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The purpose of this paper is to share how knowledge management (KM) and quality management can be integrated into a seamless framework and operational model to sustain excellence in performance, and to explore why working from the practitioners outward when implementing this framework and operational model is an effective practice for enabling employees to provide the highest quality product and solution delivery.

The paper provides a brief company context, including the knowledge and quality challenges faced in a rapidly growing company where employees are dispersed at many locations and do not often have the opportunity to meet face‐to‐face. It describes a corporate focus on “Knowledge at the Point of Execution”© and why this is critical to ensuring value to employees, clients, and the corporation. An approach for engaging both workforce and leadership and for moving from concept, to strategy, to implementing practices within the existing company culture is discussed.

This paper presents learnings on some effective approaches for implementing an integrated KM and quality framework and for engaging both workforce and leadership, including communications, events, workshops, and use of KM tools such as story telling, communities of practice, and knowledge assets.

This paper presents practical experience on implementing what the authors believe is a unique integration of KM and quality concepts, strategies, and operating practices. It is written for practitioners who are looking for approaches to improve business performance and maintain high levels of quality in their own projects, initiatives, or customer support efforts.

Medical uncertainty is recognized as a critical issue in the sociology of diagnosis and medical sociology more generally, but a neglected focus of this concern is the question of patient decision making. Using a mixed methods approach that draws upon autoethnographic accounts and third-party interviews, we aim to illuminate the dilemmas of patient decision making in the face of uncertainty. How do patients and supportive caregivers go about navigating this state of affairs? What types of patient–doctor/healthcare professional relationships hinder or enhance effective patient decision making? These are the themes we explore in this study by following patients through the sequence of experiencing symptoms, seeking a diagnosis, evaluating treatment protocols, and receiving treatments. In general, three genres of culturally available narratives are revealed in the data: strategic, technoluxe, and unbearable health narratives.

The Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) was fully implemented in October 2007 in England and Wales. This article reports on two similar, but separate, pilot questionnaire studies that examined the experience of consultants in old age psychiatry and consultants in other psychiatric specialities in the early implementation of the MCA pertaining to issues relevant to black and minority ethnic (BME) groups. Fifty‐two (27%) of the 196 consultants in old age psychiatry and 113 (12%) of the 955 consultants in other psychiatric specialities returned useable questionnaires. Eighty per cent or more of the consultants in old age psychiatry and consultants in other psychiatric specialities gave consideration to religion and culture and ethnicity in the assessment of decision‐making capacity (DMC). Almost 50% of the consultants in old age psychiatry reported that half or more of the patients lacking fluency in English or where English was not their first language received an assessment of DMC with the aid of an interpreter and 40% of the consultants in other psychiatric specialities reported that no such patients received an assessment of DMC with the aid of an interpreter.The low rate of using interpreters is of concern. The nature of the consideration and implementation of factors relevant to culture, ethnicity and religion in the application of the MCA and the precise reasons for the low rate of using interpreters in patients lacking fluency in English or English not being their first language require clarification in further studies.

This article considers the effectiveness of two one‐day events designed to raise awareness of The Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) in BME communities. The events were held using specially developed materials and were evaluated with the help of a 12‐item questionnaire. The results of the evaluation showed that there was an increase in the proportion of correct responses for 10 of the 12 questions after attending awareness‐raising events. The total score for all correct responses on the 12‐item questionnaire significantly increased after attending the awareness‐raising events. Collectively, the findings suggest that the awareness‐raising events were able to improve awareness of the MCA among representatives of BME communities. Such awareness‐raising events should be encouraged by health and social care providers

The history of post‐co‐ordinate indexing is one of trial and error in the face of poor results … Most thesauri seem very arbitrary in word selection and the extent of classification is equally arbitrary. FARRADANE The lack of semantic understanding, not even of a highly sophisticated level, by many other‐wise thoughtful workers in information retrieval is distressing… It may be hoped that the somewhat mystical aura which has been spread around the use of thesauri in literature searching, whether on purpose or by misunderstandings, will be dispersed in order to make room for a sober and down‐to‐earth discussion of the issue. BAR‐HILLEL

The purpose of this paper is to examine what impacts university students perceived from their short-term intensive international courses as part of undergraduate multidisciplinary education.

