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This study aims to explore which outcome measures are used by occupational therapy staff in adult social care settings in the UK, and the factors affecting use of outcome measures.

A quantitative descriptive research design was used, using a cross-sectional study to explore occupational therapy staff views on the use of outcome measures. A 38-question survey was developed on Microsoft Forms. Recruitment occurred online over a three-week period in 2021 via the social media platform “Twitter”. Results were analysed using Excel using descriptive statistics and qualitative results used thematic analysis.

Participants (n = 20) used a range of outcome measures (13) in adult social care settings in the previous 12 months. Standardised measures were used by half the sample in the previous 12 months. The Therapy Outcome Measure and Barthel Index were in most use. The breadth of adult social care practice and practical factors such as caseload and lack of a meaningful tool were found to be barriers to outcome measure use. Facilitators included service improvement, accountability, use of audit and professional occupational therapy leadership.

The overall use of outcome measures can be considered low in this setting, with manager support seen to be key to the use of outcome measures. Further research is needed to investigate nationwide use.

Training, time and manager support are key to use of standardised tests and outcome measures in the adult social care settings. The use of occupational performance measures should be considered to demonstrate unique professional impact.

This contemporary study reveals use of outcome measures within occupational therapy adult social care services in the UK, which is an under researched and under published area.

The construction industry shows an increased interest in how to manage logistics within construction projects. Often construction logistics is outsourced to a logistics service provider (LSP). However, construction logistics is normally approached either as a strategic decision or as an operational issue and rarely as a tactical concern. The purpose of this study is to explore how to organize the logistics outsourcing decision at strategic, tactical and operational levels.

This study is performed as a single-case study within a construction corporation, containing (amongst others) a building contractor (BC) and a construction equipment rental company (CERC) offering logistics services.

The study shows that to procure construction logistics service successfully, BCs need logistics capabilities at strategic and tactical levels to maintain an alignment between the use of logistics services and operational characteristics. Simultaneously, CERC’s need to design their service offerings to correspond to the needs of the BC.

This study builds on a single-case study of a Swedish construction corporation. Further research is needed to better understand current logistics outsourcing and development practices and how these can be improved to foster better logistics management at the project level.

BCs find suggestions of different logistics organization structures and suitable outsourcing arrangements. CERCs and LSPs can use the findings to understand their customers’ needs and adapt service offerings.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first studies of how two companies within a corporation can work together to develop construction logistics service offerings.

This article reviews New Zealand's journey through managing Covid-19. It provides a chronological overview of key developments. The article analyses the impacts of Covid-19 on business and society and offers lessons for others from the New Zealand case.

The article draws on various sources, primarily media pieces and government information. It also critically analyses and interprets the New Zealand response.

The initial onset and response from the New Zealand government, albeit with closed borders, was effective in terms of keeping the country relatively Covid free. The country was slow to introduce vaccinations, but the uptake was swift. A vaccine mandate to coincide with a Delta outbreak was controversial. Importantly, the New Zealand case is characterised by political leadership strongly and explicitly informed by public health expertise and advice which was routinely demonstrated throughout the period in discussion.

The article offers an important overview and analysis of New Zealand's experience with Covid-19 and its response, with particular focus on the way in which the government and public health specialist advisors interacted.

By reconsidering the concept of the historic environment, the aim of this study is to better understand how heritage is expressed by examining the networks within which the cultural performances of the historic environment take place. The goal is to move beyond a purely material expression and seek the expansion of the cultural dimension of the historic environment.

Conceptually, the historic environment is considered a valuable resource for heritage expression and exploration. The databases and records that house historic environment data are venerated and frequented entities for archeologists, but arguably less so for non-specialist users. In inventorying the historic environment, databases fulfill a major role in the planning process and asset management that is often considered to be more than just perfunctory. This paper approaches historic environment records (HERs) from an actor network perspective, particularizing the social foundation and relationships within the networks governing the historic environment and the environment's associated records.

The paper concludes that the performance of HERs from an actor-network perspective is a hegemonic process that is biased toward the supply and input to and from professional users. Furthermore, the paper provides a schematic for how many of the flaws in heritage transmission have come about.

The relevance here is largely belied by the fact that HERs as both public digital resources and as heritage networks were awaiting to be addressed in depth from a theoretical point of view.

This paper aims to present the findings from a European study on the digital skills gaps in tourism and hospitality companies.

Mixed methods research was adopted. The sample includes 1,668 respondents (1,404 survey respondents and 264 interviewees) in 5 tourism sectors (accommodation establishments, tour operators and travel agents, food and beverage, visitor attractions and destination management organisations) in 8 European countries (UK, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands and Bulgaria).

The most important future digital skills include online marketing and communication skills, social media skills, MS Office skills, operating systems use skills and skills to monitor online reviews. The largest gaps between the current and the future skill levels were identified for artificial intelligence and robotics skills and augmented reality and virtual reality skills, but these skills, together with computer programming skills, were considered also as the least important digital skills. Three clusters were identified on the basis of their reported gaps between the current level and the future needs of digital skills. The country of registration, sector and size shape respondents’ answers regarding the current and future skills levels and the skills gap between them.

The paper discusses the digital skills gap of tourism and hospitality employees and identifies the most important digital skills they would need in the future.

