Search results

Working mothers experienced dramatic changes to their daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many began to work from home as they simultaneously tried to balance work demands with tending to their children. The purpose of the current study was to examine working mothers’ experiences during the pandemic.

In order to examine working mothers’ experiences of telework during the pandemic, we conducted a focus group study. 45 working mothers participated, and they answered questions about their experiences.

Three themes emerged from the focus groups: (1) motivation shifts amongst working mothers; (2) difficulty balancing roles as mother and employee; and (3) workplace expectations and support. Many mothers reported that their overall motivation as employees had decreased and that they experienced difficulty in fully attending to their work and their child(ren)’s needs. As mothers navigated the stress of working during the pandemic, they reported varying levels of workplace support and many credited working with other parents as a primary contributor to feeling supported.

The findings from the current study add to the growing body of literature documenting the dark side of teleworking for mothers who struggled immensely with work–life balance. This study builds on past research by allowing mothers to share their experiences in their own words and offering suggestions for how organizations can support mothers in navigating these ongoing challenges as teleworking continues to remain prevalent. The narratives collected hold important implications for practices and policies to best support the needs of mothers as they continue to work and care for their children within the home.

The purpose of this review paper was identifying barriers to the use of telemedicine systems in primary health-care individual level among professionals.

This study used Scopus and PubMed databases for scientific records identification. A systematic review of the literature structured by PRISMA guidelines was conducted on 37 included papers published between 2009 and 2019. A qualitative approach was used to synthesize insights into using telemedicine by primary care professionals.

Three barriers were identified and classified: system quality, data quality and service quality barriers. System complexity in terms of usability, system unreliability, security and privacy concerns, lack of integration and inflexibility of systems-in-use are related to system quality. Data quality barriers are data inaccuracy, data timeliness issues, data conciseness concerns and lack of data uniqueness. Finally, service reliability concerns, lack of technical support and lack of user training have been categorized as service quality barriers.

This review identified and mapped emerging themes of barriers to the use of telemedicine systems. This paper also through a new conceptualization of telemedicine use from perspectives of the primary care professionals contributes to informatics literature and system usage practices.

In this viewpoint article, the authors recognize the increased focus in health systems on co-design for innovation and change. This article explores the role of leaders and mangers in developing and enhancing a culture of trust in their organizations to enable co-design, with the potential to drive innovation and change in healthcare.

Using social science analyses, the authors argue that current co-design literature has limited focus on interactions between senior leaders and managers, and healthcare staff and service users in supporting co-designed innovation and change. The authors draw on social and health science studies of trust to highlight how the value-based co-design process needs to be supported and enhanced. We outline what co-design innovation and change involve in a health system, conceptualize trust and reflect on its importance within the health system, and finally note the role of senior leaders and managers in supporting trust and responsiveness for co-designed innovation and change.

Healthcare needs leaders and managers to embrace co-design that drives innovation now and in the future through people – leading to better healthcare for society at large. As authors we argue that it is now the time to shift our focus on the role of senior managers and leaders to embed co-design into health and social care structures, through creating and nurturing a culture of trust.

Building public trust in the health system and interpersonal trust within the health system is an ongoing process that relies upon personal behavior of managers and senior leaders, organizational practices within the system, as well as political processes that underpin these practices. By implementing managerial, leadership and individual practices on all levels, senior managers and leaders provide a mechanism to increase both trust and responsiveness for co-design that supports innovation and change in the health system.

Many countries have a significant vaccination hesitancy rate regardless of vaccine prosperity. This study aims to identify factors restricting hesitancy and fostering vaccination intention and uptake against coronavirus in Vietnam.

The study has proposed an extended COM-B model based on the Theoretical Domains Framework to explore critical factors influencing vaccination intention and uptake in Vietnam. A database was collected from 1,015 suitable respondents who had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and ten hypotheses were tested by the partial least squares structural equation model.

The findings showed that six factors, including knowledge, experience, resource, social influence, belief and reinforcement, have either direct or indirect positive effects on COVID-19 vaccine uptake behavior. The output also indicated that personal experience positively affects vaccination intention and uptake.

This study contributes to understanding COVID-19 vaccine uptake behavior by identifying several direct and indirect factors of the extended COM-B model that include “knowledge” and “reinforcement” in shaping behavior change. The study adds to the literature on COVID-19 vaccine uptake behavior and could help achieve higher vaccination rates, ultimately leading to better control of the pandemic.

The lean startup approach (LSA) is extensively utilized by early-stage entrepreneurs, with “pivot” serving as a key pillar. However, there is a research gap concerning the boundary conditions impacting LSA and pivot decisions, especially when addressing societal challenges, as in the context of transformational entrepreneurship. In this regard, the healthcare sector, further compounded by a lack of research on startups and scale-ups, presents an embraced opportunity to provide multiple contributions for both theory and practice.

The present investigation employs a grounded approach to explore the experiences of the co-founders of a fast-growing Italian e-health startup. A narrative strategy was employed to organize conditions and evolving strategic action/interactions into three different pivoting phases of the startup – before the pivot, its enactment and aftermath – with primary and secondary data collected over a period of one year.

Pivoting in digital healthcare unfolded as a liminal experience marked by factors such as high regulation, multiple stakeholders, technological and symbolic ambivalence, resource-intensive demands and institutional actors acting as pathway pioneers, leading to an information overload and unforeseeable uncertainty to manage. These factors challenge entrepreneurs' ability to attain optimal distinctiveness, presenting the paradoxical need for vertical flexibility for scaling up.

