Search results

Researchers have spent considerable time studying how racial-ethnic minorities experience poorer health than whites [Townsend, P., & Davidson, N. (Eds). (1990). Inequalities in health: The black report. England: Penguin Press; Platt, L. (2006). Assessing the impact of illness, caring and ethnicity on social activity. STICERD Research Paper No. CASE108 London England), and how low socioeconomic status (SES) can negatively influence health status (Lynch, J., & Kaplan, G. (2000). Socioeconomic position. In: L. F. Berkman & I. Kawachi (Eds), Social epidemiology (pp. 13–55). New York: Oxford University Press]. This research investigates the relationship between class and race and perceived health status among patients with chronic conditions. More specifically, we apply the concept of social capital to assess whether the quantity of health information seeking behaviors (HISB) via social networks mediates the relationship between race and health status, and between SES and health status. Regression, t-test and ANOVA analyses of 305 surveys completed at a chronic illness management clinic in a Northwest research hospital reveal three important findings: first, that social class affects perceived health status more strongly than race; second, that frequency and amount of HISB do not play a significant role in perceived health status, regardless of race or SES; and third, that an interaction effect between frequency and amount of HISB suggests that the way that patients seek health information, and the quality of that information, may be more useful indicators of the role of social capital in HISB than our study can provide.

Science is too important to be left solely to scientists, and so the public need to be involved in the design, funding, delivery and implementation of health research, and in discussions about the ethics of research. Since the 1960s, the United Kingdom and many other countries have included scientists from outside health care in various roles in health care research, as well as nonscientists, ordinary citizens, patients and carers. In the last 20 years, these roles have increased in number and range, but significant challenges remain in ensuring that research is always conducted in an ethical fashion. Errors arise when it is assumed that research is ethical because it has passed a single test rather than being subject to constant vigilance; when academic training on its own is regarded as sufficient to guarantee ethical conduct; when pontification about sophisticated dilemmas ignores fundamental matters of equity and helpfulness and when there is an absence of curiosity about the value positions of others (Boaz et al., 2016). We argue in this chapter that in every setting, citizens have the potential to contribute to ethical debates, whether they assist in establishing priorities for research funding, serve as research funding co-applicants, take the lay member places on Research Ethics Committees and Steering Committees, collect and analyze data or co-author academic papers.

Currently, the world is experiencing the highest levels of displaced peoples ever recorded by The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2016). Consequently, greater numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers are being resettled in host nations in Anglophone and some European nations. An increasing body of literature is examining the consequences for educational systems as this new and increasingly diverse cohort of students enters various education sectors – preschools, schools, universities and adult education. Despite a surge of interest in this area, however, the practical and theoretical implications for school leaders’ practices and praxis remain under-examined and under-theorized. Moreover, scholarship on leadership for diversity fails to capture the complex nature of leading learning for refugee students who too frequently are homogenized and essentialized under the umbrella of immigrant or culturally diverse students. This chapter contributes to filling a critical gap in our knowledge in these areas.

This study provides a comprehensive framework of adaptation in triadic business relationship settings in the service sector. The framework is based on the industrial network approach (see, e.g., Axelsson & Easton, 1992; Håkansson & Snehota, 1995a). The study describes how adaptations initiate, how they progress, and what the outcomes of these adaptations are. Furthermore, the framework takes into account how adaptations spread in triadic relationship settings. The empirical context is corporate travel management, which is a chain of activities where an industrial enterprise, and its preferred travel agency and service supplier partners combine their resources. The scientific philosophy, on which the knowledge creation is based, is realist ontology. Epistemologically, the study relies on constructionist processes and interpretation. Case studies with in-depth interviews are the main source of data.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine voice as an empowerment practice in a manufacturing company. The case study follows a qualitative approach to analyse employee voice and types of empowerment from a structural perspective. Findings suggest a variety of voice arrangements to empowering employees such as voice surveys, meetings, e-suggestions, opinion boxes and informal means such as casual meetings and walkarounds. In addition, employee voice is linked to types of empowerment such as information sharing, upward problem solving, task autonomy and attitudinal shaping. Further research would benefit from an exploration of employees’ feelings regarding voice mechanisms to examine the psychological perspective of empowerment.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

Companies inevitably interact and entrench in complex organic systems of business relationships with other. These business networks are not objectively defined, instead they are shaped by the subjective perception of actors. This inherent subjectivity is associated with the notion of network pictures, that is, a research tool that researchers or managers can use to grasp practitioner theories. In this chapter, we discuss how the importance of identifying these theories results mainly from underlying principles of sense-making theory, as well as from the idea around performativity. Drawing on these theoretical groundings, this chapter has two objectives: to explore how practitioners actually perceive their business surroundings and to assess the extent of overlapping between (IMP Group) academic theories and practitioner theories. To achieve these objectives, the researchers use a dimensional network pictures model previously developed in the literature to analyze the network pictures of 49 top-level managers across 17 companies from two very distinct contexts or networks: a product-based network and a project-based network. Among other practices, findings illustrate how practitioners tend to simplify what is going on in their complex surroundings, to personalize their relationships with those surroundings, and to think in a stereotyped way. Moreover, the juxtaposition between the captured practitioner theories and academic (IMP Group) theories show that these are not always overlapping, and are in some cases quite the opposite. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the importance of grasping actors’ views of the world, arguing that sense-making theory and the notion of performativity are the two main conceptual drivers justifying the urgency in making those views more visible. This research also adds to the research on the impact and suitability of IMP Group theories on managerial thinking and practice. Finally, this research reinforces the current call for further practice-based research in business network contexts.