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A significant share of U.S. subsistence consumers is both poor and functionally low-literate. A key question that marketers and public policy makers must ask is how vulnerable these consumers are to the persuasiveness of marketing communications. We address this question by identifying who subsistence consumers in the United States are likely to be, exploring what it means to be vulnerable, with an emphasis on cognitive vulnerability; examining two theoretical frameworks for analyzing subsistence consumer vulnerability (elaboration likelihood model and persuasion knowledge model); and offering several propositions incorporating the select cognitive constructs of self-esteem, locus of control, and powerlessness.

Large‐scale change efforts are most likely to fail during the implementation phase. Implementation refers to the activities that take a design and make it operational. This article describes ten planning and management practices to prevent failures and, second, ten tactics for reviving stalled implementation efforts.

Summarizes 59 organisational change efforts that had culture change as an objective. Culture change was a common type of organisational change and usually occurred in combination with other types of change. The success rate for culture change was low. Success was more likely when the sponsors were perceived to be mid‐level rather than senior executives. Culture change was most often undertaken because of competition and customer issues. Statistical data were most often cited to describe successful culture change while unsuccessful change efforts were usually described by opinions. Success correlated most highly with the variables that reflected stakeholder management, manageability of the project, project staffing, sponsorship and progress monitoring. Failure correlated most strongly with ineffective leadership and the clash with the existing culture. Success factors and barriers for cultural change resembled the profile for other types of organizational change. Ends with recommendations for managing cultural change.

Presents research on the contributions of consultants to organizational change. Respondents to a multi‐company survey were asked to describe specific change projects. A total of 107 respondents said that consultants had supported the change effort. These respondents were asked: “What value did the consultant contribute to the change effort?”, “In what ways could the consultant have been more effective in supporting the change effort?” Responses were sorted into categories: one set for contributions and a second set for improvements. The categorization led to suggestions to clarify expectations, involve stakeholders, promote communication between project staff and stakeholders, institute a change management process, and encourage the evaluation of consultant performance and feedback to consultants.

Reference librarians in various library settings are often assigned responsibilities for training students, support staff, or other new professionals, a task for which they rarely have sufficient professional education. This bibliography recommends readings on topics that will assist reference librarians in understanding the philosophy of staff development. The readings listed here cover subjects such as: establishing an atmosphere that facilitates learning, assessing training needs, describing competent performance, writing clear and specific objectives, selecting appropriate training methods, maintaining skills and providing feedback, and evaluating the effectiveness of a training program.

Public engagement in health technology assessment (HTA) is increasingly considered crucial for good decision making. Determining the “right” type of engagement activity is key in achieving the appropriate consideration of public values. Little is known about the factors that determine how HTA organizations (HTAOs) decide on their method of public engagement, and there are a number of possible factors that might shape these decisions. The purpose of this paper is to understand the potential drivers of public engagement from an organizational perspective.

The published HTA literature is reviewed alongside existing frameworks of public engagement in order to elucidate key factors influencing the choice of public engagement process undertaken by HTAOs. A conceptual framework is then developed to illustrate the factors identified from the literature that appear to influence public engagement choice.

Determining the type of public engagement undertaken in HTA is based on multiple factors, some of which are not always explicitly acknowledged. These factors included the: perceived complexity of the policy-making issue, perceived impact of the decision, transparency and opportunities for public involvement in governance, as well as time and resource constraints. The influences of these factors vary depending on the context, indicating that a one size fits all approach to public engagement may not be effective.

Awareness of the various factors that might influence the type of public engagement undertaken would enable decision makers to reflect on their choices and be more accountable and transparent about their choice of engagement process in eliciting public values and preferences in a HTAO.

Faced with an ageing population and newspaper warnings that escalating costs are leading to a health crisis, debate has intensified in Australia and elsewhere on the allocation of limited health resources. But whose values should inform decision‐making in the health area, and should the influence of different groups vary with the level of decision‐making? These questions were put to 54 members of the public and health professionals in eight focus groups. Unlike previous studies, participants were not asked if particular groups should be involved in decisions but rather through deliberation and discussion nominated their own potential decision‐makers. This delivered a clear message that participants saw a legitimate role for a broad range of stakeholders in priority‐setting decisions. The results suggest that qualitative methods of investigation have the potential to improve the legitimacy and accountability of policy decisions by contributing to a better understanding of the values of the public and health professionals.

