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This exploratory study examined the qualitative and quantitative financial measures that best describe the patterns, predictors, or degree of success for vision driven organizations. A framework was developed within the methodology to qualitatively partition and link the financial contributions of the organizational and strategic factors within visionary organizations. The qualitative measures were identified utilizing content analysis within the literature stream. Five financial indicators were chosen to represent the respective quantitative measures from 57 visionary organizations over a 16‐year period. The inferential test results from two multiple discriminant analyses and verifying MANOVA tests show the accuracy for predicting the level of a visionary organization at 84 percent. The results of this research suggest that group membership, either visionary or average visionary, can be predicted reliably from a set of financial indicators. This research further suggests that organizations can enhance their opportunities for sustained competitive advantage and supernormal profits by focusing on the alignment of ten core elements of vision driven strategies identified from within the research stream.

A holistic, integrative and synergistic performance model is defined by inter‐firm variables represented as economic rates of return for both economic and organizational factors. These variables are used to examine performance variance and their economic contribution to firm profitability. An extensive literature review has been conducted to discover the commonality of underlying constructs and themes within the research stream on organizational performance. An analysis of the data suggests that there exists a set of common variables to explain organizational performance variance. Builds on the results of an earlier study that indicates organizational factors explain almost twice as much variance in profit rates as do economic factors. Proposes a systemic framework on which to partition the economic contribution of these interdependent determinant factors of organizational performance.

The UK Government-funded National Health Service (NHS) is experiencing significant pressures because of the complexity of challenges to, and demands of, health-care provision. This situation has driven government policy level support for transformational change initiatives, such as value-based health care (VBHC), through closer alignment and collaboration across the health-care system-life science sector nexus. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the necessary antecedents to collaboration in VBHC through a critical exploration of the existing literature, with a view to establishing the foundations for further development of policy, practice and theory in this field.

A literature review was conducted via searches on Scopus and Google Scholar between 2009 and 2019 for peer-reviewed articles containing keywords and phrases “Value-based healthcare industry” and “healthcare industry collaboration”. Refinement of the results led to the identification of “guiding conditions” (GCs) for collaboration in VBHC.

Five literature-derived GCs were identified as necessary for the successful implementation of initiatives such as VBHC through system-sector collaboration. These are: a multi-disciplinarity; use of appropriate technological infrastructure; capturing meaningful metrics; understanding the total cycle-of-care; and financial flexibility. This paper outlines research opportunities to empirically test the relevance of the five GCs with regard to improving system-sector collaboration on VBHC.

This paper has developed a practical and constructive framework that has the potential to inform both policy and further theoretical development on collaboration in VBHC.

This paper aims to focus on ergonomics intervention and quality implementation at a chemical manufacturing plant in Saudi Arabia that is prone to increased number of quality defects and shutdowns.

The paper applies the quality improvement through ergonomics (QUITE) methodology as a solution to improve the level of plants quality and reliability. The QUITE implementation relies on a great amount of human participation and constant check of quality results. The study is conducted to solve two main problems in the plant under study, namely, degradation in the products quality and unsolved frequent shutdowns in the production line

The study findings suggested to automate the inspection process through “User Alert” system to stimulate the operator attention who triggers a corrective action to avoid any possible process upset of plant shutdown. The implementation increased productivity from 280 to 310 ton; quality conformance from 91.7 to 96.80 per cent; and reduced shutdown from 1.26 days to almost zero downtime.

The work shed the light on the effect of ergonomics on the quality of finished products. Usually, ergonomics is related to the work environment. However, ergonomics initiatives can spearhead improvement in production quality.

The purpose of this paper is to explore general practitioners' (GPs') and psychiatrists' views and experiences of transparent forms of medical regulation in practice, as well as those of medical regulators and those representing patients and professionals.

The research included interviews with GPs, psychiatrists and others involved in medical regulation, representing patients and professionals. A qualitative narrative analysis of the interviews was then conducted.

Narratives suggest rising levels of complaints, legalisation and blame within the National Health Service (NHS). Three key themes emerge. First, doctors feel “guilty until proven innocent” within increasingly legalised regulatory systems and are consequently practising more defensively. Second, regulation is described as providing “spectacular transparency”, driven by political responses to high profile scandals rather than its effects in practice, which can be seen as a social defence. Finally, it is suggested that a “blame business” is driving this form of transparency, in which self‐interested regulators, the media, lawyers, and even some patient organisations are fuelling transparency in a wider culture of blame.

A relatively small number of people were interviewed, so further research testing the findings would be useful.

Transparency has some perverse effects on doctors' practice.

Rising levels of blame has perverse consequences for patient care, as doctors are practicing more defensively as a result, as well as significant financial implications for NHS funding.

Transparent forms of regulation are assumed to be beneficial and yet little research has examined its effects in practice. In this paper we highlight a number of perverse effects of transparency in practice.

