Search results

With the increase in the development of treatments that aim to improve the symptoms of dementia, more attention is focussed upon the effect that these treatments have on the patient's quality of life (QoL). There are specific challenges to be met in measuring the QoL of a patient who is in the later, more severe, stages of dementia. The main challenge to be met is whether the QoL measure can measure QoL in an individual who is unable to provide a subjective report of his or her own QoL. This paper presents five QoL measures that have been designed or used to measure the QoL of patients with severe dementia who are unable to provide self‐reports and to examine whether these measures are a valid and reliable means of assessing QoL in patients with severe dementia. It was found that all of the QoL measures have moderate to good reliability and validity, but the question still remains that without a subjective account, such as a self‐report from the person with dementia, is the outcome of these QoL measures a true reflection of the patient's QoL?

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

Efforts to increase sustainability are increasingly being promulgated using non-state forms of governance. Currently, there are multiple multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) working to develop sustainability standards and metrics for US agriculture. These include: LEO-4000, Field to Market, and the Sustainability Consortium. Using Paul Thompson’s (2010) tripartite sustainability framework, the proposed sustainability standards and metrics of the three MSIs are assessed. Our findings indicate that the current political economic stakeholder nexus is producing incremental adjustments to the status quo of industrial agriculture. Put differently, the standards and metrics being produced by these initiatives are largely advancing programs of sustainable intensification in which sustainability is equated with increasing resource efficiencies. Hence, our research problematizes the efficacy of non-state governance approaches for transformative change in food and agriculture. The findings in this chapter are based on fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013.

ALAN Armitage, managing director and Paul Thompson, manager, engineering of Gretone Engineering Limited in Lytham St. Annes believes they now know at least as much about the introduction and practical application of true high‐speed machining as anyone else. Before deciding to take this radical step they spent some six months assessing the technical, commercial and personnel implications of introducing these new and sophisticated machines to their 35‐year‐old business, and studied the specifications of the various machines on offer.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Randy Hodson’s categories offer an ambitious, comprehensive framework for analysing the objective and subjective conditions that shape dignity and resistance at work. In this chapter, we engage with Hodson and his collaborators work through exploring its potential usefulness in helping understand the experience of low-skill and low-paid factory workers at the end of supermarket supply chains in the United Kingdom. In emphasising the purposeful and strategic actions of workers to attain and maintain dignity within work, and management-influenced conditions that destroy or deny it, Hodson’s perspectives overlap with themes in more recent labour process theory that elaborate expanded notions of labour agency. While we share such concerns, we also identify some limitations to the framework and its explanatory powers, particularly where threats to dignity are associated with concepts of abuse and mismanagement. Our investigations of the supermarket supply chain reveal that management, authority and work organisation in these plants is not, by and large, ‘abusive’, ‘chaotic’ or ‘anomic’. Such terminology creates the unavoidable impression of pre-rational workplaces based on arbitrary, personal power. In our cases, the plants are not much ‘mis-managed’ as managed rationally according direct and indirect pressures exerted through supply chain power dynamics. Hodson’s framework for addressing issues of dignity and to a lesser extent resistance, remain an indispensable but incomplete entry point for understanding its dynamics.

The paper's aim are to: review the value and credibility of oral history for historical research in marketing; and conceptualize oral history as more than a data source in historical research but also a subject to investigate memory and a conceptual approach for understanding historical events.

The paper comprises an international historical review of oral history theory and practice linked to an examination of oral history methods in marketing.

Oral history is perceived as an “essentially contested concept”; a lack of consensus on universal principles has been sustained over a long time and has led to incredible diversity in theory and practice but has also made it difficult to grasp and manage. It is shown to be perspectival with analytical reach beyond individuals' recollected experiences and actions. Memory is identified as the subject as well as the source for oral history and a misconception that oral history can provide literal expressions of what experience and events were like is clarified. Oral history has been under‐utilized in marketing history and this is presented as a methodological paradox given the ubiquity of the interview in the marketing discipline more generally.

Central to oral history are a range of questions around issues of memory and remembering that have been largely unacknowledged in marketing and the oral history approach is perhaps uniquely placed to address some of these. Oral history critically examines the making of history and the paper highlights some of the issues this presents for historical research. Disciplinary efforts to standardize oral history are queried.

This case replaces UVA-M-0837. It can be used in a variety of marketing and strategy classes to understand how (1) at a macro level, a shift in consumer and environmental factors can impact firm strategy and (2) at a micro level, an e-mail-based marketing campaign designed to address these changes can impact firm-level performance.

The case puts the students in the position of CEO Robert Huth as he is preparing for a board meeting. He had taken David's Bridal from a loss in 1996 to sales of over $1 billion by 2011, but he was concerned about future growth. People were waiting longer and longer to get married and, once they decided to, were spending much less than in the past, so the industry had seen year-over-year declines since 2007. How would David's Bridal establish its brand in the minds of a new generation of brides who shopped, purchased, and decided differently than had brides in past generations?