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This paper outlines the continuous improvement journey of a voluntary organisation. The significant level of organisational growth and improving quality of services described is clearly linked to the organisation’s commitment to improvement. One of the approaches used in adopting a total quality culture was the EFQM model, specifically interpreted for the voluntary sector. Until recently such an approach would have been considered alien to the sector, not least because of its origins in the business community. This article contradicts this assumption. Issues addressed include how the improvement process is driven, the use of performance measurement, external verification and the difficulties in accessing sector appropriate benchmark data. It is suggested that the pursuit of excellence is no longer optional for the voluntary sector, it is essential.

To stimulate research on Latin American businesswomen's career development and help human resource practitioners design culturally‐adapted advancement programs.

A total of 27 interviews with human resources professional from US Fortune 500 companies with business in Latin America undertaken during 2001‐2003 are the basis for reporting on women's advancement programs in Latin America. A survey of literature on culture in Latin American work organizations provides basis for suggestions about cultural adaptation of these programs. Latin American businesswomen's perceptions of their own career development, recorded in interviews with over 100 businesswomen in six Latin American countries in 2002 by participants in the Women Business Leaders in Latin America project, corroborate these suggestions.

Women's initiatives imported from the USA to Latin America are likely to suffer several shortcomings unless modified to accommodate several common cultural attributes of Latin American work organizations.

Provides a guideline for developing gender diversity practices specifically suited to the Latin American context.

Major cross‐national projects on women, culture and leadership in business to date tend to neglect the Latin American region. This research begins to highlight and remedy that lacuna.

The purpose of this paper is to expand our understanding of the motivations for corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting.

This paper provides a conceptual exploration of the motivation for corporations to provide ESG reports and proposes deterrence theory and avoidance as a complementary explanatory motivation for such reports.

Within this paper it is argued that part of the motivation for some corporations to increase ESG disclosures is to avoid, or mitigate, the risk of class actions and the associated financial penalties. This paper proposes that in Australia the deterrence impact, and ancillary avoidance behaviour, of civil litigation class action provides a further motivation for improving both corporate ESG disclosure and sustainability performance.

This paper extends the social and environmental accounting (SEA) reporting literature by proposing deterrence theory and avoidance as a corporate motivation for environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting. Deterrence is proposed as a different, yet complementary, motivation to the oft‐cited variations of stakeholder and legitimacy theory which are dominant in the SEA reporting motivation literature.

International business (IB) and strategy research in the context of emerging economies (EEs) has focused traditionally on the strategies of firms in and from those markets to seize opportunities arising from their economic growth. This paper aims to demonstrate that declining industries in EEs are an important but overlooked research context for critical IB scholarship and to illuminate special considerations for strategising under those conditions.

This paper provides an overview of declining industries in EEs and includes an illustration of a sample of such industries in major EEs. This paper then critically reviews research on firms’ strategies in declining industries and extends that critical discussion to the EE context.

Firstly, this paper provides evidence relating to declines in industries in EEs. Secondly, this paper identifies three major strategies that firms use in response to an industry decline and critically discusses those strategies’ manifestations and special considerations in the context of EEs.

Industry decline in EEs and the resultant responses of multi-national enterprises and local firms, such as business exit, market competition and firm diversification strategies, cause significant social challenges. This paper calls for further research on the phenomenon, especially regarding its distinctive ramifications compared with those in the context of developed countries.

This paper contributes to the critical IB scholarship by questioning the assumptions around high economic growth in individual EE industries and by challenging a universalistic approach that applies findings grounded in declining industries in developed countries to the distinctive context of EEs. This paper also provides forward-looking expositions concerning industry decline in EEs.

The purpose of this paper is to provide comment on the contribution of the Environmental performance accountability special issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal published in 1997 towards the innovation through a personal reflection developed from the perceived need to move academics and practitioners into the same space on environmental improvement by organisations. In addition, the paper will offer future directions for environmental performance accountability research, including the potential for tools such as integrated reporting, the need for theoretical pragmatism and importance of a transdisciplinary approach to research.

