Engaging Professionals in Sustainable Workplace Innovation: Medical Doctors and Institutional Work

This paper investigates the role of medical professionals in the success and longevity of the implementation of workplace innovation and organizational change in the Accident and Emergency (A&E) Departments of two large public hospitals, in Australia and Canada, during the introduction of process improvement using Lean Management (LM) methodologies. We ask why and how doctors resist, influence or enable LM initiatives in healthcare. Using a qualitative methodology, we contribute to institutional work theory by unpacking the complex forms of boundary and practice work undertaken by key actors who effectively use their professional status and power to enable practice changes to be embedded. Our findings lend support to the importance of the involvement and ownership of senior doctors in the design, introduction and implementation of successful workplace innovation and organizational change. Senior doctors use their professional expertise, positional and political power at the industry, organization and workplace levels to influence strategically the use of resources designated for workplace innovation to improve efficiencies, quality of patient care and maintain their dominance. The significant organizational change achieved reflected the ownership and leadership of the workplace innovation by senior doctors in ‘hybrid roles’ who captured the rhetoric and minimized adversarialism among key stakeholders.     

Spatial planning in small islands: the need to discuss the concept of ecological structure

The concepts of green infrastructure and ecological structure (ES) are current topics of discussion among the scientific community and spatial planners. ES is mandatory in Portugal in land-planning, such as municipal master plans, but no consensus has been reached on how to implement it. The concept has not yet been implemented in the Azores, a Portuguese autonomous region, even though the Region has the responsibility of adapting legislation or accomplishing the Portuguese legislature. This study presents a critical analysis of the available literature about ES and proposes a conceptual framework to define ES for small islands, which have unique characteristics, focusing on the Azorean archipelago. The conceptual framework meets the requirements of local legislation and uses an ecological function approach that is increasingly advocated in recent European recommendations. This framework is presented as a strategic and flexible way to identify both the important elements (recognized in current legislation) in a territory and the remaining potential of the territory. The framework also supports decision-making by allowing the identification of integrated solutions, decreasing trade-offs as much as possible and reconciling the needs of nature conservation and socioeconomic development. This framework could be applied to other small islands and other territories, with local adaptations.     

Challenging the inevitability of rural decline: Advancing the policy of place in northern British Columbia

In current policy discourse, rural decline is often described as an inevitable process associated with such broader structural trends as globalization and urbanization. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the supposed inevitability of rural decline in northern British Columbia (BC), Canada. We argue that rural decline in northern BC has been facilitated through an intentional policy program that views hinterland areas as a ‘resource bank’ from which to fund provincial infrastructure and services, without adequate attention to rural reinvestment. We highlight the potential discrepancies of this approach through a comparative study of two development eras in the province. In the first era, we examine the policies and development approach adopted by the W.A.C. Bennett provincial government, which governed from 1952 to 1972. We argue that the Bennett regime confronted the complexity of the post-war era with a comprehensive vision and coordinated policy program for ‘province building’ through intensive investments in industrial expansion and community infrastructure throughout the BC hinterland. By comparison, the post-1980s era in BC has witnessed a continuation of the resource bank approach, minus a concomitant commitment to hinterland investment. Reversing the inevitability of rural decline requires a renovation of the investment orientation witnessed during the Bennett era through an appreciation of the role of place in economic development. Our recommendations for renewed rural development in northern BC are drawn from a synthesis of the Bennett lessons with those emerging within place-based development literature.     

Housing Costs in an Oil and Gas Boom Town: Issues for Low-Income Senior Women Living Alone

In resource-based towns that have historically been dominated by young workers and their families, seniors’ housing issues have received little attention by community leaders and senior policymakers. However, since the 1980s there has been a growing trend of older women living alone in Canadian rural and small town places. Although research on rural poverty focuses on small towns in decline, booming resource economies can also produce challenges for low-income senior women living alone due to higher housing costs and the retrenchment of health care and service supports. Because housing costs can consume a significant proportion of household income, low-income senior women living alone may not have the financial resources to cover expenses in a competitive housing market. Using a household survey, we explored this different dimension of the Canadian rural landscape by looking at housing costs for low-income senior women living alone in the booming oil and gas town of Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada. The authors findings indicate that low-income senior women living alone are incurring higher housing costs compared with other senior groups.     

Reason-based judgments: Using reasons to decouple perceived price–quality correlation

Many models of consumer behaviour assume that people evaluate price and quality independently. However, evidence shows that consumers perceive price and quality as positively related even when they are weakly correlated in the real markets. This paper explores whether this perceived relationship can be cognitively de-coupled by providing explicit reasons why low price and high quality may be compatible. The participants were asked to rate existing stores and fictitious stores in a two-dimensional price–quality space. When the participants were given plausible reasons why the seemingly high quality fictitious stores could have lower than average prices, their judgement of the price–quality relationship was significantly less correlated than when these stores were judged without such reasons. Therefore, the demonstrated phenomenon of reason-based judgments can be used to attenuate the typical price–quality overestimation, or heuristic, which has important implications for decision making research and marketing practice.     

A nonparametric confidence interval for slope based on spearman's rho

An algorithm is presented for computing an exact nonparametric interval estimate of the slope parameter in a simple linear regression model. The confidence interval is obtained by inverting the hypothesis test for slope that uses Spearman's rho. This method is compared to an exact procedure based on Kendall's tau. The Spearman rho procedure will generally give exact levels of confidence closer to desired levels, especially in small samples. Monte carlo results comparing these two methods with the parametric procedure are given     

Synergists and Qualities Salient to Low-Income Parents' Positive Assessment of Marital Health

Researchers sought low-income couples who considered their marriages to be “good or very good” to inform the process of how individuals and their partners establish and maintain a healthy marriage under significant financial limitations. Twenty married parents participated in semistructured interviews that sought their insights into backgrounds and antecedents that impacted their own and their partners' development and current positive marital assessment. Analysis using grounded theory methods generated a model that posits synergists enhancing the development of qualities that contributed to spouses' positive assessments. The four synergists were sensitizing experiences, a partner-as-rescuer mind-set, acute parental influences, and religious influences. The four requisite high-priority qualities associated with these synergists were love, commitment, appreciation, and child-centeredness.