The study design was informed by interpretative phenomenological analysis. Semi-structured interviews explored informants’ views of their experience to elicit key themes of their experience.

The analysis resulted in four major themes: personal development, generic skills, global perspectives and subject-specific matter. Some text segments were coded with multiple themes, which suggests that the impacts of short-term international courses are multifaceted.

Academic topics of the courses substantially centred around humanities and social sciences at a particular university. This paper furthermore primarily depended on students’ self-reported answers, and it is possible that the participants who chose to enrol in the elective international courses may be principally willing to acquire global competence. Therefore, this study did not set out to present the generalised impacts of any short-term international courses.

The findings could be used as a conceptual tool for the design and evaluation of new and existing courses. In addition, the four major themes that this study elicited are useful as a cue for students’ self-reflection about their own learning experiences.

There have been significant efforts devoted to increasing the quantity of short-term international programs, but there has been less focus on the quality of these programs. This study supports the findings of existing literature but also identified one of the potential unfavourable impacts that short-term international courses may have on students’ development.

This study seeks to answer (1) how perceived neighborhood collective efficacy and disorder affect residents' cooperation with the police, both directly and indirectly through perceptions of the police and (2) how Arab American ethnicity moderates the linkages between perceived collective efficacy, disorder and cooperation.

Relying on survey interview data from a probability sample of 414 residents in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, MI and path model analysis, this study tests an explanatory model of public cooperation with the police that integrates both neighborhood and policing factors.

Perceived neighborhood disorder undermines residents' desires to cooperate, and this influence is chiefly direct. Meanwhile, although no significant total effect, perception of neighborhood collective efficacy does have a positive effect on cooperation through the mediator of positive assessment of police effectiveness. Further, collective efficacy has a direct, positive effect on cooperation among Arab Americans only. Finally, perceptions of police equal treatment and effectiveness, rather than procedural justice, are significant correlates of public cooperation.

This study contributes to the extremely limited literature on policing and Arab American communities. The findings can deepen the understanding on why and for which groups neighborhood context is related to cooperation with the police. Findings can also add to the knowledge base for designing policies and practices that help secure and promote public support and cooperation in both Arab and non-Arab communities.

Purpose – The social dimensions of the relationship between transport and climate change are examined, in particular, the potential for unintended negative consequences to directly and/or indirectly arise from policies to reduce the climate change impact of the transport sector. It takes the example of current policies in the UK as its primary focus.

Methodology/approach – A combination of literature, policy review and the quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered through primary fieldwork research from a number of related studies.

Findings – It is identified that different social groups can experience very different outcomes in accessing transport and adapting to changes to the transport system, whether these are uniquely targeted towards certain individuals or more systemically applied across the whole population. For this reason, it is essential that policy makers fully understand the potential vulnerability and resilience of different social groups to policies that are intended to address transport-related climate change. The key component of social impacts should be systematically analyzed, by income, potential vulnerability and their spatial and temporal distribution, as well as according to resilience/adaptability to the proposed intervention. This continues to pose an important future challenge for research in this area of transport policy making.

Originality/value – This chapter highlights the potential for unintended negative social consequences to directly and/or indirectly arise from policies to reduce the climate change impact of the transport sector.

What is it about academia anyway? We profess to hate it, spend endless amounts of time complaining about it, and yet we in academia will do practically anything to stay. The pay may be low, job security elusive, and in the end, it's not the glamorous work we envisioned it would be. Yet, it still holds fascination and interest for us. This is an article about American academic fiction. By academic fiction, I mean novels whosemain characters are professors, college students, and those individuals associated with academia. These works reveal many truths about the higher education experience not readily available elsewhere. We learn about ourselves and the university community in which we work.