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The purpose of this paper is to present simulation modelling to reconfigure a 700-bed Hong Kong hospital’s master surgery schedule (MSS), aiming to improve patient flow, capacity management and resource allocation through levelling bed occupancy within the hospital.

A discrete-event simulation model was developed to understand how changes to the MSS would affect bed occupancy, thereby providing business intelligence for short- and long-term hospital planning. A decision tool was subsequently developed for hospital managers to test different scenarios.

Simulation modelling showed that significant bed occupancy levelling could be achieved through small and practicable changes to the MSS. Optimisation routines conducted using the simulation model then gave additional insights into how the schedule should be revamped for the long term.

The authors show how operations research methods are useful for guiding hospital operational planning. The authors show that a data-driven and evidence-based model enables hospital managers to critically explore various scheduling changes, while also providing a scientific common ground for discussion among important stakeholders. It is a crucial step forward when adopting advanced analytics for Hong Kong hospital operational planning.

The authors provide a robust method for evaluating the relationship between Hong Kong hospital’s MSS and its bed occupancy. Through simulating various changes to the surgical schedule, valuable and practicable insights were made available for hospital managers to make short- and longer-term changes that enhance the system’s overall efficiency and service quality.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role of church in relation to state in providing support for needy.

The analysis takes place in a Nordic welfare state context between two recessions in the early 1990s and late 2000s. The welfare state regime hypothesis suggests that the kind of traditional assistance the church lends to the poor would die out in the course of “socio‐democratic” welfare state development, a statement analogous with the secularization hypothesis.

With data on the volume of poverty alleviation activities of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church it is shown that after decades of marginalization, the role of the church's poverty alleviation became more pronounced after the recession in the early 1990s and continued to do so throughout the economic collapse of 2008.

The results give ground to challenge the conventional clear cut conception of the universal Nordic welfare state model.

European welfare state research has focused on the links between religious values, religious cleavages and the shaping of the welfare state but has mostly ignored the role of faith‐based institutions in improving welfare. The current economic crisis may provide religious institutions a window of opportunity to expand their poverty alleviation activities.

The objective of this paper is to understand changes and progress of the Korean childcare regime by examining the evolutional process of childcare initiatives that were developed since the Japanese colonial rule.

This study employed a qualitative-based research design with a particular emphasis on explanatory research. Meanwhile, the data were gathered through the peer-reviewed literature and reports.

The findings indicate that Korea has had three types of childcare regimes: effective-informal, productivist and inclusive-liberal orientation. It also pinpoints that while the care regime development followed the European regime, the egalitarian society, which is a social prerequisite for modern welfare state-building, has not yet been fully established. This paradoxical situation eventually impedes the development of universal childcare aimed at promoting gender equality and a work-life balance.

This article offers a model and characteristics of the Korean childcare regime dating back to the Japanese colonial period up until the Moon Jae-In administration, where it still receives less attention in most of the social policy literature (see Table 1).

Political analyses of the East Asian welfare state development often stress the importance of the power resource model, in which vibrant coalitions between the leftist party, interest groups, civil society and working-class unions have become driving factors in producing generous welfare outcomes. Challenging such analyses, this article discusses the convergence of the political attitude between political actors who are increasingly homogeneous (supportive) when it comes to the universal welfare state notion by focussing on childcare in South Korea.

By using desk review of the peer-reviewed literature and reports, this article investigates the causation for why political parties with different political ideologies were keen on extending childcare programs and its outcome in addressing the existing demographic problems in Korea.

Although the collective movement, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, had given important contributions to the early development of childcare in South Korea, more breakthroughs in childcare features were precisely and rapidly developed after politicians from different spectrums of political affiliations converged in their supportive attitude of the universal welfare. The driving factors of political convergence itself are not merely due to electoral competition or political activism; furthermore, it can be linked to the increased global institution involvement in domestic policy with extensive permeability, which, have ruined domestic policy development maintained for ideological reasoning and bring in more popular policy setting.

This article contributes to the growing literature on the political aspect of East Asian social policy studies, which goes beyond the traditional power resource analysis and makes a novel contribution to the childcare policy studies.

The purpose of this paper is to present the case for an analysis of communication at the supra-individual level as a means of rendering the understanding of learning and acting tractable. The paper introduces a method of analysis of redundancy to achieve this.

The paper argues for a supra-individual approach to acting, learning, and understanding against focusing on an individual or quasi-transcendental “observer”. The argument is outlined in four steps: first, articulation of the dynamics of the communication system; second, consideration of the redundancies of expectations within communication; third, the computation of anticipation which enables the authors to model meaning processing; and fourth the feedback of meaning processing on information processing can be measured as redundancy. Anticipated future states can reflexively drive reconstructions in meaning-processing systems.

