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This paper provides interesting insights for anti‐virus research, as it reflects a period of rapid uptake in the application of the Internet and the use of e‐mail for business purposes. The purpose of the research is to provide independent justification of the growing prevalence of computer virus incidents over the past five years, and identify patterns in the frequency and distribution of computer viruses. Specifically, the analysis focuses on examining the claims that computer viruses are increasing in prevalence, that computer viruses follow an evolutionary pattern and that seasonality exists in the distribution of computer viruses.

Today, we are witnessing a wave of multinational corporations who seek to be recognized for being environmentally conscious, which can become a source of competitive advantage. But how many of them actually have the policies in place to achieve this? Drawing from the strategy literature, this paper aims to argue that firms who seek to achieve green reputation must align their policies in a way to achieve this goal.

This paper presents a framework that discusses the key elements of the corporate environmental management process, and then empirically examines the impact of green policy on green reputation among Fortune 500 US firms.

The findings support a positive significant relationship between green policy and green reputation, with environmental performance to partially mediate this relationship. Insights from this study highlight the importance of focusing on company-level green policy for building green reputation as well as for discriminating across the flux of corporations that all claim to be environmentally conscious or green.

First, the study is limited by the unavailability of environmental performance data at the subsidiary level, which, if incorporated, would yield a better specified model. Second, to strengthen the causal relationships examined in the models, time-series analyses would likely be useful. Third, other informal measures that could be incorporated can include other forms of corporate verbal communications, which include 10K reports as well as shareholder letters.

Given the increased flux of firms that are racing to be known as environmentally conscious firms, one can benefit from the use of an internal mechanism that can discriminate between rhetoric and action. Therefore, when differentiating between firms’ environmental consciousness, investors and key stakeholders should investigate more internal environmental firm policies, because they are likely to be more indicative of their actions.

This study uses a quantified assessment of companies’ actual environmental footprints, drawing from a cross-sector sample within the manufacturing industry. The secondary data used in this study are combined from a number of prominent data sources in corporate social responsibility/environmental management literature.

New malicious e‐mails are created at the rate of thousands a year and pose a serious security threat. Especially, new, unseen Internet worms and virus often are arriving as e‐mail attachments. In this paper, Bayesian probabilistic network is examined to detect new malicious e‐mail viruses through anomaly detection. Experimental results show a better malicious e‐mail detection using Bayesian probabilistic networks. Managerial implications on how companies can protect their e‐mails and develop their own e‐mail security plan are addressed as well.

An e‐mail virus is an e‐mail that can infect other programs by modifying them to include a replication of itself. When the infected e‐mails are opened, the e‐mail virus spreads itself to others. Today's society has seen a dramatic increase in the use of e‐mails. As a result, organizations must take even more precautions to guard against the introduction of e‐mail viruses into their systems. This paper discusses how organizations can protect their e‐mails from the intrusion of e‐mail virus and how to develop their own e‐mail virus security plan.

Claiming that quality assurance in Europe is a growth industry, the paper looks at this development from three angles: Has quality assurance become a science? Is it being practised? And how can quality assurance be successfully introduced? The paper concludes that quality assurance cannot yet be considered ‐ nor does it need to become ‐ a science, meeting the usual criteria of a scientific discipline. In spite of this, quality assurance has to be based on sound scientific evidence. There are encouraging signs of this happening: while there is no long research tradition in quality assurance, the number of studies is increasing and their quality is improving. On positive action, the paper finds the situation brighter. There is both political will and professional acceptance. WHO's European member states have accepted as a part of their overall health for all policy a specific target which requests them to build effective mechanisms for ensuring quality of patient care. The increasing professional interest and political will have resulted, among other things, in laws, quality assurance programmes, training programmes, national societies and journals. Views on quality and quality assurance have broadened; consumer views are being accepted as part of quality; the outcomes of care are emphasised; quality assurance is being extended from hospitals to primary care and nursing homes, and from medical care to nursing care and physiotherapy. Based on lessons learned from the past experiences, the last section of the paper makes recommendations for the successful introduction of quality assurance. The importance of demonstrating a need, the involvement of all those concerned and the provision of feedback are emphasised.

