation.

The idea that relational processes are central to knowledge creation and knowledge sharing is an idea in good currency (Bouwen & Taillieu, 2004; Brown & Duguid, 1996; Wenger, 1998). Rather than considering knowledge as a commodity that can be transferred from one mind to another, when knowledge is viewed as a relational practice, it resides in social interactions and is actualized in common practices that evolve within a particular community of practice (Sternberg & Horvath, 1999; Van Looy, Debackere, & Bouwen, 2000). Thus, knowledge is both embedded and emergent — subject to change as participants in a community interact with one another. To understand what is known, it becomes necessary to study how members of an organizational community interact and how their knowledge shifts over time.

This paper examines the 1928 Women’s Bureau report, The Effects of Labor Legislation on the Employment Opportunities of Women. It argues that this was a landmark study, demonstrating that scientific management had the potential to develop into a mature applied social science which could play an important role in the identification, measurement and amelioration of recurrent social problems. It further argues that the report demonstrated the usefulness of scientific management in measuring impartially the effects of gender‐specific labor legislation. The paper highlights the instrumental role Mary van Kleeck and Lillian Gilbreth played in bringing feminism and scientific management together and the manner by which they utilized the Women’s Bureau report to advance the social and economic interests of women.