The social system can be considered as a symbolic order of coordination mechanisms. Reflexive agency can access this order and partake in it. However, expectations and their structures do not “exist”, but remain uncertain with the status of hypotheses. Historical embodiment in intentional action is structurally coupled to the order of expectations. The historical instantiations condition and enable the further development of the expectations as a retention mechanism.

The modelling and measurement of meaning processing in terms of inversion of the arrow of time and the generation of redundancy provide extensions to the mathematical theory of communication.

In a Northern city, which claims to have more than 12,000 Commonwealth immigrants, mostly of Asian origin—Pakistanis and Indians, an increasing number of whom have been joined by their wives and families, there was instituted in 1965 a routine examination of their children before school entry, later extended to children of immigrant origin already in the schools. This examination extended to haemoglobin estimation, tuberculin‐testing and, equally important, examination of the stools for pathogens and parasitic ova. 419 entrants were examined in the first half of 1965 and 898 pupils. Parental co‐operation must have been excellent, as parents all agreed, without exception, to the special examination, although to some extent, there might have been considered legal authority in the current School Health Service (Medical Inspection) Regulations made under the Education Act, 1944. We are not aware of any report of intestinal pathogens, but helminth infestations were reported (Archer D. M., Bamford F. N., and Lees E., Helminth Infestations in Immigrant Children, 1965, Brit. Med. J., 2, 1517), from which it appears 18·6% carried five types of worm, of which the commonest was hookworm. It would be fair to assume that helminth infestation, indicating as it does, exposure to food infections, water‐borne disease and environment generally, is an index of gastro‐intestinal infection and the presence of pathogens, including the carrier state.

This study aims to explore multifaceted corporate social responsibility (CSR) covered in popular English newspapers in the UK, USA, mainland China and Hong Kong from 2000 to 2016 via a computer-assisted analytical approach. This study moves the understanding of CSR away from corporate self-reporting to the mass media and raises interesting questions about the role of the news media in presenting CSR as a multifaceted, socially constructed concept.

Data were retrieved from CSR-related news articles from 2000 to 2016 that were archived in the LexisNexis database. Guided by the theoretical framework of agenda setting, a computer-assisted content analysis (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) was used to analyze 4,487 CSR-related articles from both business and non-business news sources. Analysis of variance was used to compare salient CSR topics in each country/region.

This study identifies newspapers as an alternate to corporations’ attempts to distribute CSR information and construct CSR meaning. The findings revealed that the news communicates a variety of CSR issues that are aligned or beyond what CSR was defined in corporate CSR reporting, as suggested in previous studies. In addition, CSR news coverages differ between the business and nonbusiness news sources. Furthermore, the media tone of CSR coverage significantly differed across the regions and between the business and nonbusiness newspapers.

Emerging topics in CSR news coverage, such as business education, could help companies identify untapped CSR realms in the market.

This study contributes to CSR communication research by adding a non-corporate perspective regarding what CSR means and should be focused on. The news media presents CSR using a heterogeneous approach as they not only provide surface reports on corporations’ CSR activities but also offer in-depth discussions.

To examine control and accountability in an expressive organisation.

The paper was based upon a longitudinal case study of events in the Church of England from 1994 to 2001 and was based on documents, debates in the governing body, conversations and interviews and participants' observation.

As a response to a financial crisis a group of financiers from within the Evangelical theological tradition (which places stress on headship and control) proposed the creation of a new church governance body (a national council) with strongly integrated central control and severely diminished conciliar participation. This group described the complex church organisations and structures (disparagingly) as “a cats cradle of autonomous and semi autonomous organizations”. This conflicted with the values of the other covenant traditions (Anglo‐Catholic and Liberal). The new body was created, but the proposed centralised control was unraveled, the existing constitution and governance was maintained, the “cats cradle” was enriched within the ground metaphor of autonomy. The case shows how the loosely coupled nature of this expressive institution with its multiple theological (value and belief) stances and multiple organisations, relationships and accountabilities was almost impervious to the attempt to shift them into an ordered and controlled hierarchy.

The great complexity of an ancient Church constrains the researcher to a limited account.

Change in expressive organisations happens by emergent negotiation and cannot be directed because the various value positions infuse everything.

The conception of control and accountability as being constructed and reconstructed in the interplay of the constructs of covenant, constitution and contract. This theorising may have a wider application both to expressive, public institutions and private organisations.