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Relational autonomy proposes that persons are socially embedded, with decisions being made within social relationships. Through this theoretical lens, this article explores how the healthcare professional–patient relationship can affect pregnant women’s decisions to accept pertussis and influenza vaccines.

Hackney was chosen as the study site as it has very low vaccine uptake rates. In-depth interviews were conducted with 40 pregnant and recently pregnant women, as well as 10 healthcare professionals. Interviews explored experiences of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) health care and views towards vaccination in pregnancy. An observation of a consultation between a pregnant patient and her General Practitioners (GPs) was also conducted in order to understand how the vaccination discussion takes place.

The findings of this study indicate that advice from friends and family can greatly influence a pregnant woman’s vaccination decisions. The patient’s social context, including influences on her decisions, must be understood by healthcare professionals, so that discussions about concerns can take place. If close relationships with patients are formed, healthcare professional advice is more likely to be trusted. With support from healthcare professionals, patients feel competent, empowered to make the right decision for them, and are more likely to vaccinate.

This research will help to inform contextualised policies aimed at increasing vaccination acceptance and reducing inequality in access to vaccination during pregnancy in Hackney.

To the author’s knowledge, this chapter is the first to apply the theory of relational autonomy to views towards maternal vaccination and decision making. It provides valuable insights into how healthcare professionals’ interactions with their pregnant patients can influence vaccination acceptance. The chapter contains advice on how both healthcare professionals and policy-makers can include mothers in vaccine decision-making processes in more personalised ways, by adopting a dialogue that appreciates and understands the social processes around vaccination concerns.

This chapter analyses the current situation and perceptions of quality assurance (QA) in adult education (AE) in Latvia. In the Latvian context, QA in AE is a challenge. According to recent studies, QA should have a formative character in order to facilitate targeted benefits for adult learners, whereas in practice AE in Latvia is more focussed on the institutional perspective rather than the individual’s needs and wishes. This is in contrast with the humanistic approach to adult learning and andragogy principles, which emphasise learner-centred education. The aim of the chapter is to research opportunities for improving the QA process in AE in Latvia in order to increase personal benefits for an individual. The systematic review of scholarly papers, monographs, scientific reports on QA in AE conducted in Latvia in the twenty-first century indicated a contradiction between the theoretical concepts applied to AE in Latvia and the implementation of the QA process in practice. This chapter contributes to the overall understanding of the terminology used in AE in the country, analyses the prevailing concepts and elaborates conclusions for QA improvements based on humanistic pedagogy principles.

Poverty has many varying negative effects on the health and well-being of those enduring it. Specifically, in the world of education, regardless of the many educational reform efforts over the last 50 plus years, poverty results in markedly lower achievement regardless of the metric used to determine academic success. Through this work we hope to shine light on the wealth gap in contemporary American society and the academic achievement gap that is an inevitable consequence of this inequitable concentration of monetary means. We review various literature sources to illustrate this problem and propose possible research-based solutions to ameliorate this societal ill. Using our previous works which resulted in the creation of the theoretical foundational framework of Critical Determination, we identify tangible steps that PreK-16 professionals can readily apply in an effort to minimize the current wealth gap and correlating achievement gap experienced by many students on the margins of the American public education system.

Race has played a central role in state-building in Latin America. This chapter foregrounds the role of transnational racialization politics in bureaucratic development in the region in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing the transformation of the Bolivian diplomatic bureaucracy following the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), I argue that the circulation in Europe and the Americas of racial discourses on Bolivia that cast doubt on its place among the concert of civilized nations motivated its reform and expansion. This study suggests that, given the potential costs of transnational racialization threats, states across the region developed agencies and practices that expanded their capacity to manage their racialized national images among international audiences. Against the threat of racialized imperialism and colonialism, Bolivian liberal reformers envisioned a diplomatic bureaucracy capable of negotiating Bolivia's place in the global racial imaginary abroad. This study emphasizes the central role of the diplomatic bureaucracy as a condition of possibility in these projects and directs attention to the role of race in the development of state agencies less commonly associated with race, such as diplomacy.

Many instructors have implemented decision-based learning (DBL) into their courses. This chapter is a careful qualitative analysis of the narratives in this book done by the editors. The author found common themes among all the narratives. The first theme was that many instructors discovered that they were missing conditional knowledge in their instruction. Second, the author found common issues around the complexity of designing an expert decision model (EDM). Included in this theme are stories about selecting problems and organizing the EDM, building the EDM around specific course learning outcomes, providing just-enough, just-in-time instruction, and introducing the decision model and software to students. Instructors also discovered that assessing the learning of students needed to go beyond traditional goals and began to include new goals related to conditional knowledge. Finally, the author describes the comments made by both faculty and students about the experience of using DBL. Several authors described the value of using DBL in the process of taking students from novice thinkers to expert thinkers. Many students expressed that they enjoyed the process that DBL presented to them and that they had a new level of confidence to be able to approach problems in the content area. Summaries and quotes from the chapters in this book are referenced by the authors’ names and the content areas they were teaching.

