What is quality, and how is it measured?

There is currently no universally accepted definition of "quality of care." This article describes two aspects of measurement that contribute to an assessment of quality--the perception of quality of care held by patients and comparisons of clinical care to established standards. Ongoing monitors that lead to this assessment of quality in a large HMO are described in detail. They include patient satisfaction surveys, quality of care evaluations, comparative medical expense reports, cost-effectiveness studies, and a unique physician incentive bonus plan.     

Nurse safety: How is safety climate related to affect and attitude?

Occupational accidents and injuries continue to be a critical concern for nurses, given the hazardous healthcare environment. This study advances the research on workplace safety by studying the process variables (i.e. job-related negative affect (JRNA) and job satisfaction) in explaining the relationship between safety climate and various safety criteria in nurses. Based on survey data from 326 nurses, our findings suggest that psychological safety climate is negatively related to JRNA, turnover intentions, safety workarounds, and workplace hazards. In addition, structural equation modelling indicated general support for a model in which psychological safety climate influences employee strain through job attitudes, including JRNA and job satisfaction. More specifically, job attitudes were found to mediate the relationship between psychological safety climate and turnover intentions, experience of hazards, and injuries. Safety workarounds did not significantly relate to injuries. The present study contributes to the ongoing improvement of interventions aimed at mitigating nurses’ injuries by integrating job attitudes into the safety climate–safety outcome framework.     

Whose company is it? The concept of the corporation in Japan and the west

This article examines the differences in the concept of the corporation and their possible implications for corporate performance, between Japan on the one hand and the United States and Europe (Germany, UK and France) on the other. The Japanese concept is used as the standard against which the other models are compared. The concept of the corporation is defined here as the answer to the question: ‘In whose interest should the firm be managed?’¹ This is the foundation on which corporate governance and the monitoring system for the CEO is built. The analysis is focused on large publicly-held corporations with widely diffused ownership.     

Banks and Discrimination: How Far Can We Go with Competition? A Reply to Block,Snow, and Stringham

This article discusses competition theory and how advancements from the fields of economics, cognitive science, decision sciences, and management urge us to stop using the same recipe for all different kinds of illnesses. The issue of discrimination in the banking industry offers an interesting platform for this argument, which is developed as an antithesis to what Block, Snow, and Stringham (2008) proposed in their article published in a recent issue of the Business and Society Review. Foundational concepts for a behavioral model of discrimination are presented.     

Management research in the Arab World: What is now and what is next?

Given the significant political and socio-economic transformations occurring in the challenging yet under-researched Arab world nowadays, this study seeks to (1) systematically review the literature in the leading mainstream management journals; and (2) develop a future research agenda that would enhance our understanding of the region. To do this, we conducted a systematic review of 176 published management studies (2000–2016). Our thematic analysis revealed three overarching themes. These were (1) avenues for economic development and improved performance, (2) leveraging and adapting to changing local institutional contexts and (3) overcoming legitimacy concerns/barriers in the Arab world. Our recommendations on the future research agenda of these themes were intended to provide key insights for researchers and managers interested in proactively contributing to the development of a timely research agenda for these promising markets.     

Sad to say: is it time for Sorrow Management Theory?

Terror Management Theory (TMT) research often asks respondents to describe their personal death. This exposure enables the testing of hypotheses regarding defenses ("buffers") against the anxious awareness of death. Curiously, though, the respondents' narratives are not analyzed or reported. The present study offers a qualitative analysis of 209 college student narrative responses provided for this purpose by TMT researchers Jeff Greenberg and Nathan Heflick. The narratives are reviewed with attention to affect (adjectives), semantic structure, and theme. Many responses are marked by anxiety, but sorrow is also pervasive. Individual differences in response substance and structure invite further exploration. It is suggested that our understanding of the response to personal death threat could be enhanced by encompassing sorrow as well as anxiety within the same conceptual framework. Several specific hypotheses and suggestions are offered.     

Residential Mortgages and Public Policy: What to do with Fannie and Freddie?

