Bereavement and depression: possible changes to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: a report from the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Association for Death Education and Counseling

The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) is being revised. A proposed revision hotly debated is to remove what is known as the exclusionary criterion and allow clinicians to diagnose a person with a major depressive episode within the early days and weeks following a death. The Executive Committee of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) commissioned its Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) to examine the debate over removing the exclusionary criterion and provide a written report. The DSM-IV-TR classifies bereavement as a clinical condition that is not a mental disorder. The exclusionary criterion states that within the first 2 months of the onset of bereavement a person should not be diagnosed as having major depression unless certain symptoms not characteristic of a normal grief reaction are present. We note these symptoms when discussing the exclusionary criterion. In the report we identify the features that comprise the exclusionary criterion, examine reasons (including research conclusions and clinical concerns) given for retaining and for eliminating the exclusionary criterion, offer extensive comments from experienced licensed clinicians about the issues involved, discuss diagnostic and treatment implications, and offer specific recommendations for ADEC to implement.     

The emergence of thanatology and current practice in death education

Thanatology is a recent field that contemplates death studies and employs an interdisciplinary approach to practice. This science emerged in a historical context marked by intense social, economic, and political changes that contributed to the concept of death being excluded from social life. This literature review aims to outline the history and evolution ofthanatology in Western society, delineating the contextual circumstances that led to its origin and drawing special attention to current works on death education. In our post-modern society, the call for studies in the field of thanatology appears to be increasing. However, although there have been significant contributions and promising research is underway, there are still many questions to be answered.     

Aspects of quality . . . and world domination!

Training, learning and development tend to be regarded as central to the success of every organization and the nation. However, not all organizations are able or willing to invest resources in such processes. The paper presents a view that training, learning and development occur as a consequence of successful persuasive actions in a chain of talk, which draw on the discursive and rhetorical resources of an emerging learning movement. Utilizing the findings from an examination of data from the UK Department of Education and Skills-sponsored National Training Award winners, the paper provides an employment of actor-network theory and the sociology of translation to show how some organizations make the case for training, learning and development as a virtuous endeavour. It concludes by suggesting that what is needed is a more detailed understanding of how the case for the adoption of training, learning and development, or not, within organizations is made meaningful.     

Lessons Learned from Community Organizations: Inclusion of People with Disabilities and Others

Workforce diversity requires broader vision and scope in managing diversity so that there is greater inclusion inside and outside organizations. This paper provides this vision by extending the stream of workforce diversity research to community‐oriented inclusion and its processes. The authors interviewed 34 people with disabilities and 40 people without disabilities who were stakeholders of community arts and sports organizations. The participants with disabilities were mainly arts audiences, artists and sports athletes, and the participants without disabilities were mainly managers and government officials. The key findings report the importance of inclusion through common interest groups being facilitated by (1) non‐minority specific communal activities, (2) listening to minority voices, (3) multidimensional accessibility, (4) availability of organizational and natural champions and (5) cross‐boundary networks and collaborations. In order to create more inclusive organizations, the authors suggest that private organizations need more community‐oriented values, goals and strategies that foster boundaryless inclusion of people with disabilities and other minority groups in organizations and society.     

Social Enterprises as Hybrid Organizations: A Review and Research Agenda

The impacts of the global economic crisis of 2008, the intractable problems of persistent poverty and environmental change have focused attention on organizations that combine enterprise with an embedded social purpose. Scholarly interest in social enterprise (SE) has progressed beyond the early focus on definitions and context to investigate their management and performance. From a review of the SE literature, the authors identify hybridity, the pursuit of the dual mission of financial sustainability and social purpose, as the defining characteristic of SEs. They assess the impact of hybridity on the management of the SE mission, financial resource acquisition and human resource mobilization, and present a framework for understanding the tensions and trade‐offs resulting from hybridity. By examining the influence of dual mission and conflicting institutional logics on SE management the authors suggest future research directions for theory development for SE and hybrid organizations more generally.     

The Politics of the Exhibition: Viewing Corporate Museums Through the Paradigmatic Lens of Organizational Memory

This paper explores corporate museums as little–understood sites of organizational memory and proposes that corporate museums, as a form of organizational memory, are used strategically by organizations in the development of the firm's identity and image. More critically, the authors examine the politics of the exhibition of organizational memory, or what Sturken refers to as 'organized forgetting' or 'strategic forgetting'. The authors propose that organizations, through these museums, choose what is recalled (the politics of remembering) as well as what is not remembered (the politics of forgetting). Four propositions are suggested to guide future research on corporate museums with the purpose of furthering our understanding of these museums and their relationship to the development of organizational identity and image as well as organizational actions – past, present, and future. The paper concludes with implications for the organizational–studies scholar.     

Does Management Development Add Value?

