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In many respects the office has changed little over the past 200 years. The introduction of the telephone, copier, fax and computer have only served to speed up and proliferate the basic processes. We are now faced with an increasingly complex and difficult environment that requires fundamental changes to humanize the processes. In this paper we address some of the interface issues that now appear to have near term solutions.

Health care organizational research should pay greater attention to the specific settings where health is practiced. An ethnographic account of humor, ritual and defiance is presented from 29 months spent in a private, concierge-type radiation oncology center. A thick description of the setting and interaction among center staff and patients is offered in an attempt to establish why qualitative research of health care settings is so important. Findings are compared to Ellingson’s work on health care setting. Humor, ritual and defiance have therapeutic value and deserve greater attention in cancer treatment centers and health care organizations more broadly. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An ethnographic account of humor, ritual and defiance is presented from 29 months spent in a private, concierge-type radiation oncology center through thick description.

This study reinforces the literature on the value of institutionalizing humor and ritual to improve patients’ experience in cancer care given the dominance of large public institutions, most easily accessed by academic researchers. Suncoast Coast Radiation Center’s “institutionalized humor” is an important finding that should be examine further. Scholarship can also illuminate the use of ritual in settings where health care is practiced.

This study is limited to a particular research setting which is a private, concierge care radiation oncology treatment center in the Southeastern USA.

Cancer care centers should consider carefully institutionalizing humor and ritual into their daily practices. Further, patient defiance should be reinterpreted not as a patient deficiency but as a therapeutic coping mechanism by patients.

While nearly half of cancer care in the USA is offered in private, for-profit institutions, the vast majority of the understanding of cancer care comes only from non-profit and government-run institutions. Shining a light of these neglected cancer care settings will add to the understanding and the ability to improve the care offered to patients.

This is the first health ethnography in a concierge care, cancer care treatment setting. It tests the proposition that humor, ritual and defiance play an important role in a private concierge cancer care organization.

Outlines the Fisher hypothesis, cites previous relevant research and develops mathematical models for long‐run and short‐run Fisher relationships. Applies them to the UK, USA, Canada and Japan, using 1978‐1997 monthly data and Eurocurrency interest rates to explore the relationship between nominal interest rates and inflation rates. Finds a significant positive relationship for all four currencies in the long run; and for the UK and Japan but not for Canada in the short run, with significance only at the 10 per cent level for the USA.

Novel psychoactive substances (NPS) – often known as “legal highs” – are a varied group of substances that are causing concern due to their possible effects on mental health. Particular concerns have been raised about synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists often known as “Spice”. The purpose of this paper is to identify the prevalence of NPS use and explore any association with acute psychological disturbance.

The authors reviewed the case notes for 153 admissions to a male acute inpatient ward. Prevalence of reported NPS use and admissions to psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) were recorded.

In total, 18.9 per cent of individuals admitted to acute inpatient care were reported to have used NPS. NPS users were almost ten times as likely as their non-NPS using peers to require care in PICU. This result was statistically significant (Fisher exact test: p<0.001). Although caution is required given the limitations of this study, the data and clinical experience suggest that synthetic cannabinoids may be the specific type of NPS that is being used by this group.

Mental health professionals can expect to care for people using NPS in acute inpatient environments, and so they need to understand the nature and effects of these substances. It is possible that NPS use may be associated with sustained acute psychological disturbance.

There have been few studies on the prevalence of NPS use in inpatient environments and none of them have published that explore the association with PICU admission. Despite the limitations of this study, it has significant value by identifying an urgent need for comprehensive research in this area.

Discussions on environment-friendly production connected with the concerns of growing biomass emissions have gained much attention. In this regard, this study aims to explore the issue of biomass energy consumption and its related emission effects on the economic and environmental well-being of the economy of Cyprus.

This study sources time series data on specific variables from the Global Material Flow and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI, 2020) between 1990 and 2016. The Robust least square (ROB-L²) in conjunction with Pesaran autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) methodology analysis techniques was used in addition to the Granger causality tests to examine the direction of causality flow between the variables under consideration.

The results indicate that biomass energy usage in the long run reduces pollution and negatively correlates with CO₂ emissions level. Also, the decline of emission is influenced by increased foreign direct investment (FDI), thus, activities of foreign investors contribute to combating emission in the country. According to empirical results, non-renewable energy consumption showed both positive and negative influences on increased emission level, whereas economic growth is increasing carbon dioxide emission for the case of Cyprus.

