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While there is established research that explores individual innovations across countries or developments in a specific health area, there is less work that attempts to match national innovations to specific systems of health governance to uncover themes across nations.

We used a cross-comparison design that employed content analysis of health governance models and innovation patterns in eight OECD nations (Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States).

Country-level model of health governance may impact the focus of health innovation within the eight jurisdictions studied. Innovation across all governance models has targeted consumer engagement in health systems, the integration of health services across the continuum of care, access to care in the community, and financial models that drive competition.

Improving our understanding of the linkage between health governance and innovation in health systems may heighten awareness of potential enablers and barriers to innovation success.

In recent years, a growing number of libraries have canceled or unbundled their “Big Deal” journal subscriptions – those subscriptions that include a full package of digital journal titles for one discounted cost. This started as an affordability problem but has slowly morphed into a challenge from libraries demanding a new pricing structure that accommodates and spurs the growing open access movement.

The change has caused a variety of challenges for technical services units including the increased need for user data, increasingly complicated workflows as they manage partial subscriptions, new interactions with consortia, and ongoing campus conversations. Whether the library is seeking to simply unbundle due to budget constraints, or push for new models such as “read and publish”, there is a tremendous impact on the work of technical services units.

This chapter will explore the rationale and growth of the Big Deal, how it is breaking, four case studies on breaking Big Deals, a brief discussion of new transformative agreements, new challenges for consortia, and implications for technical services units moving forward.

The purpose of this contribution is to investigate whether popular reports can strengthen public governance by fostering greater transparency and public participation.

The analysis is based on the case of the “Bilancio in Arancio” of the Municipality of Milan. Data are collected through a triangulation of sources, including the authors’ direct observation, conversational interviews, the press, and a questionnaire distributed to the citizens participating in the experience.

The analysis discusses how popular reports can improve Public Governance, and identify related critical issues. More specifically, four key aspects of Popular reporting appear to play a central role in strengthening governance, that is, their capacity to ensure greater transparency, neutrality, enhanced participation and impacts on decision making. We suggest that every aspect represents an important “step” to be taken in an ideal “ladder of participation.”

Governments that want to enhance public governance may have an interest in developing popular reports, paying attention at ensuring transparency, neutrality, stakeholders’ participation, and their contribution to decision-making processes.

Popular reports can provide to citizens the education on public budgeting issues required to consciously participate in public decision-making processes and give them greater voice and power to express their instances. Popular reports can also promote a two-way communication and dialogue between citizens and governments.

Drawing on the experience of the Municipality of Milan, more general lessons are learnt on the role of popular reports in strengthening public governance, and on the related strengths and weaknesses.

Participation is a key concept in budgeting practice and research. While extant literature primarily focuses on the antecedents and modifiers of participation, here we focus on the measurement of participation.

Building on theoretical and empirical research on user involvement and influence from the information systems, decision–making, and organizational justice literature, we develop a new theoretical perspective on budgetary participation. This new perspective recognizes the complexity of participation and separates it into three dimensions: situational participation, intrinsic involvement, and influence. We provide evidence of these new insights by testing hypotheses based on the model via results from a survey.

Survey results from middle managers indicate that our three separate dimensions of budgetary participation impact motivation and satisfaction in different ways. Specifically, situational participation does not have a direct impact on either motivation or satisfaction; intrinsic involvement impacts both satisfaction and motivation; and influence impacts satisfaction, but does not impact motivation.

These new insights can enhance future budgeting research as well as help managers design participative budgeting processes to improve employee motivation and satisfaction to hopefully enhance organizational performance.

Budget decision-makers are forced at times to assign budgets that deviate substantially from budget participants’ requests. In these instances, budget participants likely interpret their budgetary involvement as lacking influence and perhaps as pseudo-participative. This experimental study examined two situational factors that may affect perceptions of pseudo-participation: budget favorability (receiving a much better or much worse budget than requested) and disclosure of budget intention (the decision-maker discloses or does not disclose a preliminary budget before the budget decision, with the final budget exactly matching the preliminary budget). As hypothesized, budget participants had a self-serving tendency to discount pseudo-participation as the cause of low influence when they received a favorable budget. However, contrary to a hypothesized effect, budget participants did not have a self-serving tendency to inflate pseudo-participation as the cause of low influence when they received an unfavorable budget. Instead, they formed strong, unbiased pseudo-participation perceptions. Also contrary to a hypothesized effect, the budget decision-maker's disclosure of an intended budget, which should have provided clear indications of an insincere request for budget input, did not increase perceptions of pseudo-participation. Budget outcomes that indicate low influence may evoke such strong perceptions of pseudo-participation as to override other information that suggests pseudo-participation.

This study investigates how university libraries in Nigeria are staffed and presents staff development opportunities and learning activities that sustain staff.

A survey research design was adopted. Purposive sampling technique was used to select 46 universities and 400 respondents consisting of 46 heads of libraries and 354 professionals from federal, state, and private universities. Content of the instrument was based on literature comprising six questions. The 327 (92.4%) usable responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics and presented in simple frequency tables.

The study showed that library workforce in Nigerian universities included different categories of professionals and para-professionals having diversified job opportunities and duties. Most libraries had staff development budget and respondents received various forms of assistance to foster learning. Although all nontransferable skills recorded high mean, respondents accorded less importance to nonlibrary personal skills that can be used to leverage the expectations of recruitment, retention, and sustainability.

The study was limited to practicing professionals but has staffing implications for all libraries across Nigeria.

Many professionals may lack the appropriate multi-skills that would enhance exploring new approaches and breaking out of traditional ways of operation in the different library and outside library settings.

The study contributes to knowledge about sustaining library staff in relation to adopting the recommended skills on a broad scale, and assessing how their acquisition can change the perception of professionals to its immense contributions to sustaining them in the workforce.

Like conflict in general, budgetary conflict is perceived by conflicting parties as a zero-sum game or distributive: one party's gain is the other party's loss. We identify an organizational culture that promotes this view as “traditional.” We propose that changing certain elements of organizational culture is sufficient to produce more integrative, nonzero-sum outcomes. We call this changed organizational culture “empowering.” We propose and test the effects of an empowering organizational culture (EOC) in contrast to the traditional organizational culture (TOC). We hypothesize that an EOC would produce more integrative conflict resolution than the typical TOC. Based on our review of the literature, we identify two elements of the EOC that are essential in producing more integrative solutions to budgetary conflict. The two elements that we simultaneously manipulate are the superior's empowering style (or lack thereof) as reflected in encouragement to freely negotiate, and the superior's intervention process in failed negotiations (a process that encourages the search for integrative solutions and avoids imposed compromises that dampen the desire to negotiate). Using a laboratory experiment, 84 subjects forming 42 dyads negotiated the allocation of discretionary budgets face-to-face. The results of the experiment confirm our hypotheses that the EOC produces more integrative budget negotiation outcomes, greater convergence, and greater satisfaction with the outcome than TOC.

William Beveridge talked about the five evils that he felt confronted society. He listed them as want, idleness, squalor, ignorance and disease. He was writing before the end of the World War II at a time of anxiety, uncertainty and expectation (Abel-Smith, 1992). The post war welfare state and the growth of prosperity would arguably have served to resolve some of the evils listed by Beveridge. The absolute poverty that he referred to is no longer as prevalent and education is now a legal requirement and funded by the state at least up to school leaving age.