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For any bilateral or multilateral trade agreement to be effective, it is imperative that transparency and good governance form the mainstay for achieving parity and trust amongst the partners. This article highlights pressing issues facing the partners of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), analyzes some of the current areas of conflict and suggests action to reduce tensions and promote harmony, goodwill and cooperation. The legal framework for transparency and governance needs to be seen as fair in addition to providing a mechanism for the airing of grievances and resolving conflicts. The requirements include: disclosure of relevant information, reasons for appropriate policy enactment and application and provision of investor protection safeguards. Of special import is the dire need to deal with issues of corruption at all levels. It is recommended that a conference be held to discuss issues of transparency and accountability as an initial endeavour in understanding the dynamics involved.

The adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and digitization of health data over the past decade is ushering in the next generation of digital health tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve varied aspects of health system performance. The decade ahead is therefore shaping up to be one in which digital health becomes even more at the forefront of health care delivery – demanding the time, attention, and resources of health care leaders and frontline staff, and becoming inextricably linked with all dimensions of health care delivery. In this chapter, we look back and look ahead. There are substantive lessons learned from the first era of large-scale adoption of enterprise EHRs and ongoing challenges that organizations are wrestling with – particularly related to the tension between standardization and flexibility/customization of EHR systems and the processes they support. Managing this tension during efforts to implement and optimize enterprise systems is perhaps the core challenge of the past decade, and one that has impeded consistent realization of value from initial EHR investments. We describe these challenges, how they manifest, and organizational strategies to address them, with a specific focus on alignment with broader value-based care transformation. We then look ahead to the AI wave – the massive number of applications of AI to health care delivery, the expected benefits, the risks and challenges, and approaches that health systems can consider to realize the benefits while avoiding the risks.

Welcome to the second volume of Research Methodology in Strategy and Management. This book series’ mission is to provide a forum for critique, commentary, and discussion about key research methodology issues in the strategic management field. Strategic management relies on an array of complex methods drawn from various allied disciplines to examine how managers attempt to lead their firms toward success. The field is undergoing a rapid transformation in methodological rigor, and researchers face many new challenges about how to conduct their research and in understanding the implications that are associated with their research choices. For example, as the field progresses, what new methodologies might be best suited for testing the developments in thinking and theorizing? Many long-standing issues remain unresolved as well. What methodological challenges persist as we consider those matters? This book series seeks to bridge the gap between what researchers know and what they need to know about methodology. We seek to provide wisdom, insight, and guidance from some of the best methodologists inside and outside the strategic management field.

To test how responsiveness to key organizational stakeholders (owners, customers, employees) is related to organizational effectiveness (OE). Focused versus balanced strategies of responsiveness are compared.

Employs Boolean algebra to study performance of 69 companies in three industries over a ten‐year period. Responsiveness to key stakeholders and performance are measured using publicly available data provided by these organizations (Compustat by Standard & Poor's).

Provides evidence that balanced responsiveness to multiple constituencies is more likely to lead to high OE than focused responsiveness to a single one. Trade‐offs in responsiveness to key stakeholders are found supporting the idea that serving multiple interests is challenging. Most results are not industry‐specific – the usefulness of a balanced strategy of responsiveness may be generalized.

Responsiveness embraces organizational behaviors not covered by accounting information. Development of more comprehensive responsiveness measures may be a fruitful avenue for further research. Analyses are limited to a subset of key stakeholders and three industries.

Provides evidence that organizations avoiding extreme unresponsiveness to any of its key stakeholders are more effective. Aiming for above‐average responsiveness to any constituency only pays off if no other constituency simultaneously enjoys below‐average responsiveness.

This article develops a comprehensive methodological framework to assess strategies comparing balanced versus focused responsiveness to multiple organizational constituencies. Empirical results should be of relevance to strategy practitioners and scholars alike.

This paper aims to, drawing from Adorno et al.’s (1950) The Authoritarian Personality, explain why some workers reject participation in decision-making on principle, preferring instead to defer to managerial authority and remain silent.

The paper reviews the literatures on employee voice and silence and then builds a conceptual framework that can be used to explain employee silence in relation to personality structures.

It is argued that some employees have personality structures that make them more susceptible to anti-democratic thoughts. Potentially fascistic personalities, as measured by the F-scale, are expected to derive pleasure in submission to the will of management.

The paper has implications for political and social psychologists, especially those seeking to understand how best to promote employee voice in the workplace.

This study makes an original contribution to the employee voice and silence literatures by being among the first of its kind to examine the political psychology of fascism in the micro-context of the workplace.

This paper adopts a modified Taguchi approach to develop empirical relationships to the performance characteristics (output responses) in terms of process variables and demonstrated their validity through comparison of test data. The method suggests a few tests as per the orthogonal array and provides complete information for all combinations of levels and process variables. This method also provides the estimated range of output responses so that the scatter in the repeated tests can be assessed prior to the tests.

In order to obtain defect-free products meeting the required specifications, researchers have conducted extensive experiments using powder bed fusion (PBF) process measuring the performance indicators (namely, relative density, surface roughness and hardness) to specify a set of printing parameters (namely, laser power, scanning speed and hatch spacing). A simple and reliable multi-objective optimization method is considered in this paper for specifying a set of optimal process parameters with SS316 L powder. It was reported that test samples printed even with optimal set of input variables revealed irregular shaped, microscopic porosities and improper melt pool formation.

Finally, based on detailed analysis, it is concluded that it is impossible to express the performance indicators, explicitly in terms of equivalent energy density (E_0ˆ*), which is a combination of multiple sets of selective laser melting (SLM) process parameters, with different performance indicators. Empirical relations for the performance indicators are developed in terms of SLM process parameters. Test data are within/close to the expected range.

Based on extensive analysis of the SS316 L data using modified Taguchi approach, the optimized process parameters are laser power = 298 W, scanning speed = 900 mm/s and hatch distance = 0.075 mm, for which the results of surface roughness = 2.77 Ra, relative density = 99.24%, hardness = 334 Hv and equivalent energy density is 4.062. The estimated data for the same are surface roughness is 3.733 Ra, relative density is 99.926%, hardness is 213.64 Hv and equivalent energy density is 3.677.

Even though equivalent energy density represents the energy input to the process, the findings of this paper conclude that energy density should no longer be considered as a dependent process parameter, as it provides multiple results for the specified energy density. This aspect has been successfully demonstrated in this paper using test data.