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According to the social justice model of disability, inclusion is about securing civil and human rights for individuals with disabilities. To that end, supported decision-making is a person-centred process that allows individuals to take control of their own choices and increases their ability to live self-determined lives. Utilizing a case-study approach, this chapter examines the differences between guardianship and supported decision-making and explores how one individual who had been placed within a guardianship format, embraced a more supported decision-making framework through self-selecting a group of family, friends and professionals to serve in an advisory capacity. Through this approach, he regained control of decision-making, assumed the ‘dignity of risk’ associated with decision-making and restored his right to self-determination.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

Recent research has promoted the use of supported decision making, in contrast to historical methods of substitute decision making when working with people with intellectual disabilities. In Israel, people with disabilities are protected by the Legal Capacity and Guardianship Law of 1962, which was amended in 2016. The purpose of this paper is to consider how these recent changes are perceived by the professionals in Israel.

Professionals with experience in policy making, law, social work and with direct experience working with people with intellectual disabilities (ID) were interviewed using semi-structured interviews and one focus group. Interviews were recorded and subsequently coded and analysed qualitatively.

Two major themes were identified. These were: the law and its phrasing, and changing culture. Findings highlight the process of change within guardianship law and practice and the challenges in implementation encountered so far and anticipated in the future.

Guardianship laws are changing in many states and the challenges to implementation of supported decision-making in these countries have been echoed in this study. Functional models to allow implementation of supported decision-making have not yet been strongly evidenced. It is hoped that this research may provide a springboard for further study into legal capacity and guardianship issues in Israel and elsewhere.

To support vaccine decision-making, a growing number of parents use online communities to obtain informational and emotional support; however, relatively high information heterogeneity and polarization in the online environment make it challenging for parents to make informed vaccine decisions based on the systematic processing of conflicting information. In this context, this study aims to focus on the relationship between parents’ knowledge integration and rational and experiential decision-making and the mediating effect of anxiety on this relationship.

A theoretical model incorporating the direct and indirect effects of knowledge integration and anxiety on decision-making is proposed and tested through partial least squares structural equation modeling with survey data from 223 parents.

Knowledge integration negatively affects anxiety. Knowledge integration has a direct positive effect on rational decision-making and an indirect negative effect on experiential decision-making.

These insights into the key role of knowledge integration in parental vaccine decision-making under information heterogeneity and polarization provide support for practical strategies to encourage knowledge integration and alleviate anxiety in online communities.

This study underscores the importance of knowledge integration in vaccine decision-making under information heterogeneity and polarization and reveals distinct mechanisms underlying the effects of knowledge integration on decision-making dominated by rational and experiential modes. The findings also provide insights into the information processing mechanisms underlying the knowledge integration of subjects with insufficient prior knowledge in the non-organizational context.

Decision support (DS), as a traditional management concept, have had a remarkable role in competitiveness or survival of organizations and nowadays, business intelligence (BI), as a brand modern impression, has various contributions in supporting decision-making process. Although, a variety of benefits are expected to arise from BI functions, researches, and models that determining the effect of BI functions on the decisional and organizational benefits are rare. The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between BI functions, DS benefits, and organizational benefits in context of decision environment.

This research conducts a quantitative survey-based study to represent the relationship between BI capabilities, decision support benefits, and organizational benefits in context of decision environment. On this basis, the partial least squares (PLS) technique employs a sample of 228 firms from different industries located in Middle-East countries.

The findings confirm the existence of meaningful relationship between BI functions, DS benefits, and organizational benefits by supporting 15 out of 16 main hypotheses. Essentially, this research provides an insightful understanding about which capabilities of BI have strongest impact on the outcome benefits.

The results can provide effective and useful insights for investors and business owners to utilize more appropriate BI tools and functions to reach more idealistic organizational advantages. Also it enables managers to better understand the application of BI functions in the process of achieving the specified managerial support benefits.

Decision making is inherently stressful since the decision maker must choose between potentially conflicting alternatives with unique hazards and uncertain outcomes. Whereas decision aids such as decision support systems (DSS) can be beneficial in stressful scenarios, decision makers sometimes misuse them during decision making, leading to suboptimal outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between stress, decision making and decision aid use.

The authors conduct an extensive multi-disciplinary review of decision making and DSS use through the lens of stress and examine how stress, as perceived by decision makers, impacts their use or misuse of DSS even when such aids can improve decision quality. Research questions examine underlying sources of stress in managerial decision making that influence decision quality, relationships between a decision maker’s perception of stress, DSS use/misuse, and decision quality, and implications for research and practice on DSS design and capabilities.

The study presents a conceptual model that provides an integrative behavioral view of the impact of a decision maker’s perceived stress on their use of a DSS and the quality of their decisions. The authors identify critical knowledge gaps and propose a research agenda to improve decision quality and use of DSS by considering a decision maker’s perceived stress.

