Search results

The wake of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had caused substantial disruptions to the usual delivery of healthcare services. This is because of restrictive orders that were put in place to curb the spread of the infection. Palliative care services in Brunei also face challenges to deliver effective services during this period. However, the impact of advanced illnesses on patients' health and end-of-life care are issues that cannot be planned, postponed or cancelled. Hence, the palliative care team needs to continue to deliver effective palliative care services. As Brunei faced its second pandemic wave in August 2021, crucial adaptations were made to ensure palliative care service was not disrupted. This reflective case study aims to discuss the adaptations made in providing palliative care during this era of disruptions.

The purpose of this study is to understand the effect of increasing the intensity of sexual or violent content on consumer responses to online video advertisements, with a particular emphasis on sharing intentions.

The paper uses a between-subjects experimental design across two studies using new to the world online video advertisements as stimuli.

Study 1 finds that increasing the intensity of sexual and violent humor improves advertisement effectiveness amongst men but leads to significantly more negative attitudes toward the advertisement and brand amongst women. Study 2 identifies gender and humor type as moderators for sharing intentions in the presence of audience diversity. While men are more likely to publicly share sexual and violent humor advertisements, social anxiety mediates intentions to share sexual humor advertisements in the presence of greater audience diversity.

The paper offers insights to practitioners regarding the use of risqué forms of humor as part of a digital marketing strategy.

Drawing on and extending benign violation theory, the paper introduces and verifies a theoretical model for understanding consumer responses to the use of risqué forms of humor in online advertisements. It identifies how audience diversity affects sharing intentions for sexual and violent humor-based advertisements on social media.

This paper aims to describe the process of identifying, applying and assessing the balanced scorecard model on a five‐year, strategic plan in an academic, medical library two years into the five‐year period. The existing strategic plan consisted of eight inter‐connected pathways with multiple goals and objectives, generating a high volume of data, which made it difficult to track the implementation of the plan.

A research query seeking an alternative to the current strategic plan framework was developed and researched. This process identified the balanced scorecard as a possible successful alternative to the eight inter‐connected pathways in place. After the application of the balanced scorecard, a second query, with assessment criteria, was developed to determine if the balanced scorecard did, in fact, provide a better framework than the original plan.

The balanced scorecard restructured the eight pathways into four perspectives to create an aligned, cause‐and‐effect strategy. The original plan had too many themes to manage and lacked a cohesive strategy. Performance measures proved more meaningful and manageable in measuring the success of the strategic plan than the high volume of project management data. It was concluded that the balanced scorecard met the assessment criteria as a better framework for the strategic plan.

Aligning goals and objectives to form strategy simplified the implementation of the strategic plan. Performance measures focus on the performance of the organization, creating a process of continuous improvement.

While the balanced scorecard has been applied in academic libraries, this project successfully applied the model on a strategic plan two years after its implementation.

This descriptive study of 184 small firms identified strategies most frequently used by their managers. These strategies were identified using the Entrepreneurial Strategy Matrix, a situational model in which the identification of levels of innovation and risk lead to prescriptions of appropriate strategies. Concurrently, this model was empirically tested and its validity supported. Of the strategies used, the five most common were: “work to create a competitive advantage,” “maintain innovation,” “lower the costs of developing and/or maintaining one’s venture,” “defend product/service as it is now,” and “create a first mover advantage.” In addition, there were no differences between the use of strategies by entrepreneurs in service and manufacturing industries.

