Search results

The challenge of accessibility to adequate housing in several countries by a large percentage of citizens has given rise to different housing programs designed to facilitate access to affordable housing. In South Africa, the National Housing Finance Corporation (NHFC) was created to provides housing loans to low- and middle-income earners. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the implication of the macroeconomic risk elements on the performance of the NHFC incremental housing finance.

This study used a mixed-method approach to examine the time-series data of the NHFC over 17 years (2003–2020), relative to selected macroeconomic indicators. Additionally, this study analysed primary data from a 2022 survey of NHFC Executives.

This study found that incremental housing finance addresses a housing affordability gap, caters to disadvantaged groups, adapts to changing macroeconomic conditions and can mitigate default risk. It also finds that the performance of the NHFC’s incremental housing finance is premised on the behaviour of the macroeconomic elements that drive its strategy in South Africa.

Unlike previous works on housing finance, this case study of the NHFC considers the implication of macroeconomic trends when disbursing incremental housing finance to low- and middle-level income earners as a risk mitigation measure for the South African market. Its mixed method use of quantitative and qualitative data also allows a robust insight into trends that drive investment in incremental housing finance in South Africa.

Childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) refers to schizophrenia with onset of psychotic symptoms prior to a child's 13th birthday. Optimal treatment likely includes family-based services supplementing antipsychotic pharmacotherapy. However, family-based services can require adjustment based on parental psychopathology; there has been little literature exploring the frequency or type of psychopathology seen in parents of COS cases. This report includes the results of a structured psychiatric evaluation on 80 parents of a COS case with comparison to a sample of 304 parents. Having a child with psychosis and being of minority racial/ethnicity status increased risk for psychiatric illness. Psychotic disorders (15% vs. 5%), mood disorders (54% vs. 27%), anxiety disorders (30% vs. 18%), and substance use disorders (49% vs. 31%) were all increased in the parents with a psychotic child. Psychiatric illness is common in parents of a child with COS and will need to be considered as family-based services for COS are developed.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether some aspects of the distinctive Mayo Clinic care model could be translated into English National Health Service (NHS) hospital settings, to overcome the fragmented and episodic nature of non-emergency patient care.

The authors used a rapid review to assess the literature on integrated clinical care in hospital settings and critical analysis of links between Mayo Clinic’s care model and the organisation’s performance and associated patient outcomes.

The literature directly concerned with Mayo Clinic’s distinctive ethos and approach to patient care is limited in scope and largely confined to “grey” sources or to authors and institutions with links to Mayo Clinic. The authors found only two peer-reviewed articles which offer critical analysis of the contribution of the Mayo model to the performance of the organisation.

Mayo Clinic is not the only organisation to practice integrated, in-hospital clinical care; however, it is widely regarded as an exemplar.

There are barriers to implementing a Mayo-style model in English NHS hospitals, but they are not insurmountable and could lead to much better coordination of care for some patients.

The study shows that there is an appetite among NHS patients and staff for better coordinated, multi-specialty care within NHS hospitals.

In the English NHS integrated care generally aims to improve coordination between primary, community and secondary care, but problems remain of fragmented care for non-emergency hospital patients. Use of a Mayo-type care model, within hospital settings, could offer significant benefits to this patient group, particularly for multi-morbid patients.

Following publication of a new vision for the English National Health Service (NHS) in 2014, known as the NHS Five-Year Forward View, a Vanguard programme was introduced by NHS England charged with the task of designing and delivering a range of new care models (NCMs) aimed at tackling deep-seated problems of a type facing all health systems to a greater or lesser degree. Drawing upon recent theoretical developments on the multilevel nature of context, we explore factors shaping the implementation of five NCM initiatives in the North East of England.

Data collection was based on semi-structured interviews (66 in total) between December 2016 and May 2017 with key informants at each site and a detailed review of Trusts' internal documents and policies related to the implementation of each NCM. Our analysis explores factors shaping the implementation of five NCM pilot sites as they touched on the multiple levels of context ranging from the macro policy level to the micro-level setting of workforce redesign.

It is far too early to conclude with any confidence that a successful outcome for the NCM programme will be forthcoming although the NHS Long-Term Plan seeks to build on the earlier vision set out in the Five-Year Forward View. Early indications show some signs of promise, especially where there is evidence of the ground having been prepared and changes already being put in place prior to the official launch of NCM initiatives. At the same time our findings demonstrate that all five pilot sites experienced, and were subject to, unrealistic pressure placed upon them to deliver outcomes.

Our findings demonstrate the need for a deeper understanding of the multilevel nature of context by exploring factors shaping the implementation of five NCMs in the North East of England. Exploring the wider national policy context is desirable as well as understanding the perceptions of front-line staff and service users in order to establish the degree of alignment or, conversely, to identify where policy and practice are at risk of pushing and pulling against each other.

This paper offers a definition of the core of information science, which encompasses most research in the field. The definition provides a unique identity for information science and positions it in the disciplinary universe.

After motivating the objective, a definition of the core and an explanation of its key aspects are provided. The definition is related to other definitions of information science before controversial discourse aspects are briefly addressed: discipline vs. field, science vs. humanities, library vs. information science and application vs. theory. Interdisciplinarity as an often-assumed foundation of information science is challenged.

