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We present the results of one of the only in-depth studies of a police agency’s internal and external response to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 (COVID-19). This study emphasizes the importance of law enforcement agencies conducting comprehensive case studies and after-action assessments to prepare, prevent and respond to prolonged public health crises and showcases the profound (and lingering) effects of COVID-19 on police organizations.

This multi-method case study combines document analysis, a workforce survey, a community survey, interviews and analysis of administrative data to detail and assess the agency’s internal and operational responses to the pandemic and the reactions of employees and community members to those responses.

Despite agency strategies to mitigate the pandemic’s effects, employees cited very high stress levels one year after the pandemic and a third of sworn officers considered leaving the policing profession altogether during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several policies intended by the agency to protect employee health and maintain staffing needs kept workforce levels steady but may have increased feelings of organizational injustice in both sworn and non-sworn individuals, with variation across racial and gender groups. A jurisdiction-wide community survey indicated general support for the police department’s responses but a preference for in-person rather than telephone-based responses to service calls. Officers, however, preferred continuing remote responses even after the pandemic subsided.

To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the only in-depth case studies that examine a police agency’s internal and external responses to COVID-19 and the sworn, non-sworn and community reactions to those responses.

In recent times, the idea of taking advantage of the benefits of simulation techniques and Six Sigma discipline altogether has led various organizations towards implementation of simulation tools within Six Sigma methodology. The purpose of this study is to provide a more comprehensive literature review on the topic exploring how this amalgamation could work both in theory and practice. This precisely entailed finding dependable studies that shows how Six Sigma (DMAIC) Methodology can be enhanced by the three prevalent simulation techniques; Agent-Based (AB), Discrete-Events (DE), System Dynamics (SD).

A systematic literature review was considered more fitting in research because it involves rigorous and well-defined approach compared to other forms of literature review. In this case, the literature was comprehensive, well-encompassing and involved finding Six Sigma and Simulations literatures from reputable scholarly databases. The outcome of these reviews was the identification of a set of key finding compiled and classified by topics. The study follows an inductive approach and utilises a meta-synthesis review technique.

As numerous studies assert, simulation techniques including AB, DE and SD are applicable tools in almost every stage of DMAIC, especially the Analyse, Improve and Control phases, because of their capability to test and identify potential bottlenecks and improvement areas. Findings show that the simulation tools such as CLDs, Group Model Building, Dynamic Balance Scorecards and Cost of poor quality all have the potential to add value to a Six Sigma methodology.

The findings of this study highlight the importance of further inquiry in this area of study. The finding of this study suggests that although the study on the integration of Six Sigma and simulations is increasing, empirical evidence on its effectiveness is still limited. Therefore, this study suggests more roadmaps and investigations aimed at merging Six Sigma methodology and various simulation technique. Moreover, studies that centre on hybrid or multi-method simulations within Six Sigma are also urgently necessitated.

This study investigates the impact of political interference on the capacity to combat corruption within Indonesian public sector institutions. It analyses the troubling impact of politicians in strategic leadership positions in public institutions and the impact this has on its ethical leadership credibility.

A qualitative multi-method approach was followed. Firstly, media publications were analysed to describe typical cases of corruption by political and public leaders and to evaluate the current state of the country. Secondly, the authors studied the selection and appointment processes for strategic leadership in two types of leading Indonesian public sector institutions based on laws and regulations and critical (media) publications to assess the problem of political interference. Lastly, the authors used insights from 42 face-to-face interviews within one leading public institution to understand the problem of political interference and its impact on ethical leadership credibility in Indonesia.

When politicians are appointed in strategic leadership positions of public institutions, including CEOs, the board of directors and commissioners, the downside is that such political support causes a conflict of interest that seriously threatens the independent functioning of public institutions and the ethical reputation of the public sector as a whole. The influence of specific Indonesian cultural values and norms only reinforces these ethical challenges in building public sector integrity.

Most empirical studies on ethical leadership focus on middle managers and the impact of ethical leadership on organisational outcomes. In addition, little is yet known about the effectiveness of ethical leadership in developing countries. This study attempts to address this gap and analyses the troubling role of politicians in strategic leadership positions in Indonesia's public institutions and the impact this has on its ethical leadership credibility.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors influencing e‐procurement adoption in the United Nations (UN) system of organizations are examined.

