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Explores recent approaches to international best practices and how they relate to context and innovation in health services.

Critical review of existing research on best practices and how they created, diffused, and translate in the international setting.

Best practices are widely used and discussed, but processes by which they are developed and diffused across international settings are not well understood.

Further research is needed on innovation and dissemination of best practices internationally.

This commentary points out directions for future research on innovation and diffusion of best practices, particularly in the international setting.

This chapter asks whether it is helpful to consider a profession to be a practice and to what extent this meshes with the idea that ‘profession’ is a moral concept. It examines MacIntyre’s concept of a practice as an activity that pursues internal goods, finds that MacIntyre’s articulation of the concept by itself is not enough to describe what it is to be a profession and seeks to supplement this with ideas from others, primarily Miller and Davis. This supplementation, however, still leaves open the question of the origin of a profession’s authority (or licence) to use what can be called the ‘dangerous knowledge’ that differentiates the work of professions from other occupations. For this, Veatch provides useful ideas.

This chapter discusses the strengths and challenges posed by the chapter by Aumann and Ostroff entitled, “Multi-Level Fit: An Integrative Framework for Understanding HRM Practices in Cross-Cultural Contexts.” In addition, this chapter proposes an alternative multi-level model of culture, which consists of structural and dynamic dimensions with culture's strength as a moderator of the top-down bottom-up dynamic processes. This model assumes that there is a fit between the value system and the HRM practices, as they represent two layers of culture – visible and less visible. Yet, the fit can be interrupted when HRM practices are transferred across cultures. The chapter further discusses when HRM practices are rejected and when they are accepted despite the misfit.

The hotel sector in South Africa is also aware of the detrimental impact of its activities on the environment. As a result, it has taken steps to mitigate such effects, evidenced by implementing green hotel practices. ‘Green hotels’ refers to lodging establishments that try to consume less energy, water and materials while still offering high-quality services. Unfortunately, although the hotel sector contributes significantly to employment and economic growth globally, its activities harm the environment through pollution, overuse of natural resources and solid and liquid waste.

This chapter discusses the concepts of green hotels and green practices. This chapter also highlights the need for green practices and identifies a case study on green hotels and practices in a South African context. This chapter found that the green hotel sector implements green practices, such as water-saving practices due to the risk of water insecurity, the growing demand for sustainability and the necessity to boost revenues. Green hotels and practices are a step to actualise the objectives of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 12 and 13, which focus on clean water and sanitation and climate change, respectively. The study underscores the importance of green practices and how South Africa responds to the challenge. It is believed that hotels contribute significantly to environmental degradation, but they can also help to preserve the environment through their activities through green practices. Strategies like adopting green practices would be a remedy to mitigate pollution and its effects on environmental sustainability.

This chapter describes pre-service teachers' teaching practices of didactic methods based on cognitive apprenticeship. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate potential of Second Life® as a space for teaching practices of pre-service teachers. The participants were 160 college students who were completing a practicum at Korea National University of Education. These students enrolled in four sections of teaching methods and educational technology, which was one of the requirements for their teaching certificate. The students were placed in groups of three to five students according to their majors. In Second Life, they practiced their teaching and participated in the evaluation of other groups' teaching. They discussed Second Life's potential, such as a space for expanding their teaching experiences and explored possibilities for using it as an environment for teaching practices. The authors believe that readers will find that Second Life can offer a valuable environment to promote pre-teachers' understanding of teaching techniques.

School library media specialists (SLMSs) often struggle with assuming leadership roles. Discrepancies existed in perceptions of SLMSs of their leadership preparedness, their opportunities to exert leadership, and their assumption of leadership roles. The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the perceptions of SLMSs regarding their instructional leadership and to examine the extent to which they practiced instructional leadership. The study was designed to determine whether there were differences between SLMSs perceptions of the importance of their leadership roles and their opportunities to practice those roles. The results of the study indicated that SLMSs perceived all of the leadership roles to be more important than they were able to carry out in practice and that supportive administrators were the most essential factor in providing SLMSs the opportunity to practice and expand their roles as instructional leaders.

Teacher education in the United States has been widely criticized for its uneven and often poorly supported approach to preparing novices for clinical practice. In 2010, the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning (commissioned by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education) released a report titled “Transforming Teacher Education Through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers.” The report called for teacher education to “be turned upside down,” a dramatic shift from traditional approaches to preparing teachers to “programs that are fully grounded in clinical practice and interwoven with academic content and professional courses” (p. ii). Many preparation programs in the United States are engaged in efforts to become more clinically rich in their approach to teacher preparation. This chapter will examine the call for more clinically rich approaches to English language arts teacher education, and will highlight how such a shift is integral to more socially just teacher preparation programs. Particular features of two clinically rich English language arts teacher preparation programs, one in California the other in New York, will be described and research focusing on the programs will be highlighted in an effort to share lessons learned.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of empirical research on performance management (PM) in former communist Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, to evaluate the state of knowledge in this area and suggest possible directions for future research.

An examination of the literature was undertaken to review the empirical studies treating on PM in ex-communist countries from CEE. A total of 96 journal articles, PhD thesis, and conference papers were identified, categorized, and analyzed according to research questions, methodology, and theoretical framework. Contributions are classified by countries, according to progress in transition process (post-transition/transition countries) and membership in the Soviet Union (Soviet/non-Soviet countries). The review examines publications in four languages (English, French, Romanian, and Russian).

The literature review identified various stages of development of PM research and practice in the different groups of CEE countries.

In post-transition CEE countries, PM research follows the trends settled up in the developed countries (quantitative studies examining the extent of usage of different PM tools, influence of contingent factors, relationship PM-strategy, and impact on company’s performance). Also, the findings illustrate the modernization of PM practices: increasing importance of nonfinancial indicators and integrated performance management systems (PMS), although financial indicators are prevailing.

On the contrary, in transition countries PM research and practices are at an early stage, the reviewed literature highlights some specific issues related to transition context: the dynamic aspect of PM, change management, importance of informal systems, cultural aspects, and business traditions.

Because of the large number of CEE countries and the diversity of their national languages, many studies conducted in native languages have not been addressed in this literature review, which is essentially based on publications in English and French. Only for three CEE countries (Russia, Romania, and Moldova) publications in national language were considered.

This literature review may be useful for practitioners, providing insights on the extent of diffusion and usage of different PM tools and identifying difficulties and pitfalls to avoid in their implementation.

The chapter represents one of the first contributions to the knowledge about PM research and practice in former communist CEE countries. The adopted framework for reviewing and classifying the literature allows identifying the differences in PM research and practices between post-transition/transition and Soviet/non-Soviet countries.

This chapter explores institution as a religious phenomenon. Institutional logics are organized around relatively stable congeries of objects, subjects, and practices. Institutional substances, the most general object of an institutional field, are immanent in the practices that organize an institutional field, values never exhausted by those practices, and practices premised on a practical belief in that substance. Like religion, an institution's practices are ontologically rational, that is, tied to a substance indexed by the conjunction of a practice and a name. Institutional substances are not loosely coupled, ceremonial, legitimating exteriors, but unquestioned, constitutive interiors, the sacred core of each field, unobservable, but socially real.