The diegetic method used for this article allowed for the provision of a narrative about actions, characters and events of interest to an audience. This method facilitated the intersection between the biographical and the historical content and context, and a hypodiegesis provided the ability for an embedded story within the larger history. The approach allowed for a hypodiegetic as the story within the story of developing the relationships between academic accountants and practitioners.

Contained in the special issue is a set of articles marking the extremes of academic and practitioner perspectives on what is broadly termed environmental performance and accountability. Review of the content of the special issue reveals that the bias is towards academic rather than practitioner appreciation. Review of the context providing the setting for the special issue shows the need for publishers to engage in the social media mechanisms needed to commence dialogue and convey the messages of academics to practitioners.

Subjective assessment is overtly recognized rather than subsumed in the research methods adopted.

The embedding of articles in special issues within a broader communications portfolio for practitioner understanding is suggested.

The nature of the personal reflection means that thoughts recorded are novel and unique.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of black Sub-Saharan African (BSSA) migrants from war-torn zones in accessing health services in the West Midlands region of the UK. This may help to inform on factors influencing the uptake of health services for new migrant communities.

This study explored the experiences of BSSA migrants from war-torn zones in accessing health services in the West Midlands using an explorative qualitative approach. Ten focus groups made up of seven participants each were followed up with three in-depth one-to-one interviews from each focus group using a conversational approach where research participants were encouraged to direct and shape the discussion in accordance with their own experiences, views and particular concerns (Kvale, 1996) as opposed to responding to a pre-determined agenda.

Following transcription, coding and analysis of the focus group discussions and follow-up interviews, this study found that perceptions and attitudes of BSSA communities in accessing health services included difficulties in navigating the health system, intrusive and embarrassing questions from clinicians, stigmatisation through offering an HIV test, culturally unfriendly counselling support, unconfidently services and episodes of trauma flashbacks.

The experiences of BSSA migrants who sought health services in the West Midlands in the UK demonstrated important implications for future practice and informed service delivery. There is a need to consider cultural education for both BSSA migrants and health professionals to enhance understanding and trust between the groups. Basic professional training for health professionals should also encompass the needs of the growing ethnic populations in the UK.

Strong leadership in primary care is necessary to coordinate an effective pandemic response; however, descriptions of leadership roles for family physicians are absent from previous pandemic plans. This study aims to describe the leadership roles and functions family physicians played during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada and identify supports and barriers to formalizing these roles in future pandemic plans.

This study conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with family physicians across four regions in Canada as part of a multiple case study. During the interviews, participants were asked about their roles during each pandemic stage and the facilitators and barriers they experienced. Interviews were transcribed and a thematic analysis approach was used to identify recurring themes.

Sixty-eight family physicians completed interviews. Three key functions of family physician leadership during the pandemic were identified: conveying knowledge, developing and adapting protocols for primary care practices and advocacy. Each function involved curating and synthesizing information, tailoring communications based on individual needs and building upon established relationships.

Findings demonstrate the need for future pandemic plans to incorporate formal family physician leadership appointments, as well as supports such as training, communication aides and compensation to allow family physicians to enact these key roles.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to examine the leadership roles of family physicians, which have been largely overlooked in past pandemic plans. This study’s findings highlight the importance of these roles toward delivering an effective and coordinated pandemic response with uninterrupted and safe access to primary care.

Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford: the names of these universities instantly conjure up images of the highest attainments of higher education. Of course, great universities also operate great university presses. So any reference book with the name of Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard in the title possesses immediate credibility and saleability. But it was not always so. Prior to the latter half of the nineteenth century the Oxford and the Cambridge University Presses were known to the public primarily as publishers of the Bible. Oxford broke into reference publishing, and along with it widespread public recognition, by means of its famous dictionaries, of which the pinnacle was the massive Oxford English Dictionary. The Cambridge University Press [hereafter referred to as CUP] took a different approach to publishing scholarly reference works by producing authoritative and encyclopedic histories. According to S.C. Roberts, a long‐time secretary to the Syndics of the CUP, “apart from the Bible, the first book that made the Press well known to the general public was the Cambridge Modern History.”

