7,585 research outputs found

    Boundary Spanner Corruption in Business Relationships

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    Boundary spanner corruption—voluntary collaborative behaviour between individuals representing different organisations that violates their organisations’ norms—is a serious problem in business relationships. Drawing on insights from the literatures on general corruption perspectives, the dark side of business relationships and deviance in sales and service organisations, this dissertation identifies boundary spanner corruption as a potential dark side complication inherent in close business relationships It builds research questions from these literature streams and proposes a research structure based upon commonly used methods in corruption research to address this new concept. In the first study, using an exploratory survey of boundary spanner practitioners, the dissertation finds that the nature of boundary spanner corruption is broad and encompasses severe and non-severe types. The survey also finds that these deviance types are prevalent in a widespread of geographies and industries. This prevalence is particularly noticeable for less-severe corruption types, which may be an under-researched phenomenon in general corruption research. The consequences of boundary spanner corruption can be serious for both individuals and organisations. Indeed, even less-severe types can generate long-term negative consequences. A second interview-based study found that multi-level trust factors could also motivate the emergence of boundary spanner corruption. This was integrated into a theoretical model that illustrates how trust at the interpersonal, intraorganisational, and interorganisational levels enables corrupt behaviours by allowing deviance-inducing factors stemming from the task environment or from the individual boundary spanner to manifest in boundary spanner corruption. Interpersonal trust between representatives of different organisations, interorganisational trust between these organisations, and intraorganisational agency trust of management in their representatives foster the development of a boundary-spanning social cocoon—a mechanism that can inculcate deviant norms leading to corrupt behaviour. This conceptualisation and model of boundary spanner corruption highlights intriguing directions for future research to support practitioners engaged in a difficult problem in business relationships

    An Exploration of the Suitability of Pharmacy Education in Saudi Arabia to Prepare Graduates to Meet Healthcare Needs: a Mixed-Methods Study

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    The key role of pharmacists within the health system, particularly in optimising safe, responsible and effective use of medicines, underpins the demand for a highly skilled and competent workforce. Therefore, developing the capacity of pharmacists to attain and maintain essential competencies relevant to the population’s health needs is required to ensure a high standard of patient care, thereby helping to improve patient and population health. In Saudi Arabia, little evidence exists regarding the assessment of national educational programmes’ structure and outcomes. Moreover, no national competency framework exists for pharmacists in any sector or stage of practice. In the absence of such core quality elements to inform pharmacy education assessment and development, the extent to which pharmacy schools in Saudi Arabia prepare competent pharmacists to address societal needs from pharmacy services is unclear. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the extent to which pharmacy education can prepare competent pharmacists to address the healthcare needs for pharmacy practice in Saudi Arabia. An exploratory sequential mixed methods research design was used to address the aim of this study in three phases: individual interviews and focus groups were employed with a purposively selected sample of pharmacy policy makers, pharmacists and the public to explore societal healthcare needs and the roles required of pharmacists to meet those needs; a national online survey of pharmacists and an online nominal group consensus method of pharmacy experts were used to identify competencies considered essential to develop a profession-wide national foundation level competency framework; and a case study in which curriculum mapping of two purposively selected Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) curricula was used to assess the extent to which the current pharmacy programme in Saudi Arabia meets the identified competencies of the developed national competency framework. Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of societal healthcare needs, pharmacists’ roles, core competencies and curricular contents within the local context of Saudi Arabia, findings showed that there is a mismatch between initial education and real practice needs and expectations. While the country’s current needs from pharmacists are to optimise health system capacity and increase access to primary care services and medicines expertise in community pharmacies, the study indicated local education is product-oriented with a focus of curricular content and experiential training opportunities in most schools on preparing future pharmacists for hospital pharmacy practice. The study also identified several gaps between current initial education programmes and the competencies required to practise the expected roles, suggesting that current initial education might not prepare the students sufficiently to provide the full range of quality pharmaceutical services as per the country’s pharmacy practice needs. The study provided a new understanding of graduates’ readiness to practise as per the country’s pharmacy practice needs, the quality of educational programmes and pharmacists' professional development opportunities in Saudi Arabia. Findings maybe used to inform the development of competency-based education and maximise graduates’ capacity to deliver and develop pharmaceutical services effectively to best meet societal healthcare needs in Saudi Arabia

    A Secure and Distributed Architecture for Vehicular Cloud and Protocols for Privacy-preserving Message Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

