Search results

This study explains Indonesian consumers' choice of poultry meat attributes and the willingness to pay (WTP) for these attributes using a discrete choice experiment.

The survey was conducted for the traditional and modern channels and involved a sample of 440 respondents in the Greater Jakarta area. A discrete choice experiment was employed as the study framework and in designing the questionnaire. A multinomial logistic regression analysis was used to evaluate consumers' preference for poultry attributes in modern and traditional channels.

Consumers preferred warm poultry meat, government certification and product information labeling on poultry meat. The WTP for warm poultry meat was the highest, which is indicating that freshness is crucial for consumers to ensure quality. Moreover, consumers had more trust in government certification than private certification for food safety and were willing to pay more for product information labeling on poultry meat.

The government can use the model as a decision support to improve poultry meat quality at sales channels in Indonesia including to close sales channels where sick poultry are sold and thus address food safety concerns caused by the avian influenza outbreak.

This study shows that understanding the WTP for poultry meat attributes enables the government to control the poultry sales channels and stimulates producers to supply the market with a safer poultry meat quality using the price mechanism.

The purpose of this paper is to compare home care workers' views of their employment conditions by provider type – private for-profit vs public and non-profit – using the case study of Ireland.

An online survey was distributed to care workers (n = 350) employed by private for-profit, public and non-profit home care providers in Ireland. Returned questionnaires were analysed statistically in R using chi-squared tests to systematically compare key aspects of employment conditions.

Analysis shows that conditions are perceived to be significantly worse for those employed by private for-profit providers (and to a lesser extent non-profit organisations) compared to the public provider. There are wide disparities between public and private sector conditions in terms of contracts, pensions, unsocial hours pay and travel time allowances. The main area of convergence is in relation to employer support, where although the public sector performed better, the difference between the three provider types is smaller.

Relatively little research compares working conditions in private for-profit providers vs public and non-profit providers in Ireland and other countries. The findings can be understood in the context of marketisation reforms and may partly be explained by a lack of regulation in Ireland's home care sector and low unionisation rates amongst care workers employed by private for-profit providers.

This paper aims to analyze the determinants on job satisfaction in the Egyptian labor market, using Egypt’s Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS), the wave of 2012.

Several determinants are analyzed including the wage level, the paid and sick leaves, the medical and social insurance, job stability among other individual and job characteristics. To this end, an ordered logit model is estimated to assess the significance of these different variables as determinants for job satisfaction.

The empirical findings indicate that wages and stability are major determinants for job satisfaction for the sample of wage workers. However, the results change according to gender; the hourly wage level affects men’s level of job satisfaction, while it does not affect that of females. Furthermore, the job satisfaction of women is determined more by the job characteristics rather than the monetary compensation.

The empirical findings shed light on the importance of formalizing jobs, as it has an effect on the level of job satisfaction of both women and men.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the determinants of job satisfaction for wage workers in Egypt using the ELMPS data.

To investigate the effects of payor–provider integration on the operational performance of health service provision. The research explores whether integration governs agency problems and tilts the incentives of diverse actors toward more systematic outcomes.

A two stage multimethod case study of occupational health services. A qualitative stage aimed to understand the reasons, mechanisms, and outcomes of payor–provider integration. A quantitative stage evaluated the performance of the integrated hospital against fee-for-service partner hospitals with a sample of 2,726 patients.

Payor–provider integration mitigates agency problems on multiple levels of the service system by complementing formal governance mechanisms with informal mechanisms. Compared to partner hospitals, the integrated hospital yielded 9% lower the total costs of occupational injuries achieved primarily by emphasizing conservative care and faster recovery.

Focuses on occupational health services in Finland. Provides initial evidence of the effects of payor–provider integration on the operational performance.

Vertical integration may provide systematic outcomes but requires mindful implementation of multiple mechanisms. Rigorous change management initiative is advised.

For patients, the research shows payor–provider integration of health services can be implemented in a manner that it reduces care costs while not compromising care quality and customer satisfaction.

This study provides a rare longitudinal analysis of payor–provider integration in health-care operations management. The study adds to the knowledge of operational performance improvement of health services.

The purpose of this article is to increase the understanding of how improvements can be facilitated in a public service containing multiple actors in terms of identifying, aligning and prerequisites for the improvements.

The research utilizes an interactive research approach where data were gathered though a conference, workshop and a survey. The study alternately combines quality management methods such as affinity and interrelationship diagrams with computer aided text mining and latent semantic analysis.

The research shows that practitioners must consider interconnectedness between improvements and benefits that are crossing organizational levels of the public service system as well as professional borders. In public service systems, the complex reality can be better understood when improvements and benefits are classified into different organizational layers and an interconnectedness and sequence of improvement areas are acknowledged.

The research is set in the Swedish public service of the tax-paid sick leave insurance. Future research would benefit by investigating similar cases in other nations and other services.

The used methodology can be applied by practitioners to enhance a unified understanding of the system required to improve. The study also guides practitioners for how to support, relive hinders and prioritize improvements.

The research fills a gap of understanding of improvements in public services with multiple actors. As this area is difficult to improve, a novel combination of qualitative and quantitative methods paved the way for deeper and more unified understanding of the system.

The purpose of this paper is to disseminate among concerned professionals its certain operational aspects, including some possible implications on health and medical care practices.

It is written on the basis of the author’s special study of a diverse source of information, as well as on author’s practical experience and observation in this particular area.

Special attention is paid to possible public health impacts within a broad social and economic framework, as well as to its impacts on the existing national health care systems in countries, that would possibly lead to certain degree of inequity in health at national level as an important consequence of health development progress.

Knowledge and understanding gained from this paper might be useful in the efforts to develop and manage national health care systems to ensure a reasonable balance in health status of people of all groups.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how migration affects the care of older people in Italy.

The paper is based on anthropological fieldwork by one of the authors. This consisted of in-depth interviews with 20 “badanti” (migrant caregivers), with relatives of older people and with social workers in the city of Verona, Italy. It further included extensive study of secondary materials on the topic of migrant care of older people.

Badanti, Italian families and older people find themselves locked in an uneasy contract: badanti because they are exploited and often unable to find better, formal employment; Italian families because they are aware that they fail to render their moral duty to their aged parents and grandparents; and older people because they feel neglected and maltreated by their children. Yet the three parties also rely on each other to make the best of a precarious situation. The relationship between badanti and Italian elderly highlights the contradictions within Italian politics on care and migration. This case study shows how migrants help Italian families to hold on to the tradition of family care for ageing parents.

The small sample of badanti and families provides a detailed and profound insight of the complexity of elder care in Italy but does not allow generalisation for developments in the country as a whole.

Policy makers should take notice of the indispensability of informal migrant care in present day Italy.

The originality of the paper lies in the in-depth conversations with badanti and in the way in which elderly care is contextualised in the Italian tradition of care and present day politics.

The aim of the study was to understand the social and organisational factors in the workplace that shape managers' actions and attitudes towards workers with repeated short-term sickness absence.

This was a qualitative interview study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 managers at 15 different workplaces. The analysis had an abductive approach, using thematic analysis which focused on the latent content of managers attitudes towards employees with repeated short-term sickness absence.

Results indicate that the managers' views of people on short-term sick leave shift and move through several phases, which was analysed as they were acts in a play, where their given roles are prescribing which actions to take given the available resources for acting these parts. These acts depict an increasingly controlling attitude, where the sick leave is ultimately seen as an individual problem best managed by repressive tactics.

Role theory offers the possibility to analyse managers' attitudes and behaviours by considering the workplace and the manager-employee relationship as regulated by norms and organisational factors.