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The monograph analyses (a) the potential impact of information technology (IT) on organisational issues that directly concern the personnel function; (b) the nature of personnel’s involvement in the decision making and activities surrounding the choice and implementation of advanced technologies, and (c) their own use of IT in developing and carrying out their own range of specialist activities. The monograph attempts to explain why personnel’s involvement is often late, peripheral and reactive. Finally, an analysis is made of whether personnel specialists – or the Human Resource Management function more generally – will play a more proactive role in relation to such technologies in the future.

Legal standards that allow teens to make health care decisions, or any important decisions, must account for the contingency and variability of minors’ capacity. Traditional law denied minors’ legal authority to make any decisions, giving all power to parents. This rule goes too far; the Supreme Court has held that minors have constitutionally protected autonomy-based rights, and modern views about adolescence are inconsistent with the rule. The question is how and where to draw lines.

Legal standards are based on minors’ evolving maturity, policy favoring decisions that follow medical advice, and policy supporting parental authority. This paper uses four hard cases to show how these considerations factor into legal rules.

The existing literature on emotion regulation strategies provides important insights with regards to intrapersonal strategies for emotion regulation. However, in pointing out the limitations of intrapersonal emotion regulation models, it has been suggested that emotion regulation is not confined to intrapersonal processes and the complex social networks that humans form are intricately connected to their emotions. The previous work on financial traders has recognized the relevance of emotions in trading, focusing only on intrapersonal emotion regulation strategies. In this chapter, drawing on the author’s previous research on emotions in trading as well as existing research on social sharing of emotions and interpersonal emotion regulation, interpersonal emotion regulation strategies in the work of financial traders are identified. In doing so, an existing definition of interpersonal emotion regulation is extended and it is argued that while the pursuit of a regulatory goal is paramount, the benefits of interpersonal regulation may be achieved even in the absence of live social interaction, as long as labeling of the affective state takes place. The chapter concludes with a model summarizing intra–interpersonal emotion regulation processes.

In March 2007 the Chief Medical Officer called for a major improvement in public and professional engagement with venous thromboembolism (VTE) prevention. Key to his recommendations for hospitals was a new requirement for a documented mandatory (VTE) risk assessment on every hospitalised patient. The purpose of this paper is to describe how one acute Trust responded to this call using regular Trust‐wide audit as a driver for change. The Trust now has evidence of sustained and ongoing improvement in compliance with documented VTE risk assessment and this has been associated with a reduction in the number and severity of VTE events.

The paper examines the approach that one Trust took to ensure that a documented VTE Risk Assessment is carried out on all hospitalised patients and that appropriate measures are taken to reduce the incidence of VTE events.

In March 2008, prior to the project, audit demonstrated that 15 per cent of patients had a documented risk assessment for VTE. After a VTE Implementation Working Group was set up and new assessment tools were piloted, evaluated, amended and re‐launched together with Trust‐wide education and general awareness‐raising sessions, the number of patients receiving a documented risk assessment has risen to a cross‐institutional average of 75 per cent.

The paper gives evidence that a planned approach, with simple practical tools, broad clinical engagement and intensive education delivered “at the coal‐face” can result in a systematic change in professional practice across a Trust.

I investigate the efficacy of adopting two mental aptitudes in the financial industry: mindfulness and compassion.

A conceptual link is drawn between the powerful mental acuteness obtained from practicing Mindfulness (defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn) and Ruthless Compassion (defined by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoché) and the pursuit of a noble purpose for finance, which is to channel resources into the most deserving social and/or economic activities that raise community and societal welfare.

These techniques allow decision-makers to reach new levels of awareness, giving them a competitive advantage for instance in terms of avoiding behavioral traps. Making money remains an important by-product of financial services, but not the overriding or sole criterion. An interview of Solomon Halpern, longstanding disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoché, expert in Buddhist meditation, and president of Highlander Wealth Services, illustrates how these mental tools are applied for running a small US equity fund.

The present study provides a starting point for further survey research on how these practices are becoming adopted in the industry.

This chapter is the first to analyze the impact of both ruthless compassion and mindfulness in the business of finance not only in terms of raised morality but also as an added tool to resolve informational asymetries proper to the finance business.

The thinking of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza is gradually entering the field of social science. In this paper, we are particularly interested in applying his theory of affects to the analysis of passionate collective behaviours at work in the field of financial markets. The general hypothesis that underpins our work is the idea that, in a context of radical uncertainty about the future, the succession of common affect regimes translates into passionate sequences that determine investor behaviour and produce market dynamics. Using an analysis of the stock market cycles of Taffler, Bellotti, and Agarwal (2018), Taffler, Agarwal, and Wang (2019), we show that the Spinozist concept of common affects can help us to understand the mechanisms in the production of collective emotion and to account for the speculative dynamics at the origin of the great financial bubbles.

This paper provides an exploratory examination of the growing phenomenon of secondary management buy‐outs and buy‐ins, where an enterprise having initially been bought out by management is later the subject of a second buy‐out or buy‐in. Such transactions provide a further dimension to the exit opportunities available to venture capital investors and also to the maintenance of independent entrepreneurial businesses. The paper uses large scale data to test propositions relating to the expected differences between secondary buy‐outs and buy‐ins and buy‐outs and buy‐ins in general as well as detailed case study evidence from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to examine the rationale for such transactions. The quantitative data suggest that secondary buy‐outs and buy‐ins are more likely to involve enterprises in traditional industrial sectors and are significantly more likely to occur a longer time after the initial buy‐out than are trade sales or flotations. The case study evidence reveals that secondary buy‐outs and buy‐ins can arise for various reasons but are rarely the first choice exit route for venture capitalists, though they provide a means by which entrepreneurs can maintain the enterprise’s independent private existence.

This paper aims to identify the expressions and flows of tacit knowledge in the unstructured decision process. In this type of process, decision-makers use not only the explicit knowledge but also aspects such as intuition, experience and other forms of tacit knowledge. The research developed a qualitative approach, through a study of multiple cases, and applied semi-structured interviews to ten executives. The analysis of data was carried out according to Flores (1994) interpretative analysis of text technique. Results indicated that there was the insertion of tacit knowledge in all unstructured decision-making routines. It was also detected the need to explicitly add the routine of evaluation to the Mintzberg et al.’s (1976) model as elements of tacit knowledge were also identified at this stage of the decision-making process.

The research has taken a qualitative approach, through a study of multiple cases, applying semi-structured interviews to ten executives. The analysis of data was carried out according to technique for interpretative analysis of the text.

Results indicated that there was tacit knowledge in all unstructured decision-making routines. Also detected was the need to explicitly add the routine of evaluation to the model.

It was unable to perform psychological studies to investigate the deepest cognitive and emotional aspects of managers, and it does not address, in depth, some issues that are related to tacit knowledge in decisions and that would be considered relevant.

Although this research was unable to dissect the composition of tacit knowledge in unstructured decision process, a better understanding of the aspects that make up the knowledge in question has been developed, providing some decision-making guidelines to managers.

The language between communications actors can share decision-making rules to assist in the production and process of arguments necessary for the debate, evaluation and attribution of institutionally recurrent decisions.

The original contribution is present in a detailed description of the expressions of flows of tacit knowledge in unstructured decision-making processes, based on the model of Mintzberg et al. (1976). From the influence of tacit knowledge, it was found that the model in question needs to consider the relevance of the evaluation phase, as a stage equivalent to the other described by Mintzberg et al. (1976). These aspects have been better explained in the introduction and conclusion. Participant observation was not possible because the decision had already been taken by the informant at the moment of the interviews.