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    Given the enormous interest in self-driving cars, Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) are likely to be widely deployed in the near future. Cloud computing is also gaining widespread deployment. Marriage between cloud computing and VANETs would help solve many of the needs of drivers, law enforcement agencies, traffic management, etc. The contributions of this dissertation are summarized as follows: A Secure and Distributed Architecture for Vehicular Cloud: Ensuring security and privacy is an important issue in the vehicular cloud; if information exchanged between entities is modified by a malicious vehicle, serious consequences such as traffic congestion and accidents can occur. In addition, sensitive data could be lost, and human lives also could be in danger. Hence, messages sent by vehicles must be authenticated and securely delivered to vehicles in the appropriate regions. In this dissertation, we present a secure and distributed architecture for the vehicular cloud which uses the capabilities of vehicles to provide various services such as parking management, accident alert, traffic updates, cooperative driving, etc. Our architecture ensures the privacy of vehicles and supports secure message dissemination using the vehicular infrastructure. A Low-Overhead Message Authentication and Secure Message Dissemination Scheme for VANETs: Efficient, authenticated message dissemination in VANETs are important for the timely delivery of authentic messages to vehicles in appropriate regions in the VANET. Many of the approaches proposed in the literature use Road Side Units (RSUs) to collect events (such as accidents, weather conditions, etc.) observed by vehicles in its region, authenticate them, and disseminate them to vehicles in appropriate regions. However, as the number of messages received by RSUs increases in the network, the computation and communication overhead for RSUs related to message authentication and dissemination also increases. We address this issue and present a low-overhead message authentication and dissemination scheme in this dissertation. On-Board Hardware Implementation in VANET: Design and Experimental Evaluation: Information collected by On Board Units (OBUs) located in vehicles can help in avoiding congestion, provide useful information to drivers, etc. However, not all drivers on the roads can benefit from OBU implementation because OBU is currently not available in all car models. Therefore, in this dissertation, we designed and built a hardware implementation for OBU that allows the dissemination of messages in VANET. This OBU implementation is simple, efficient, and low-cost. In addition, we present an On-Board hardware implementation of Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol for VANETs. Privacy-preserving approach for collection and dissemination of messages in VANETs: Several existing schemes need to consider safety message collection in areas where the density of vehicles is low and roadside infrastructure is sparse. These areas could also have hazardous road conditions and may have poor connectivity. In this dissertation, we present an improved method for securely collecting and disseminating safety messages in such areas which preserves the privacy of vehicles. We propose installing fixed OBUs along the roadside of dangerous roads (i.e., roads that are likely to have more ice, accidents, etc., but have a low density of vehicles and roadside infrastructure) to help collect data about the surrounding environment. This would help vehicles to be notified about the events on such roads (such as ice, accidents, etc.).Furthermore, to enhance the privacy of vehicles, our scheme allows vehicles to change their pseudo IDs in all traffic conditions. Therefore, regardless of whether the number of vehicles is low in the RSU or Group Leader GL region, it would be hard for an attacker to know the actual number of vehicles in the RSU/GL region

    The nexus between e-marketing, e-service quality, e-satisfaction and e-loyalty: a cross-sectional study within the context of online SMEs in Ghana

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    The spread of the Internet, the proliferation of mobile devices, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic have given impetus to online shopping in Ghana and the subregion. This situation has also created opportunities for SMEs to take advantage of online marketing technologies. However, there is a dearth of studies on the link between e-marketing and e-loyalty in terms of online shopping, thereby creating a policy gap on the prospects for business success for online SMEs in Ghana. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between the main independent variable, e-marketing and the main dependent variable, e-loyalty, as well as the mediating roles of e-service quality and e-satisfaction in the link between e-marketing and e-loyalty. The study adopted a positivist stance with a quantitative method. The study was cross-sectional in nature with the adoption of a descriptive correlational design. A Structural Equation Modelling approach was employed to examine the nature of the associations between the independent, mediating and dependent variables. A sensitivity analysis was also conducted to control for the potential confounding effects of the demographic factors. A sample size of 1,293 residents in Accra, Ghana, who had previously shopped online, responded to structured questionnaire in an online survey via Google Docs. The IBM SPSS Amos 24 software was used to analyse the data collected. Positive associations were found between the key constructs in the study: e-marketing, e-service quality, e-satisfaction and e-Loyalty. The findings from the study gave further backing to the diffusion innovation theory, resource-based view theory, and technology acceptance model. In addition, e-service quality and e-satisfaction individually and jointly mediated the relationship between e-marketing and e-loyalty. However, these mediations were partial, instead of an originally anticipated full mediation. In terms of value and contribution, this is the first study in a developing economy context to undertake a holistic examination of the key marketing performance variables within an online shopping context. The study uniquely tested the mediation roles of both e-service quality and e-satisfaction in the link between e-marketing and e-loyalty. The findings of the study are novel in the e-marketing literature as they unearthed the key antecedents of e-loyalty for online SMEs in a developing economy context. The study suggested areas for further related studies and also highlighted the limitations