This paper reports on an extended multi‐method case study of e‐procurement in the UN. A three stage methodology is adopted – a questionnaire survey of UN organizations, case studies of e‐procurement issues in three UN organizations, and an interactive workshop with the heads of purchasing of UN organizations.

The paper finds that e‐procurement is being used in the UN for transactions of routine, non‐strategic purchases. UN development agencies are more likely to adopt e‐procurement than humanitarian aid agencies as their operations are more predictable. The intention of the majority of UN organizations to adopt e‐procurement within three years has been reversed following the workshop, which revealed that adoption of e‐procurement would run counter to UN policies of supporting less developed nations, regions and organizations. A more cautious, “wait and see” approach has been taken rather than to unilaterally promote e‐procurement across the UN system.

This research focuses on the UN, yet could have implications for other complex systems of organizations such as the public sector, or multinational companies considering implementing e‐procurement with suppliers in developing countries.

E‐procurement needs to be considered in the context of other procurement policy objectives. What may be good e‐procurement practice in a profit‐making firm may be viewed as competing with broader policy objectives of not‐for‐profit organizations. The digital divide is a salient contextual factor for the UN, and brings about unforeseen issues regarding e‐procurement adoption which may have resonance for other organisations.

Much research on e‐procurement has been conducted in the private sector and this paper contributes to the small but growing number of studies of e‐procurement in the context of the public and not‐for‐profit sectors by studying e‐procurement in the UN.

This paper explores how Airbnb hosts' experiences with and responses to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) health crisis may differ according to their motivations to host and to the type and spatial layout of their Airbnb accommodation. Based on these insights, the paper reflects on the lessons that are learned for the future of short-term rentals.

This is a qualitative multi-method small-scale case study, which relies on in-depth interviews and a focus group discussion carried out with a group of hosts affiliated to the Airbnb Host Community in Aarhus, Denmark. Informed by an interpretivist approach, the study aims to make sense of people's subjective experiences with hosting on the Airbnb platform, and how they have continued and adapted their hospitality practices during the pandemic.

Participants' adaptive practices vary according to their motivations to host and the type of accommodation that they rent out. Although all hosts in this study now implement more intensive cleaning practices, hosts who stay with their guests onsite tend to take stricter preventative measures to avoid contamination and transmission of the virus in their social interactions with guests. On the contrary, hosts who rent out their entire properties and have minimal contact with their guests found themselves less affected by the pandemic's impacts and have had a continued demand for their properties.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unevenly affected Airbnb hosts. Hosts who share their homes with guests require different adaptations to their daily behaviour and cleaning practices at home than hosts who do not stay with their guests and rent out entire properties. However, unlike professional hosts who largely or solely rely on Airbnb for their income, occasional home-sharing hosts tend to be more flexible in coping with cancelled or fewer bookings.

This study provides novel insights into the uneven impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on participants in the platform economies of tourism. It contributes to existing literature on the impacts of the pandemic on Airbnb's operations by showing how hosts' adaptive practices are informed by their subjective living conditions and the type of accommodation they can offer their guests.