Vitamin A has been found to occur both as such and in the form of several precursors, and rather than try to coin one word to cover several substances we continue to use the alphabetical designation, with or without mention of precursors, or we say vitamin A value. In addition to its many other functions in our bodies, vitamin A has been found to be immediately essential to vision, a fact effectively used in the introductory summary of the Federal volume “Food and Life.” Vitamin B has been differentiated into thiamin, riboflavin, nicotinic acid, pantothenic acid, and pyridoxine, all now structurally identified, while still other possibilities are under investigation. Thiamin prevents and cures some of the most prevalent of the nerve diseases both of the Orient and of our Western World; and as it aids a fundamental intermediate step in the nutritional chemistry of all of our organs and tissues, it is proving helpful in a surprising diversity of ills. Nicotinic acid—a substance not nutritionally related to nicotine, and until lately little more than a laboratory curiosity— has been found dramatically potent in the cure of the conspicuous inflammation of the skin (and tongue) which gives the name to the disease pellagra which has been extremely prevalent in our Southern States; and which may perhaps afflict other regions and other countries to a larger extent than is recognised. Few discoveries could be more striking than that of the potency of this simple and inexpensive substance in the prevention and cure of such a scourge as pellagra. Yet it remains to be said that when the typical pellagrin has been cured of his pellagra by means of nicotinic acid alone, he needs something more to make him a fully healthy man. The previous diet of the poor pellagrin has usually contained so little of foods other than grain products, fats and sweets as to make his bodily condition that of a multiple nutritional deficiency instead of a “single” or “simple” one. Clinical treatment with the pure vitamins, separately and in combination, shows that the typical pellagrin probably needs riboflavin almost as much as he needs nicotinic acid, and often needs thiamin also, while in only less degree his “one‐sided” food supply is likely to have involved other shortages as well as these three. Good diet cures all of these deficiencies at once, and renders unnecessary the further investigation of the frequency in the pellagrous population of shortages other than those of nicotinic acid, riboflavin, and thiamin. It is believed that if these three vitamins were regularly and adequately added to white flour and to the corresponding products of corn, illness would be reduced and the efficiency of our people improved; while there would still be a higher goal ahead to be reached through better understanding and appreciation of what constitutes a well balanced dietary or food supply, and what it can do for one's health and efficiency. In the case of the antiscorbutic vitamin the new world has done much to repay its debt to Europe. The old world got the potato from the new, and with year‐round availability of potatoes scurvy became relatively rare. Also, it was an American physician who first clearly set forth the view that the antiscorbutic property of “fresh” food is due to a definite substance; and an American chemist who first identified this substance now called interchangeably ascorbic acid or vitamin C. Another of this rapid series of dis‐coveries was the finding of a vitamin since differentiated into several, the vitamins D, preventive of rickets which had recently been called the most prevalent of all diseases outside of the tropics. Any one of such discoveries of nutritional means for the cure and prevention of previously baffling diseases might alone have made this generation memorable in the history of the medical sciences and of human progress. Not only did these discoveries open men's eyes to a broader and clearer view of their ills: that not every disease is to be explained in terms of the presence of something injurious, because several are now seen to be due (instead) to a lack or shortage of something nutritionally essential. In addition, these discoveries led to a further and more constructive advance. Even while the chemical identification of the earlier‐discovered of the vitamins was still in progress, means of measuring them through their effects had been worked out and much active and fruitful research was in progress upon such quantitative problems as, In what relative abundance do these substances occur in different types of foods and elsewhere in nature? How much is required in nutrition under different conditions?, and How liberal a nutritional intake of each yields best results in the long view which considers the whole lifetime and successive generations? Laboratory research upon problems of amounts or proportions of nutritional intakes has also gained much through the clear recognition of the scientific value of the use of two kinds of experimental variable: (1) the individual chemical factor; and (2) the actual article of food as produced by nature or agriculture and consumed in everyday life. The chairman of the League of Nations' mixed committee on nutrition reduced the problem of food supply to its simplest terms when he said that what is needed is, “Not only enough food but also enough of the right kinds of food.” In the nature of things the “protective” foods must usually be more expensive, calorie‐for‐calorie, than the more abundant “fuel” foods such as the chief grain crops. Thus for most low‐income families at all times, and for greater proportions of the people during food shortages such as accompanied and followed the first World War, and now threatens the world again, a persistently outstanding problem is, What proportion of protective food is needed so to “balance” a dietary or food supply as to permit the full development and exercise of the innate capacities of those subsisting upon it? Twenty years of experimentation in the field that this question suggests, with large numbers of laboratory animals continued throughout the entire lifetimes of successive generations under the standards of control characteristic of research in the exact sciences, have brought accurately measured objective evidence that there is an important distinction between the merely adequate and the optimal in nutrition; and that the difference between the minimal‐adequate and the optimal levels is much greater for some nutritional factors than for others.

The paper aims to explore the issues surrounding the user conceptualisation of academic libraries. The paper will solidify the role of academic libraries as learning spaces and problematise how libraries are conceptualised by users.

The paper is a literature-based conceptual paper and draws on a wide range of literature to challenge the concept of academic libraries and presents how they are becoming reframed as different spaces.

The paper argues that the concept of a library is at risk. While libraries have undergone substantial changes, the concept of a library has lingered. This paper demonstrated that libraries need to proactively engage users in this debate.

The spatial approach taken by this paper demonstrates the complicity behind the user conceptualisation of libraries. Developing an understanding of this process is an important foundation for libraries to develop their user engagement.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how industry conditions affect corporate social performance (CSP). To accomplish this objective, the authors develop and test a theoretical argument that task environment managerial discretion plays an important role in determining a firm’s level of CSP.

In this research, the authors utilize a longitudinal data set of archival data nested across year, firm and industry. They then test their research model using multilevel techniques, which account for the nested nature of their research design.

