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Reports on a study which explored the views of key stakeholders regarding the meaning and implementation of effective health care and clinical governance in NHS Trusts, and the role for public health professionals. The authors used a national questionnaire survey to derive a sample for qualitative telephone interviews and two area case studies. The authors found that the meaning of effective health care and the means employed for implementation varied. Mergers were seen as hindrances to gaining organisational engagement whilst others, such as the White Paper on quality and the notion of clinical governance, were seen as facilitating. A widespread aspiration was a more integrated and corporate quality culture where quality was central, not marginal. The authors conclude that there is widespread concern among Trusts to change their culture and assert effective health care as a central value. Public health skills, rather than the discipline itself, are seen as important for such culture change.

We review 25 years of research on expatriate experiences concentrating on expatriate adjustment as a central construct, and relying on a general stressor-stress-strain framework. First, we consider who expatriates are, why their experiences differ from domestic employees, and what adjustment is. Conceptualizing (mal)adjustment in terms of stress, we next review the stressors and strains associated with it. Consolidating the wide range of antecedents (anticipatory and in-country) that have been studied to date, we note major patterns of effects and their implications for how HR managers can facilitate adjustment. Although relatively less research has focused on the consequences of adjustment, enough evidence exists to establish a bottom-line impact of poor adjustment on performance. To stimulate future efforts to understand the experiences of expatriates, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of continuing down this road of research.

The post‐Griffiths period in the British National Health Service (NHS) has seen a major upswing of interest in the evaluation of organisational performance. Many criteria are available to conduct such an evaluation. This paper presents a coherent framework to assist in thinking about this area. It explores the definitions and usages of relevant concepts. The variety of perspectives that actors in the health care field hold about quality are also examined and the inevitable role of values highlighted.

Entrepreneurship is a prominent area of inquiry which is enriched by an ample literature base and challenged by definitional deficiencies. Over the years, multiple perspectives of entrepreneurship have emerged and a holistic approach to entrepreneurship has been proposed. This can facilitate the continued enlargement of the entrepreneurship field and allow for interdisciplinary research within the African region. This chapter contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship in developing economies by providing an extensive review of the various approaches that entrepreneurship has been conceptualised. Nine themes are explored: the great person, economic perspective, psychological perspective, sociological perspective, behavioural perspective, management, intrapreneurship, cognitive perspective and leadership perspective. This is followed by an examination of entrepreneurship as a process, as a new venture creation and as an art of opportunity recognition and exploitation. In the last section of this chapter, a clarion call is made for more African scholarship and research in the field of entrepreneurship.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Using an international field study of 196 US executive expatriates from multiple industries on assignment in South Korea, Japan and the Netherlands, this study aimed to explore the relationship between three facets of cross‐cultural adjustment (work, interaction, and general) and expatriate attitudes (job satisfaction and non‐work satisfaction), and to examine the role of cross‐cultural adjustment in mediating the relationship between family adjustment and expatriate attitudes. The results demonstrate the influence of each facet of adjustment on expatriate attitudes, and provide evidence that the relationship between family adjustment and non‐work satisfaction is mediated by general adjustment. Future research directions and implications for practice are offered.

In this chapter, we identify three distinct transformational performance improvement (TPI) approaches commonly used to redesign work processes in health care organizations. We describe the unique components or tools that each approach uses to improve the delivery of health services. We also summarize what is empirically known about the effectiveness of each TPI approach according to systematic reviews and recent studies published in the peer-reviewed literature. Based on examination of this research, we discuss what knowledge is still needed to strengthen the evidence for whole system transformation. This involves the use of conceptual frameworks to assess and guide implementation efforts, and facilitators and barriers to change as revealed in a recent evaluation of one major initiative, the Lean Enterprise Transformation (LET) at the Veterans Health Administration. The analysis suggests ways in which TPI facilitators can be developed and barriers reduced to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of quality initiatives. Finally, we discuss appropriate study designs to evaluate TPI interventions that may strengthen the evidence for their effectiveness in real world practice settings.

Prior escalation research (Harrison & Harrell, 1993; Harrell & Harrison, 1994) has supported the prediction that when a project manager has private information and an incentive to shirk (i.e. To protect his/her reputation) he/she will have a greater tendency to continue an unprofitable project than a manager who faces only one or neither of these conditions. Harrison et al. (1999) extended this line of research across cultures to Chinese nationals in Taiwan. The purpose of this paper is to extend the cross-national direction of this line of research by: (1) determining if Mexican nationals who have private information and an incentive to shirk have this same general propensity to continue an unprofitable project when compared to Mexican nationals who experience neither condition, and (2) comparing this general tendency with a sample of U.S. Subjects. The results of this study indicate that the Mexican subjects in the private information, incentive to shirk group also had a tendency to continue unprofitable projects at a rate similar to their U.S. Counterparts. The implications of these results are discussed.

Multicommunicating, the practice of using technology to carry on multiple near-simultaneous conversations, has been studied for almost two decades. This practice has new meaning today as more people carry a mobile device with them, remote working is prominent, and teams are looking for ways to be more productive. This chapter establishes why multicommunicating is an important communication concept that can help scholars interested in teams. After distinguishing multicommunicating from related concepts, such as multitasking, this chapter reviews key findings from literature and highlights the conundrum around whether this is a productive, acceptable practice or one that is rude and increases inefficiency. In conclusion, the proposed research agenda invites studies of multicommunicating in contexts where actual responses to the practice can be observed. Additionally, there are growing opportunities to include mobile communication and human–technology interactions in the multicommunicating mix.