Deborah L. Balk is a social demographer at Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). Her prior work has focused on fertility, marriage, health and gender in Asia and north Africa. Her current work integrates demography with geography, applying both geospatial and demographic data and techniques to one another. Her current research includes a study of climate, health and migration interactions in sub-Saharan Africa, and analysis of the global spatial distribution of population with particular attention to estimates of urban extents.Alejandro Cervantes-Carson is assistant professor of sociology at Mary Washington College. Born in Mexico City, he studied both in Mexico and the United States, obtaining a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas, at Austin. His primary areas of interest and research are political sociology, social inequality, and Latin America. He has written articles on gender, human rights, population policies and reproductive rights in Mexico. He is currently part of a research team studying a transnational community that connects northern Virginia, U.S., and southern Puebla, Mexico, and developing a project on deliberative democracy in the Zapatista movement.Denise A. Copelton is visiting assistant professor of sociology at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where she teaches courses on women’s health, medical sociology, and sociology of families. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Binghamton University (SUNY) in 2003. Her dissertation examined the social experience of pregnancy in the U.S., focusing both on the social construction of prenatal norms in popular pregnancy advice books and on the ways in which pregnant women accommodate and resist these norms in their daily lives.Vasilikie Demos is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Morris. She has studied ethnicity and gender in the United States and is currently completing a monograph on her study of Kytherian Greek women based on interviews in Greece and among immigrants in the United States and Australia. With Marcia Texler Segal, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and of the North Central Sociological Association, and has been an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales.Lara Foley is assistant professor of sociology and governing board member of the women’s studies program at the University of Tulsa. Among the courses she teaches are Sociology of Medicine and Sociology of Reproduction and Birth. Her work in this volume is based on her dissertation research examining the work narratives of midwives. Another article from this project, co-authored with Christopher Faircloth, entitled “Medicine as a Discursive Resource: Legitimation in the Work Narratives of Midwives” appears in Sociology of Health and Illness, 2003, 25, 165–184. She is currently working on a book project examining the experiences and roles of male partners in pregnancy and childbirth.Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld is professor in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She conducts research in the areas of health policy, health across the life course, health behavior including preventive health behavior, and research into AIDS in geographically mobile populations. She has recently authored Health Care Policy: Issues and Trends (Praeger, 2002). She has conducted research in a variety of topics related to child health, including recruitment into CHIP (child health insurance program) and has published a book on the impact of school-based health clinics, Schools and the Health of Children (Sage, 2000). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and past chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.Marcia Texler Segal is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dean for Research and professor of sociology at Indiana University Southeast. Her research and consulting focus on education and on women in Sub-Saharan Africa and on ethnic women in the United States. With Vasilikie Demos, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of the North Central Sociological Association and past chair of the American Sociological Association Sections on Sex and Gender and Race, Gender and Class.Chikako Takeshita is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech University. Her research interests include socio-cultural and political aspects of biodiversity prospecting and indigenous rights. She is the author of the article “Bioprospecting and its Discontents: Indigenous Resistances as Legitimate Politics” (Alternatives, 2001, 26, 259–282). More recently, she has been researching the social and scientific development of intrauterine devices, politics of medical representations of female bodies, and reproductive rights and population policies from a gender perspective. She has a M.S. degree from the Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech, an M.B.A. from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and a B.A. from Keio University in Tokyo.Carol A. B. Warren is Professor Emerita and former chair of sociology at the University of Kansas. Her former appointment was as associate to full professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. Among her recent publications are Gender Issues in Ethnography with Jennifer K. Hackney (Sage, 2000), “Qualitative Interviewing” in the Handbook of Interview Research (J. Gubrium & J. Holstein (Eds), Sage, 2002), Pushbutton Psychiatry: A History of Electroshock in America with Timothy Kneeland (Praeger, 2002) and “Sex and Gender in the 1970s,” in Qualitative Sociology (Winter 2003). She is working on a book, Discovering Qualitative Methods: Field Research, Interviews, and Images, with Tracy X. Karneer, to be published by Roxbury, and on articles (with Timothy Kneeland) on “Mineral Magnetism in Psychiatric Treatment” and “Natural Electricity in Psychiatric Treatment: Amber, Fish and Eels.”Terri A. Winnick earned a B.S. in psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University, Mansfield. Her area of interest is medical sociology, with a focus on professions; she is currently doing research on the reaction of the established medical profession to alternative medicine.Kathryn M. Yount is a social demographer specializing in the measurement of morbidity and mortality in less developed settings and in the integration of qualitative and quantitative data in sociodemographic analysis. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of International Health and Sociology and Affiliated Faculty of the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses primarily on multi-method case studies and comparative analyses of the determinants of disparities by gender in survival, health, and access to care over the life course. Yount has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the University Research Committee at Emory, and the National Institute on Aging to study these issues in the Middle East.