Digital servitization concerns how manufacturers utilize digital technologies to enhance their provision of services. Although digital servitization requires that manufacturers possess new capabilities, in contrast to strategic (or dynamic) capabilities, little is known about how they develop the required operational capabilities. The paper investigates the mechanisms for developing operational capabilities in digital servitization.

This paper presents an exploratory study based on 15 large manufacturers operating in Europe engaged in digital servitization.

Three operational capability development mechanisms are set out that manufacturers use to facilitate digital servitization: learning (developing capabilities in-house), building (bringing the requisite capabilities into the manufacturer), and acquiring (utilizing the capabilities of other actors). These mechanisms emphasize exploitation and exploration efforts within manufacturers and in collaborations with upstream and downstream partners. The findings demonstrate the need to combine these mechanisms for digital servitization according to combinations that match each manufacturer’s traditional servitization phase: (1) initial phase - building and acquiring, (2) middle phase - learning, building and acquiring, and (3) advanced phase - learning and building.

This study reveals three operational capability development mechanisms, highlighting the parallel use of these mechanisms for digital servitization. It provides a holistic understanding of operational capability development mechanisms used by manufacturers by combining three theoretical perspectives (organizational learning, absorptive capacity, and network perspectives). The paper demonstrates that digital servitization requires the significant application of building and acquiring mechanisms to develop the requisite operational capabilities.

This brief considers how small and specialist higher education providers in England have approached creating an inclusive learning community, particularly focusing on ethnically diverse students. It notes that sector efforts are surrounded by controversy and sometimes viewed by politicians or the media as either misunderstood, deliberately positioned as “wokery” or against the principles of free speech. Yet there is substantial evidence and a regulatory requirement to improve the student experience and outcomes of diverse students. Through the models of anti-racism and allyship, GuildHE has created a package of support for small and specialist institutions to navigate the complexities of institutional change. This brief provides examples of how our members have made positive steps to become more inclusive, thoughtful, knowledgeable and impactful and provides recommendations to government, HEIs and individuals to continue to improve experiences and outcomes for students.

Managing biosphere reserves (BR) have become more challenging regarding the socio-cultural conflict between communities and BR administrators. For the past two decades, community participation (CP) has become the central narrative for BR management practices in Asia. This paper aims to set out to analyse the current literature because of the paucity of systematic reviews on CP in Asian BR. Also, it proffers possible solutions to enhance biosphere performance.

In total, 31 related studies were identified from the Scopus, Web of Science databases and materials from organisations in the field of practice of territorial conservation. Three themes emerged from the review – willingness to participate, encumbrances and possible solutions.

Factors that influence community willingness to participate in a BR, encumbrances facing the community and possible policy solutions to enhance CP in a BR in Asia were the three themes that emerged from the review. The factors that influence community willingness were categorised into the level of participants in education, perceived waste of time, no confidence of the outcome, okay with current management, land owned, household size and gender factors.

This paper’s recommendations were based on empirical literature reviewed systematically but do not compromise the robustness concerning BR management practices in Asia. It was established that to enrich the findings of this research, regional studies of CP in BR should be conducted, including primary source data using the mixed methods paradigm.

As part of the practical implications, recommendations were highlighted to enhance CP in BR. Also, the paper suggested that BR administrators should have two-way communication mechanisms, cross-sectoral participation and collaboration, implement locally-based solutions through full engagement of community members in decision-making.

This is probably the first systematic review paper on BR management practices in Asia. Filling the theoretical gap via systematic review was part of the significant contribution to CP in Asian BR.

This study attempts to examine the factors that influence user intention to adopt e-procurement in the Nigerian public sector.

A well-structured questionnaire was used to collect primary data from 278 procurement and information technology (IT) departments’ officials of key federal government ministries and agencies. The technology acceptance model (TAM) model was adopted and extended with security-related factors, namely perceived trust and perceived security. A partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach was used to test and validate the model.

The results indicated that perceived usefulness is the best predictor of users’ intention to adopt e-procurement, followed by perceived security and perceived trust. In contrast, however, perceived ease of use was found to have a significant negative effect on the intention to adopt e-procurement.

This study is among the first in the Nigerian public sector context to evaluate users’ perceptions on e-procurement adoption with the use of a distinctive research model (TAM). The study's findings contribute to a better understanding of the factors influencing the adoption of e-procurement in the Nigerian public sector.

Although universities have extensive research and initiatives in place that align with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is still a significant gap in documenting and assessing these efforts. This paper aims to discuss how academic libraries can apply their information management skills and open-access platforms, to facilitate the discoverability and retrieval of evidence on SDGs.

Introduced by a brief literature review on the role of libraries in contributing to the SDGs in general, the authors draw on their personal experiences as metadata specialists, participating in a project aimed at linking their university’s research output to the SDGs. A case study, from the University of Pretoria’s Veterinary Science Library, is used as an example to demonstrate the benefits of resourceful metadata in organising, communicating and raising awareness about the SDGs in the field of veterinary science.

Through practical examples and recommended workflows, this paper illustrates that metadata specialists are perfectly positioned to apply their information management skills and library platforms to facilitate the discoverability and retrieval of evidence on SDGs.

Although there are increasing reports on the contributions of libraries to support the successful implementation of the SDGs, limited information exists on the role of metadata specialists, as well as those with a practical focus.