The current debate on U.S. housing policy focuses on the role of the government in supporting the mortgage market. Existing organizations (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) are in conservatorship status, and Congress is considering alternative structures and guarantees including the Johnson‐Crapo bill, to provide catastrophic insurance in support of the coverage from private companies. The resolution of this issue is complicated by the various activities involved in the issue—investment securities, public policy, macroeconomics, accounting, and insurance. This article reviews the impact of these activities on U.S. housing, with a discussion of the feasibility of creating a catastrophic insurance program similar to that of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The federal government has successfully operated catastrophic insurance programs in support of private sector initiatives, and this experience—while certainly not perfect—may be a reasonable approach to the current Fannie/Freddie dilemma.     

Resilient product and production adaptation in a large-scale disaster: Does it pay off?

Pandemic outbreaks can disrupt firms’ normal operations, so they demand a resilient response. Firms can combine social responsibility initiatives with resilient responses by reconfiguring their production resources for pandemic relief. It remains unclear, however, whether pandemic-relieving product adaptation (in short, PRPA) improves financial performance. We draw on stakeholder theory to analyze the effect of a PRPA strategy on the stock returns of US-listed manufacturing firms during the COVID-19 pandemic—the most enduring and large-scale pandemic in recent history. The results reveal that the stock market reacts more positively to PRPA under severe pandemic circumstances and for firms with low political connectedness, low media coverage, and/or more unique production technology. The findings offer important implications for operations theory and practice.     

Carry on Shrinking?: The Bankruptcy of Urban Policy in Detroit

Much attention has recently been focused on the bankruptcy of the City of Detroit in 2013 and the reasons for the largest municipal fiscal melt down in US history. Contrary to a view gaining currency, which dismisses Detroit as the product of exceptional forces and largely calls it the architect of its own collapse, this article argues the case that Detroit conveys more general lessons for European cities struggling with decline, not least of which is the need for interventionist regional planning to avoid predictable but avoidable urban distress. The article briefly reviews the well-documented decline of the city of Detroit measured against population, economic, fiscal and image impacts. It considers five current misreadings of the reasons for Detroit's predicament and implicit signposts for European practice before concluding with an assessment of what has been hailed as the shoots of yet another possible renaissance in the originally proclaimed Renaissance City over 40 years ago.     

Merit Payment in France: Towards New Forms of Wage Determination?

ABSTRACT Wage policies in France were substantially renewed in the 1980s; this renewal was reflected in two phenomena: profit-sharing and merit payment. Merit payment is analysed here in relation to the emergence of new forms of organization of production. The need for higher-skilled labour, the relative decline of execution work and Taylorism have led to the setting up of systems of individual assessment and a more coherent organization of internal labour markets. Thus, merit payment should be seen as a very different practice from piece work: rather, it is the first attempt to establish a system of payment which could serve as a basis for renewing the entire wage bargaining set-up.     

How Responsive Is Investment in Schooling to Changes in Redistributive Policies and in Returns?

This paper uses an unusual pay reform to test the responsiveness of investment in schooling to changes in redistribution schemes that increase the rate of return to education. We exploit an episode where different Israeli kibbutzim shifted from equal sharing to productivity‐based wages in different years and find that students in kibbutzim that reformed earlier invested more in high school education and, in the long run, also in post‐secondary schooling. We further show that the effect is mainly driven by students in kibbutzim that reformed to a larger degree. Our findings support the prediction that education is highly responsive to changes in the redistribution policy.     

Tax and Education Policy in a Heterogeneous‐Agent Economy: What Levels of Redistribution Maximize Growth and Efficiency?

This paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous‐agent economy. Such redistributive policies entail distortions to labor supply and savings, but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets. The resulting tradeoffs for growth and efficiency are explored, both theoretically and quantitatively, in a model that yields complete analytical solutions. Progressive education finance always leads to higher income growth than taxes and transfers, but at the cost of lower insurance. Overall efficiency is assessed using a new measure that properly reflects aggregate resources and idiosyncratic risks but, unlike a standard social welfare function, does not reward equality per se. Simulations using empirical parameter estimates show that the efficiency costs and benefits of redistribution are generally of the same order of magnitude, resulting in plausible values for the optimal rates. Aggregate income and aggregate welfare provide only crude lower and upper bounds around the true efficiency tradeoff.     

Reducing Customer Dissatisfaction: How Important is Learning to Reduce Service Failure?