Advanced skills in communication, teamwork and stakeholder engagement are widely recognized as important success factors for advancing sustainability. While project-based learning formats claim to advance such skills, there is little empirical evidence that demonstrates how interpersonal competence is being developed. This study aims to describe and explains teaching and learning processes of project-based sustainability courses that contribute to the development of interpersonal competence as one of the key competencies in sustainability.

This study on an international project-based learning course adopted a multi-method case study approach, triangulating observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups supported by Photovoice method through which students tracked their learning processes. Data collection and analysis followed a grounded theory approach.

Learning through and from conflicts within a learning community can foster competence development in teamwork, communication and stakeholder engagement. This study identified inner and outer conflicts (within individuals versus between individuals or groups) as potential drivers of learning processes, depending on strategies applied to address these conflicts.

The value of this study is fourfold: it demonstrates how conflicts can be leveraged for students’ competence development; it provides in-depth empirical data from multiple perspectives, it discusses the findings in the context of teaching and learning theories, and it demonstrates an application of the Photovoice method to track and improve teaching and learning processes.

While recent theoretical discussions around discourse–material relationality have facilitated important conceptual and analytical advancements within the broader field of CMS, less progress has been made methodologically with regard to innovating empirical methods and data modes. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to contribute to strengthening the methodological focus in the literature when grappling with the relationality of discourse–materiality and co-constitution. This includes a method-retooling framework inspired by new materialism.

In this article, the authors engage at the methodological level by developing a method-retooling framework that combines insights from organizational discourse studies and new materialist thinking. This framework enables a retooling of existing methods to become sensitive to multimodality and offers two concrete examples that were developed during fieldwork for a multi-sited and multi-method case study in 2018.

Based on the framework for retooling methods for multimodality, two illustrations are offered. These include retooling interviews by employing multimodal vignettes and retooling observations by using multimodal mappings. They are unfolded and discussed regarding their appropriation of discourse–material relationality.

This paper includes original research and method developments – adding a critical focus on the methodological aspects and potential advancements that are necessary in the wake of the ongoing debates around discourse–materiality across CMS and specifically within studies of organizational discourse and CCO. By suggesting a framework, the authors stimulate methodological explorations and contribute to furthering method developments that are equal to the rich conceptual progress made within the field.

Trainers and organisations in heavily regulated industries face a number of training-related HR challenges. The purpose of this paper is to examine barriers and propose solutions in such circumstances.

The paper briefly outlines the results of a case study involving multi-method data collection (interview, survey, focus groups, etc.) to explore barriers to training effectiveness in a pharmaceutical company in Germany.

The case study suggests that the company in question experienced several time and resource pressures to accommodate internally and externally required training needs. Other issues pertained to negative effects of these circumstances on employee motivation, engagement and relevance of training.

Based on the case study and existing work, a number of general practical recommendations are outlined for trainers working in regulated industries. These include suggestions such as the need for situation awareness in the design of the training strategy, co-creation in training, the benefit of linking training to reward systems, training accreditation and the benefit of reviewing existing training approaches in the regulated industry.

The paper provides one starting point for those leading and managing training activities in regulated industry settings to manage the internal and external training challenges.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether patrol officers believe that police practices vary by precinct assignment and whether the precinct acts as a sub‐organizational level of analysis in police organizations.

The research design is a multi‐method ethnographic case study including observational fieldwork, both structured and unstructured interviews and official departmental documents.

The study finds that patrol officers overwhelmingly agree that police practices vary at the precinct level of analysis. This variation is perceived to be caused by: individual officer temperament/personality and level of experience,; culture, nature and expectations of the clientele/citizens; nature of calls for service, higher call loads and officer safety concerns; and command and precinct rules/norms. The study also finds that the precinct is a viable and important level of analysis within police organizations.

This study highlights the need to examine variation in police behavior within organizations at the precinct level of analysis.

The findings from this study have considerable practical implications because the findings indicate that to understand police patrol practices, police practitioners must investigate variation in the informal structures/cultures of police organizations at the sub‐organizational level of the precinct.

This paper is valuable because police researchers have investigated police behavior at the individual, situational, neighborhood, organizational and legal levels of analyses but have largely overlooked the intersection of these levels of analyses: the precinct.