While the act of faith approach to management development assumes that training and development will improve performance, and that attention to the people factor will give organizations a competitive advantage, there has been little systematic study of the business benefits of management development. The extent to which competence-based management development made identifiable improvements to individual, organizational and business performance was examined in sixteen organizations using an in-depth embedded case-study protocol developed following the preparatory work of an expert group convened by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE). Interviews were conducted with senior strategic managers, line managers and members of management work teams, and triangulation was sought with documentary evidence. Case reports were validated with the organizations, then evaluated and ranked by an independent consultancy not involved in the fieldwork. The results provide support for attributing business benefits to management development, particularly in relation to individual and business performance. The performance improvements were found to be most significant where management development is linked with organizational strategy and where Human Resource Development (HRD) systems and processes adopt the management standards developed by Management Charter Initiative (MCI).     

Leveraging Big Data Analytics to Improve Quality of Care in Healthcare Organizations: A Configurational Perspective

Big data analytics (BDA) is beneficial for organizations, yet implementing BDA to leverage profitability is fundamental challenge confronting practitioners. Although prior research has explored the impact that BDA has on business growth, there is a lack of research that explains the full complexity of BDA implementations. Examination of how and under what conditions BDA achieves organizational performance from a holistic perspective is absent from the existing literature. Extending the theoretical perspective from the traditional views (e.g. resource‐based theory) to configuration theory, the authors have developed a conceptual model of BDA success that aims to investigate how BDA capabilities interact with complementary organizational resources and organizational capabilities in multiple configuration solutions leading to higher quality of care in healthcare organizations. To test this model, the authors use fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis to analyse multi‐source data acquired from a survey and databases maintained by the Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The findings suggest that BDA, when given alone, is not sufficient in achieving the outcome, but is a synergy effect in which BDA capabilities and analytical personnel's skills together with organizational resources and capabilities as supportive role can improve average excess readmission rates and patient satisfaction in healthcare organizations.     

IT strategy: Formal rational orthodoxy or contingent adhocracy?

This paper examines empirical evidence of support by managers for formal rational as opposed to ad hoc approaches to IT strategy. The evidence was gathered by a large scale survey of IT managers in the UK private and public sectors. A heuristic conceptual model was used to place organizations on a continuum for several aspects of IT strategy. The authors found that most organizations appeared to subscribe to formal rationalism, but only in some aspects of strategy     

The importance of operations management problems in service organizations

This article reports on the research to empirically determine which operations management problems are the most important to small service organizations. The authors asked managers of service organizations to rank a set of operations problems according to their relative importance using Q methodology. In this article, Q method is explained, significant factors are analyzed, and explanations are offered for the ranking of the operations problems. The results indicate that forecasting, quality management, and resource utilization are important operational issues for service organizations. However, the results also indicate that facility location and layout, waiting line systems, and distribution requirements planning were for the most part unimportant to the respondent service organizations. In addition, Schmenner's service typology does not provide an explanatory basis for the variations in the factor results. Lastly, the results are used to suggest operations management techniques that should be taught to students who are expected to work in service organizations upon graduation.     

Integrated planning for health care organizations, especially hospitals

Planning in health care organizations is of considerable current interest in this country. Furthermore, effective planning processes require, as a necessary condition for that effectiveness, development within a framework which considers the organizational, managerial and service delivery environment.This paper examines the concept of planning in relation to health care organizations. Through an examination of the effects which proper planning can have upon industrial organizations the authors analyze the possible impacts of planning procedures upon health care institutions. Their analysis leads to certain tentative conclusions as to appropriate organizational structure which could support effective planning. Whilst the authors have yet to test their hypothesis the conclusion they draw from their initial analysis are worthy of further investigation.     

Effects of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion in high moral intensity situations

Emotional exhaustion is a threat to standard operations, particularly in organizations in which physical safety is at risk. High moral intensity is inherent in such organizations due to the magnitude of consequences associated with ethical/unethical conduct. The authors proposed a psychological process in which ethical leadership affects emotional exhaustion directly and indirectly through team cohesion. As military operational contexts typically are (or frequently have the potential to become) high moral intensity situations, the authors tested their model among 338 military personnel deployed in combat zones. They found that: (1) team cohesion partially mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and emotional exhaustion, and (2) this psychological process of direct and indirect effects of ethical leadership did not hold among individuals approaching the low end of conscientiousness.     

The COVID‐19 Pandemic: What can we learn from past research in organizations and management?

The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic is having a profound impact on organizations across the world, as businesses and societies face their greatest challenges for many decades. Over the past 20 years, the International Journal of Management Reviews (IJMR) has published many reviews of research that bring together the key findings across important bodies of research relevant to understanding how organizations might confront grand challenges such as these. Reflecting on this work, we have chosen a number of recent reviews published in the journal which have relevance both for practitioners and scholars in the current crisis. We invited the authors of these papers to offer some comments, which we have drawn from in the discussion below.     

