Search results

The aim was to identify the competencies professionals need to promote co-creation engagement within communities.

Co-creation could contribute to building community capacity to promote health. Professional development is key to support co-creative practices. Participants were professionals in a position to promote co-creation processes in health-promoting welfare settings across Denmark, Portugal, France and United Kingdom. An overarching unstructured topic guide was used within interviews, focus groups, questionnaires and creative activities.

The need to develop competencies to promote co-creation was high across all countries. Creating a common understanding of co-creation and the processes involved to increase inclusivity, engagement and shared understanding was also necessary. Competencies included: How to run co-creation from the beginning of the process right through to evaluation, using feedback and communication throughout using an open action-oriented approach; initiating a perspective change and committing to the transformation of co-creation into a real-life process.

Overall, learning about underlying principles, process initiation, implementation and facilitation of co-creation were areas identified to be included within a co-creation training programme. This can be applied through the framework of enabling change, advocating for co-creative processes, mediating through partnership, communication, leadership, assessment, planning, implementation, evaluation and research, ethical values and knowledge of co-creative processes.

This study provides novel findings on the competencies needed for health promoting professionals to embed co-creative processes within their practice, and the key concerns that professionals with a position to mediate co-creation have in transferring the abstract term of co-creation into a real-world practice.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the construction of health knowledge in the Finnish national curriculum and recent Finnish health education textbooks, at primary and secondary levels of education. The authors examine the visual and textual content of the textbooks in an attempt to identify their pedagogical style and approach to health education.

The study is part of an international, European Union funded, FP6 STREP Project, Biohead‐Citizen. Conceptual health knowledge construction is analysed evaluating the emphasis placed on a biomedical model or on a health promotion ( HP) approach. Pedagogical style of the text and illustration is classified as either neutral, persuasive, participative or injunctive, out of which especially persuasive and participative reflect the constructionist approach.

The textbooks cover a wide range of health topics and meet the core contents of the national curriculum. The approach used was primarily that of HP and used a persuasive and participative approach. The pedagogical style of text, tasks and illustrations reflected current pedagogical thinking.

The study encourages future research to explore the effects of pedagogical construction on materials and learning in health education.

The paper usefully analyzes the pedagogical properties of recent Finnish health knowledge textbooks.

Health and education are inextricably linked. Health promotion sits somewhat uncomfortably within schools, often remaining a marginal aspect of teachers’ work. The purpose of this paper is to examine the compatibility of an HP-initiative with teacher professional identity.

A qualitative research design was adopted consisting of semi-structured interviews. In total, 49 teachers in two school districts in the Auvergne region in central France were interviewed in depth post having completed three years’ involvement in a health promoting schools initiative called “Learning to Live Better Together” (“Apprendre a Mieux Vivre Ensemble”).

Teachers in the study had a broad conceptualisation of their role in health promotion. In keeping with international trends, there was more success at classroom than at whole school level. While generally teachers can be reluctant to engage with health promotion, the teachers in this study identified having little difficulty in understanding their professional identity as health promoters and identified strong compatibility with the HP-initiative.

Teachers generally viewed professional development in health promotion in a positive light when its underlying values were commensurate with their own and when the context was seen as compatible with the school mission. The promotion of health in schools needs to be sensitive to professional identity and be tailored specifically to blend more successfully with current teacher identity and practice.

The promotion of health in schools needs to be sensitive to professional identity and be tailored specifically to blend more successfully with current teacher identity and practice.

A fully three‐dimensional model has been applied to an oil‐fired water tube boiler in order to predict the flow, temperature, mixture fraction, species concentrations and the heat flux distributions to the furnace walls. The partial differential equations governing conservation of mass, momentum and energy as well as those describing the combustion phenomena are discretized by a finite volume method and solved numerically. Radiative heat transfer is handled by the discrete transfer method. Predicted results are presented and compared with experimental data for the heat fluxes. The results have suggested that 3‐D models of the present kind can be used with some confidence for design calculations.

This study aims to explore the firm’s and country-level institutional forces that determine banks’ CSR reporting diversity, during the recent global financial crisis.

Specifically, this study assesses whether economic and institutional conditions explain CSR disclosure strategies used by 30 listed and unlisted banks from six countries in the context of the recent 2007/2008 global financial crisis. The annual reports and social responsibility reports of the largest banks in Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal were content analyzed.

The findings suggest that economic factors do not influence CSR disclosure. Institutional factors associated with the legal environment, industry self-regulation and the organization’s commitments in maintaining a dialogue with relevant stakeholders are crucial elements in explaining CSR reporting. Consistent with the Dillard et al.’s (2004) model, CSR disclosure by banks not only stems from institutional legitimacy processes, but also from strategic ones.

The findings highlight the importance of CSR regulation to properly monitor manager’s’ opportunistic use of CSR information and regulate the assurance activities (regarding standards, their profession or even the scope of assurance) to guarantee the proper credibility reliability of CSR information.

The study makes two major contributions. First, it extends and modifies the model used by Chih et al. (2010). Second, drawn on the new institutional sociology, this study develops a theoretical framework that combines the multilevel model of the dynamic process of institutionalization, transposition and deinstitutionalization of organizational practices developed by Dillard et al. (2004) with Campbell’s (2007) theoretical framework of socially responsible behavior. This theoretical framework incorporates a more inclusive social context, aligned with a more comprehensive sociology-based institutional theory (Dillard et al., 2004; Campbell, 2007), which has never been used in the CSR reporting literature hitherto.

