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While there is considerable evidence supporting the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment, the relationship between the antecedents of job satisfaction, organizational commitment and career commitment are not clearly understood. This study seeks to clarify whether these antecedents have an effect independent of job satisfaction on career commitment or whether these antecedents are mediated by job satisfaction.

In total, 2,799 questionnaires were mailed out to members of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). The responses received were 643 (22.9 percent) and after eliminating retirees or students, a sample of 456 respondents currently employed in the health care industry was obtained. Path analysis was conducted to test the hypothetical relationships between work situation, career experiences and career commitment.

It was found that job satisfaction mediated the influences of job tenure and career pattern on career commitment. Job satisfaction partially mediated the influences of perceived job security and one's satisfaction with career on career commitment. Both of these measures had a direct influence on career commitment. Career experience such as sector change was also positively associated with career commitment.

While the research offers some insights into the factors affecting the career commitment of health care executives, the sample was limited to respondents who were members of the American College of Healthcare Executives, and thus may not represent the views of all managers in the health care sector.

To retain high‐valued health care workers it is important that an organization has a work environment that enhances their commitment to their occupation as well as their careers.

This study clarifies the influence of job satisfaction on the career commitment of health care managers during a very dynamic period.

The purpose of this article is to present an alternative theory to why publicly‐traded physician practice management companies in the US were popular and successful for a limited number of years and then essentially self‐destructed.

The short history of publicly‐traded practice management companies suggests that they had limited value and utility in the US healthcare industry. It is the premise of the paper that the sudden appearance these for‐profit companies upset the natural order within the healthcare industry and created a disequilibria which ultimately resulted in their demise. While Gaia theory is most commonly applied to the natural sciences, it has been applied to a number of interdisciplinary issues.

Physicians gravitated to these for‐profit companies either out of fear of encroaching managed care or out a desire to sell their practice to the highest bidder. Physician practice management companies, on the other hand, saw a way to entice stockholders to invest in a growth industry. The paper suggests that the physician practice management companies added little new value to the health care industry and applies Gaia theory as a possible explanation for this phenomena. Gaia theory was first postulated in 1979 to address the evolution of the material environment and corresponding organisms as a tightly coupled system which attempt to manipulate the environment for the purpose of creating biologically favorable conditions.

The paper is one of the first to suggest that the laws of nature, as understood from the perspective of Gaia theory, may have applicability to the US health care industry.

Education and training is vital in improving age-related care provisions. However, a lack of awareness and understanding of dementia could be a factor in meeting the age-related needs of people. This paper aims to examine the impact dementia education has on caregivers’ confidence to provide person-centred care for people with intellectual disability and identifies additional training needs.

A systematic scoping review was completed using preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses to guide the process of mapping existing evidence of dementia education and training programmes available to caregivers of people with intellectual disability.

A search of five electronic databases identified 11 articles that reported on the role of dementia education in improving the knowledge of caregivers in effectively delivering the age-related care. Findings suggest that improved training provision is needed to support early diagnosis and increase caregivers’ confidence in meeting the physical and psychological needs of older adults with intellectual disability.

This review contributes to the literature by identifying the value of and need for continued development in dementia education and training to improve person-centred dementia care.

The current study aims to deliver a consolidated view of environmental sustainability in cold supply chain performance systems (CSCPS), incorporating theoretical and empirical analysis for improving environmental standards. For this purpose, this study firstly aims to explore and analyze the various crucial challenging factors for environmental sustainability in the cold supply chain (CSC). Secondly, it discovers the most effective sustainable strategies for improving the environmental sustainability of CSCPS.

The exploration of the crucial challenging factors and the proposed sustainable strategies have been done using a systematic literature review relevant to the sustainable performance of CSC. At the same time, semi-structured brainstorming sessions were conducted with the domain professionals having an industrial and academic background to finalize the strategies. Empirical analysis has been performed using an intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) based hybrid approach of SWARA and COPRAS methods.

The key findings of the study address that “higher energy consumption during refrigerated transportation and storage” is the most crucial challenge for environmental sustainability in CSC. In addition, “managerial refrain to profit decline due to sustainability implementation” is the second most crucial challenge that hinders the adoption of sustainable practices in CSCs. Meanwhile, the governmental attention to motivating organizations for green adoption and implementation of solar energy-driven refrigeration technologies are the two most important discoveries of the study that might help in improving CSC's environmental performance.