Stephen Town has been a thought leader and change agent in the academic library world for more than 20 years, who has produced a very large body of work in the areas of quality management and performance measurement that has been disseminated internationally. Town’s retirement from full-time employment at the University of York provides a timely opportunity to review his contribution to the field. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this issue.

The review outlines Town’s career path and professional interests and then appraises his published output, concentrating on his contributions to thinking and practice in the areas of benchmarking, information literacy, service quality, and measuring the value and impact of academic libraries and information services. The discussion is organized thematically to illustrate the evolution and development of his interests and ideas over the review period and also references-related work by other authors to set his work in context.

The study found many examples of innovative and creative work that had influenced thinking and practice in the library profession, including the development of models, frameworks, and tools with the potential to improve the effectiveness of service benchmarking, information literacy education, library advocacy, relationship management, staff evaluation, and impact measurement.

The volume of published work necessitated some selectivity in the material covered, but the review provides sufficiently comprehensive coverage of the areas specified to represent the work effectively.

Town has produced a substantial number of publications as a practitioner-researcher that have not previously been reviewed independently as a coherent body of work.

This applied neuroscience study aims to understand how direct and unconscious emotional and cognitive responses underlie travel destination preferences. State-of-the-art neuroscience tools and methods were used, including stationary eye tracking and brain scanning electroencephalography (EEG) to assess emotional and cognitive responses to destination images and assets. To the researchers’ knowledge, this study is the first applied neuroscience study in tourism research and thus opens a new path of research and enquiry to this area. This paper is an attempt to understand specific mental processes in human tourism behaviours, and it is suggest that unconscious emotional and cognitive responses are natural processes that need to be studied and understood, not as special cases, but embedded as natural parts of tourism research.

To better understand consumers’ unconscious responses to possible travel destinations, a 3 × 5 factorial design was run with the factors being stimulus type (images, printed names and videos) and travel destination (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, New York and London). Eye-tracking calibration was done with a nine-point fixation test and the EEG calibration was done using functional localizer tests based on the ABM B-ALERT calibration process. This calibration procedure allows reliable tracking of emotional and cognitive responses over time. Thirty Emirati (nationals of the UAE) participants, consisting of equal numbers of males and females (15) were recruited from the UAE and signed informed consent. Each participant was positioned in front of an eye tracker and computer screen, and brain-scanning equipment was mounted; then, each participant underwent eye-tracking and neuroimaging calibration procedures. A Tobii T60XL eye tracker and an ABM X-10 EEG brain scanner, both running iMotions v5.1 in a Windows 7 environment, were used.

General emotional and cognitive differences were identified between the channels through which travel destinations are presented. Words about and names of travel destinations cause higher cognitive loads, which may not be surprising, given the greater associative load that words have than images. Of particular interest is the hypothesis that images evoke stronger affective responses than verbal representations. However, as previously noted (Holmes and Mathews, 2005), empirical evidence for this assumption seems surprisingly sparse. The present study and the context provided here suggest that decisions on travel destination have an unconscious component and a direct component that may drive or affect overt preference and actual choice.

The limitations of this paper is that first, neuromarketing is not dependent on sample sizes; however, future studies could build on this paper to understand why there is a preference for cities. It is suggested that unconscious emotional and cognitive responses are natural processes that need to be studied and understood, not as special cases, but embedded as natural parts of tourism research.

Thus, tourism research may indeed be a suitable field for understanding the brain bases of complex preference formation and choice. Various researchers have found that a destination image is typically measured using cognitive, affective and behavioural components, and further stated that the cognitive image component of a destination was found to have a significant positive effect on the affective image component and overall destination image (Stylidis et al., 2017). Therefore, this research which has introduced brain scanning can be used to better understand the underlying unconscious emotional and cognitive processes that affect consumer thought and action. An understanding of what goes on in the human unconscious mind is very important for destination marketers, this can help in the integrated marketing communication process to create a destination image and brand.