By uniquely illuminating the sector’s constraints on entrepreneurial phenomena, this study provides a valuable guide for entrepreneurs and institutional actors in addressing societal challenges.

This study introduces a process model of transformational information crafting when pivoting, highlighting the role of entrepreneurs' transformational stance and platform-mediated solutions as engines behind strategies involving information breaking and transition, preceding knowledge-driven integration strategies.

The psychological foundations of consumers’ reasons for product choices are analyzed in the field of marketing. The purpose of this research is to identify the implicit reasons for white meat consumption in the UK and Turkey.

In the scope of the means-end chain theory, in-depth interviews were conducted with individuals, and the reasons for consumers’ product preferences were revealed by moving from concrete to abstract.

It has been determined that the white meat consumption of Muslims in the UK is primarily shaped by their religious approach. In Turkey, on the contrary, both consumption patterns and reasons for preference are changing. It has been found that white meat consumption is associated with values such as security needs, satisfaction with life, self-fulfillment and happiness.

This research has contributed to the marketing literature by examining consumers’ implicit consumption reasons for white meat in the context of religion and culture.

Marketing strategies should focus on building trust in halal certification, particularly in the UK. Brands should associate their promotion strategies with feelings of security and happiness, which are associated in the minds of consumers.

This study is a new study in terms of revealing the connotations of consumers about consuming chicken and fish and showing the implicit needs that the brands can emotionally associate with.

This study aims to examine how the theory of planned behaviour and technology acceptance theory can be used to understand the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). The relationships between attitudes, behavioural intentions towards using NPIs, actual use of NPIs and word-of-mouth (WOM) were examined and compared between early and late adopters.

A survey was conducted to test the hypotheses with partial least squares structural equation modelling (n = 278).

The results indicate that relationships between attitudes, intentions and behavioural intentions were positive and significant in the whole data set – and that there were differences between the early and late adopters. WOM had no substantial relationship with actual usage and early adopters’ behavioural intentions.

This research gives a better sense of how WOM impacts attitudes, behavioural intentions and actual usage among early and late adopters of NPIs and highlights the effectiveness of WOM, especially among late adopters of NPIs. Furthermore, using the TAM allows us to make specific recommendations regarding encouraging the use of NPIs. A new three-stage communications model is introduced that uses early adopters as influencers to reduce the NPI adoption time by late adopters.

This paper aims to introduce a growth comprehensive pattern to explain the phenomenon of individual foreign investment, first at the global level and then at the regional level. The patterns are developed based on a number of main theories with grounded theory (GT) as the foundation, distributed on the two pull and push forces of international business theory and migration theory; simultaneously, it is classified on the three levels (attribute–consequence–value [ACV]) of means-end theory.

An embedded method is applied to generate two complementary datasets from two approaches: in-depth interviews and secondary data analysis.

In this structure, the investor plays a central role as the decision-maker based on the entrepreneur's motives for internationalization (economics-driven and psychology-driven factors) and the householders' motives for emigration (aspiration and access capabilities). The external forces considered are a push from the home country (structures) and pull from the host country (immigrant investment programs [IIPs]), in which the factor of (dis)trust/misconception as a moderator has an additional impact on this mobility. Demographic factors such as gender, region, generation/age, level of education, religion and occupation generally describe the characteristics of each specific target group.

This paper is to develop a conceptual framework.

The results of this study, in addition to fulfilling its own objectives, will also serve as the foundation for further research in several scientific fields such as economics, sociology and politics.

The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-12-2022-0786

Although there is a growing body of work on immigrants' information behavior, little is known about the pre-arrival information experiences of immigrants who consult formal information sources such as immigration agents. Drawn from a larger study on the information behavior of immigrants, this paper mainly reports the semi-structured interview findings on the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants who used formal information sources with discussion on how that affected their post-arrival settlement into Canada.

The study used a mixed method approach with semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and surveys (n = 205) with participants who arrived in Canada between the years of 1971 and 2017. Data were collected from May 2017 to February 2018.

Although the overall scope of the original study is much larger, this paper features findings on the pre-arrival information experiences derived mainly from an analysis of interview data. This study provides insights into the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants consulting formal information sources such as immigration firms, individual immigration consultants and more formal government agencies. The author introduces a new concept of “information crafting” by exploring the negative consequences of selective information sharing by immigration consultants/agents in newcomers' settlements in Canada, primarily positive information about life in Canada, sometimes with exaggeration and falsification. The interview participants shared story after the story of the settlement challenges they faced after arriving in Canada and how the expectations they built through the information received from immigration consultants and government agencies did not match after arrival. This study emphasizes the importance of providing comprehensive information about life in Canada to potential newcomers so that they can make informed decisions even before they apply.

The findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. This study provides insights into the complicated culturally situated pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants. Moreover, the study findings encourage researchers in various disciplines, including psychology, migration studies and geography, to delve more deeply into newcomers' information experiences using an informational lens to examine the information newcomers receive from diverse sources and their effects on their post-arrival settlement in a new country. The study challenges the general assumptions that formal information sources are always reputable, useful, and comprehensive, and it provides some future directions for research that seeks to understand the culturally situated information behavior of diverse immigrant groups.