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With the cost of periodical subscriptions increasing every year, our library, like most others, has been attempting to limit our periodicals expenditures and to restrict our current subscriptions to those journals most important to our students and faculty. This article is a report of a study done to help determine which periodicals we should continue to receive and those which we could cancel.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of workers' demographic characteristics on their perceptions of procedural justice from grievance management. A related aim is to determine whether procedural justice perceptions have an impact on perceptions of distributive justice.

The study is based on a survey of 660 employees across the public and private sectors. Perceptions were measured with the use of a dichotomous scale, and logistic regression analysis was applied to test the relationships between the dependent and independent variables.

Except for education, demographic characteristics made no significant difference to workers' perceptions of procedural justice afforded by grievance procedures. Perceptions of procedural justice, however, had an impact on perceived distributive justice.

The use of dichotomous response sets prevented the use of factor analysis. Logistic regression analysis compensated for the inability to use ANOVA. Further research is needed to explain why education moreso that any other demographic characteristic would influence procedural justice perceptions of grievance management. Research is also required to isolate the effects of justice perceptions on satisfaction with the trade union and organizational citizenship behaviours.

Failure to pay careful attention to procedural justice can create problems for managers, workers and unions.

This paper highlights the need to pay due attention to procedural justice. It continues a line of inquiry on workplace justice that has only recently been initiated in Barbados.

The purpose of this paper is to present lessons learnt through the development of an evaluation framework for a clinical redesign programme – the aim of which was to improve the patient journey through improved discharge practices within an Australian public hospital.

The development of the evaluation framework involved three stages – namely, the analysis of secondary data relating to the discharge planning pathway; the analysis of primary data including field-notes and interview transcripts on hospital processes; and the triangulation of these data sets to devise the framework. The evaluation framework ensured that resource use, process management, patient satisfaction, and staff well-being and productivity were each connected with measures, targets, and the aim of clinical redesign programme.

The application of business process management and a balanced scorecard enabled a different way of framing the evaluation, ensuring measurable outcomes were connected to inputs and outputs. Lessons learnt include: first, the importance of mixed-methods research to devise the framework and evaluate the redesigned processes; second, the need for appropriate tools and resources to adequately capture change across the different domains of the redesign programme; and third, the value of developing and applying an evaluative framework progressively.

The evaluation framework is limited by its retrospective application to a clinical process redesign programme.

This research supports benchmarking with national and international practices in relation to best practice healthcare redesign processes. Additionally, it provides a theoretical contribution on evaluating health services improvement and redesign initiatives.

The authors contribute to scholarly understanding of the interplay between macro-level institutions and micro-level action by focusing attention on the ways the power of institutions works through mundane organizational spaces to constrain individuals as they interact with organizations. The authors explore these macro- and micro-connections between institutions and organizational spaces through a qualitative inductive study of an emergency department in a public hospital in Australia. Analyzing observational and interview data related to a waiting room and a corridor, their findings show how the systemic power of the state and the medical profession impacts micro-level action through organizational spaces. The authors find that the medical profession exerted power in a system of domination over marginalized patients through the waiting room as an exclusion space. At the same time, the state exerted discipline power over professional subjects through the corridor as a surveillance space. Individual resistance to institutional power over the ED was controlled by policing deviance in the surveillance space and ejecting resisters to the exclusion space. Their findings contribute to the literature by opening up new insight into how mundane organizational spaces convey institutional power by dominating and disciplining micro-level actions.

Purpose – The integration of librarians and technologists to deliver information services represents a new and costly organizational challenge for many library administrators. To understand how to control the costs of integration, this study uses structural contingency theory to study the coordination of librarians and technologists within the information commons.

Design/methodology/approach – This study tests the structural contingency theory expectation that an organization will achieve higher levels of performance when there is a positive relationship between the degree of workflow interdependence and the complexity of coordinative structures necessary to integrate these workflows. This expectation was tested by (a) identifying and collecting a sample of information common; (b) developing and validating survey instruments to test the proposition; and (c) quantitatively analyzing the data to test the proposed contingency theory relationship.

Findings – The contingency theory expectations were confirmed by finding both a positive relationship between coordination and interdependence and a positive relationship between perceptions of performance and degree of congruency between interdependence and coordination.

Limitations – The findings of this study are limited to both the context of an information common and the structures tested. Future research should seek to both broaden the context in which these findings are applicable, and test additional structural relationships as proposed by contingency theory

Practical implications – This study contributes to the library profession in a number of ways. First, it suggests that managers can improve IC performance by matching coordination structures to the degree of interdependence. For instance, when librarians and technologists are strictly co-located, managers should coordinate workflows using less resource-intensive policies rather than meetings. Second, the instruments developed in this study will improve the library manager's ability to measure and report unit interdependence and coordination in a valid and reliable manner. Lastly, it also contributes to the study of structural contingency theory by presenting one of the first empirical confirmations of a positive relationship between interdependence and coordination.