    Tourism and heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone

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    Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) uses an ethnographic lens to explore the dissonances associated with the commodification of Chornobyl's heritage. The book considers the role of the guides as experience brokers, focusing on the synergy between tourists and guides in the performance of heritage interpretation. Banaszkiewicz proposes to perceive tour guides as important actors in the bottom-up construction of heritage discourse contributing to more inclusive and participatory approach to heritage management. Demonstrating that the CEZ has been going through a dynamic transformation into a mass tourism attraction, the book offers a critical reflection on heritagisation as a meaning-making process in which the resources of the past are interpreted, negotiated, and recognised as a valuable legacy. Applying the concepts of dissonant heritage to describe the heterogeneous character of the CEZ, the book broadens the interpretative scope of dark tourism which takes on a new dimension in the context of the war in Ukraine. Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone argues that post-disaster sites such as Chornobyl can teach us a great deal about the importance of preserving cultural and natural heritage for future generations. The book will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of heritage, tourism, memory, disasters and Eastern Europe

    Effective and proportionate implementation of the DMA

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    An exploration of adherence and persistence in overactive bladder and other long-term conditions

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    Background and aims Overactive bladder is a common, bothersome, and chronic condition associated with symptoms of urinary urgency, incontinence, increased daytime micturition frequency and nocturia. Despite exerting a significant burden on quality of life, adherence, and persistence behaviours with OAB are particularly poor in comparison with other long-term conditions. The aims of the present work were to explore themes relating to medicine-taking behaviours in OAB and other long-term conditions and to suggest ways to improve them. Methods A systematic literature review was undertaken to understand the current landscape of qualitative work exploring adherence and persistence with OAB patients. A qualitative study involving 1:1 semi-structured interviews was conducted with OAB patients to explore the context and drivers for adherence and persistence behaviours using thematic analysis. A comparative analysis was then undertaken with qualitative papers exploring medicinetaking behaviours in a chronic bowel condition, type II diabetes, and multimorbidity to explore the themes identified in the OAB study for convergence and divergence in other conditions and to contextualise the learnings from the former study. Results The systematic literature review revealed a gap in the literature of qualitative exploration of adherence and persistence behaviours in OAB patients. The OAB study found a range of drivers for non-adherent behaviours including a perceived lack of treatment efficacy, side effects, unclear instructions, and drug and condition hierarchies, as well as the rich context within which these themes sit. The comparative analysis study supported the findings of the OAB study demonstrating evidence of key themes transcending across conditions, including a perceived lack of treatment efficacy and side effects, as well as nuances associated with the OAB experience. Conclusions The present work has identified key drivers for non-adherent behaviours in OAB patients and sets out a number of recommendations categorised within the World Health Organisation’s 5 dimensions of adherence. These include addressing the poor understanding and illness perception of OAB by patients and others, by improving the provision and availability of information, as well as the work of patient support groups; scrutiny on the support within primary care to OAB patients before and after diagnosis; and the encouragement of realistic expectations of the condition and treatment with mindful use of prescriber’s language at the point of prescribing. The present work has further highlighted the utility of conceptual models of adherence such as COM-B and the NCF in understanding medicine-taking behaviours in the context of OAB

    Affinity-Based Reinforcement Learning : A New Paradigm for Agent Interpretability

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    The steady increase in complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is accompanied by a corresponding increase in opacity that obfuscates insights into their devised strategies. Methods in explainable artificial intelligence seek to mitigate this opacity by either creating transparent algorithms or extracting explanations post hoc. A third category exists that allows the developer to affect what agents learn: constrained RL has been used in safety-critical applications and prohibits agents from visiting certain states; preference-based RL agents have been used in robotics applications and learn state-action preferences instead of traditional reward functions. We propose a new affinity-based RL paradigm in which agents learn strategies that are partially decoupled from reward functions. Unlike entropy regularisation, we regularise the objective function with a distinct action distribution that represents a desired behaviour; we encourage the agent to act according to a prior while learning to maximise rewards. The result is an inherently interpretable agent that solves problems with an intrinsic affinity for certain actions. We demonstrate the utility of our method in a financial application: we learn continuous time-variant compositions of prototypical policies, each interpretable by its action affinities, that are globally interpretable according to customers’ financial personalities. Our method combines advantages from both constrained RL and preferencebased RL: it retains the reward function but generalises the policy to match a defined behaviour, thus avoiding problems such as reward shaping and hacking. Unlike Boolean task composition, our method is a fuzzy superposition of different prototypical strategies to arrive at a more complex, yet interpretable, strategy.publishedVersio
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