The strategic implications of sustainability in strategy textbooks

Underlying every strategic management textbook are numerous assumptions about the nature of the economic system, society and the environment. One assumption that seems saliently absent from management textbooks is sustainability. In view of the detailed critique of the design of the MBA set out in Bubna-Litic and Benn (2003) it is likely that a systematic study of strategy textbooks will reveal other similar omissions. This study analyses a number of strategy textbooks exploring how they engage with questions of sustainability. The findings show that although the increase in the ethical self-consciousness of environmental economics is visible, so too is a narrow view of sustainability

Improving quality and safety of care in nursing homes by team support for strengths use: A survey study

Growing evidence suggests that workload has an adverse effect on quality of care and patient safety in nursing homes. A novel job resource that may improve quality of care and patient safety and alleviate the negative effect of workload in nursing homes is team support for strengths use. This refers to team members’ beliefs concerning the extent to which the team they work in actively supports them in applying their individual strengths at work. The objective was to investigate the relationships between workload, team support for strengths use, quality of care, and patient safety in nursing homes. We collected (cross-sectional) survey data from 497 caregivers from 74 teams in seven different nursing homes. The survey included measures on perceived workload, team support for strengths use, caregivers’ perception of the quality of care provided by the team and four safety incidents (i.e. fall incidents, medication errors, pressure ulcers, incidents of aggression). After controlling for age, team size, team tenure, organizational tenure, and nursing home, multilevel regression analyses (i.e. individual and team level) showed that perceived workload was not significantly related to perceived team-based quality of care and the frequency of safety incidents. Team support for strengths use was positively related to perceived team-based quality of care, negatively related to medication errors, but not significantly related to fall incidents, pressure ulcers, and aggression incidents. Finally, we found that perceived workload had a negative effect on perceived team-based quality of care when team support for strengths use is low and no significant effect on perceived team-based quality of care when team support for strengths use is high. This study provides promising evidence for a novel avenue for promoting team-based quality of care in nursing homes

A commentary on decision-making and organisational legitimacy in the Risk Society

Key concepts of Risk Society as elaborated by Ulrich Beck and others (Beck, U., 1992 (trans. Mark Ritter). The Risk Society. Sage Publications, London. Beck, U., 1995, Ecological Politics in the Age of Risk. Polity Press, Cambridge. Beck, U., 1999, World Risk Society. Polity Press, Cambridge. Giddens, A., 1994, Beyond Left and Right. Polity Press, Oxford. Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S., 1994, Reflexive Modernisation: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Beck, U., Bonss, W. and Lau, C., 2003, Theory, Culture & Society 2003, Sage, London, 20(2), pp. 1-33.) are illuminated though a case study of managed environmental risk, namely the hexachlorobenzene (HCB) controversy at Botany, a southeast suburb of Sydney. We observe the way multiple stakeholder decision-making plays out a number of Risk Society themes, including the emergence of 'unbounded risk' and of highly 'individualised' and 'reflexive' risk communities. Across several decades, the events of the HCB story support Risk Society predictions of legitimacy problems faced by corporations as they harness technoscientific support for innovation in their products and industrial processes without due recognition of social and environmental risk. Tensions involving identity, trust and access to expert knowledge advance our understanding of democratic 'sub-political' decision-making and ways of distributing environmental risk. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The effect of human resource management on performance in hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa: A systematic literature review

Hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face major workforce challenges while having to deal with extraordinary high burdens of disease. The effectiveness of human resource management (HRM) is therefore of particular interest for these SSA hospitals. While, in general, the relationship between HRM and hospital performance is extensively investigated, most of the underlying empirical evidence is from western countries and may have limited validity in SSA. Evidence on this relationship for SSA hospitals is scarce and scattered. We present a systematic review of empirical studies investigating the relationship between HRM and performance in SSA hospitals. Following the PRISMA protocol, searching in seven databases (i.e., Embase, MEDLINE, Web of Science, Cochrane, PubMed, CINAHL, Google Scholar) yielded 2252 hits and a total of 111 included studies that represent 19 out of 48 SSA countries. From a HRM perspective, most studies researched HRM bundles that combined practices from motivation-enhancing, skills-enhancing, and empowerment-enhancing domains. Motivation-enhancing practices were most frequently researched, followed by skills-enhancing practices and empowerment-enhancing practices. Few studies focused on single HRM practices (instead of bundles). Training and education were the most researched single practices, followed by task shifting. From a performance perspective, our review reveals that employee outcomes and organizational outcomes are frequently researched, whereas team outcomes and patient outcomes are significantly less researched. Most studies report HRM interventions to have positively impacted performance in one way or another. As researchers have studied a wide variety of (bundled) interventions and outcomes, our analysis does not allow to present a structured set of effective one-to-one relationships between specific HRM interventions and performance measures. Instead, we find that specific outcome improvements can be accomplished by different HRM interventions and conversely that similar HRM interventions are reported to affect different outcome measures. In view of the high burden of disease, our review identified remarkable little evidence on the relationship between HRM and patient outcomes. Moreover, the presented evidence often fails to provide contextual characteristics which are likely to induce variety in the performance effects of HRM interventions. Coordinated resea

Repairing reforms and transforming professional practices

Although much has been written on changing professionalism, only limited attention has been given to the way in which professionals themselves give shape to new requirements in everyday professional practice. This article investigates the understudied reform of postgraduate medical education. The reform takes in a shift from apprenticeship-based training based on “learning-by-doing” and socialization to time-restricted, streamlined, competency-based training programs based on competency-based training and standardized performance assessment. We deploy a mixed-methods study design of surgical training reform in the Netherlands (2011-2012) to examine how surgeons and surgical residents give shape to changes in education as well as in the wider hospital context, and how this impact on surgical training from a micro perspective. Informed by sociological literatures on medical education and changing professionalism, this article reveals how the reform is repaired in everyday training practice. This repair work, as a form of institutional work, goes beyond restoring disrupted institutional arrangements in order to restore the status quo as is often argued. Instead, it involves acting with the reform; seeking feasible solutions that preserve old values and related practices while adopting new requirements that reconfigure institutionalized arrangements in professional training practices