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Competition in the managed care industry has intensified as the industry has reached maturity. The current competitive environment of the industry and an increasing industry-wide ephasis on cost containment have resulted in declining profits, lower levels of member satisfaction, and increasing member disenrollment. Many health maintenance organizations (HMOs) have begun to reorient their approach to competitive advantage in the industry by offering theiry members open access to specialits. HMO executives believe that open access will reduce the degree of differentiation achieved by free-for-service (FFS) plans and thereby will allow HMOs to attract additional employers and members away from FFS plans and to improve overall member retention. Unfortunately, there is no empirical evidence to support this assumption. This study is the first empirical test of the strategic importance of member autonomy and open access in a managed care environment. The study expands the model of consumer satisfaction with a health care system proposed by Luft 1981 and tested by Mummalaneni and Gopalakrishna 1997 and incorporates Porter's 1980 theory of competition in mature industries. The model utilized in this study assesses the relative importance of autonomy in selecting specialists (open access), service convenience, value/pricing, and HMO resources on member satisfaction with care and intentions to remain with the HMO. Results show that all four factors significantly influence satisfaction and that subsequently, satisfaction influences intentions to remain enrolled in the plan. In addition, the importance of autonomy is demonstrated by significant direct and indirect paths to intentions to remain in the plan.

The question of cultural identity has taken new levels of importance in the Andean country of Ecuador. Ecuadorian scholars often treat identity as a historical construction, revealing the country's Mestizo population as a culture of oppression. However, such statements only take into account the Western definition of history and fail to appreciate the indigenous concept of myth and the human need to constantly rewrite history in terms of today. Since Ecuador's majority is profoundly Mestizo (people with both Spanish and indigenous ancestry), there exists a clash of thought structures, both Western and indigenous, which do not allow for collective transformation. This research utilizes interactive research methods, particularly Augusto Boal's “Theatre of the Oppressed,” to penetrate the clash, intensifying it so that the “cultural oppression” becomes clear to those involved in the explorations, allowing them to uncover the “power of myth” now deeply buried in the collective unconscious.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between productivity, firm strategy and bankruptcy risk.

This paper uses data envelopment analysis to compute productivity of firms and uses archival data to empirically examine the relationship between productivity, firm strategy and bankruptcy risk.

The results indicate that productivity has a positive effect on reducing bankruptcy risk, and the results also indicate that pursuing either of the generic strategies successfully has a positive effect on reducing bankruptcy risk. The study also brings to light the mediating effect of productivity in the relationship between strategy and bankruptcy risk.

The effect of productivity and firm strategy on bankruptcy risk is of importance to external stakeholders such as lenders and investors to evaluate the bankruptcy risk of such a firm. Internal stakeholders (managers and management consultants) will find this study expedient by using productivity enhancements and effective strategy implementation to mitigate bankruptcy risk.

This is the first paper to highlight the link between productivity and bankruptcy risk, firm strategy and bankruptcy risk and the mediation effects of productivity on the link between a cost leadership strategy and bankruptcy risk.

Cross-border M&A has become one of the leading approaches for firms to gain access to global markets. Yet there has been little progress in the research literature exploring the role that culture may play in the success of these ventures. Poor culture-fit has often been cited as one reason why M&A has not produced the outcomes organizations hoped for (Cartwright & Schoenberg, 2006). Cross-border M&A has the added challenges of having to deal with both national and organizational culture differences. In this chapter we review the literature on cultural integration in cross-border M&A and provide a framework designed to help manage the integration process throughout the M&A lifecycle. This framework presents culture assessment and integration as a crucial component to reducing poor culture-fit as a barrier to M&A success.

Learning to teach in ways that are academically, linguistically and culturally responsive to diverse learners in today’s schools is a complex and challenging endeavor for novice and experienced teachers. In recent years, educators in schools and universities have been collaborating to create more powerful ways for prospective and practicing teachers to explore and develop what some call “best practice” in teaching and learning (Zemelman, Daniels & Hyde, 1993, 1998). Meanwhile, the advent of new technologies has provided exciting opportunities to invent innovative ways to document, explore and enhance our understanding of teaching as a professional practice. Many educators have written about the rich potential of hypermedia to document the everyday work in which teachers engage – curriculum development, planning, teaching, assessment and reflection – in ways that preserve the highly contextualized and situated nature of teaching practice (Lacey & Merseth, 1993; Lampert & Ball, 1998; Spiro & Jehng, 1990). Video clips of classroom teaching and artifacts associated with it (e.g. student work, the teacher’s reflections, planning documents, district curriculum) can be accessed by computer in flexible, non-linear ways. Moreover, the use of hypermedia materials affords opportunities for novice and experienced teachers to engage together in taking an inquiring stance to investigate practice and to generate new understandings and insights that can inform future practices (Lampert & Ball, 1999). Lacey and Merseth (1993) argued that hypermedia is a curricular innovation that addresses “three currently held beliefs about teaching and learning to teach: namely, that teaching is complex and context-dependent; that engaging in the construction of knowledge about teaching is a powerful way to learn it; and that learning to teach can be greatly enhanced by participation in a community of inquiry” (p. 547).