This study provides a previously unexplored view of DSS use and misuse as shaped by the decision and job stress experienced by decision makers. Through the application of four theories, the review and its findings highlight key design principles that can mitigate the negative effects of stressors on DSS use.

This chapter aims to provide an overview of the ethical framework and decision-making in clinical dementia research, and to analyze and discuss the ethical challenges and issues that can arise when conducting clinical dementia research.

Informed consent is the most scrutinized and controversial aspect of clinical research ethics. In clinical dementia research, assessing decision-making capacity may be challenging as the nature and progress of each disease influences decision-making capacity in diverse ways. Persons with dementia represent a vulnerable population deserving special attention when developing, implementing, and evaluating the informed consent process. In this chapter, particular attention will be given to vulnerability categories and how these influence decision-making capacity. Ethical frameworks with a pragmatic contour and implication are needed to protect vulnerable patients from potential harms and ensure their optimal participation in clinical dementia research.

In addition, this chapter analyses important ethical challenges and issues in clinical dementia research. If handled thoughtfully, they would not pose insuperable barriers to research. But if they are ignored, they could slow the research process, alienate potential study subjects and cause harm to research participants. Ethical considerations in research involving persons with dementia primarily concern the representation of the interests of the participants with dementia and protection of their vulnerabilities and rights.

A core set of ethical questions and recommendations are drawn to aid researchers, institutional review boards and potential research participants in the process of participating in clinical dementia research.

In England, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) cannot be administered to service users who make an advance decision to refuse the treatment, unless in life-threatening circumstances. In a sector where person-centred practice is revered, no prior research has investigated whether community mental health practitioners (CMHPs) encourage service users to make advance decisions about ECT. This study aims to explore whether CMHPs have supported advance decision-making about ECT and whether their profession, attitudes towards and knowledge of the treatment affect this.

A quantitative online survey was completed by n = 120 CMHPs (nurses, social workers and occupational therapists). The validated Questionnaire on Attitudes and Knowledge of ECT was used.

In total, 93% of participants knew service users who had undergone ECT, yet only 12% had supported a service user to make an advance decision about ECT. Compared to those who had not supported advance decision-making, those who had shown significantly higher knowledge and a more positive attitude. Nurses and those who had worked in the mental health field for over 10 years had significantly higher knowledge of ECT.

CMHPs are well placed to support advance decision-making about ECT. Increased knowledge about advance decisions and ECT may bolster the uptake of advance decision-making, thus greater training is recommended.

This chapter focuses on techniques and technologies to aid groups in making decisions, with an emphasis on computer-based support. Many office workers regularly meet colleagues and clients in virtual meetings using videoconferencing platforms, which enable participants to carry out tasks in a manner similar to a face-to-face meeting. The development of computer-based platforms to facilitate group tasks can be traced back to the 1960s, and while they support group communication, they do not directly support group decision making. In this chapter we distinguish four technologies developed to provide support to group decisions, clustered into two main traditions. Technologies in the task-oriented tradition are mainly concerned with enabling participants to complete tasks to solve the group's decision problem via computer-supported communications. Group Decision Support Systems and social software technologies comprise the task-oriented tradition. Alternately, in the model-driven tradition, participants use computers to build and use a model that acts as a referent to communicate, mostly verbally, about the group's decision problem. System modeling and decision-modeling technologies constitute the model-driven tradition. This chapter sketches the history and guiding ideas of both traditions, and describes their associated technologies. The chapter concludes with questioning if increased availability of online tools will lead to increased use of group decision support technologies, and the differential impact of communication support versus decision support.

This study is undertaken to examine the antecedents and role of big data decision-making capabilities toward decision-making quality and environmental performance among the Chinese public and private hospitals. It also examined the moderating effect of big data governance that was almost ignored in previous studies.

The target population consisted of managerial employees (IT experts and executives) in hospitals. Data collected using a survey questionnaire from 752 respondents (374 respondents from public hospitals and 378 respondents from private hospitals) was subjected to PLS-SEM for analysis.

Findings revealed that data management challenges (leadership focus, talent management, technology and organizational culture for big data) are significant antecedents for big data decision-making capabilities in both public and private hospitals. Moreover, it was also found that big data decision-making capabilities played a key role to improve the decision-making quality (effectiveness and efficiency), which positively contribute toward environmental performance in public and private hospitals of China. Public hospitals are playing greater attention to big data management for the sake of quality decision-making and environmental performance than private hospitals.

This study provides guidelines required by hospitals to strengthen their big data capabilities to improve decision-making quality and environmental performance.

The proposed model provides an insight look at the dynamic capabilities theory in the domain of big data management to tackle the environmental issues in hospitals. The current study is the novel addition in the literature, and it identifies that big data capabilities are envisioned to be a game-changer player in effective decision-making and to improve the environmental performance in health sector.