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Purpose: While COVID-19 has upended lives, it has also catalyzed innovation with potential to advance health delivery. Yet, we know little about how the delivery system, and primary care in particular, has responded and how this has impacted vulnerable patients. We aimed to understand the impact of COVID-19 on primary care practice sites and their vulnerable patients and to identify explanations for variation. Approach: We developed and administered a survey to practice managers and physician leaders from 173 primary care practice sites, October-November 2020. We report and graphically depict results from univariate analysis and examine potential explanations for variation in practices' process innovations in response to COVID-19 by assessing bivariate relationships between seven dependent variables and four independent variables. Findings: Among 96 (55.5%) respondents, primary care practice sites on average took more safety (8.5 of 12) than financial (2.5 of 17) precautions in response to COVID-19. Practice sites varied in their efforts to protect patients with vulnerabilities, providing care initially postponed, and experience with virtual visits. Financial risk, practice size, practitioner age, and emergency preparedness explained variation in primary care practices' process innovations. Many practice sites plan to sustain virtual visits, dependent mostly on patient and provider preference and continued reimbursement. Value: While findings indicate rapid and substantial innovation, conditions must enable primary care practice sites to build on and sustain innovations, to support care for vulnerable populations, including those with multiple chronic conditions and socio-economic barriers to health, and to prepare primary care for future emergencies.

A boarding school research center annually invites students, professors, and others to collaborate with faculty members, forming interconnected communities of practice. The authors interviewed visitors to determine how their experience contributed to their identity as a scholar and the extent to which they felt part of a community of practice. Categorizing emergent themes according to Wenger's (1998) categories of communities of practice, we identified six subthemes that characterize their experience. All participants valued their stay and expressed a desire to remain connected to the school, visiting scholars, and other people they met and now consider part of their network.

Prior reports on theory and research focusing on describing and explaining national cultural influences on purchase and consumption behavior use a net effects approach (i.e., theory and analysis relying on main and interaction effects via statistical analysis). Theory and research in this chapter advances qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of a configuration perspective of culture's consequences on consumption behavior. This research informs the view that national cultures represent causal recipes (conjunctions) of cultural values; the study of main and interaction effects offer meager representations of national culture's consequences in comparison to adopting a cultural configuration stance. The configuration research here includes transforming Hofstede's country cultural scores into fuzzy set values and applying Boolean algebra to estimate the relevancy of alternative cultural configurations for each of 14 nations to consuming experiences during visits to Australia. The findings support primary and additional hypotheses that specific cultural configurations are sufficient (but not necessary) for describing substantial culture's consequences on consuming tourism experiences. For example, the animus (i.e., Carl Jung's unconscious masculine personality-force) configuration — the combination of high power (P), high individualism (I), high masculine (M), and low uncertainty avoidance (∼U) (i.e., P·I·M·∼U) — is sufficient in indicating not-shopping-for-gifts while visiting Australia. Western national cultures (e.g., United States) have higher fuzzy set scores than Eastern national cultures (e.g., Japan) for the animus configuration.

This paper analyses the role of face-to-face interactions between employees of different firms meeting during work-related visits in fostering skills and generating new productive knowledge. The analysis is based on primary data collected from 1,982 business visitors to/from Australia. The results suggest that face-to-face interacting can be an effective mechanism to enhance skill formation, as it improves the stock of useful knowledge and offers opportunities to learning to both visiting and visited parties.

It seems that the Internet boom, which started at the end of the 1990s and finished with the spectacular collapse of the so-called dotcoms, is probably over. We are currently enjoying a period of fast and stable growth. This is manifested by the growing number of both Internet users and companies which – to an ever-increasing extent – use the Internet as a form of communication (both internal and external), promotion, sales etc. Expenditures on Internet advertising are growing continuously and now constitute more than 25% of all advertising expenditure. A natural consequence of this development is the need for the standardisation and organisation of the world of the Internet. These activities will result in a greater awareness of the benefits which this medium provides, increasing the possibilities of its use, and – most importantly – the opportunity to evaluate the return on investments made on the Internet. Nowadays, it is clear that many companies are striving to increase the quality of their activities on the Internet or to improve the effectiveness of such activities. As a consequence, the number of companies that look for indices which would enable the making of more precise and effective decisions in the scope of online operations is growing.