Information science is concerned with how information is manifested across space and time. Information is manifested to facilitate and support the representation, access, documentation and preservation of ideas, activities, or practices, and to enable different types of interactions. Research and professional practice encompass the infrastructures – institutions and technology –and phenomena and practices around manifested information across space and time as its core contribution to the scholarly landscape. Information science collaborates with other disciplines to work on complex information problems that need multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to address them.

The paper argues that new information problems may change the core of the field, but throughout its existence, the discipline has remained quite stable in its central focus, yet proved to be highly adaptive to the tremendous changes in the forms, practices, institutions and technologies around and for manifested information.

Despite the abundance of small-scale farms in the USA and their importance for both rural economic development and food availability, the extensive research on small business management and entrepreneurship has mostly neglected the agricultural context, leaving many of these farms' business challenges unexplored. The authors focus on informing a specific decision faced by small farm managers: selling directly to consumers (i.e. farmer's markets) versus selling through aggregators. By collecting historical data and a series of interviews with industry experts, the authors employ simulation methodology to offer a framework that advises how small-scale farmers can allocate their product across these two channels to increase revenue in a given season. The results, which are relevant for operations management, small business management and entrepreneurship literature, can help small-scale farmers improve their performance and compete against their larger counterparts.

The authors rely on historical and interview data from key industry players (an aggregator and a small farm manager) to design a simulation analysis that determines which factors influence season-long farm revenue performance under varying strategies of channel allocation and commodity production.

The model suggests that farm managers should plan to evenly split their production between the two distribution channels, but if an even split is not possible, they should plan to keep a larger percentage in the nonaggregator (farmers' market/direct) channel. Further, the authors find that farmers can benefit significantly from a strong aggregator channel customer base, which suggests that farmers should promote and advertise the aggregator channel even if they only use it for a limited amount of their product.

The authors integrate small business management and operations management literature to study a widely understudied context and present practical implications for the performance of small-scale farms.

Both the academic literature and practitioners have long noted the need for an equity investment mechanism for worker-controlled firms that alleviates investor anxieties without undermining internal workplace democracy. The purpose of this paper is to outline one such possible mechanism.

The proposal locks together the interests of workers and external investors, via non-voting shares with dividends set by a pre-agreed value-added sharing formula. Each worker is paid a base wage, with the average across the firm being a pre-defined multiple of the national minimum wage. Any additional surplus is split into a number of equal “slices”, with each share receiving one slice as its dividend, and the average worker receiving a pre-agreed number of slices as a bonus.

Workers have an incentive to maximise their own incomes, and in so doing, will also automatically maximise the dividends received by investors, obviating the need for the shares to have normal voting rights. Working on this principle of aligned interests, the authors also discuss reinvestment, worker ownership of non-voting shares and possibilities for a secondary share market. The authors show how this proposal will be a significant step in aligning the interests of investors with owner-workers in a democratic, negotiated way that shares both risk and returns, thus making worker-controlled firms more attractive to equity investment.

In light of the recognised problem of underinvestment in worker-controlled firms and the risk of their degeneration, this paper will interest both academics and practitioners in employee ownership, co-operatives and various forms of workplace democracy.

Mobile shopping is the current trend for firms to conduct business, having great advantages over electronic shopping as well as traditional shopping. The purpose of this paper is to discuss not only the driving forces of mobile shopping behaviors from the theory of reasoned action (TRA) perspective, but also the additional promotion and barrier sides of the mobile business.

A structural equation modeling approach with latent constructs is applied on a self-administered survey data of 208 Vietnamese consumers to test the hypotheses.

The results of this study have proved the predictive power of TRA in exploring consumer behavior in the context of mobile shopping. Also, both promotion and barrier variables have significantly strong impacts on the intention to adopt mobile shopping.

Future studies would benefit from investigating other variables (e.g. specific aspects of trust and risk) and using actual behavior (e.g. online purchases).

Business managers should pay attention to both promotion and barrier factors to understand how and why Vietnamese consumers adopt mobile shopping.

This pioneering study adapts the TRA model with extended promotion and barrier variables to explain mobile shopping in the context of Vietnam.

The purpose of this paper is to document the results and the impact of the ESRC-funded High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020), a project designed to take the existing academic knowledge relating to retail and high street change directly to UK High Streets, to improve local decision-making and, ultimately, their vitality and viability.

Through a systematic literature review, and by following the tenets of engaged scholarship, the authors identified 201 factors that influence the vitality and viability of town centres. Through the consensus-building Delphi technique, a panel of 20 retail experts identified the top 25 priorities for action.

Taking a place management approach led to the development of a more strategic framework for regeneration, which consisted of repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring strategies (4R’s of regeneration). Collaboration with the project towns resulted in identification of the strategy area that would add the most value, and the impact of the 4R’s and the top 25 priorities is demonstrated via numerous town examples.

Knowledge exchange projects, such as High Street UK2020, have an important contribution to make, not by developing even more theory that is unlikely to get utilised, instead their contribution is to bring existing theory into practical use.