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Although it is widely acknowledged that health care delivery systems are complex adaptive systems, there are gaps in understanding the application of systems engineering approaches to systems analysis and redesign in the health care domain. Commonly employed methods, such as statistical analysis of risk factors and outcomes, are simply not adequate to robustly characterize all system requirements and facilitate reliable design of complex care delivery systems. This is especially apparent in institutional-level systems, such as patient safety programs that must mitigate the risk of infections and other complications that can occur in virtually any setting providing direct and indirect patient care. The case example presented here illustrates the application of various system engineering methods to identify requirements and intervention candidates for a critical patient safety problem known as failure to rescue. Detailed descriptions of the analysis methods and their application are presented along with specific analysis artifacts related to the failure to rescue case study. Given the prevalence of complex systems in health care, this practical and effective approach provides an important example of how systems engineering methods can effectively address the shortcomings in current health care analysis and design, where complex systems are increasingly prevalent.

Failure to rescue events, or events involving preventable deaths from complications, are a significant contributor to inpatient mortality. While many interventions have been designed and implemented over several decades, this patient safety issue remains at the forefront of concern for most hospitals. In the first part of this study, the development and implementation of one type of highly studied and widely adopted rescue intervention, algorithm-based patient assessment tools, is examined. The analysis summarizes how a lack of systems-oriented approaches in the design and implementation of these tools has resulted in suboptimal understanding of patient risk of mortality and complications and the early recognition of patient deterioration. The gaps identified impact several critical aspects of excellent patient care, including information-sharing across care settings, support for the development of shared mental models within care teams, and access to timely and accurate patient information.

This chapter describes the use of several system-oriented design and implementation activities to establish design objectives, model clinical processes and workflows, and create an extensible information system model to maximize the benefits of patient state and risk assessment tools in the inpatient setting. A prototype based on the product of the design activities is discussed along with system-level considerations for implementation. This study also demonstrates the effectiveness and impact of applying systems design principles and practices to real-world clinical applications.

The paper aims to analyse the published work of Ireland's pre-eminent public relations (PR) educator, across a number of literary genres in which he has written. More broadly, it considers the writing life of academics.

This paper examines Carty's writings about his own history, Irish history, the development of church-state relations in Ireland and PR. It seeks to make connections between Carty's subjects and his writing styles.

Through detailed analysis of a number of key texts, the paper explores the writing styles used by Carty to discern the nature of his distinctive “voice(s)”.

There is considerable research into a handful of (mostly American) “great men” in PR' history and development. But every nation has its own PR pioneers about whom little is known outside that country and who deserve to be more widely recognised.

This paper hopes to stimulate future work by other colleagues in other nations, reflecting on the contribution of their own PR educators and practitioners.

This paper aims to use the case of early medieval Irish monasticism to highlight the implicit a historicism of the knowledge management (KM) literature and to show how such a historical study can be used to increase the level of discourse and reflection within the contested and increasingly fragmented field of KM.

The author uses secondary source analysis from a diversity of academic fields to examine the relatively sophisticated processes through which the monks gathered, codified, created, interpreted, disseminated and used religious and secular knowledge. The author then draws out a number of insights from this literature to aid current thinking on and debates within the field of KM.

The paper presents a church metaphor of KM operating at two levels. Internally the metaphor highlights the deliberate but politically contentious nature of knowledge creation, a process of developing both explicit and tacit knowledge among the monks, revolving around ideologies and cults, and primarily concerned with the avoidance, constraining and settling of controversies and debates. Externally, the metaphor highlights the political use of and the mediation of access to knowledge for the purposes of social position and influence.

This paper is original in providing a detailed consideration of KM activities within a specific early medieval historical context and in drawing from the study to contribute to current thinking within the field of KM.

Australian mining projects frequently undertake cultural salvage, involving archaeological consultants and Aboriginal Elders to identify important artefacts. However, the storage conditions within shipping containers present challenges, such as weather, insects, and limited access for Traditional Owners. The author, reflecting on his experience working as a project heritage advisor in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, emphasises the need for collaborative engagement between the mining sector and Aboriginal communities to develop effective storage strategies that prioritise both scientific integrity and cultural significance. The author raises questions about the purpose and sustainability of storing cultural artefacts in containers, while highlighting the need to balance safeguarding heritage with the evolving needs of Indigenous communities. Ultimately, the author emphasises the importance of empowering Traditional Owners in decisions about artefact storage and engaging in meaningful consultation to preserve cultural heritage. The author suggests that the process should prioritise not just tangible artefacts but also intangible aspects like stories and songlines that make up the living Indigenous culture.

The unavailability of practitioners is one of the disturbing realities that often prevent the use of experimental methods in accounting research. The availability of pragmatic alternatives to accounting practitioners demands that researchers explore such alternatives fully before conducting expensive experiments with practitioners. However, the use of students as surrogates for non‐students has been a controversial issue and this has led to an under‐utilization of the experimental method in management accounting research. Recent research has warned that relying solely on practitioners as subjects in experimental methods may result in “negative externalities”. The purpose of this paper is to inquire in to the feasibility of using student subjects in behavioral accounting research so that better judgments can be made about the benefits and dangers of using students in experiments.

