Search results

When properly designed and implemented, prison-to-community transition programs targeting older prisoners could potentially save resources, reduce reoffending rates and contribute to improved public protection and safety. However, older prisoners transitioning to community are often neglected and overlooked, and thus, interventions targeted to address their needs are limited. The purpose of this study was to identify barriers and enablers to health and social services for older prisoners transitioning to community.

A qualitative study was conducted using focus group discussions with corrections officers, community corrections officers and parole officers (n = 32) in four correctional centres, two community corrections offices (CCOs) and one parole unit in New South Wales (NSW) in 2019. The authors used thematic analysis to analyse the findings.

The study identified three main themes relating to barriers and enablers: organisational, social and economic and individual and family and seven sub-themes: planning the transition, communication, assisting prisoners, transition programs, officers’ knowledge and scope of work, social and economic issues and offenders’ conditions

The processes required to ensure effective prison-to-community transition of older prisoners are not well-developed suggesting the need for more systemic and organised mechanisms. Implications of the barriers and enablers for policy, research and practice are discussed.

This study identified a composite of barriers and enablers to health and social services for older prisoners in NSW prisons and CCOs.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

The purpose of this paper is to reassess the properties of the hierarchical service quality model (HSQM) – a previously introduced service quality assessment tool. The HSQM views service quality as a three‐tiered concept with interaction quality, outcome quality, and physical environment quality as initial sub‐dimensions. The study aims to apply HSQM to two new service contexts and to further investigate the relationship between service quality, as measured by this instrument, and satisfaction and customer loyalty. To this end, five hypotheses are to be submitted to empirical tests.

The data for empirically re‐assessing the scale's properties and for testing the proposed hypotheses were collected from convenience samples of 250 customers of hairdresser/barber services and 300 customers of local phone service subscribers. The measurement model of the HSQM was re‐assessed using confirmatory factor analysis. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

The results confirm the HSQM as predictor of satisfaction and loyalty. However, the results suggest that the significance of various service quality dimensions differs depending on the type of service.

From a managerial perspective, the HSQM is useful for assessing service quality at various levels. It allows firms to recognize problems in their delivered interaction quality, outcome quality, or the physical service environment.

The paper provides further evidence for the validity and reliability of the HSQM service quality measure.

The purpose of this paper is to study the distinctive features of service performance measurement. It also provides an overview of current status of performance measurement in three service sectors in Finland.

The paper builds on two complementary empirical studies. In the first study, data were gathered through individual interviews in Finnish service organizations. In the second study, group interviews were held in order to enhance the understanding. The service sectors studied are knowledge-intensive, public and industrial services. There are two main units of analysis in the data set: an organization and service operations.

The results show that the specific performance measurement characteristics are more apparent at service operations level. The findings reveal three distinctive features of service performance measurement. First, the contingency perspective stresses a need to consider the characteristics of different service contexts. Second, customer-orientation implies that the measurement should also cover customers’ actions during the service operation as well as the impacts of service operations. Third, the systemic perspective proposes that performance measurement should encompass all actors participating to service operations.

The results provide support for structuring the existing research and identifying paths for future research. They also assist practitioners in their search for best measurement practices.

This paper contributes by providing empirical insights from three service sectors on the development needs of performance measurement. The findings provide understanding on what exactly makes service performance measurement problematic and suggests three paths to move forward.

The objectives of this paper are to identify the critical factors that influence the decision to outsource maintenance services in public Saudi Arabian universities, and to investigate the relative importance of each of the identified factors based on the expressed opinions of the in‐house maintenance managers in the concerned maintenance departments in these universities.

The authors conducted a comprehensive review of the literature in the fields of maintenance management and outsourcing practices to achieve a thorough understanding of the issues involved, and identifying the crucial factors affecting the outsourcing decision of maintenance services. A questionnaire survey was developed to assess each factor influencing the decision to outsource maintenance services in the public Saudi Arabian universities. The survey included 38 factors grouped in six major groups. The respondents who have opted to outsource several of their maintenance services to specialty contractors were asked to indicate their perceived level of importance for each of the identified factors. The level of importance of the factors and the groups were measured. The factor groups were ranked according to the obtained mean rating values.

The findings show that Saudi universities generally value the importance of the quality, management and strategic factors when making outsourcing decisions. The most important three factors influencing the decision to outsource maintenance services in the public Saudi Arabia universities were identified as “increase the speed of implementation”, “improve quality requirements” and “risk sharing with contractors”.

The findings of the study provide practical value for facilities maintenance managers in institutions of higher education confronted with the decision of whether to outsource maintenance services in their campuses.

The paper is original in the sense that it identifies how in‐house maintenance managers rate the importance of the factors influencing outsourcing decisions.

Adversarial contracting methods are used for most public infrastructure procurement and timely delivery on budget remains a problem. In the past 20 years, OECD countries have adopted a number of alternative procurement methods that are based on collaborative principles including public private partnerships, long-term outsourcing arrangements and relationship/alliance contracts. We review the theoretical principles that operate for both adversarial and collaborative contracting methods. We identify the characteristics of non-adversarial contracting methods such as the output specification, qualitative selection criteria, the alignment of incentives, discrete allocation of residual control rights, life cycle costing, and risk-weighted value for money measurement that are delivering better procurement outcomes for government.

This paper aims to present a dual-perspective framework for maintenance service delivery that should be used by manufacturing companies to structure and manage their maintenance service delivery process, using aggregated historical and real-time data to improve operational decision-making. The framework, built for continuous improvement, allows the exploitation of maintenance data to improve the knowledge of service processes and machines.

The Dual-perspective, data-based decision-making process for maintenance delivery (D3M) framework development and test followed a qualitative approach based on literature reviews and semi-structured interviews. The pool of companies interviewed was expanded from the development to the test stage to increase its applicability and present additional perspectives.

The interviews confirmed that manufacturing companies are interested in exploiting the data generated in the use phase to improve operational decision-making in maintenance service delivery. Feedback to improve the framework methods and tools was collected, as well as suggestions for the introduction of new ones according to the companies' necessities.

The paper presents a novel framework addressing the data-based decision-making process for maintenance service delivery. The D3M framework can be used by manufacturing companies to structure their maintenance service delivery process and improve their knowledge of machines and service processes.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the after-sales strategy of an industrial equipment manufacturer.

The research study’s object is the Brazilian operation of a company belonging to a multinational group that designs, manufactures and installs technology-based equipment. The research method is qualitative modeling with a quantitative analysis. A literature review and a focus group with managers organized the after-sales strategy of the company in four constructs measured by 24 indicators. The constructs are technical assistance (TA), reliability management (RM), customer relationships (CRs) and spare part logistics (SL). A total of seven managers evaluated the importance and performance of the indicators.

TA, RM and CRs are lagging constructs (the importance is greater than the performance), whereas SL is a leading construct (the opposite). The study proposed four strategic actions that change the type of emphasis that the company poses to service: from in-house to field maintenance service, from correction to prevention reliability improvement, from technical- to customer-focused relationships and from direct to integrated logistics service.

The study limits to the case of a technology-based manufacturing company.

The strategic movement reallocates resources from leading indicators to lagging indicators in a sharp, clear movement of forces in the company.

The main contribution is a structured method to evaluate and control the strategic performance of an industrial equipment manufacturer in after-sales activities.