LIBRARIES have come impressively into the public picture in the past year or two, and seldom with more effect than when Their Majesties the King and Queen opened the new Central Reference Library at Manchester on July 17th. In a time, which is nearly the end of a great depression, that the city which probably felt the depression more than any in the Kingdom should have proceeded with the building of a vast store‐house of learning is a fact of great social significance and a happy augury for libraries as a whole. His Majesty the King has been most felicitous in providing what we may call “slogans” for libraries. It will be remembered that in connection with the opening of the National Central Library, he suggested that it was a “University which all may join and which none need ever leave” —words which should be written in imperishable letters upon that library and be printed upon its stationery for ever. As Mr. J. D. Stewart said at the annual meeting of the National Central Library, it was a slogan which every public library would like to appropriate. At Manchester, His Majesty gave us another. He said: “To our urban population open libraries are as essential to health of mind, as open spaces to health of body.” This will be at the disposal of all of us for use. It is a wonderful thing that Manchester in these times has been able to provide a building costing £450,000 embodying all that is modern and all that is attractive in the design of libraries. The architect, Mr. Vincent Harris, and the successive librarians, Mr. Jast and Mr. Nowell, are to be congratulated upon the crown of their work.

We bring together the institutional theory literature on institutional logics and the information systems (IS) literature that conceptualizes a relational view of affordances to explore the digital changes unfolding in the delivery of professional services. Through a qualitative inductive study of the development of an app led by a clinician manager in an Australian hospital, we investigate how multiple institutional logics shape the design of affordances when an organization develops new digital technologies for frontline professional work. Our findings show how a billing function was designed into the app by the development team over four episodes to afford potential physician users with billing usability, billing acceptability, billing authority and billing discretion. These affordances emerged as different elements of professional, state, managerial and market logics became activated, interpreted, evaluated, negotiated and designed into the digital technology through the team’s interactions with the clinician manager, a hybrid professional, during the app development process. Our findings contribute new insight to the affordance-based logics perspective by deepening understanding of the process through which multiple institutional logics play out in the design of affordances of digital technology. We also highlight the role of hybrid professionals in this digital transformation of frontline professional work.

In this chapter, we propose and discuss a framework to organise some of the individual difference constructs which have appeared consistently in the business ethics literature. Although many constructs have appeared in both conceptual and empirical work in the major business ethics journals, there has been little effort to categorise such constructs in accord with recognised frameworks. In our work, we rely on the industrial/organisational psychology literature to provide a starting point for categorising individual differences. Using the business ethics literature, we then develop a framework composed of three broad categories: cognitive skills, moral volition and personal values. We then provide examples within each category of the framework, and map these examples onto subcategories under each of the major categories. Finally, we organise the complete framework into a comprehensive table and we discuss several implications that may inform future research.

WE seem to be immediately facing a drive for much more technical education and for many more technical colleges and schools to produce it. In the condition of the world today this is an inevitable, an indispensable, process. The reasons are loudly proclaimed and patent to every librarian, and the library must come strongly, as it always has, into the picture but perhaps now more universally and with greater intensity. Dr. Chandler, who is proceeding at a rare pace to specialize his departments, has created a new local council to unify the information work that has already been done at Liverpool. Every technical book costing over five shillings is bought, and the usual collections of periodicals and other material of technical and industrial interest are being increased and a bulletin of additions is being issued soon after the end of each month. The Technical library is one that combines lending and reference activities, telephone and postal services; in fact all the orthodox activities that have been standard in the larger towns since Glasgow began them in 1916, and possibly new and extended ones. The William Brown Library which was destroyed in Air Raids is being reconstructed and the enlarged Technical Library will be developed in it. This is one city only; every large city reports some increase in the services rendered, for example the Telex service is now available at Manchester. It is essential that public libraries everywhere realize the part they may play; if they do not, the suggestion made recently that the lending of technical books should become an activity of the Technical Colleges may become a reality.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of professional and leader identity and the maintenance of identity, through identity work as IT professionals transitioned to a permanent hybrid role. This study therefore contributes to the under-researched area of permanent transition to a hybrid role in the context of IT, where there is a requirement to enact both the professional and leader roles together.

The study utilised a longitudinal design and two qualitative methods (interviews and reflective diaries) to gather data from 17 IT professionals transitioning to hybrid roles.

The study findings reveal that IT professionals engage in an ongoing process of reconciliation of professional and leader identity as they transition to a permanent hybrid role, and they construct hybrid professional–leader identities while continuing to value their professional identity. They experience professional–leader identity conflict resulting from reluctance to reconcile both professional and leader identities. They used both integration and differentiation identity work tactics to ameliorate these tensions.

The longitudinal study design, the qualitative approaches used and the unique context of the participants provide a dynamic and deep understanding of the challenges involved in performing hybrid roles in the context of IT.