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The subtitle to the English translation of this work (not employed in the Spanish original) bills it as “a theological critique of capitalism”. At the same time, it proves a veritable tour de force for students of the history and philosophy of economics (erstwhile political economy) as well. And, this is especially true for those who, like the present reviewer, begin that history with the beginning. The author, who served on the faculty of the Catholic University of Chile from 1963 to 1973, holds a doctorate in economics from the Free University of Berlin, and is currently director of the postgraduate programme in economics at the Independent National University of Honduras. Further according to the “bio” provided on the back cover of the Spanish edition, his “is a name familiar to the social scientists of Latin America”. Thus, from these evidences we have a professionally trained economist/social scientist doing — or, at least, purporting to do — theology.

The present paper is intended to form an introduction to the ideas of machine translation; it is in no sense a complete account of the work which has been carried out at Birkbeck College and elsewhere and which interested readers can study in more detail in a book which is in course of publication.

The burgeoning interest over the last decade in technology transfer at universities in the United States has driven contentious debates over patent policy. In this context, biotech patenting has become the poster-child for claims that the proliferation of patenting by universities, and in the private sector, is undermining scientific norms and threatening innovation. Commentators have expressed particular fears about the negative effects of biotech patenting on the public information commons and concerns about emerging “patent anticommons.” This chapter argues that the standard (finite) commons model is being misapplied in the biotech arena because, owing to the complexity of biological processes and the power of existing biotech methods to produce genetic data, biomedical science is, in crucial respects, an unbounded, uncongested common resource. These findings imply that strategic biotech patenting of problem-specific research tools (i.e., single-nucleotide polymorphisms, drug targets) is not economically justified and therefore is irrational.

The paper aims to establish structure of patient satisfaction construct in Indian health care settings.

The data were collected from 528 indoor patients who were seeking treatment from Government Medical College (GMC), Bakshi Nagar and Acharya Chandra Medical College and Hospital Sidra (ASCOMS), Sidhara, the two teaching and research hospitals operating in Jammu City, India. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses are used to verify the scale dimensions.

The results reveal that patient satisfaction is a multidimensional construct comprised of four dimensions, namely: physical maintenance, physician care, nursing care and internal facilities. Among the four hypothesized models, only model 2 depicting the impact of dimensions on satisfaction showed a good fit while the other three models showed either average (model 4) or poor (models 1 and 3) fit. The analysis of the models indicates that all patient satisfaction dimensions positively and significantly contribute to patient satisfaction and which also act as an important mediating factor between the satisfaction dimensions and patient loyalty.

The cross‐sectional design of the research is the limitation as all measures were collected at a single point‐of‐time. Because the findings of the study are based on overall satisfaction of the patients, no comparison is made between the degree of patient satisfaction achieved in public and private health care hospitals.

The paper measures patient satisfaction in the Indian context.

This study empirically tests a conceptual framework that shows how integration practices are significantly associated with supply chain (SC) performance. This study also intends to achieve the following purposes: first, how the performance is influenced by the integration practices, i.e. internal and external; second, to measure the mediating effect of organizational antecedents (market orientation, learning orientation) between integration practices and firm’s SC performance.

In a noncontrived study environment, a cross-sectional study design was used with a questionnaire. The study used a stratified proportionate random sample of 205 managers from manufacturing firms in China. Six hypothesized relationships were examined using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique in AMOS software, and five were shown to be valid. The proposed model was validated through various techniques.

Results of this study indicate that both external and internal integration influence SC performance and confirms the mediating role of organizational antecedents between integration practices and SC performance. According to the findings, five out of the six hypotheses are accepted. Findings of this research also offer very expedient insights for the companies’ management which can help them to ensure optimal output by giving due importance to external as well as internal integration.

The data for the study were only obtained from one province, which was Henan Province, and one industry, which was manufacturing; this constrained the generalizability of the study. The findings may be further validated in the future by expanding the scope of the studies to include various cultural contexts and types of businesses. Second, this study used data from a cross-sectional analysis; however, future research may potentially make use of a longitudinal design in order to more thoroughly confirm the findings.

Findings of this study offer substantial managerial insights suggesting various ways to develop better internal as well as external integration to get better results. Management of the company should focus and give more importance to job rotation, trainings and management commitment as part of internal integration. Moreover, management should strive for improving the capabilities of integration in internal functions prior to external integration as internal collaboration, teamwork and interaction within the company are considered as a precondition to maintain integration with external stakeholders. It is also a social process which needs to be built up over a longer period of time.

