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Indian healthcare system, especially in rural regions, faces several problems that prevent it from achieving universal and sustainable healthcare coverage. The purpose of this paper is to capture such problems through expert opinions and provide solution concepts that are derived from other similar scenarios.

Delphi study has been conducted with 38 experts from diverse areas related to the Indian healthcare sector. Nineteen theses were formulated based on the discussion with experts and were reconfirmed through intensive desktop research. Finally, theses were subjected to expert panel member’s evaluation.

The pool of arguments provided by the participating experts included 415 written statements explaining the (dis-)agreement with the theses. The experts achieved consensus in six theses with interquartile ranges smaller or equal to 20. The written arguments provided by experts were summarized into five different categories, namely interrelations/dependencies in healthcare, inequalities in healthcare, lack of proactive measures, importance of healthcare personnel and role of government in healthcare. Finally, a framework is proposed mapping the issues identified at different stages of the healthcare value chain. Problem-based cost allocation and hub-and-spoke model are discussed as potential solutions for the issues identified.

Lack of empirical and statistical data on the effective cost arising from the present issues suggests future research to determine these expenses and therefore examine the feasibility of applying the problem-based cost allocation framework discussed in this study.

Results show that merely targeting the supply side of healthcare falls short of the mark, especially in a country, such as India, with large socio-economic differentials. Healthcare system, hence, should be viewed from a market perspective, taking both forces of supply and demand into consideration.

This study intends to allow for a comprehensive approach to identify the issues in Indian healthcare system by reviewing the existing key studies in literature and validating it through empirical inputs from experts in the domain. Based on the validation, a framework is proposed mapping the issues identified at different stages of the healthcare value chain.

This chapter studies a political rationale by which colonial law forged socially assigned individuals as criminally accused persons. Focussing on archived documents of a preliminary examination that took place in 1883 in the North West Territories (now Alberta), it highlights how an accused person was moulded as a culpable individual. Arranged by a justice of the peace, and member of the North West Mounted Police, the investigation in this case reveals how colonial law unleashed an individualising force that obscured power relations behind the settlement it aimed to further. The unequal ways in which certain distinctions of person were legally recognised and individualised may be traced to long-standing western uses of social hierarchies as ‘masks’ from which law unequally recognised persons. Challenging such approaches to personhood, the analysis works off Naffine’s ‘legalistic’ ideas of persons as fictions, calling for a retelling of the fictions around accused persons. By pointing out the possibility of accusing relational rather than individual constructions, it concludes with a brief insinuation of legal forms directed at ‘collective persons’, interrupting a key political logic of colonial criminal law with allied promises of social justice beyond colonisation.

This article explores how the Danish public sector, over time, has followed different temporal strategies in order to extend the present and handle the system's increasing complexity, thereby counteracting a tendency towards entropy. It proposes that historical changes in the public sector's understandings of the concepts of “time” and “change” can be seen as the answer to the sector's enduring problem of ever-increasing complexity.

The authors conduct second-order observations of how the Danish public sector, in the period from 1900 until 2020, observes “time” and “change”. More specifically, they first observe how issues over time are temporalized in different forms, before employing the guiding distinction, operation/temporalization, to analyse the differences between temporalities.

The authors show that, today, the Danish public sector deals with the problems of complexity and entropy through, what is called, potentialization. Potentialization entails operations that aim to increase potentialities, rather than realize possibilities within a given potentiality. It works by extending the present, drawing on a particular temporality which is split into a present present and a future future.

The paper offers managers insights into the implications of their own observations of time and change, including how they might draw on different temporal semantics, through which managerial situations emerge differently. The paper also reveals that issues of transformation are not always about transformation, rather they concern the question of how to handle an increasing internal complexity.

The article shows that potentialization and its temporal semantic of “transformation” also comes with a price – namely that it dissolves the certainties of structures, which results in conflicting expectations.

The paper draws on systems theory, including its notions of time and entropy, to analyse the evolution of public administration and management. It thereby produces a diagnosis of the present which offers insights into contemporary conditions for public management.

Scholarly interest in the business effects of organised crime (OC) has recently increased. This study aims to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) on the conditions under which OC could pose a threat to or take control of firms within a particular context.