The paper relies on a review and synthesis of the literature on the student surrogate debate.

The paper shows that accounting students may be adequate surrogates for practitioners in many decision‐making experiments.

The paper demonstrates that maintaining the experimental realism of a study and replications are more important than the type of subject when generalizing results.

The paper provides an analysis and synthesis of literature that will enable researchers to make sound judgments about the selection of subjects for experiments.

Our study proposes a resource environment view (REV) of competitive advantage by unpacking the environmental origins of a firm’s competitive advantage. The key tenet of the REV is that the heterogeneity and imperfect mobility of strategic factor markets and institutions across countries explain how firms based in different countries would likely both create and sustain a competitive advantage. In particular, our study introduces the notion of “the paradox of environmental embeddedness.” The paradox lies in the fact that the same environmental conditions – in terms of strategic factor markets and institutions – that enable firms to create a competitive advantage can paradoxically also create a situation in which it is more difficult for these firms to sustain an advantage. Another important aspect of our study is that, to enhance our understanding of how firms manage the paradox of environmental embeddedness, our study specifies the resource environmental conditions under which firms’ internal and external resource-oriented strategies – that is, the development of dynamic capabilities and interventions in the country resource environment – are more beneficial when managing the environmental paradox. Overall, our theorizing has important implications for strategic management theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to use expert interviews with communication managers of the German energy industry to analyze the strategic aims and challenges of consumer campaigns as a relatively new phenomenon in German public affairs management. The analysis is based on structuration theory, which is used as a theoretical framework. This framework helps to conceptualize the different logics of action within non-public and public paths of public affairs management, their stakeholders and respective instruments.

Expert interviews with German public affairs managers from multinational and regional energy corporations as well as industry associations were conducted regarding their communication in the context of climate regulation. Based on this data, the study reconstructs manager’s strategic considerations about why to engage in consumer campaigns, and analyses the challenges they see with them, and the strategies they employ to handle these.

Managers perceive the importance of the public path of regulative intervention as growing along with a strong media orientation of political authorities. Against this backdrop they describe the bypassing of critical journalists and the engaging of critical individuals and minorities as the strategic aims of consumer campaigns. They portray a lack of credibility as the main challenge of such campaigns – and relativising the corporation’s societal efforts as well as allowing public critique as most promising strategies to handle this challenge.

The contribution of the study is twofold: first, it adds to the scientific analysis of consumer campaigns as a rather new phenomenon in German public affairs management. Second, practitioners may utilize the results as impulses for their own communicative strategies in the context of public affairs management.

Today’s business leaders face a global environment that is marked by increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions. Design thinking offers a proven way to navigate in a VUCA environment. I used this approach while serving as a military officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. This chapter focuses on what I learned from applying design thinking to our operations as well as on insights from businesses that have also successfully integrated design thinking. I use the framework “inspire, ideate, and implement” to describe how I utilized design thinking. I finish the chapter with key factors for successfully employing a design methodology to VUCA problems.

Design thinking empowers organizations to tackle successfully VUCA challenges. Inspiration allows designers to frame relevant problems that clients care about. With the pressing challenge in hand, designers immerse themselves in the context of a problem to empathize with a customer’s concerns. They synthesize input from a variety of diverse sources, and meet experts who can give meaning to their collected data. With this comprehensive picture in hand, design teams brainstorm new possibilities as they move into ideation. Taking their ideas out for a test run, they iterate the most promising ways to move into action. They conduct pilot projects, adapt to what works best, and share their learning from the process. Leaders with a design mindset, aligned with a collaborative organizational culture and congruent support systems, can build an innovative enterprise that is primed to thrive in a VUCA world.

The purpose of the study is to introduce the idea of arena-relevant marketing capabilities and examine their impact on firm performance. Arena-relevant marketing capabilities are capabilities particularly relevant for success in a specific competitive arena in which rivals from different industries try to satisfy customer needs with alternative products and services. The authors focus on the luxury arena and pose the following research questions: Which are the arena-relevant marketing capabilities in the luxury competitive arena (i.e. luxury-arena-relevant capabilities)? (2) What is the relative importance of luxury-arena-relevant vs general marketing capabilities for firm performance in the luxury competitive arena?

To identify luxury-arena-relevant marketing capabilities, the authors conduct a qualitative study among 21 top managers of luxury brands. A subsequent large-scale managerial survey empirically tests the effects of luxury-arena-relevant vs general marketing capabilities on firm performance.

The study identifies four luxury-arena-relevant marketing capabilities: perfection in product creation, exclusive pricing, luxury-congruent storytelling and luxury brand inspiration. It confirms empirically that they have a higher impact on firm performance within the luxury competitive arena than general marketing capabilities.

The study takes an innovative perspective on marketing capabilities by linking them with the concept of a competitive arena and underlines the academic relevance of the concept of arena-relevant marketing capabilities for explaining firm performance.