Originality/value – This study represents one of the first empirical confirmations of the structural contingency theory expectations of both a positive relationship between workflow interdependence and coordination, and a positive relationship between performance and coordination's fit to workflow interdependence. These findings are of value to both organizational theorists and to administrators of information commons.

In this chapter the authors focus on the role of power associated with microfoundations of organizational hybridity. They develop a framework that illuminates how key sources of power based on Buchanan and Badham (2008) and French and Raven (1959) manifest at the level of everyday work practices. Using this framework, they draw on existing studies concerning hybridity in professional organizations to illustrate how different forms of power come into play when actors guided by different logics engage in day-to-day professional work. Overall, the authors suggest that more attention to how micro-level actors use different forms of power to support, hamper, or alter different mechanisms to manage tensions among competing logics in everyday work is critical to improving our understanding about the microfoundations of institutionalism.

Incidents of violence and aggression are a regular occurrence within adult forensic mental health inpatient settings and often lead to the use of restrictive practices such as seclusion. Such events are frequently attributed to the complexity of the patients. Research commonly focuses on patient’s characteristics and their association with seclusion use. Less attention has been centred on forensic mental health nurses’ attitudes to seclusion and the association of nursing staff characteristics.

A cross-sectional survey was undertaken using a standardised questionnaire, “Survey of Nurses’ Attitudes to Seclusion”. Responses were received from n = 147 nurses at a high secure forensic mental health hospital in the UK.

Key findings indicate that most participants believed seclusion should remain part of clinical practice. A correlation was identified between forensic mental health nurses’ attitudes to seclusion use and their characteristics: gender, age range, educational level and experience.

This paper presents novel information on seclusion reduction opportunities through modifiable workforce factors such as gender-sensitive rostering and staff training and development. Furthermore, recruitment and retention strategies should be prioritised so forensic mental health is perceived as an attractive career and a safe workplace.

The paucity of research in this area has prompted calls for further research to explore nursing staff characteristics and seclusion use. This is particularly important now due to the current global difficulty in the recruitment and retention of mental health nurses.

The Covid-19 pandemic generated significant changes in the operating methods of hospital logistics departments. The objective of this research is to understand how these changes took place, what collaboration mechanisms were developed with clinical authorities and, to what extent, logistics and clinical care activities should be decoupled to maximize each area's contribution?

The case study is selected to investigate practices implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in hospitals in Canada. The pandemic presented an opportunity to contrast practices implemented in response to this crisis with those historically used in this environment.

The strategy of decoupling logistical tasks of an operational nature from clinical activities is well-founded and helps free clinical staff from tasks for which they are not trained. However, the decoupling of operational tasks should be combined with an integration of the clinical information flow to the logistics hub players. With this clinical information, the logistics hub can generate its full potential enabling better inventory management decisions to be made.

The concept of decoupling is studied to identify configurations that offer the best benefits for clinical staff.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test an accessible and culturally appropriate social support intervention designed to meet the support needs and preferences identified by African refugee parents of young children.

The study was built on the research team’s preceding study assessing social support needs and intervention preferences of Sudanese and Zimbabwean refugee parents of young children. Face-to-face support groups led by peer and professional mentors were conducted bi-weekly over seven months. Qualitative data collection methods were employed through group and individual interviews.

In total, 85 refugee parents (48 Sudanese, 37 Zimbabwean; 47 male, 38 female) in two Canadian provinces participated in the social support intervention. Results demonstrated that this intervention increased participants’ social support by: providing information, enhancing spousal relationships, and expanding engagement with their ethnic community. This pilot intervention decreased refugee new parents’ loneliness and isolation, enhanced coping, improved their capacity to attain education and employment, and increased their parenting competence.

Peer mentors who were refugee parents of young children were key to facilitating the support intervention and to enhancing confidence of group members to raise their children in Canada. They acted as role models as they had faced similar challenges. Success of this intervention can also be attributed to its flexibility and participant-centered focus.

This is the first reported study to design and test the impacts of support interventions for African refugee parents of young children.

It is well recognized that emotions support adaptation to environmental demands by guiding cognitions and behavior in line with one’s implicit and explicit goals. This is true in the work context, as in other areas of life. Traditionally, however, research into emotion regulation within the work context has been centered on the problematic aspects of feeling and displaying emotion at work. In order to meet organizational goals, felt emotions need to be subdued or modified, and inauthentic emotions displayed. In this way, conceptualizations of work-related emotion regulation have disconnected emotion from its most basic and adaptive signal function. This disconnection has led to a dilemma regarding the real- and the fake-self and been associated with a range of negative consequences for employee health and well-being. Understanding how emotions can be regulated to help employees meet personal goals for growth and development has also been overlooked. In this chapter, we challenge this existing paradigm, and instead argue that examining emotion regulation in terms of its adaptive functions will help to unify disparate findings from within the emotion regulation literature and progress research in the field of emotion and emotion regulation at work.