The authors contribute to the literature by experimentally evaluating the effects of integration practices on SC performance using a conceptual model drawn from current theories. The study also offer additional empirical evidence for Han et al. (2007), who found that SCI enhances firm performance through quality management in their analyses of the relationships between SCI, quality management practices and firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate brand trust and brand image effects on healthcare service users. Nowadays, managers and health activists are showing increased tendency to marketing and branding to attract and satisfy customers.

The current study’s design is based on a conceptual model examining brand trust and brand image effects on customer satisfaction. Data obtained from 240 questionnaires (310 respondents) were analyzed using path analysis.

Results revealed that the most effective items bearing the highest influence on customer satisfaction and on benefiting from healthcare services include brand image, staff sincerity to its patients, interactions with physicians and rapport.

This study needs to be conducted in different hospitals and with different patients, which would lead to the model’s expansion and its influence on the patient satisfaction.

Being the first study that simultaneously addresses brand trust and brand image effects on customer satisfaction, this research provides in-depth insights into healthcare marketing. Moreover, identifying significant components associated with healthcare branding helps managers and healthcare activists to create and protect their brands and, consequently, leading to an increased profitability resulting from the enhanced consumer satisfaction. Additionally, it would probably facilitate purchasing processes during the service selection.

This paper examines how medical practice, like all other productive activities, has been subject to the transformative elements of the forces and the relations of production involving class struggle and intra-class conflict. It will explore changes in the relations of production of medical practice which have been catalyzed by powerful productive forces. The current period of medical production involves the transformation of simple commodity production into a transitional stage of capitalist production with the seemingly unbounded growth of the medical productive forces. This development was precipitated by the intervention of capital as a whole, to restrict the drain on their variable capital through the placement of units of financial capital into the management of medical production, using the leverage of access to patients. In response, physicians have consolidated and centralized their practices to create enterprises with market power to limit the extraction of surplus by financial capital, and by their own employment of productive labor to extract surplus from hired physician labor and other clinical workers. Rationalization of the production of medical service commodities, and the sharing of surplus generated from exploitation of an expanded labor force by managed care financial capital and their capitalist partners owning medical enterprises, constitutes the contemporary relations of production. The contradictions of this mode of medical production and the potential for its reproduction will be analyzed.

The purpose of this study is to examine the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB)’s response to criticism and political pressure at the time of the global financial crisis through the lens of legitimacy theory.

This study constructs a thick description about a causal mechanism between social crisis and organizational change using a process-tracing approach that combines a historical narrative and a theoretical consideration.

The IASB faced criticism of its accounting standards for financial instruments and its governance structure during the financial crisis. This criticism represented the crises of pragmatic and cultural legitimacy. Facing these legitimacy crises, the IASB adopted such legitimation strategies as normalization and restructuring to repair its legitimacy. Additionally, in these repairing processes, the IASB, as a bonus, became institutionally embedded itself in the global political arena and succeeded to strengthen its legitimacy.

The study suggests that the financial crisis had a significant impact on the standardization of transnational accounting. Indeed, the crisis was an important turning point of the IASB’s work on revising its accounting standards to reduce complexity and altering its Constitution. Moreover, the authors bridge the gaps in the literature on accounting and legitimacy by examining how the IASB used particular legitimacy repair strategies when facing its legitimacy crises

This paper proposes that ethnic identity and identification in the modern nation-state is a process of dialogical interaction between self-perceived notions of identity and sociopolitical contexts, often defined by the state. Each example of ethnic identification has at least two levels of discourse, articulated internally and externally. As suggested by Bakhtin, whose study of Dostoevsky posed fundamental questions of self and society, identity and ideology: The endlessness of the external dialogue emerges here with the same mathematical clarity as does the endlessness of internal dialogue. … In Dostoevsky’s dialogues, collision and quarrelling occurs not between two integral monologic voices, but between two divided voices quarreling (one of those voices, at least, is divided). The open rejoinders of the one answer the hidden rejoinders of the other (Bakhtin, 1981 [1963], pp. 253, 254).

This chapter discusses why employees keep their knowledge to themselves. Despite managers’ best efforts, many employees tend to hoard knowledge or are reluctant to share their expertise with coworkers or managers. Although many firms have introduced specialized initiatives to encourage a broader dissemination of ideas and knowledge among organizational members, these initiatives often fail. This chapter provides reasons as to why this is so. Instead of focusing on why individuals might share their knowledge, however, we explain why individuals keep their knowledge to themselves. Multiple perspectives are offered, including social exchange, norms of secrecy, and territorial behaviors.