Search results

The Open Business School recently awarded its first MBAs from a programme first launched in 1989. Over 4,000 part‐time MBA students are now under its aegis, many of them senior managers. Discusses what motivates them to take on this extra burden, its implications and their aspirations.

Every organisation invests in design to create and develop distinctive products and services. The development of a coherent design and marketing philosophy is essential to the achievement of a longer‐term competitive edge. However the marketing literature hardly refers to design and where it does so there is a great deal of confusion as to what design means. Design is taken to encompass styling, fashion and product development and innovation. Key findings of a major study recently undertaken by the Design Innovation Group (DIG) are reported here. The research investigated the risks and rewards of investment in design by British companies participating in the Department of Trade and Industry/Design Council′s Funded Consultancy Scheme and subsequent Support for Design Programme. The study showed that investment in design does pay. But design effort could be more fully exploited if marketing practitioners as well as other managers acquired design management skills.

Applies Kirzner’s concept of entrepreneurship to explain the economic success of Hong Kong. The city economy possesses neither natural resources, nor sophisticated technologies, and yet it has successfully developed into one of the most prosperous economies in East Asia. This study argues that Hong Kong’s industrial dynamism relies mainly on a large number of adaptive entrepreneurs who are constantly alert to opportunities, maintain a high degree of flexibility in their production and respond rapidly to change. In the textile and garment industry, firms survived by pursuing a product imitation strategy, operating at a small‐scale, extensively utilizing subcontracting networks, producing customer label garments as well as performing spatial arbitrageurship. Employing these adaptive entrepreneurial strategies, Hong Kong manufacturers have learnt from foreign firms and imitated their products. By selling improved commodities at lower prices, they have competed against the original suppliers from the western advanced countries. Furthermore, to exploit new profit opportunities, Hong Kong’s entrepreneurs have shifted their production activities from one product to another, from one industry to another, from higher cost to lower cost regions, from traditional fishing and agriculture into manufacturing, and then to finance and other services. Their efforts have brought about structural transformation in the economy and enabled Hong Kong to catch up with early industrialized nations.

The study compares how distinct mechanisms that connect pre-established policy objectives to professionals' practices, and the health policy implementation context influenced different approaches to frontline staff participation. The authors analysed 26 teams in six cities from two Brazilian states, during the last cycle of the National Program for Improving Access and Quality of Primary Care (PMAQ).

About 172 in-depth interviews were conducted with frontliners – community health workers (78), nurses (37), doctors (30) – and managers (27). Interview guides were based on key issues identified in the implementation and pay-for-performance (P4P) literature. Drawing on thematic analysis and synthesis of the literature, three types of participation mechanisms were identified: relational, motivational and incremental learning. They were analysed considering distinct contexts at the local level to understand how they influenced different forms of participation: mere adherence, result-oriented and transformative.

Administrations with stronger institutional organizational structures were able to control work processes and reduce professional discretion. However, sustained participation was more likely where there was greater integration between management and frontline health care teams. Motivation based only on financial incentives could not bring about transformative participation. This depended on the degree of professional's ideational motivation towards primary care. Finally, contexts with unfavourable working conditions tend to demotivate professionals, but incremental learning helps teams cope with these obstacles.

The study overcomes gaps in the literature in relation to PMAQ's implementation process. Overall, the study delves into which/how mechanisms alter frontliners participation in performance-oriented health programs.

This article provides a resource for traders and other market participants by providing an overview of certain automatic circuit breaker mechanisms and discretionary powers that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the U.S. president, as applicable, can exercise to pause or stop the trading of individual securities or trading activities across exchanges during extreme market volatility, each of which can cause interruptions to trading activity.

This article surveys automatic and discretionary mechanisms to halt trading activity under extreme market conditions. In particular, the article examines automatic cross-market circuit breakers, limit up-limit down pauses, the alternative uptick rule, as well as discretionary authority to stop short selling of particular securities and to stop trading across exchanges.

The article concludes that market participants must be cognizant not only of automatic cross-market circuit breakers, but also several other forms of potential market disruptions that may occur due to increased market volatility during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

By exploring various mechanisms that respond to market disruption, this article provides a valuable resource for traders and other market participants looking to identify and respond to potential interruptions to their trading activity.

Community-generated digital content (CGDC) is one of the UK’s prime cultural assets. However, CGDC is currently “critically endangered” (Digital Preservation Coalition, 2021) due to technological and organisational barriers and has proven resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration. The challenge of integrating CGDC into larger archives has effectively silenced diverse community voices within our national collection. Our Heritage, Our Stories (OHOS), funded by the UK’s AHRC programme Towards a National Collection, responds to these urgent challenges by bringing together cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science.

Existing solutions to CGDC integration, involving bespoke interventionist activities, are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale, while unsophisticated computational integration erases the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators. Using innovative multidisciplinary methods, AI tools and a co-design process, previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC will be made discoverable in our virtual national collection.

There currently exists a range of disconnected, fragile and under-represented community-generated heritage which is at increasing risk of loss. Therefore, OHOS will work to ensure the survival and preservation of these nationally important resources, for the future and for our shared national collection.

As we dissolve barriers to create meaningful new links across CGDC collections and develop new methods of engagement, OHOS will also make this content accessible to new and diverse audiences. This will facilitate a wealth of fresh research while also embedding new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training and fostering newly enriching, robust connections between communities and archival institutions.

A key development in early adolescence is the active construction of individual identity; for autistic young people, integrating the idea of “being autistic” forms part of this process. The purpose of this paper is to explore identity development from a contextualist perspective, foregrounding young people’s experiences within mainstream educational settings.

A longitudinal, qualitative methodology was used: semi-structured interviews were conducted annually with 14 autistic young people, their parents and teachers between school years 6 and 9.

Young people felt different from their neurotypical peers and their acceptance of their diagnosis changed over time as they managed their developing personal and public identities. In pursuit of being treated “normally,” many camouflaged their differences at school, which sometimes involved opting out of school-based support. Adults described their own understandings of autism and discussed the responses of others in the school environment to autistic differences.

The influence of sociocultural discourses of autism on young people’s identity development is discussed and implications for both school based and post-diagnostic support for young people and their families explored.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the experiences of conducting focus groups amongst acquaintances in naturally occurring settings, where participants were known to each other and participation was less about being recruited, and more about being there when the focus group took place.

This was a qualitative study of multi-generational experiences of teenage parenting, and used interviews and focus groups. The study took an ethnographic approach, using case studies with a small number (4) of families, plus supplementary interviews, and focus groups with teenage parents and parents-to-be.

Using focus groups in naturally occurring settings alongside other qualitative data collection affords insights into the research topic that would not otherwise be available.

The paper discusses the challenges and benefits of using naturally occurring groups, and reflects on the way the findings from these groups illuminated aspects of the study concerning relationships. It argues that naturally occurring groups have advantages over conventionally organised focus groups that contribute to a deeper understanding of relationships between members.

Jenny Chapman is a practitioner, consultant and lecturer in vocational rehabilitation, and has extensive experience of rehabilitation, training and service management in Australia and the UK. Continuing our occasional series on lessons from other countries we asked Jenny to give an account of some aspects of a very successful programme in which she worked for a number of years. The Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service (CRS) in Australia, where Jenny gained her experience in vocational rehabilitation, continue to provide effective ‘return to work’ programmes for disabled people. The use of methods such as workplace assessment is one reason why Australia is extremely successful in return to work and placement rates.