As service failures are inevitable, firms must be prepared to recover and learn from service failures. Yet, the majority of customers are still dissatisfied with the way firms resolve their complaints. Can learning to reduce service failures reduce customer dissatisfaction, and to what extent are such reductions sustainable? Previous research showed that organizational learning curves for customer dissatisfaction (i) follow a U‐shaped function of operating experience and (ii) are heterogeneous across firms. In this paper, I tease out where the U‐shaped learning‐curve effect and learning‐curve heterogeneity originate: service failure or customers' propensity to complain with a third party given the occurrence of a service failure. Using quarterly data for nine major US airlines over 11 years, I find that the U‐shaped learning‐curve effect and the learning‐curve heterogeneity originate in the propensity to complain. In the long term, reductions in service failure did not translate in sustainable reductions in customer dissatisfaction. Customers' propensity to complain eventually went up. Managing the propensity to complain provides more opportunity for a firm to distinguish itself from competitors.     

Environmental leadership in business education: Where's the innovation and how should we support it?

General managers have the power to shape environmental performance through the strategic decisions they make about products, markets and investments. Yet, often times managers fail to fully recognize the link between improved environmental performance and business performance. Over the past ten years, many business schools have added environmental content to their classes and research to help future business leaders recognize and act on these links. Ironically, although business leaders articulate ambitious environmental goals, corporate recruiting demands have not kept pace with the growing supply of these graduates. The following recap of the World Resources Institute's recent study, Grey Pinstripes with Green Ties: MBA Programs Where the Environment Matters, helps identify information barriers firms encounter in seeking new managers with a combination of business training and technical competence.     

What is a Healthy Sustainable Built Environment? Developing Evidence-Based Healthy Built Environment Indicators for Policy-Makers and Practitioners

Abstract

Healthy built environments place people and communities at the heart of urban planning, encouraging decision-making based on human health, well-being and environmental sustainability. This paper describes the development of a set of indicators to assist in this endeavour—by translating and linking the research evidence base with policy-makers and other practitioners. The paper describes how the indicators were chosen, contextualized and subsequently structured to maximize useability for urban planners and health professionals working together to improve community health and neighbourhood sustainability.     

Regional Development Agencies in Turkey: Are They Examples of Obligated Policy Transfer?

EU requires the candidate states to introduce the necessary legal arrangements and administrative reforms to harmonize with the EU’s regional policy, and the establishment of RDAs is an important element of those administrative reforms. This is an example of “obligated policy transfer,” which is a subtype of policy transfer. In this context, this article aims to analyze the establishment of RDAs in Turkey as an example of obligated policy transfer. Within this perspective, this article primarily explicates the conceptual framework of policy transfer and obligated transfer as a subtype of policy transfer. Second, the place of RDAs within the EU regional policy and Turkey’s view of regional governments and development conception will be briefly dealt with. Finally, establishment of RDAs in Turkey will be analyzed, using official documents, as an example of obligated policy transfer and the role of EU will be demonstrated.

Affirmative Action in Higher Education: How Do Admission and Financial Aid Rules Affect Future Earnings?

This paper addresses how changing the admission and financial aid rules at colleges affects future earnings. I estimate a structural model of the following decisions by individuals: where to submit applications, which school to attend, and what field to study. The model also includes decisions by schools as to which students to accept and how much financial aid to offer. Simulating how black educational choices would change were they to face the white admission and aid rules shows that race‐based advantages had little effect on earnings. However, removing race‐based advantages does affect black educational outcomes. In particular, removing advantages in admissions substantially decreases the number of black students at top‐tier schools, while removing advantages in financial aid causes a decrease in the number of blacks who attend college.     

Union Density and Relative Wages: What is the Relationship?

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the impact of union density on relative wages under decentralised bargaining settings. Whilst, traditionally, empirical studies have focused on the impact of union status on wages (either at the individual or at the plant level), here it is argued that local trade union density can have an independent (positive) effect on wages. This occurs through the threat of collective action and the ability of the union to impose costs onto employers. First, a Nash bargaining model is presented under efficient-bargaining settings, and a wage-membership equation is derived. Wages are shown to be an increasing and convex function of union membership. Second, an empirical specification of the wage-membership equation, suitable for estimation, is obtained and fitted to establishment-level data for the Italian metal-mechanical engineering industry. A positive monotonic relationship between wages and union density is detected. Furthermore, wages are shown to be increasing with union density even where no formal local bargaining agreement is in force, thus suggesting that “union-threat” effects might be relevant.