This study applies current reliable data that offers renewed insights and sheds light on the state of affairs on biomass utilization from a developing country perspective. Additionally, it extends the discourse on the impact of biomass utilization on CO₂ emissions by considering the impact of FDI, trade flow and energy consumption in a carbon-income function built on the liner version of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Although this is by no means exhaustive, the study pioneers the discourse on how FDI with biomass utilization among other relevant variables influences carbon dioxide emission.

The purpose of this paper is to present an exploratory analysis of campus community member (i.e. students, faculty, staff) definitions of sustainability, their perceptions of select elements of sustainability culture and the relationship between the two.

Researchers implemented a cross-sectional design where participants from two higher education institutions in the USA completed an online survey. The 352 respondents from James Madison University and 349 respondents from Wofford College included students, faculty and staff members. Descriptive statistics were used to examine patterns in the quantitative data, and an inductive theme approach was used to analyze the qualitative data.

This study provides evidence that sustainability is often viewed from an environmental lens, and personal definitions of sustainability may impact perceptions of campus sustainability culture elements. Generally, the highest rated elements of culture examined (i.e. university actions, signs and symbols and institutional commitments) were all aligned with the environment dimension of sustainability and consistent across sustainability definitions. However, respondents with a more integrative definition of sustainability expected to see elements of culture that aligned with the social dimension of sustainability at a considerably higher rate than the respondents who reported more narrow definitions of sustainability.

Lack of generalizability, low response rates and self-selection bias are some of the limitations of the study.

Personal definitions of sustainability may impact campus community member perceptions of sustainability culture and progress on their campuses. Practitioners may use this study to inform development of more effective strategies for creating and assessing the culture of sustainability that colleges and universities are pursuing.

The empirical analysis of campus community members on two very different campus communities responds to Owens and Legere (2015) who argue for further studies to understand the concept of sustainability at other higher education institutions that are at different stages of pursuing sustainability. This paper links research about sustainability definitions to the emergent research on campus sustainability culture, filling a gap between these two areas.

Story‐telling has been identified as a metaphor for management consulting which focuses on the consultant as “impression manager”. The convincing power of strong stories told by consultants is emphasised. In this article management consulting is conceptualised through the metaphor of story‐making, identifying co‐operation and reflection as characteristic features. A specific consultancy process is interpreted as a co‐operative effort between the consultant and the client in which plot lines and characters are constructed. Plots can be opened or closed, and characters can be settled or negotiated. Thus story‐making as a reflective act moves between enhancing reflection and preparing for action.

This paper aims to propose an innovative approach to risk measurement for the abolition of selection bias arising from the specious selection of different horizons for investment and risk computation of equity-linked-saving schemes (ELSS).

ELSS has a lock-in period of three years, but shorter horizons’ (daily/weekly/monthly) return data are preferred, in practice, for risk computation. This results in horizon mismatch. This paper studies the consequences of this mismatch and provides a noble solution to diminish its effect on investors’ decision-making. To accomplish this objective, the paper uses an innovative methodology, maximal overlap discrete wavelet transformation, to segregate the price movements across different horizons. Risk across all horizons is measured using Cornish-Fisher expected shortfall and Cornish-Fisher value-at-risk methods.

The degree of consistency of risk-based rankings across horizons is examined by means of the Spearman and Kendall’s rank correlation tests. The risk-based ranking of ELSS is found to vary significantly with the change in investor’s horizon. Precisely, the rankings formulated using daily net asset values are significantly different from the rankings developed using fluctuations over longer horizons (two-four and four-eight years).

This finding indicates that the ranking exercise may mislead investors if horizon correction is not done while developing such rankings.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how reproductivity (child‐rearing) fits into ethics. It aims to use objectivist ethics (OE) specifically as the framework for considering this.

The approach is conceptual in nature. Economic concepts are used to analyze and extend an ethical issue and the cardinal values within OE, which includes productive purpose, are reviewed.

The paper argues that reproductivity is sufficiently different from productivity to be a separate category. Then using the trader principle, the objectivist case for inheritance, and capital theory, the case is made that reproductivity is required of each person in the same sense that productivity is.

This is an original argument made by the author in Then Athena Said: Unilateral Transfers and the Transformation of Objectivist Ethics. In that work, reproductivity is linked to human capital replacement, depreciation, the sinking fund, and Irving Fisher's conception of standard income. This paper also relates it to permanent income. Also, the conclusions are more inclusive than those in the previous work in that other forms that the replacement of human capital can take in addition to reproduction are considered.