Search results

Leaders in health-care organizations introducing electronic medical records (EMRs) face implementation challenges. The adoption of EMR by the emergency medical and ambulance setting is expected to provide wide-ranging benefits, but there is little research into the processes of adoption in this sector. The purpose of this study is to examine the introduction of EMR in a small emergency care organization and identify factors that aided adoption.

Semi-structured interviews with selected paramedics were followed up with a survey issued to all paramedics in the company.

The user interfaces with the EMR, and perceived ease of use, were important factors affecting adoption. Individual paramedics were found to have strong and varied preferences about how and when they integrated the EMR into their practice. As company leadership introduced flexibility of use, this enhanced both individual and collective ability to make sense of the change and removed barriers to acceptance.

This is a case study of one small organization. However, there may be useful lessons for other emergency care organizations adopting EMR.

Leaders introducing EMR in similar situations may benefit from considering a sense-making perspective and responding promptly to feedback.

The study contributes to a wider understanding of issues faced by leaders who seek to implement EMRs in emergency medical services, a sector in which there has been to date very little research on this issue.

In this chapter, we develop the “hall of mirrors” metaphor for practicum learning, introduced in Schön (1987) and expanded upon in MacKinnon (1989), as a heuristic for considering the ways in which we might claim that our practice has transformed through engaging with self-study methodology. First, we reconsider Schön's (1987) ideas about professional learning and their implications for our understanding of self-study, specifically, his claim that professional learning is unique in that a hall of mirrors is created “on the basis of parallelisms between practice and practicum” (p. 297). This parallelism is particularly relevant for teacher educators as we often aim to engage our students in the very practices we hope they will enact in schools. In so doing, we consider MacKinnon's cautions about over-simplifying any model of teacher education. Second, we use these ideas to each select excerpts from self-study work we have conducted in our careers to identify moments of transformed thinking about teacher education. Finally, we arrived at a new metaphor of a concave mirror for a retrospective look at the results of our self-study investigations. A concave mirror, unlike its planar counterpart, creates different orientations of images (right-side up vs. up-side down), depending on how far an object is away. We develop this final metaphor as a way of thinking about the differences inherent in treating self-study work at a distance, after some time has passed from the original moments when we were embedded in a hall-of-mirrors relationship with our students.

Through comparative analysis with other social science disciplines, gaps are identified in the performance gaming literature of public administration as it compares to other social science disciplines in order to understand directions for future research in this space.

This study involves a systematic review of the performance gaming literature, focusing on important drivers of performance gaming. Using Google Scholar, Web of Science, and ProQuest Central, the systematic review covers years ranging from 1990 through 2019 and revealed empirical studies that were deemed relevant based on whether an article was (1) an empirical study and (2) performance gaming or cheating behavior was the outcome variable. Out of the 81 articles surmised from the search, 51 were regarded as relevant by meeting these criteria.

The main finding is that public administration has primarily focused on drivers that are embedded in the performance system. The other social sciences (psychology and economics, in particular) focus mainly on individual factors, mostly cognitive in nature. Public administration has also looked at organizational drivers, though this is a burgeoning area. Scholars in public administration may benefit from the other social sciences by determining how individual drivers work within the context of public organizations and how these shape organizational behavior.

Per my knowledge, the paper is the first to systematically compare the performance gaming literature of public administration to other social science disciplines. The paper provides a direction for this burgeoning area of research.

During the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal created a wide range of spending and loan programs. Brief descriptions are provided for the programs created by the New Deal and loan and spending programs that were in place before the New Deal. I worked with others to create a panel data set with estimates of the spending and lending by the programs each year from 1930 through 1940. The data aggregated to broad categories are reported here and the methods and sources used to construct the estimates of the spending and lending for the categories are discussed.

Adapting a concept from the biological sciences, organizational researchers have proposed a life cycle of organizational development from birth to death. Several distinct models have been postulated, ranging from three to ten stages. This paper proposes a five‐stage model and tests it empirically to assess the specific stage of the life cycle of any organization. Results of a twenty‐item scale that captures managers' perceptions of their firms' position in the life cycle are discussed. Knowledge of an organization's present position or stage of development can aid top managers in understanding the relationships between organizational life cycle, competitive strategy, and performance.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the selection process for the new scanner and issues with its installation. Production scanning acts as a frame to explain why the new scanner is interesting and how it is being used.

This paper employs the descriptive case study method. The case is the selection of a planetary digital scanner for a unit within an academic Library in the USA.

The choice of a capture device is the most important decision a library or archive makes because it determines the maximum quality that can be achieved regardless of the other components of the system. Possessing expertise to parse technical details is a rarefied space.

This paper seeks to help inform the choices of those deciding to purchase new hardware.

This paper provides librarians with a basis on which to assess potential adoption decisions for a large‐format scanner and to learn from the experiences of others.

Legal solvency tests play a crucial role in high‐stakes financial transactions. This article presents a brief introduction to legal solvency tests that play important roles in bankruptcy and corporate law. The author then proceeds to analyze these tests from the perspective of financial economics, and argues that optimal solvency tests should be context‐dependent.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between demographic and public policy with the entrepreneurial related variables of entrepreneurial orientation, self employment, customer service, and leadership.

Results from 264 first generation expatriate entrepreneurs from Lebanon are used in order to examine the relationships between the variables using a mail questionnaire.

It was found that educational level was important with all of the dependent variables and that the public policy variable of Property Rights was related to entrepreneurial orientation.

The major limitation of the research is that there was range restriction in the dependent variables, likely due to the sample characteristic of them all being expatriate entrepreneurs. The major implications of the study include that additional research should examine the importance of public policy variables with entrepreneurs and the importance of education in encouraging entrepreneurial activities.

Very little research has examined expatriate entrepreneurs and nearly none has examined the relationship between public policy and expatriate entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to scholarly work on the role of sell-side financial analysts in corporate governance (CG). It examines the more recent work products pertaining specifically to CG that analysts based in the USA and UK have generated in the past two decades, namely, their CGCG reports. Specifically, this paper focusses on analysing how analyst CG reports constitute a comparative space in which the governance procedures of companies are evaluated and “best practices” are created.

This study involves a social constructivist textual analysis of 48 CG reports produced by analysts based in the USA and UK between 1998 and 2009.

Analyst CG reports textually construct a comparative space comprising four dimensions. First, the space is constructed for some carefully edited users to evaluate the governance of companies. Second, the construction of this space requires the selection of “building materials”, i.e., governance issues included in the space that render companies amenable to evaluation and comparison. Third, by linking the range of governance issues chosen to formal regulations, firms are rendered governable and regulatory requirements reinterpreted. Lastly, by using different types of inscriptions, such as narratives and tables, the space highlights “winners”, i.e., those companies which do better than others, and constructs their governance procedures as “best practices”.

This research provides a first step towards an in-depth understanding of analyst CG reports. The insights from this paper generate a range of areas for future research, including how these reports are produced and used.

This paper adds to the existing literature focussing on the role of analysts in CG. It extends previous studies by examining the more recent and debatable work products generated by analysts, namely, their CG reports, and suggests an extended CG role for them. Theoretically, analyst CG reports are conceptualised as “inscriptions” that construct “documentary reality”. The notion of “editing” is also drawn upon, to analyse a particular way in which documentary reality is constructed. Accordingly, this paper broadens the theoretical perspectives used in CG research.