The purpose is to analyse the nutritional adequacy and carbon footprint of intermediated meals provided to preschool children and primary-level students in a Portuguese municipality.

An observational cross-sectional study was conducted with a convenience sampling consisting of school snacks from a Portuguese municipality. The nutritional assessment used food labels and a Portuguese food composition table. The literature review for carbon footprint assessment was conducted by searching for the products under analysis or similar ones.

The results showed that 80% of snacks have a higher energy value than recommended. The majority of options are below recommendations for protein and fat and above recommendations for carbohydrates. The intermediated meals with more dairy products in composition have the highest carbon footprint. The carbon footprint included the packaging of the products, and it wasn't possible to determine the influence of non-food products.

This study has limitations in the fact that we do not know the carbon footprint of Portuguese products and we had to compare them with others, from different countries, with possibly different types of production.

Intermediate meals are inadequate, and the carbon footprint is higher when the intermediated meals include products of animal origin – the reason why the composition of intermediated meals should be redesigned considering the achievement of these targets.

The promotion of intermediated meals that promote the Mediterranean eating pattern contributes to health and well-being and is a vehicle for nutrition education and healthy food consumption in schools.

Many studies have been conducted to analyse the carbon footprint and environmental impact of school meals, but commonly lunch is the meal evaluated and the assessment of intermediated meals' impact is an open field.

Organizations are faced with increasing pressure to engage in sustainable development. There is an ongoing discussion on how to incorporate green thinking into lean management systems. This study aims to investigate configurations of lean and green supply chain management (GSCM) practices associated with high environmental performance.

The study uses survey data from a sample of Portuguese manufacturing firms and apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the data. This configurational technique allows to capture the synergetic effect of lean and GSCM practices and identify distinct combinations leading to the outcome of interest.

Seven configurations of lean and green practices are associated with high environmental performance. The implementation of lean practices is required in all configurations. Analysis of alternative combinations reveals trade-offs between lean initiatives and environmental goals. Four configurations require low level of implementation of pull production. In one configuration, high environmental performance is achieved with low implementation of statistical process control and without lean employee involvement.

This study expands the literature on lean management by identifying different strategies to integrate lean and GSCM practices to achieve high environmental performance.

The findings suggest different strategies to achieve high environmental performance. Managers need to selectively implement lean and green supply chain practices to achieve the desired combinatorial effect, which may require not to implement specific lean practices.

The study demonstrates the synergetic effects of lean and green practices on environmental performance using a configurational perspective. In addition, it identifies combinations that require a low level of implementation of specific lean practices.

Social factors can shape economic decisions. Corporate governance (CG) studies and guidelines usually neglect that the chief executive officer (CEO) and board members may be socially tied. This study investigates the effects of social ties between the CEO and board members on earnings management (EM).

The authors run a series of regressions using a sample of Brazilian companies listed on the Brazilian Stock Exchange [B]³ between 2011 and 2017 to assess the effect of the social ties between the CEO and board members on EM using a social ties index. The authors also employ five robustness tests to verify the consistency of results, including alternative proxies of EM and social ties and an estimation using fixed effects.

After developing and computing a social ties index between the CEOs and members of the board of directors (BD) and the fiscal council (FC), the study’s findings indicate that a significant level of social ties between the CEO and BD has a negative impact on EM. However, for FC members, the authors found non-significant results.

Unlike previous studies, the authors built a social tie index (STI) from five elements of social ties assessed in an environment with a two-tier board system. Results show that elements of social interactions and personal relationships can benefit the company, as a CEO's level of social ties with the BD reduces EM practices.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a worldwide health problem. Blood pressure (BP) and inflammation are well-established risk factors for the cardiovascular complications of T2DM. Genistein is known to improve endothelial dysfunction. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of genistein supplementation on BP, high-sensitive C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) and homocysteine (Hcy) levels in postmenopausal women with T2DM.

This randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial is conducted on postmenopausal women with T2DM. A total of 54 subjects aged between 47 and 69 years are divided into two groups. Participants in the genistein group (n = 28) are given two genistein capsules (each capsule contained 54 mg genistein) and those in the placebo group (n = 26) received two placebo capsules (each capsule contained 54 mg maltodextrin) daily for 12 weeks. General characteristics, BP, hs-CRP and Hcy levels are measured at the baseline and at the end of the trial.

Genistein supplementation resulted in a significant reduction in systolic BP (SBP) (p < 0.001), diastolic BP (DBP) (p = 0.020), mean arterial pressure (MAP) (p < 0.001), serum levels of hs-CRP (p = 0.005) and Hcy (p = 0.001) in genistein group compared with placebo group at the end of the study. Significant decreases are also found in SBP by 5.4%, p < 0.001, DBP by 6.7%, p < 0.001, MAP by 6.2%, p < 0.001, serum levels of hs-CRP by 47.0%, p = 0.015 and Hcy by 18.4%, p < 0.001 in the genistein supplemented group. No significant changes are observed in terms of all post-intervention values in the placebo group.

Genistein administration improved BP, hs-CRP and Hcy levels in postmenopausal women with T2DM and may be useful in control of some CVD risk factors in these subjects.