This study seeks to investigate a nonlinear relationship between the uncertainty associated with an economic exchange and trust.

This study uses data from 191 respondents representing middle and senior management in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry in the USA and Canada to achieve the research purpose. Respondents completed a questionnaire designed to assess their firm's attitude towards their counterpart. A select number of executives were also interviewed. Measures were developed to assess inter‐firm trust, relational intensity and uncertainty.

The study showed that a certain amount of uncertainty is necessary for trust to emerge. Beyond some threshold, however, increases in uncertainty led to a reduction in trust. This midrange proposition suggests that there may be an optimal level of trust.

First, the findings show that a focus on the structural aspects of exchange can yield additional understandings of trust. Current research has tended to focus overwhelmingly on relational determinants of trust. Second, the nonlinear relationship between uncertainty and trust should spur additional research on the conditions that lead to trust failure. Finally, the findings may provide a starting point for reconciling two opposing explanations of the governance of economic exchange, namely social exchange and transaction cost theory. The study had some limitations. First, the research used cross‐sectional data and took a snapshot measure of trust. Second, single informants were relied on as the main data source. However, steps were taken to reduce the harmful effects of relying on single informants to collect the data.

The study demonstrated that the structure of an exchange could be a limit to the creation of trust. This implies that actors should focus on both behaviors and the nature of the exchange itself to understand when trust is likely to emerge, and the conditions under which trust may fail. The study also suggests that actors should approach trust as one of strategic thinking. There are costs to creating trust and, unless it is determined that trust is important (reasonable levels of uncertainty), actors should not invest in trust creation. At the same time, beyond a certain level of uncertainty, it will be prudent to think of other control measures to reduce opportunism in an exchange relationship.

This study has shown that the structure of an exchange, specifically uncertainty, provides a useful conceptual link to trust. The present research bridged some of the gaps in the understanding of inter‐organizational trust by proposing and empirically testing a midrange hypothesis linking uncertainty and trust. The study also increases understanding of the structural limits to trust. This study may be one of the first to test this midrange hypothesis. The study may also provide groundwork for linking two opposing theories on the governance of exchange. Findings from this research should prove useful to management researchers and practitioners.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of trust in the relationships and long‐term commitment between partners in strategic alliances. A framework is developed for better understanding the role of trust in the performance of strategic alliances in a cross‐cultural context.

The empirical findings of this study are gathered from structured and unstructured interviews with some key actors involved in the process of forming strategic alliances in their own organizations; a case study of the oil industry in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which illustrates this is analysed. Qualitative analysis is conducted to assess the role of trust in this cross‐cultural context.

It was noted that building trust between partners helped to avoid bureaucratic obstructions and enhanced the decision making process in the UAE. It was found that trust helped partners to exchange resources faster, devote more funds to the venture and exchange knowledge and information smoothly. The results clearly show that trust plays an important role in building well‐functioning relationships in the oil and gas industry.

This study is limited to the UAE and can be generalized to other similar cultural contexts only to a certain extent. Future research should consider the same parameters in order to fully generalize the results to other industries.

The paper presents a case study of the nature and characteristics of partners in the oil and gas industry, which may be applied to other similar industries. It is hoped that presenting practical tools for understanding the function of trust in strategic alliance performance may be useful.

This framework makes two major contributions; first, it explores a subject which has been under‐researched in the literature, that is, the issue of trust between partners of strategic alliances in a developing context; and, second, it leads to a set of recommendations and benchmarks the practitioners in the UAE and similar contexts to help them increase the trust between partners in strategic alliances.

Research on corporate entrepreneurship (CE) has grown rapidly over the past decade (for reviews, see Dess et al., 2003). This interest in CE stems from rising international competition, requiring companies to learn new skills and develop new competencies (Eisemhardt & Santos, 2003). These competencies enable companies to compete in new market arenas both at home and internationally, creating value for shareholders (McGrath, MacMillan & Venkataraman, 1995). With more and more companies focusing on international expansion, recent research on CE has focused on examining international issues. Though most past research is comparative in nature, some has investigated companies’ international expansion as a forum within which CE activities unfold (Zahra & Garvis, 2000).