Search results

We examine how interpersonal behavior and social interaction influence team sensemaking and subsequent team actions during a hospital-based health information technology (HIT) implementation project.

Over the course of 18 months, we directly observed the interpersonal interactions of HIT implementation teams using a sensemaking lens.

We identified three voice-promoting strategies enacted by team leaders that fostered team member voice and sensemaking; communicating a vision; connecting goals to team member values; and seeking team member input. However, infrequent leader expressions of anger quickly undermined team sensemaking, halting dialog essential to problem solving. By seeking team member opinions, team leaders overcame the negative effects of anger.

Leaders must enact voice-promoting behaviors and use them throughout a team’s engagement. Further, training teams in how to use conflict to achieve greater innovation may improve sensemaking essential to project risk mitigation.

Health care work processes are complex; teams involved in implementing improvements must be prepared to deal with conflicting, contentious issues, which will arise during change. Therefore, team conflict training may be essential to sustaining sensemaking.

Future research should seek to identify team interactions that foster sensemaking, especially when topics are difficult or unwelcome, then determine the association between staff sensemaking and the impact on HIT implementation outcomes.

We are among the first to focus on project teams tasked with HIT implementation. This research extends our understanding of how leaders’ behaviors might facilitate or impeded speaking up among project teams in health care settings.

Both Hungary and Germany belong to the old-world wine-producing countries and have long winemaking traditions. This paper aims at exploring and comparing online branding strategies of family SME (small and medium sized enterprises) wineries at Lake Balaton (Hungary) and Lake Constance (Germany), as two wine regions with similar geographic characteristics.

This paper, based on a total sample of 37 family wineries, 15 at Lake Balaton and 22 at Lake Constance, investigates the differences in brand identity on the website, brand image in social media and online communication channels deployed in both wine regions. The study applies a qualitative methodology using MaxQDA software for conducting content analysis of texts in websites and social media. Descriptive statistics and t-test were conducted to compare the usage of different communication channels and determine statistical significance.

At Lake Balaton, the vineyard, the winery and the family, while at Lake Constance, the lake itself and the grape are highlighted regarding family winery brand identity. The customer-based brand image of Hungarian family wineries emphasizes wine, food and service, with the predominant use of Facebook. In the German family wineries, the focus of brand identity is on wine, friendliness and taste and includes more extensive usage of websites.

The paper deploys a novel methodology, both in terms of tools used as well as geographic focus to uncover online branding patterns of family wineries, thereby providing implications for wine and tourism industries at lake regions. It compares the share of selected most-used words in the overall text in websites and in social media, and presents the key findings from this innovative approach.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.

Efforts to increase sustainability are increasingly being promulgated using non-state forms of governance. Currently, there are multiple multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) working to develop sustainability standards and metrics for US agriculture. These include: LEO-4000, Field to Market, and the Sustainability Consortium. Using Paul Thompson’s (2010) tripartite sustainability framework, the proposed sustainability standards and metrics of the three MSIs are assessed. Our findings indicate that the current political economic stakeholder nexus is producing incremental adjustments to the status quo of industrial agriculture. Put differently, the standards and metrics being produced by these initiatives are largely advancing programs of sustainable intensification in which sustainability is equated with increasing resource efficiencies. Hence, our research problematizes the efficacy of non-state governance approaches for transformative change in food and agriculture. The findings in this chapter are based on fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013.

Multi-stakeholder initiatives have proliferated as a leading form of standard-development, as they are understood to be more legitimate than other forms of non-state governance. The legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives is a result of their perceived congruence with normative democratic principles. Using a case study of a multi-stakeholder initiative to develop a National Sustainable Agriculture Standard (LEO-4000) for the United States, this chapter examines the practices and politics of legitimation in non-state governance. The analysis of LEO-4000 indicates that, first, the simultaneous construction of legitimacy and standards affects the kinds of standards developed. Second, understandings of legitimacy are influenced by the standpoint of actors. Third, legitimacy has become a strategic dimension of standard-development, which actors use to further their interests. Based on these findings, we contend that non-state governance that relies on normative democratic principles for legitimation is constrained in its ability to develop stringent standards. Thus, there may be limits to non-state governance as a regulatory tool, and to achieve non-economic objectives such as increased sustainability. For rural areas, the implication is that they are becoming enmeshed in an emerging system of non-state governance that continues to be highly contested, particularly regarding who has the right to govern such areas. The findings in this chapter are based on qualitative data, including 34 interviews and participant-observation.

THE topics of the Library Association Conference and the election of the Council of the Association naturally absorb a great deal of attention this month. To deal with the second first: there were few novelties in the nominations, and most of the suggested new Councillors are good people; so that a fairly good Council should result. The unique thing, as we imagine, about the Library Association is the number of vice‐presidents, all of whom have Council privileges. These are not elected by the members but by the Council, and by the retiring Council; they occupy a position analagous to aldermen in town councils, and are not amenable to the choice or desires of the members at large. There are enough of them, too, if they care to be active, to dominate the Council. Fortunately, good men are usually elected, but recently there has been a tendency to elect comparatively young men to what are virtually perpetual seats on the Council, simply, if one may judge from the names, because these men occupy certain library positions. It, therefore; is all the more necessary that the electors see that men who really represent the profession get the seats that remain.

The purpose of this paper is to examine visitor management in the German-Swiss border area of the Lake Constance region. Taking a customer perspective, it determines the requirements for an application with the ability to optimize personal mobility.

A quantitative study and a survey of focus groups were conducted to identify movement patterns of different types of visitors and their requirements concerning the development of a visitor management application.

Visitors want an application that provides real-time forecasts of issues such as traffic, parking and queues and, at the same time, enables them to create a personal activity schedule based on this information.

Not every subsample reached a sufficient number of cases to yield representative results.

The results may lead to an optimization and management separation of mobility flows in the research area and be helpful to municipal planners, destination marketing organizations and visitors.

The German border cities of Konstanz, Radolfzell and Singen in the Lake Constance region need improved visitor management, mainly because of a high level of shopping tourism by Swiss visitors to Germany. In the Summer months, Lake Constance is also a popular destination for leisure tourists, which causes overtourism. For the first time, the results of this research presented here offer possible solutions, in particular by showing how a mobile application for visitors could defuse the situation.

This chapter combines a global value chain methodology with the case of the development of the farmed Atlantic salmon industry in Chile to inform discussions regarding the globalization of economy and society. The research documents the shifting structure of the value chain from the north to the south as Chile replaced northern Europe as the locus of production and the major world supplier of farmed Atlantic salmon. Farmed salmon was supported by the Chilean state as part of its export-oriented industrialization model that attracted foreign direct investment (FDI) from northern TNCs. Chile's low costs of production combined with growing environmental problems in the north and global retailers' demand for large quantities of low-cost product resulted in the restructuring of the farmed Atlantic-salmon value chain as northern capital sourced the south as a lucrative production platform to service northern consumers. A detailed investigation of the rise in dominance of the firm Marine Harvest is provided to illustrate the process of industry concentration the Chilean farmed-salmon industry. This model has generated a legitimation crisis related to environmental degradation and labor abuses resulting in social movement organization both nationally and internationally. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the Wal-Mart Effect on the agrifood industry in particular and in the farmed-salmon industry in particular.