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The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between organizational learning and patient safety culture in hospital pharmacy settings as determined by the learning organization survey short-form (LOS-27) and pharmacy survey on patient safety culture instruments, and to further explore how dimensions of organizational learning relate to dimensions of pharmacy patient safety culture.

This study is a cross-sectional study. Data were obtained from three public hospital pharmacies and three private hospital pharmacies in Kuwait. Partial least square structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

A total of 272 surveys (59.1 percent response rate) were completed and returned. The results indicated a significant positive relationship between organizational learning and patient safety culture in hospital pharmacy settings (path coefficient of 0.826, p-value <0.05 and R² of 0.683). Several dimensions of the organizational learning showed significant links to the various dimensions of the pharmacy patient safety culture. Specifically, training (TRN), management that reinforces learning (MRL) and supportive learning environment (SLE) had the strongest effects on the pharmacy patient safety culture dimensions. Moreover, these effects indicated that MRL, SLE and TRN were associated with improvements in most dimensions of pharmacy patient safety culture.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to assess the relationship between organizational learning, patient safety culture and their dimensions in hospital pharmacy settings.

Notes that professionals in education have learned from those in industry with regard to quality management concepts. Suggests that, with regard to quality concepts in universities, there are four main issues, including aspects such as incorporation of quality concepts in the curriculum and using quality concepts to improve educational administration. Notes likely improvement paths, namely: improving the business operations side of schools, and shortening the time taken to identify failing students. Lists six quality concepts for education based on quality management principles in areas such as leadership, understanding stakeholders and involvement of people. Also lists some management concepts required to provide the necessary linkages for the improvement of education, including identification of critical processes for improvement, and reporting improvements in terms meaningful to process stakeholders.

This paper analyzes the impact of increased federal regulatory enforcement from the SEC's Municipalities Continuing Disclosure Cooperation (MCDC) initiative on municipal debt issuers continuing disclosure practices.

We analyze the changes in continuing disclosure practices by estimating a series of difference-in-differences regressions based on variables representing issuers' changes in regulatory risk after the MCDC. The continuing disclosure data are hand-collected for 827 cities over a seven-year period.

The empirical findings indicate that increased regulatory enforcement has a significant impact on continuing disclosure compliance. We find increased enforcement has no impact on issuers that already have a higher probability of being monitored by federal regulators. We also find that an increase in continuing disclosure compliance does not automatically increase continuing disclosure timeliness.

The MCDC lacks monetary penalties for noncompliant bond issuers and no direct regulatory consequences exist for untimely disclosure. Our findings suggest that regulatory enforcement should be followed by adequate sanctions to emphasize the credibility of the enforcement threat and the SEC should consider requiring bond issuers to commit to the timely disclosure of significant information in offering documents.

This paper extends prior studies by analyzing regulatory risk in the market, and the ability of regulation to reduce disclosure compliance deficiencies in the municipal market. By focusing on the MCDC, this study is able to disentangle the impact of regulatory enforcement from the changes in accounting regulation.

This study aims to understand the role of technology in relationship maintenance among romantic partners.

It takes a qualitative, inductive approach and collected data from in-depth interviews with 20 individuals who are married or in cohabiting relationships.

This study supports the extension of relationship maintenance typology derived from face-to-face relationship studies to technology-mediated communication, but highlights how technology use transforms the implementation of maintenance behaviors. Technology helps couples coordinate tasks and keep in touch with friends and families. Although technology-mediated communication cannot replace face-to-face interactions in relationship talk and sharing in-depth feelings, it plays an important role in redefining the ways in which couples interact positively, maintain mutual understanding, and secure the future of the relationship. Moreover, this study identifies a new maintenance behavior, communication coordination. These maintenance behaviors reflect a tension between maintaining connectivity and managing the boundary between work and home and between the public and private spheres.

This study builds on previous work on technology use and relationship maintenance, but takes a different qualitative, inductive approach to address the limitations in the survey research dominant in the literature. It helps us understand the advantages and challenges in maintaining relationships in the digital age and also explores the factors that influence the patterns of technology use in relationship maintenance.

This study investigated how college students’ pace of life and perceptions of communication technologies shape the choices they make when engaging in mediated communication with their parents.

We conducted 21 interviews to explore how students’ understandings of various communication technologies, the rules and patterns of technology use in their families, and the circumstances surrounding their use of technologies while at college influence the number and type of media they use to communicate with their parents.

We found that perceived busyness and generational differences played a large role in limiting technologies used, with environmental factors, the purpose of communication, and complexity of message also contributing to technology choices.

This study extends media multiplexity theory by investigating media choice and relational tie strength in an intergenerational context.

In response to the financial crisis that began in 2007, United States President Barack Obama signed H.R. 4173, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, into law on July 21, 2010. “Dodd-Frank” is intended to correct certain problems in financial markets by federally regulating the activities of independent municipal financial advisors and comprehensively expanding regulatory oversight over credit rating agencies. This article reviews the legislation and its financial management rationale, and discusses its actual and potential impact on the future operations of the municipal securities market and its participants.

To review presentations on assembly and joining given at a seminar, “The changing face of robotics: inside and outside the factory”, organised by the UK Institution of Electrical Engineers.

Details are given of three presentations. The first is by Dr Phil Webb of the University of Nottingham, who described a project to develop a flexible robotic cell capable of riveting and assembling aero‐structure components, in which a new method of “simulation‐based control” evolved. In the second, Pearl Agjakwa of Nottingham University and Craig Johnson of Rolls Royce talked about shape metal deposition, a process by which layers of weld are deposited by robot to form complex aerospace components with minimal tooling and short lead times. The final presentation was by Dr Wolfgang Kölbl of Meta Vision Systems on laser vision robot guidance. Applications in automotive and a new cross vision sensor were described, the latter being applicable to hole location such as for drilling and riveting.

Robotics inside the factory is extending into new areas of assembly and fastening and is now finding applications in the aerospace industry and not just in automotive.

Provides a review of some new assembly‐related process developments in robotics.

This paper is offered as an introduction to action learning. The nature of the organisational problem(s) for investigation under an action learning programme is defined and the constitution and general principles of an action learning set are introduced. The paper concludes with some of the advantages of an action learning programme along with some of the drawbacks.