Search results

Health care institutions in many Western countries have developed preoperative testing and assessment guidelines to improve surgical outcomes and reduce cost of surgical care. The aims of this chapter are to (1) summarize the literature on the effect of preoperative testing on clinical outcomes, efficiency, and cost; and (2) to compare preoperative testing guidelines developed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

We reviewed the literature from 1975 to 2014 for studies and preoperative testing guidelines.

We identified 29 empirical studies and 8 country-specific guidelines for review. Most studies indicate that preoperative testing is overused and comes at a high cost. Guidelines are tied to payment only in one country studied. This is the most recent review of the literature on preoperative testing and assessment with a focus on quality of care, efficiency, and cost outcomes. In addition, this chapter provides an international comparison of preoperative guidelines.

This chapter deals with the process perspective of entrepreneurship, that is, what prospective entrepreneurs should do and how they do it (the processes they use) to launch a new venture in the tourism field. The main purpose of this chapter is to explain what the entrepreneurial process is, the steps/phases to transit from idea to enterprise and the risks involved.

General review was conducted on conceptual issues and managerial aspects of the entrepreneurial process and legal issues.

This chapter highlights that the entrepreneurial process undergone by entrepreneurs is dual in nature, both in terms of action and thinking process. Given that the failure rate of new ventures is high, there is a need to focus on the importance of understanding the dynamics of entrepreneurship, the action process of the prospective entrepreneur and the potential risk impact.

This chapter is explorative in nature because the discussion is based on a general review.

Prospective entrepreneurs should follow specific steps, a rational process to establish their business venture and to protect its operations against any event. Thus, any new business should manage risks appropriately, as well as record insurance to cover for unforeseen events.

This chapter provides an overview of the entrepreneurial process and legal risk issues that may affect the success of a new venture. The hands-on approach is particularly useful in dealing with the entrepreneurial mind when exploring new business ventures in the tourism field.

Entrepreneurs and their ventures are often portrayed as unambiguously positive forces in society. Specifically, high technology and equity-funded startups are heralded for their innovative products and services that are believed to alter the economic, social, and even political fabric of life in advantageous ways. This paper draws on established theory on the causes of misconduct in and by organizations to elaborate the factors that can give rise to misconduct in entrepreneurial ventures, illustrating our arguments with case material on both widely known and less well-known instances of entrepreneurial misconduct. In venturing into the dark side of entrepreneurship, we hope to contribute to theory on entrepreneurship and organizational misconduct, augment entrepreneurship pedagogy, and offer ideas and examples that can enhance entrepreneurs’ awareness of their susceptibility to wrongdoing.

While the main emotional labor strategies are well-documented, the manner in which professionals navigate emotional rules within the workplace and effectively perform emotional labor is less understood. With this contribution, I aim to unveil “the good, the bad and the ugly” of emotional labor as a dynamic theatrical performance.

Focusing on three geriatric long-term care units within a French public hospital, this qualitative study relies on two sets of data (observation and interviews). Deeply rooted within the field of study, the chosen methodological approach substantializes the subtle hues of the emotional experience at work and targets resonance rather than generalization.

Using the theatrical metaphor, this research underlines the role of space in the practice of emotional labor in a unique way. It identifies the main emotionalized zones or emotional regions (front, back, transitional, mixed) and details their characteristics, before unearthing the nonlinearity and polyphonic quality of emotional labor performance and the versatility needed to that effect. Indeed, this research shows how health-care professionals juggle with the specificities of each region, as well as how space generates both constraints and resources. By combining static and dynamic prisms, diverse instantiations of hybridity and spatial in-betweens, anchored in liminality and trajectories, are revealed.

This research adds to the current body of literature on the concept of emotional labor by shedding light on its highly dynamic and interactional nature, revealing different levels of porosity between emotional regions and how the characteristics of each type of area can taint others and increase/decrease the occupational health costs of emotional labor. The study also raises questions about the interplay of emotional labor performance with the level of humanization/dehumanization of elderly people. Given the global demographics about an aging population, this gives food for thought at a social level.

This work explores the effectiveness of an innovative inclusion model that is based on the development and operationalization of the inclusion coach (IC) role in one school district (in Ontario, generally referred to as a ‘board’). This model has implications for school systems that desire a change in practice but may perceive challenges to this change in their local capacity. In this model, internal school district funding and existing structures were reallocated to convert teaching positions into IC positions. This staffing change was designed to support the desegregation of stand-alone special education classes at the elementary and secondary levels within that school district. While significantly decreasing the number of segregated settings, the intervention was not without its challenges. Challenges and successes will be examined through the perspectives of school principals, ICs and classroom teachers. This school district created an effective and sustainable model to promote inclusion, through internal staffing adjustments, and role redefinition. Utilizing a shared focus and support for staff, this school district was successfully able to transition beliefs and practices from segregated special education to full inclusion for students with special education needs.

One of the lessons learned from the recent financial-sector crisis is that institutions may sometimes sow the seeds of their own destruction. We offer a two-tiered analysis of how the diffusion of innovative practices – in this case, issuing and securitizing subprime mortgages – can lead to an unanticipated breakdown of established institutions. At the institutional level, we demonstrate that the lack of effective external regulatory presence, the emergence of new norms through the introduction of a new institutional logic, and intense mimetic and competitive pressures may lead organizational actors to exploit a suboptimal innovation. At the organizational level, we argue that over-embeddedness of central actors within relatively closed networks and superstitious learning processes can exacerbate the biases to which decision makers are susceptible, leading to the institutionalization of a suboptimal organizational practice. These two parallel sets of processes led to severe consequences at the institutional level, which we label “terminal isomorphism.” We end by discussing consequences for institutional theory, future research directions, and recommendations for policy makers.