This chapter is dedicated to the phenomenon of the increasing role of the Internet in business, including the scale of its use by Polish and international companies. We present the most commonly used measures of marketing activities on the Internet and in social media. This group includes the indices which make it possible to determine whether a company actually needs a website. Other measures allow for the improvement in the effectiveness of the activity on the Internet, whereas others specify the costs of activities on the Internet and often serve as the basis for settlements between a company and advertising agencies or companies specialising in website design. It is worth emphasising that the Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned (PESO) model, worked out by Don Bartholomew,¹ is the basis for creation and description of indices concerning social media. This model has gained certain popularity in the social media industry. It does not, however, specify how individual indices should be named and calculated. It maps already existing indices and adapts them to specific levels of marketing communication measurement. All the measures indicated by the author of the model have been grouped into five major areas: exposure, engagement, brand awareness, action and recommendations. This model– similarly to all models of performance measurement – inspired by the sales funnel concept, adjusts certain standard indices and proposals of measurements for specific levels. Additionally, the measures are divided into four types, depending on who the owner of the content is: Paid (P) – refers to all forms of paid content; Owned (O) – all websites and web properties controlled by a company or brand; Earned (E) – the contents about a given brand created spontaneously by Internet users; and Shared (S) – the contents shared by Internet users.

Family engagement is a central tenet of high-quality early education practice. However, the ways in which programs interact with families have varied significantly over time and in relationship to program type. This chapter extends traditional notions of family involvement by emphasizing the potential of early care and education programs to effectively support parents and other primary caregivers in enhancing daily interactions with their children. Specifically, home visits are described as an important mechanism to influence parent-child interaction particularly when intentional, evidence-based curricula are employed. In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on developing and implementing such home visiting models. In this chapter, we describe a specific example of the integration of the Promoting First Relationships (PFR) parent-child interaction curriculum (Kelly, Zuckerman, Sandoval, & Buehlman, 2008) into home visits in both home and center-based Early Head Start practice. Implementation aspects for enhancing existing family engagement strategies with an intentional home visiting curriculum are discussed with recommendations for future programming and research.

Micro-tipping point (MTP) theory includes the proposal that a specific stream of unconscious and conscious thoughts result in a go/no-go discretionary action in a given context (e.g., whether or not to visit a given destination in a given season or year involving particular persons being included or excluded from the trip; whether to buy a Ford, BMW, or Toyota). The specific stream represents a stream or conjunctive combination of thoughts-in-context that results in a tourist party actually taking the steps that include booking the trip and experiencing a destination first-hand. Building such contingency models that are applicable to real-life combinations of unconscious and conscious thinking requires collecting data from informants on both implicit and explicit beliefs, attitudes, and thinking rules relevant for a specific yes/no context. Chapter 14 illustrates applying the long interview for collecting such data and using quantitative comparative analysis for constructing MTP models.

“Country-collectors” (CCs) are defined here as international leisure travelers who have visited 6 +  countries within the five most recent calendar years primarily to pursue leisure activities. The study here contributes by offering an early workbench model of antecedents, paths, and outcomes of country-collectors’ evaluations and behavior toward countries as place-brands competing for such visitors. This study reports findings from a large-scale omnibus survey in three large Japanese cities (total n = 1,200). Key findings support the model and the following conclusions. Generally, country-collectors represent a small share of a nation’s adult population (less than 5%) but over 40% of the total leisure trips abroad; country-collectors are classifiable into distinct sub-segments according to the country place-brands that they visit; CC sub-segments, less frequent international leisure travelers, and stay-in-country travelers and non-travelers each offer unique assessments of competing countries as place-brands. National place-brand strategists planning a marketing campaign to influence a given nation’s residents to visit a specific destination (e.g., persuading Japanese nationals to visit the United States) may increase the campaign’s effectiveness by using this workbench model. The study offers a blueprint of how to appraise strengths and weaknesses of competing national place-brands among realized and potential visitors in specific national markets.