Search results

A common way to handle quality problems and increasing costs of modern health care systems is more transparency through public reporting. Thereby, patient satisfaction is seen as one main reported outcome. Previous studies proposed several associated factors. Only a few of them included organizational determinants with potential to inform the health care provider's management. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the influence of organizational contingency factors on patient satisfaction.

As a case, Switzerland's inpatient rehabilitation sector was used. Therein, a cross-sectional study of public released secondary data with an exploratory multiple linear regression (MLR) modeling approach was conducted.

Five significant influencing factors on patient satisfaction were found. They declared 42.2% of the variance in satisfaction on provider level. The organizations' supplementary insured patients, staff payment, outpatients, extracantonal patients and permanent resident population revealed significant correlations with patient satisfaction.

Drawing on publicly available cross-sectional data, statistically no causality can be proved. However, integration of routine data and organization theory can be useful for further studies.

Regarding inpatient satisfaction, improvement levers for providers' managers are as follow: first, service provision should be customized to patients' needs, expectations and context; second, employees' salary should be adequate to prevent dissatisfaction; third, the main business should be prioritized to avoid frittering.

Former studies regarding public reporting are often atheoretical and rarely used organizational variables as determinants for relevant outcomes. Therefore, uniformed data are useful.

Different age groups display different shopping patterns in terms of how and where consumers buy products. During times of crisis, such behavioural differences become even more striking yet remain under-researched with respect to elderly consumers. This paper investigates the impact of age on retail-related behavioural changes and behavioural stability of elderly shoppers (in comparison to younger consumers) during a crisis.

The authors surveyed 643 Austrian consumers to assess the impact of perceived threat on behavioural change and the moderating effect of age groups. Based on findings from this survey, they subsequently conducted 51 semi-structured interviews to understand the causes of behavioural change and behavioural stability during a crisis.

Elderly shoppers display more stable shopping behaviour during a crisis compared to younger consumers, which is influenced by perceived threat related to the crisis. Such findings indicate that elderly shoppers reinforce their learnt and embedded shopping patterns. The causes of change and stability in behaviour include environmental and inter-personal factors.

Through the lens of social cognitive theory, protection motivation theory and dual process theory, this research contributes to an improved understanding of changes in shopping behaviour of elderly consumers, its antecedents and consequences during a time of crisis. The authors reveal reasons that lead to behavioural stability, hence the absence of change, in terms of shopping during a crisis. They further outline implications for retailers that might wish to better respond to shopping behaviours of the elderly.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation of the predominance of austerity policies in Europe based on distinct crisis narratives and their underlying market metaphors in public speeches and addresses of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to a broader audience of economic decision-makers.

The author uses discourse and metaphor analysis of speeches and addresses of Angela Merkel in the aftermath of the crisis applying cognitive metaphor theory in combination with a corpus linguistic approach.

Dominant conceptual metaphors in Merkel’s crisis narrative subordinate policy-making to superior “market mechanisms”, which are attributed with human and natural characteristics. Moral focus of crisis narrative of “living-beyond-ones-means” forces austerity policies.

The analysis is restricted to public speeches of Merkel, whereas the impact on public discourses was not analyzed.

The paper offers an explanation for the prevalence of neoliberal policies in the Eurozone and the uneven balances of political power in public economic discourses.

Study of the role of “market metaphors” in crisis narratives of influential political leaders as well as an analysis of the impact of discursive manifestations and conceptual market metaphors for economic crisis policies.

The past decade has witnessed a growing interest in vehicular networking and its myriad applications. The initial view of practitioners and researchers was that radio‐equipped vehicles can keep the drivers informed about potential safety risks and can enhance their awareness of road conditions and traffic‐related events. This conceptual paper seeks to put forth a novel vision, namely that advances in vehicular networks, embedded devices, and cloud computing can be used to set up what are known as vehicular clouds (VCs).

The paper suggests that VCs are technologically feasible and that they are likely to have a significant societal impact.

The paper argues that at least in some of its manifestations, the ideas behind VCs are eminently implementable under present day technology. It is also expected that, once adopted and championed by municipalities and third‐party infrastructure providers, VCs will redefine the way in which pervasive computing and its myriad applications is thought of.

This is a new concept for which a small‐scale prototype is being built. No large‐scale prototype exists at the moment.

