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Charitable Choice Policy, the heart of President Bush’s Faith‐Based Initiative, is the direct government funding of religious organizations for the purpose of carrying out government programs. The Bush presidential administration has called for the application of Charitable Choice Policy to all kinds of social services. Advocates for child‐abuse victims contend that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy would further dismantle essential social services provided to abused children. Others have argued Charitable Choice Policy is unconstitutional because it crosses the boundary separating church and state. Rather than drastically altering the US social‐policy landscape, this paper demonstrates that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy already is in place for childabuse services across many of the fifty states. One reason this phenomenon is ignored is due to the reliance on the public‐private dichotomy for studying social policies and services. This paper contends that relying on the public‐private dichotomy leads researchers to overlook important configurations of actors and institutions that provide services to abused children. It offers an alternate framework to the public‐private dichotomy useful for the analysis of social policy in general and, in particular, Charitable Choice Policy affecting services to abused children. Employing a new methodological approach, fuzzy‐sets analysis, demonstrates the degree to which social services for abused children match ideal types. It suggests relationships between religious organizations and governments are essential to the provision of services to abused children in the United States. Given the direction in which the Bush Charitable Choice Policy will push social‐policy programs, scholars should ask whether abused children will be placed in circumstances that other social groups will not and why.

Previous research has identified a need for greater clarity regarding the functions of multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings in UK community mental health services. The purpose of this paper is to identify the functions of these meetings by systematically reviewing both primary research and academic discussion papers.

Papers relating to adult community mental health teams (CMHTs) in the UK and published between September 1999 and February 2014 were reviewed and appraised using NICE quality checklists. The search was broad in scope to include both general CMHTs and specialist CMHTs such as early intervention psychosis services and forensic mental health teams. A thematic synthesis of the findings was performed to develop an overarching thematic framework of the reported functions of MDT meetings.

None of the 4,046 studies identified directly investigated the functions of MDT meetings. However, 49 mentioned functions in passing. These functions were categorised into four thematic domains: discussing the care of individual patients, teamwork, team management and learning and development. Several papers reported a lack of clarity about the purpose of MDT meetings and the roles of different team members which hindered effective collaboration.

Without clearly agreed objectives for MDT meetings, monitoring their effectiveness is problematic. Unwarranted variation in their functioning may undermine the quality of care.

This is the first systematic review to investigate the functions of CMHT MDT meetings in the UK. The findings highlight a need for empirical research to establish how MDT meetings are being used so that their effectiveness can be understood, monitored and evaluated.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.