We use narrative synthesis and thematic analysis, with a sample of 46 theoretical and empirical studies published over the past 30 years on the relationship between OC and firms within the disciplines of Business, Management and Accounting (BMA).

SLR and thematic analysis show that scholarly interest has focused on four key domains: OC as a firm, the impact of OC on firms, firms’ efforts to counter OC’s influence and governmental interventions. Using medical metaphors, we also develop a diagram depicting the interplay between OC and firms within the BMA literature.

This study contributes to the literature shaping an agenda to steer future research towards these four key themes. The effectiveness of anti-OC tools and measures depends on a thorough understanding of local norms, behaviours and business practices. In addition to measurement and methodological challenges, several grey areas remain, including the distinction between criminal enterprises and legitimate businesses. Ambiguities also surround the circumstances under which the OC preys upon firms or employs them to establish dominance over a territory.

This article has two main aims. First, to observe the different causes of public (dis)value. Second, to explore, through a case study, an example of public value regeneration through the social reuse of assets seized from criminal organizations.

This is a theoretical article with a case study, utilizing semi-structured interviews.

The study analyzes the factors resulting from the regeneration of new public value within an initially compromised context. This is achieved by ‘freeing’ and converting properties seized from the Mafia in public goods available to the community (Plus-Value). The article finds that the different causes of public (dis)value are Mafia infiltration in public goods, corruption, tax evasion, abstaining from voting, (ab)use of power and (ab)use of law.

The study may help both scholars and practitioners to identify strategies to offset (dis)value factors, something that would be easy to imagine as having managerial implications.

The value regenerated with respect to properties confiscated from the Mafia and then converted to social activities for the community highlights how it is possible to transform public (dis)value to public value.

The article explores a little examined area of public value, that is the destruction of value or (dis)value.

This chapter focuses on the impact of national economic conditions and voters’ attitudes on the positioning of European national political parties with regard to the European Union (EU). We provide an empirical analysis based on data gathered through the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) covering parties from 14 European countries observed over the 1999–2010 time span. We perform a regression analysis where the dependent variable measures the position of political parties vis-à-vis EU integration and explanatory variables include a number of measures of national economic conditions, features of the national political and institutional framework and voters’ Euroscepticism. Fixed effect, ordered logit and fractional logit estimates provide the following main results. Compared with other parties, non-mainstream political parties and those acting in established economies are more prone to mirror citizens’ Eurosceptic sentiments. National economic conditions such as inflation as well as gross domestic product (GDP) growth affect mainstream party support for the EU. Smaller and ideologically extreme parties are, on average, less supportive of European integration.

Drawing on the work of Niklas Luhmann, the paper argues that technology can be viewed as a self-referential system which is autonomous from both human beings and other function systems of society. The paper aims to develop a philosophy of technology from the work of Niklas Luhmann. To achieve this aim, it draws upon the systems-theory work of Jacques Ellul, a philosopher of technology who focuses on the autonomous potential of technological evolution.

The paper draws on the work of Niklas Luhmann and Jacques Ellul to explore the theme of autonomous technology and what this means for our thinking about technological issues in the twenty-first century. Insights from these two thinkers and researchers working in the Luhmannian sociological tradition are applied to remote work.

The sociological approach of Luhmann, coupled with Ellul's insights into the autonomous nature of technology, can help us develop a systems theory of technology which takes seriously its irreducibility to human functions.

The paper contributes to the growing sociological literature that thematizes the Luhmannian approach to technology, helping us better understand this phenomenon and think in new ways about what technological autonomy means.

The paper brings together the work of Luhmann, Ellul and contemporary researchers to advance a new understanding of technology and technological communication.

In this short chapter, we seek to begin to understand what it might mean to ‘interrupt the legal person’. We do this in two parts. In the first part, we begin with the phrase itself and interrogate its components. Interrogating these components leads us to think of the legal person as a technical and grammatical question that varies across different legal traditions and jurisdictions, i.e., across different ways of living and speaking law (recall that juris-diction says to speak the law). In the second part, we briefly explore four versions or declinations of interruptions, each corresponding to a different kind of juris-diction or legal tradition. We see this chapter as itself a friendly interruption in (or of) a broad and rich conversation so as to encourage ourselves to be struck again by some things we may take for granted.