Green and lean: a Gemba–Kaizen model for sustainability enhancement

Abstract

Despite the encouraging results obtained from the application of Green Lean, organizations have found the integration of Green and Lean, and their implementation as an integrated approach, challenging. This paper therefore presents a model for integrating Lean and Green based on the Gemba-Kaizen approach. The proposed model was developed on the basis of a through literature review on Gemba and Kaizen, conducted on peer reviewed journal articles and pragmatic books, and the more than 40 years of accumulated experience of the authors as academics, researchers, industrialists and consultants. The model was validated through two cases study in the aerospace and automotive industries. The results showed that the proposed model helped the case organizations to reduce the consumption of resources and improve their environmental performance. The proposed model can be the basis for further research on Lean and Green, contributing to help organizations to improve their sustainability performance.     

The Negative Effects of Social Capital in Organizations: A Review and Extension

Numerous studies have examined the positive effects of social capital in organizations, whereas the possible negative effects have attracted considerably less scholarly attention. To rectify this imbalance, this paper first undertakes a rigorous review of the published scholarly empirical evidence pertaining to the negative effects of social capital in organizations through a search of Web of Knowledge and Scopus, and then enumerates six potentially negative effects arising from increased levels of social capital. The review focuses on negative effects arising from bonding social capital and those arising from dense networks and closure, advancing new theory to elucidate the generative mechanisms that give rise to the proposed negative effects. Finally, the authors identify potential moderators of the negative effects thus theorized. Using the lens of social identification theory, the authors argue that dysfunctional identification processes restrict the processing of information and stimulate over‐commitment to established relationships, diluting in turn the dialectical process, and inhibiting individual learning within organizations, culminating in groupthink, the postponement of structural adjustments, the non‐rational escalation of commitment, and the blurring of firms’ boundaries. This review thus furthers the agenda of a more balanced inquiry into the effects of social capital in organizations.     

中国NGO的发展分析

本文分三个方面 ,系统阐述了作者对中国ＮＧＯ发展的基本观点。作者认为：ＮＧＯ指的是不以营利为目的且具有正式的组织形式、属于非政府体系的社会组织 ,它们具有一定的自治性、志愿性、公益性或互益性。中国ＮＧＯ作为转型时期过渡性的社会组织 ,在广义上包括如下形式：会员制公益性组织 ,运作型组织 (基金会 ) ,实体型社会服务机构 (民办非企业单位 ) ,互益型的经济性团体和社会性团体 ,大量未登记或转登记团体 ,以及转型中的事业单位和人民团体。这些被称为ＮＧＯ的社会组织活跃在转型期中国的社会、经济、文化和政治生活的各个方面 ,特…     

Love of life and death distress: two separate factors

The objectives of the current investigation were threefold: a) to explore the gender differences on love of life (a new construct in the well-being domain) and death distress (death anxiety, death depression, and death obsession); b) to explore the relationship between the scales of these constructs; and c) to examine the factorial structure of these scales. The sample was 245 volunteer Kuwaiti college students (53.5% women). Their mean age was 21.9 (SD = 2.3). They responded to the Love of Life Scale, the Death Anxiety Scale, the Arabic Scale of Death Anxiety, the Death Depression Scale-Revised, and the Death Obsession Scale. Gender differences on love of life were not significant. However, women had significantly higher mean scores for the four death distress scales than did their male counterparts. All the correlations between love of life and the death distress scales were not significant except one pertaining to love of life and death depression (negative) in women. Two oblique factors were extracted: death distress and love of life. It was concluded that these constructs represent two distinct and independent factors. Counselors and clinicians dealing with death distress would find that it is not associated with love of life.     

SME manager development in virtual learning communities and the role of trust: A conceptual study

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are seen as vital to economic development. However, managers in these organizations generally have fewer opportunities for training and development than their counterparts in larger organizations. In this paper, the authors argue the need for development opportunities based around ‘virtual’ learning and develop a conceptual framework. The increasing penetration of broadband technologies offers the opportunity to create learning communities to engage SME managers with peers facing similar challenges. For a meaningful experience to be achieved in a virtual community, the role of the facilitator is established as important; however, an area largely overlooked in prior research into networked learning is that of the role of trust and how facilitators can generate it. In order to develop the framework for this paper, the authors review prior research into trust, learning, facilitation and virtual learning communities – the main aim being the identification of those aspects of the facilitator intervention that are most likely to engender trust and participation. Finally, areas for further research are identified.     

Making planning more effective

The authors have been carrying out a comparative study of strategic planning in a set of ten, diverse organizations from both public and private sectors. The research focused on two issues: (1) what constitutes effective planning? and (2) what is the impact of participation on that effectiveness. This paper describes those elements of the results of the research which have greatest relevance to practising planners and managers.