VCs are a novel concept motivated by the realization of the fact that, most of the time, the tremendous amount of computing and communication resources available in vehicles is underutilized. Putting these resources to work in a meaningful way should have a significant societal impact.

The main goal of this paper is to introduce and promote the concept of VCs, a non‐trivial extension, along several dimensions, of the by‐now “classic” cloud computing. The paper shows that the concept of VCs is feasible as of today – at least in some of its manifestations – and that it can have a significant societal impact in the years to come.

The idea of a VC is novel and so are the potential applications that are discussed in the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the ageing behaviour of acrylate‐based resins for stereolithography (SL) technology using different test methods and to investigate these effects on polymers.

Controlling the polymer degradation requires an understanding of many different phenomena, including the different chemical mechanisms underlying structural changes in polymer macromolecules, the influences of polymer morphology, the complexities of oxidation chemistry and the complex reaction pathways of polymer additives. Several ageing characterization experiments are given.

The paper covers the ageing process analysis of acrylate‐based polymers. An overview of the ageing behaviour is given, along with the bandwidth of material characteristics for a prolonged lifetime of this material class.

For research and development in the field of rapid prototyping (RP) materials data about ageing behaviour and environmental effects are crucial. The authors show possible methods for measuring these effects and discuss the consequences in material research using a recently developed biocompatible SL resin as an example.

The study of the ageing behaviour of polymers is important for understanding their usability, storage, lifetime and recycling. The presented polymeric formulations are able to meet the growing demand for both soft and stiff manufacturing resin materials in the engineering and medical fields.

The analysis of the ageing behaviour of polymer materials is an important issue for engineering applications, recycling of post‐consumer plastic waste, as well as the use of polymers as biological implants and matrices for drug delivery and the lifetime of an article. The paper gives an overview of details involving ageing behaviour and their meaning for applications of acrylate‐based SL resins and is therefore of high importance to people with interest in long‐term behaviour and ageing of RP materials.

This paper aims to unfold and emphasise the relevance of sustainability and time as research topics in media and communication research and discusses the relation of both phenomena with a focus on processes of media appropriation and media consumption.

The submission argues theoretically. Firstly, theories on sustainability and media and media and time are presented. Secondly, previous approaches from research on sustainable media use will be discussed. Finally, the authors call for a stronger accentuation of research on digital media, time, and sustainability.

The submission shows that previous research on sustainable media use does sufficiently take individual and social time experience into account. Moreover, research is too much focussed on the individual level. The authors therefore argue for three major conceptual changes in research on digital sustainability: time is a sustainable human resource; a shift of perspective from individual to relations is needed; and consideration of the cultural condition of capitalism is necessary.

This paper includes implications for the future research on digital media, time and sustainability.

According to the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one that connects perspectives on time with digital sustainability.

Self-employed workers typically report higher well-being levels than employees. The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanisms that lead to differences in work engagement between self-employed and organizationally employed high-skilled workers.

Self-employed and organizationally employed high-skilled workers (N=167) were compared using a multigroup multilevel analysis. Participants assessed their job control (general level) and reported their work engagement during work tasks (task level) by means of the Day Reconstruction Method. Aspects of job control (autonomy, creativity, and learning opportunities) and task characteristics (social tasks and core work tasks) were contrasted for the two groups as predictors of work engagement.

Self-employed workers reported higher levels of job control and work engagement than organizationally employed workers. In both groups, job control predicted work engagement. Employees with more opportunities to be creative and autonomous were more engaged at work. Self-employed workers were more engaged when they had more learning opportunities. On the task level, the self-employed were more engaged during core work tasks and social tasks.

The findings suggest that self-employment is an effective way for high-skilled workers to increase the amount of job control available to them, and to improve their work engagement. From an intervention perspective, self-employed workers may benefit most from more learning opportunities, more social tasks, and more core work tasks. Organizationally employed workers may appreciate more autonomy and opportunities for creativity.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the role that job control and task characteristics play in predicting the work engagement of high-skilled self-employed and organizationally employed workers.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

EEO and the management of diversity Volume 8 Number 5 of the Journal of Organizational Change Management contains an article by Maria Humphries and Shayne Grice entitled “Equal employment opportunity and the management of diversity: a global discourse of assimilation?”