Firms exhibit higher levels of CSP when their industry’s environment is high in dynamism and product differentiation. Conversely, firms exhibit lower levels of CSP when capital intensity is high. Finally, the authors find that firms exhibit higher levels of both positive and negative CSP as industry munificence increases.

A number of researchers have called for investigation into the antecedents of CSP. This research provides an important next step in understanding the factors that influence firm CSP. Specifically, this research illustrates how the task environment affects stakeholder management by influencing the degree to which firms engage in CSP.

Managers should be mindful of the task environment’s conditions for managerial discretion and how these conditions affect stakeholder support for CSP. Moreover, managers should understand how industry conditions affect the firm’s ability to achieve competitive advantage through the use of CSP strategies.

While there has been much research aimed at understanding the potential CSP-firm performance link, there has been relatively little attention paid to understanding what influences firm CSP in the first place. This research suggests that industry-level characteristics of managerial discretion strongly influence firm strategic actions toward social performance.

This paper aims to present an examination of the characterisation of accounting and accountants in popular music. Some authors have considered the place of accounting in popular culture and the social perceptions of accounting and accountants. This research aims to advance this work by suggesting that music both offers a powerful insight into social perceptions of accounting, and serves both to reflect and reinforce these perceptions.

Songs featuring accountants were identified, which was verified by a search of song lyric databases using the search terms “accountant/s”, “accounting” and “accounts” and accounting terms. The lyrics were analysed on the basis of how the accountants or accounting activity were presented, and a taxonomy was established.

Some songs reflect the image of the accountant as both the facilitator and accoutrement of positions of wealth and privilege. The dark side of the image is the assertion that the accountant will abuse their position of trust. The final, and perhaps most sinister image, is that of accountants as the perpetrators of fraud and deception. It is concluded that these images of accountants and accounting illustrate that the accounting profession is facing a significant challenge in terms of its image and relationship to the public.

This study is the first to consider the characterisation of accountants/accounting in popular music. Recent representations have tended to characterise accounting and accountants in a particularly negative light. Accountants are presented as agents in the destruction of the environment, exploiters of the poor, accessories and agents of the wealthy and constructors of a “truth” that benefits the rich. Overall, the representation of accounting in music tends to fit the position adopted by many of the most critical accounting authors. A particular aspect of the oppressive role exercised by accountants and accounting in society is as the embodiment of, and advocate for, or even a metaphor for, a particular form of economic reason that progressively suppresses and destroys relationships, the environment and artistic creativity in the interest of financial gain.

Leadership research has traditionally focused on formal leadership; however, leaders may emerge in informal settings in self-managed teams, and little is known about who emergent leaders are and what their characteristics are. This study investigates emergent leaders' behaviors, roles, skills, and leadership style, drawing on a multi-method approach.

We first identify emergent leaders using social network analysis and aggregation approaches. Second, we investigate emergent leaders' characteristics using interviews with forty agile team members in five organizations.

Results indicate different roles of emergent leaders (i.e. coach, liaisons), leadership styles (i.e. supportive), skills (i.e. culturally intelligent, strategist), and influencing factors (i.e. personality, technical knowledge, social circle).

We contribute by identifying emergent leaders through multiple identification methods (i.e. network analysis, aggregation), and then through identifying their various characteristics, we contribute to leadership literature as well as idiosyncrasy-credit theory. We also add to agile-leadership theory, showing that multiple informal leaders may emerge within agile teams. Finally, our findings have practical implications for self-managed teams, informal group settings, organizational change professionals, and organizations with horizontal structures.

The impostor phenomenon (IP) is a psychological cycle experienced by individuals who, despite successes, are plagued by self-doubt and a concern of being identified as fraudulent. IP research is typically focused on the psychological well-being of those who experience IP, examining antecedents and outcomes of IP. Research on organizational impact is limited with few studies examining IP’s influence on leadership practices. The purpose of this paper is to discuss IP and explore the value of mitigating IP’s negative effects with a view to developing a conceptual model that illustrates IP in context with leaders.

Using a scoping literature review methodology, this paper draws on identity theory to explore and discuss the relevance of IP to organizations and leadership practice.

Following a review of relevant literature, the authors propose a conceptual model that illustrates IP’s impact on organizational leaders’ capacity to practice leadership due to conflicting identity standards and diminished self-efficacy. Implications for organizational leadership development as well as leadership practice, theory, and research are discussed.

This paper is a theoretical analysis, not an empirical study, however, it presents a conceptual model that provides perspective on IP and its relevance to leadership as well as the organizational value of and suggestions for mitigating IP.

A greater understanding of IP and IP’s potential consequences on leadership in the workplace may contribute to organizational interventions that mitigate IP's impact on leaders and the organizations they serve.