This article reports on a design for citizen identified performance measures for budgeting that seeks to overcome problems of validity and representativeness that typically exist in citizen involvement processes. This design selected participants using random sampling so that each resident had the same chance of being invited to be in one of the focus groups that worked to develop outcome measures for a set of town services. In order to assure that the resulting measures were helpful to residents at large, an additional phase of the process involved a large sample survey of town residents to validate the results. The results were a set of performance measures that were developed by a small group of citizens that the population at large found useful to them when thinking about local services.

To overcome the shortcomings of diversity training programs, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize an organizational diversity-learning framework, which features an organizational intervention for employees’ joint decision-making process with other employees from different statuses, functions, and identities. Borrowing key principles from the diversity learning (Rainey and Kolb, 1995); integration and learning perspective (Ely and Thomas, 2001; Thomas and Ely, 1996), and the key practices informed by deliberative democratic theories (Thompson, 2008), the authors develop a new organizational diversity learning framework for behavioral, attitudinal, and cognitive learning at workplaces. They conclude with directions for future research.

This paper first presents an overview of key shortcomings of diversity training programs in relation to their group composition, design, content and evaluation. Second, it borrows the key principles of diversity learning (Rainey and Kolb, 1995); integration and learning perspectives (Ely and Thomas, 2001; Thomas and Ely, 1996), and the key practices informed by deliberative democratic theories (Thompson, 2008) to delineate the organizational diversity learning framework. Third, it presents a table of the approach contrasted with the shortcomings of diversity training programs and discusses practical and theoretical contributions, along with directions for future research.

This paper conceptualizes an organizational diversity-learning framework, which features an organizational intervention for employees’ joint decision-making process with other employees from different statuses, functions, and identities.

The organizational diversity learning framework developed in this paper provides an inclusive diversity learning paradigm in which diversity learning rests in the experience of the learner. As stated by experiential learning theory, this framework encourages workers to heuristically learn about diverse perspectives in a psychologically safe environment, to reflect on different perspectives, and to create a new awareness about learning from others. As the participants learn to apply new repertoires for interacting with others in their daily work interactions (e.g. listening to different perspectives shared by unfamiliar social group members), it proposes that their behaviors may create a ripple effect, changing other colleagues’ attitudes, behaviors, and thinking patterns on working with diverse coworkers.

This paper provides detailed instructions for practitioners to facilitate diversity learning. It highlights a few key practical implications. First, the framework provides a method of organization-wide diversity learning through intersecting networks within the workplace, which is designed to reduce the elitist organizational decision making that mainly occurs at the upper echelon. Second, unlike other stand-alone diversity initiatives, the framework is embedded in the organizational decision-making process, which makes employees’ learning applicable to core organizational activities, contributing to both employees’ diversity learning and organizational growth. Third, the framework provides a preliminary model for transferring employees’ diversity learning in daily work operations, nurturing their behavioral learning to interact with different social groups more frequently at work and inclusive of their colleagues’ perspectives, feelings, and attitudes.

Workforces across nations are becoming increasingly diverse, and, simultaneously, the gap and tension between demographic representation in the upper and lower echelons is widening. By joining with other scholars who have advocated for the need to move beyond diversity training programs, the authors developed the organizational diversity learning framework for meaningful co-participation of employees with different statuses, functions, and identities. By inviting minority perspectives into the organizational decision-making process, top managers can explicitly send a message to minority groups that their perspectives matter and that their contributions are highly valued by the organization.

There has not been a conceptual paper that delineates the diversity inclusive decision-making process within a workplace. The authors established the organizational diversity learning framework based on the diversity learning, organizational diversity integration and learning perspectives, and deliberative democracy practices. The proposed framework guides organizations in structural interventions to educate employees on how to learn from multiple perspectives for better organizational decision making.

Formalised support services for prisoners that rely on peer methods of delivery show promising health and social outcomes but there is also conjecture that negative effects, both at an individual and organisational level, can occur. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Individuals with recognised professional expertise from various sectors (including ex-prisoners) were invited to contribute to an expert symposium to share their perceptions of the positive and negative effects of peer interventions in prison. Discussions and debate were audio recorded with the consent of all delegates and verbatim transcripts were analysed using framework analysis.

According to the participants, peer interventions in the prison setting created both positive and negative impacts. It was clear from the evidence gathered that peer interventions in prisons can impact positively on health outcomes, but these effects were perceived to be more well-defined for peer deliverers. The notion that peer deliverers can be subjected to “burnout” suggests that supervisory processes for peer workers need to be considered carefully in order to avoid the intervention from being counter-productive. Organisationally, one of the salient issues was the adverse effects that peer interventions cause to the security of the prison.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time an expert symposium has been conducted to specifically examine peer interventions in prison and to consider the effects, both positive and negative, of such schemes.