Search results

Healthcare is traditionally considered an indispensable service in both personal and social points of views. In this regard, healthcare-seeking behaviour is driven by utilitarian orientation, given its existential value. But this trend is changing, as the propensity to avail (un)necessary healthcare services is burgeoning with changing lifestyle and practices. From the supply point of view, the market appears to be relentless in enforcing propensity to seek healthcare. The service providers, generally, create unnecessary needs and aspirations, taking undue advantage of the prospects’ over-conscious health concerns and overzealous longing for wellness. This study aims to find whether utilitarianism or hedonism is the prominent paradigm of healthcare-seeking behaviour in the onset of changing preferences and lifestyles and supply-driven market forces.

The study followed an empirical approach to accomplish the aim of research. Subjects for the study constitute sample respondents in the age of 18-60 years, who were identified on inspection. A structured questionnaire, drawn upon literature, was used to elicit information.

The study offered new insight into the basic psychological motive for healthcare-seeking. The results have empirically validated the pre-eminence of a hedonic attribute of consumer behaviour in healthcare-seeking.

The outcome of the study has implications for healthcare providers to tailor-make their future products and services and for governing bodies to design suitable policy guidelines.

The study explores the emerging trends in health-seeking behaviour.

The purpose of this study is to examine the interplay between the curatorial practices of consumers as collectors and the materiality of the collected objects. In particular, this study explores how the material substances of collected objects shapes curatorial practices and how the ongoing use of the collected objects challenges curatorial practices.

Taking advantage of the publicization of once-private collections on social media, we collect 111 YouTube videos created by plastic shoe aficionados. Drawing from visual anthropology and theorizations of materiality, we analyze consumer interactions with the objects they collect.

This study’s findings elucidate consumers’ interactions with the material substances of the objects they collect and demonstrate how these interactions shape the ways in which consumers curate their collections, including how they wear, care for, catalog, and display the collected objects.

Our findings have implications for theorization on consumer collections, consumer identity, and consumer participation in brand communities and are relevant for consumer researchers who study the interactions and relationships between consumers and consumption objects.

This study is the first to re-examine consumers as collectors to extend and update consumer research on the curatorial practices of physical, wearable collectibles. This study sets the foundations for further research to advance our understanding of consumers as collectors as well as to illuminate other theories and aspects of consumer research that consider consumer–object interactions.

THE study of fatigue from a physiological aspect is a field which motion study technicians have made little or no attempt to explore. Shame on their heads. The physiological simplification of motions aimed at reducing fatigue could have completely offset the notion that motion study is aimed at converting the operator into an automaton. It may well be that an elaborate motion pattern set‐up designed to simplify the work merely succeeds in setting up stresses in the worker. The superimposing of a time‐studied standard for the job may not have taken into account the adaptation of the speed of motions to the physiological limitations of the operator working at a high level performance. Very few practitioners have attempted to study motions in the factory with a view to reducing fatigue and stress as a prerequisite to studying the set‐up for increased production. Still fewer have attempted to evaluate these factors. It is about time they did.

Sterilization is endorsed as a method of family planning by international governmental organizations; abortion is not. Focusing on policy development for these two issues in a single country, Peru, we ask how power and inequality operate under conditions of global consensus or dissensus. The case of sterilization unfolded the way many previous research studies would predict, with Peruvian state actions corresponding to a global diffusion process. We find that global consensus provided cover for top-down actions that violated the human rights of indigenous women in the country, who were predominantly poor, non-Spanish speakers, and residents of the mountainous, sparsely populated parts of the country. With respect to abortion in Peru, in the absence of global consensus, the state resisted calls for change, advocacy networks have worked at cross-purposes, and a powerful local actor, the Catholic Church, has effectively blocked liberalization efforts. As with sterilization, however, marginalized indigenous women and their interests were rendered invisible.

Middle managers in health care today are expected to continuously and efficiently decide and act in administration, finance, care quality, and work environment, and strategic communication has become paramount. Since dialogical communication is considered to promote a healthy work environment, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which health care managers experienced observing subordinates’ dialogue training.

A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews and documents from eight middle managers in a dialogue programme intervention conducted by dialogue trainers. Focus was on fostering and assisting workplace dialogue. Conventional qualitative content analysis was used.

Managers’ experiences were both enriching and demanding, and consisted of becoming aware of communication, meaning perceiving interaction between subordinates as well as own silent interaction with subordinates and trainer; Discovering communicative actions for leadership, by gaining self-knowledge and recognizing relational leadership models from trainers – such as acting democratically and pedagogically – and converting theory into practice, signifying practising dialogue-promoting conversation behaviour with subordinates, peers, and superiors.

Only eight managers participated in the intervention, but data afforded a basis for further research.

Findings stressed the importance of listening, and of support from superiors, for well-functioning leadership communication at work.

Studies focusing on health care managers’ communication and dialogue are few. This study contributes to knowledge about these activities in managerial leadership.