From the implications side, the study enriches and extends the current literature content on CSC sustainability. In addition, it offers sound managerial implications by identifying the challenges that create threats among the management for sustainability adoption and suggesting the most suitable sustainable strategies, which may help the management to raise the environmental performance of their CSC. Besides having various important theoretical and managerial implications for the study, contemplation of only environmental sustainability traits as a broader perspective limits the scope of the study.

The study's main contribution is the exploration of the most crucial challenges imparting obstructions in sustainable development and sustainable strategies, which may get the interest of the CSC players, market leaders, and industrial and academic practitioners working in the domain of CSC sustainability. In addition, this study offers structured theoretical and empirical evidence for CSC's environmental sustainability, thus playing a bridging role between theoretical sustainability concepts and its practical implications in CSC industries.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest an approach to post‐Kyoto climate negotiations that could provide a way out of the apparent deadlock between developed and developing countries. This is an urgent issue as the world already appears to be close to a level of climate change that could be considered “dangerous”.

The paper explores the potential that control of short‐lived greenhouse gases such as methane, tropospheric ozone, and soot could have, in addition to steep cutbacks in industrialized nations, to both mitigate global warming and overcome political stalemate in the international climate negotiations.

Although rarely mentioned in climate discourse, reducing emissions of short‐lived greenhouse gases offers a cost‐effective way of actually reducing the radiative forcing in the atmosphere, while at the same time producing substantial subsidiary benefits such as improved urban air quality. The paper suggests leveraging this potential in the post‐Kyoto treaty in order to “buy time” to address the arguably more difficult problem of essentially eliminating fossil‐fuel related CO₂ emissions, which will ultimately be required to truly bring climate change under control. While high‐income countries work on steep cutbacks of all greenhouse gas emissions, middle‐income nations could make significant additional contributions by undertaking commitments to control only short‐lived greenhouse gases until they reached a threshold level of per‐capita GDP, at which point they would cap and begin reducing all greenhouse gas emissions.

This paper recognizes that political tradeoffs will have to be made in negotiating the next climate treaty, and offers a way of approaching these tradeoffs that could minimize resulting environmental damage.

Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors’ mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors’ mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.

For their part, GSE went into 2002 with a vision of how they saw the year unfolding. 2002 would see the holding of a general election, and the momentum of GSE's petition gathering and public meetings could be utilised in an attempt to politicise the incineration issue as part of the overall election campaign. The shifting dynamic of the political opportunity structure surrounding the incineration issue had seen GSE and their local political allies losing momentum, due to the removal of the councillors’ powers on the waste issue. However, the response of a public now concerned at this perceived undermining of democracy allowed GSE to extend their democratic deficit frame.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of organizational learning on technical innovation and the role of organizational culture as a determinant of the organizational learning processes.

After reviewing the literature on organizational learning and its relationship with both, technical innovation and organizational culture, this paper analyzes those relationships using a sample of 451 firms.

Findings reveal that organizational learning is positively associated with technical innovation and that organizational culture can foster both organizational learning and technical innovation but can also act as a barrier. Additionally, findings show that in order to enhance innovation neither a flexibility focus nor an external focus are enough. Both of them are necessary to characterize organizational culture.

The main limitations of this paper are the cross‐sectional design of the empirical research and the fact that data were collected from one source only.

Findings can guide managers' efforts in the development of an organizational culture which fosters both organizational learning and innovation since they show that adhocracy culture fosters both of them and that a hierarchy culture may act as a barrier for them.

The paper focuses on the little‐researched relations between organizational culture, organizational learning and innovation. Moreover, it focuses on the Spanish context, where there is a lack of studies on this issue. Finally, the paper provides empirical evidence that these relations exist. In particular, adhocracy enhances both learning and innovation the most, while hierarchy inhibits them most.

Key forces shaping higher education drive institutions to make strategic choices to locate themselves in niches where they can make use of their resources effectively and efficiently. However, the concepts of strategy and strategic positioning in higher education are contested issues due to the nature and complexity of the sector and the university. As an industry facing increasing pressure toward marketization and competition, this study calls for an analysis of higher education, as an industry, in a more business-oriented framework. This chapter makes a contribution to scholarly research in higher education by applying Porter’s five forces framework to medical education. In doing so, it provides a foundational perspective on the competitive landscape, its environment, its organizations, and the groups and individuals that make up the higher and medical education sector.