This paper reports on the implementation and evaluation of the JOBS programme in Ireland. This is a training intervention to promote re‐employment and improve mental health among unemployed people that was implemented on a pilot basis in the border region of the Republic and Northern Ireland. Programme participants were unemployed people recruited from local training and employment offices and health agencies. The evaluation indicated that the programme was implemented successfully and led to improved psychological and re‐employment outcomes for the intervention group, lasting up to 12 months post‐intervention. This paper reflects on the implementation issues that arose in adapting an international evidence‐based programme to the local setting and considers the implications of the evaluation findings for the roll out of the programme on a larger scale.

The chapter aims to compare public, private and non-profit working citizens’ preferences for cross-sectoral relations in England and Finland. Its main contribution is in identifying preferences in the delivery of services in the respective countries in which citizen choice has become an issue in times of public sector austerity. Challenges arise because in these two similarly institutionalized healthcare systems but pluralistic societies people have contrasting perspectives on the values that should guide policy decisions. The survey data was therefore collected in both England (N = 2,000) and Finland (N = 1,973) in 2013 from cities in which citizens have choices regarding health service delivery. Our informants in England anticipated more potential for better ‘privatized driven public interest’ than did those in Finland. Surprisingly, over 60% of public sector employees in England would like for-profit healthcare to carry main responsibility, and almost 55% of all employees agree with this. Almost 20% of respondents in both countries did not care who the service provider is if only services are available. Thus, the research has pioneering relevance for policymaking, public strategic management and the comparative empirical study of managing people’s preferences in cross-sectoral relations. We conclude that identifying working citizens’ preferences is crucial for effective utilization of current welfare services because the preferences derive from both service and work experience. In sum, strategically, this identification lets public managers balance biased images of the cross-sectoral differences and reconstruct functional hybridity of services.

If we want to improve managerial cognition, we need to capture the full spectrum of cognitive functions and the complex processes through which they unfold. I propose two very different methods (one older and low-tech, one newer and high-tech) that allow us to observe cognitive functions and processes directly in real time.

This book on uncertainty comprises the initial volume in a series titled “New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition”. We asked Frances Milliken and Gerard P. Hodgkinson, two well-known scholars who have made important contributions to our understanding of uncertainty to join us in this opening chapter to introduce this project. The brief bios found at the end of this volume cannot do justice to the broad range of their contributions, but our conversation gives a flavor of the kind of insights they have brought to managerial and organizational cognition (MOC). The editors thank them for helping launch the series with a decisive exploration of what defining uncertainty involves, how that might be done, why it is important, and how the task is changing. We were interested to discover that all five of us are currently involved in research that considers the nature and impact of uncertainty, and we hope that readers similarly find that paying attention to uncertainty contributes to their current projects. Working together, we can advance understanding of organizational settings and effective action, both for researchers and practitioners.

While recent research has referred to a cognitive view on “business modelling,” it remains unclear in specifying the cognitive foundations of how such modelling happens. This paper proposes building on heuristics as models of individual cognition, which have proved effective foundations of adaptive individual and managerial behaviors. By also drawing on gestalt theory to specify principles of modelling as rule-based form giving, we propose business modelling as a managerial cognitive process of configuring heuristics. The paper makes three contributions. First, we introduce heuristics to the business modelling literature and so provide an established theory of adaptive individual behavior that strengthens the cognitive foundations of business modelling. Second, we conceptualize and theorize on the cognitive activity of business modelling as an iterative process of configuring heuristics by applying gestalt principles. Although the literature on business models has referred to the theories of configurations and gestalt, it has been left to this work to make the theoretical linkages between heuristics, gestalt theory and business modelling explicit. Third, our work contributes to the micro-foundations of the cognitive processes underlying business modelling and thus to broader accounts of adaptive managerial behaviors.