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Organizations that learn the lessons of experience are much more likely to be successful than those which continue to repeat mistakes. Organizational learning is the process of learning from experience. Suggests that organizational learning and knowledge management are not synonyms for the same activity but complementary, overlapping processes which offer maximum benefit when used together. Unless this is recognised, organizations are in danger of appointing inappropriate knowledge managers and of failing to get the proper return from their investment.

“When James Boswell returned from a tour of Corsica in 1765 he wrote: ‘It is indeed amazing that an island so considerable, and in which such noble things have been doing, should be so imperfectly known.’ The same might be said today of Puerto Rico.” Thus began Millard Hansen and Henry Wells in the foreword to their 1953 look at Puerto Rico's democratic development. Four decades later, the same could again be said about the island.

Drawing on ethnographic field research on female sex workers and male clients in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s global sex industry, this paper complicates our understanding of human trafficking in two ways. First, introducing the term perverse humanitarianism, the paper extends work on carceral feminism by offering concrete examples of interagency commitments between NGOs and the police. Second, my ethnography reveals that women framed their relationships with male clients as mutually beneficial because the men provided them with alternate pathways to economic mobility outside of sex work. Drawing on the same tropes of victimhood employed by the NGOs, sex workers elicited sympathy from male clients that they leveraged into gifts of money. Using men’s charitable gifts, many women became small entrepreneurs who opened local businesses and empowered other sex workers far beyond what NGOs were able to provide.

This paper examines how “quality” was framed in the design and implementation of a policy to reform hospital funding and associated care delivery. The aims of the study were: (1) To describe how government policy-makers who designed the policy and managers and clinicians who implemented the policy framed the concept of “quality” and (2) To explore how frames of quality and the framing process may have influenced policy implementation.

The authors conducted a secondary analysis of data from a qualitative case study involving semi-structured interviews with 45 purposefully selected key informants involved in the design and implementation of the quality-based procedures policy in Ontario, Canada. The authors used framing theory to inform coding and analysis.

The authors found that policy designers perpetuated a broader frame of quality than implementers who held more narrow frames of quality. Frame divergence was further characterized by how informants framed the relationship between clinical and financial domains of quality. Several environmental and organizational factors influenced how quality was framed by implementers.

As health systems around the world increasingly implement new models of governance and financing to strengthen quality of care, there is a need to consider how “quality” is framed in the context of these policies and with what effect. This is the first framing analysis of “quality” in health policy.

This paper reports from a qualitative case study of a change initiative undertaken in a Danish public hospital setting during national healthcare reforms. The purpose of this paper is to challenge understandings of innovations as defined by being value-adding per se. Whether the effects of attempting to innovate are positive or negative is in this paper regarded as a matter of empirical investigation.

Narrative accounts of activities during the change initiative are analysed in order to elucidate the effects of framing the change initiative as innovation on which boundaries are created and crossed.

Framing change initiatives as innovation leads to intended as well as unanticipated boundary crossings where healthcare practitioners from different organizations recognize a shared problem and task. It also leads to unintended boundary reinforcements between “us and them” that may exclude the perspectives of patients or stakeholders when confronting complex problems in healthcare. This boundary reinforcement can lead to further fragmentation of healthcare despite the stated intention to create more integrated services.

The paper suggests that researchers as well as practitioners should not presume that intentions to innovate will by themselves enhance creativity and innovation. When analysing the intended, unintended as well as unanticipated consequences of framing change initiatives as innovation, researchers and practitioner gain nuanced knowledge about the effects of intending to innovate in complex settings such as healthcare.

This paper suggests the need for an analytical move from studying the effects of innovation to studying the effects of framing complex problems as a call for innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of acquaintance on performance rating accuracy and halo.

After expert ratings were obtained, US Air Force Officers (n=104) with an average of six years experience rated the performance of four officers who delivered 6‐7 minute briefings on their research projects; 26 raters reported being acquainted with one or more of the briefers. Raters were randomly assigned to use a rating format designed to encourage between‐ratee comparisons on each dimension or a format in which each ratee was separately rated on all dimensions.

Ratings made by acquainted raters were more accurate than ratings by unacquainted raters. Accuracy was positively correlated with halo for both sets of ratings. Rating format had no discernible effect on accuracy or halo.

One limitation of this study is that the measure of acquaintance was not designed as a surrogate for familiarity. Development of a multi‐item, psychometrically‐valid measure of acquaintance should be the first step in pursuing this research. The use of a laboratory design where only a small percentage of the sample was acquainted with those being rated also limits the study's generalizability.

The results show that prior acquaintance with the ratee results in more accurate ratings. Ratings were also more positive when raters had prior contact with the person they rated.

The hypothesis is that the cognitive processes used to produce ratings are different for raters who have had no prior contact with a ratee and raters who are in some manner acquainted with a ratee. In the past, a positive halo effect from acquaintance between raters and ratees has been a concern. However, this limited study indicates that acquaintance may actually result in more accurate ratings.