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This study aims to assess the extent to which acute hospital trust mergers in England are associated with quality improvements.

We apply an event study design using difference-in-difference (DID) and coarsened exact matching to compare the before-and-after performance of eight mergers from 2011 to 2015.

We find little evidence that mergers contribute to quality improvements other than some limited increases in the proportion of patients waiting a maximum of 18 weeks from referral to treatment. We postulate that financial incentives and political influence could have biased management effort towards waiting time measures.

Inherent sample size constraints may limit generalisability. Merger costs and complexity mean they are unlikely to offer an efficient strategy for helping to clear elective care backlogs. We recommend further research into causal mechanisms to help health systems maximise benefits from both mergers and emerging models of hospital provider collaboration.

This paper is the first to study the quality impact of a new wave of acute hospital mergers taking place in the English National Health Service from 2011 onwards, applying a group-time DID estimator to account for multiple treatment timings.

Manufacturing companies still struggle to integrate additive manufacturing (AM) technologies with existing traditional manufacturing technologies. This paper explores AM technology integration into a global manufacturing company from an operational capability perspective.

The research was conducted using a single case study in collaboration with a global heavy-duty vehicle manufacturer. Data were collected through a focus group and interviews representing management and engineering roles. Additional data were collected from meetings, company documents, field notes and observations. Subsequently, the collected data were analyzed thematically.

The findings reveal that, despite the company embarking on its AM technology integration journey, it encountered challenges, including cognitive fixation, manufacturing fixation, situational awareness, ambiguous ownership and the make-or-buy dilemma. Furthermore, the findings showed that the company developed operational capabilities – such as developing proficiency in AM know-how, continuous use of AM technology, operational practices for AM technology, cross-collaboration for AM initiatives and business cases for AM technology – to address these challenges. A facilitation model was developed, outlining essential actions prioritized for the short-term, mid-term and long-term. These actions leverage the operational capabilities to address challenges in AM technology integration.

This paper offers an in-depth exploration of AM technology integration in a global heavy-duty vehicle manufacturer. It introduces a novel application of operational capability theory and proposes a facilitation model for managers and academics in pursuit of achieving AM technology integration.

The Workplace Dialogue is a digitalized method directed at managers. The purpose of this study was to explore managers’ experiences of using the digital Workplace Dialogue in cases of employee ill-health.

The Workplace Dialogue provides an easy and accessible method for managers, including text, short films, client examples and concrete guides that provides support in how managers can act in the event of ill-health, for example, by creating dialogue and adjustments at work. A total of five public and private organizations participated in a cohort study, implementing and using the Workplace Dialogue for one year. We interviewed 22 managers to explore their experiences of using the Workplace Dialogue. The interviews were analyzed using Qualitative Content Analysis.

The experiences of using the Workplace Dialogue are presented in one overall theme: Supports and strengthens managers’ leadership and ability to handle and act on work-related health, and four sub-themes: Requires organizational legitimacy, Facilitates management of work-related health, Strengthens manager–employee collaboration and Contributes to leadership development. The Workplace Dialogue was described as a method that contributed to better work-related health by emphasizing the early identification of problems. Manager–employee collaboration was improved, and responsibilities were made clearer. Using the method enabled personal development among managers. Some prerequisites were pointed out, such as a need for time and support from the organization.

The Workplace Dialogue can support managers in addressing and acting on cases of employee ill-health.

In a post-pandemic era, the hybrid workspace (HW) that came into practice now remains a new normal way of working for employees. This new practice has received a great deal of attention from researchers recently. However, the impact of HW on the affective well-being (AWB) of employees is less investigated. The present study focuses on the relationship between HW and affective states (positive and negative affects together) and the role of positive work reflection (PWR).

This present research work is based on the cross-sectional data collected from employees of IT and software sectors in India, through the purposive convenience sampling method (N = 329). Respondents were identified through the social and industrial connections of the authors. Structural equation modeling with AMOS 24 was adopted for hypothesis testing.

The empirical findings showed that HW is positively related to positive affects, negatively related to negative affects and positively associated with PWR. In addition, the PWR can partially mediate the relationship between HW and affective states, which is in line with the existing literature on PWR.

By exploring the less investigated link between HW and affective states, this study offers new insights into the understanding of HW and AWB. Based on the ideas of cognitive appraisal theory, this study contributes to the literature by proposing and analyzing PWR as a mechanism that partially mediates the influence of HW on the positive and negative affects of employees. These findings will facilitate the decision-makers, employees and organizations to understand the essential benefits of HW in the form of affective states and PWR. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to explore the relationship between HW, PWR and AWB of employees.

This paper aims to explore the influence of social frame (worker vs animal rights), product category (hedonic vs utilitarian) and social presence (similar age, younger and older) on expected shame and purchase intentions for sustainable products.

This study used an online experiment with a 3 × 2 between-subjects design to manipulate social frame (workers vs animal rights and a control group) and product category (hedonic vs utilitarian) with 252 young German consumers (under 30 years old).

This study finds that social frame and social presence influence expected shame, which in turn positively affects purchase intentions for sustainable products, in the presence of people with similar age, but with no difference between hedonic and utilitarian product types.

This study tested the influence of social frame, product type and social presence on German young consumers using specific purchase scenarios. Future research may test the generalizability of the model in diverse cultural settings.

This study would help marketers and public policymakers identify factors that may motivate young consumers to act in a sustainable manner and to develop suitable strategies and messages to improve their pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.

This study uses Schwartz’s norm activation theory to investigate the link between consumer emotions and sustainable consumption and shows that social sustainability can trigger expected shame through message framing especially in the presence of others, which in turn could increase the probability of environment-friendly product choice.

The acceleration of technology adoption in higher education, prompted by the global shift to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, called for responsive programmes to address pedagogical challenges. This paper aims to present the design process and initial adoption of an institutional programme created to support instructors in providing educational resources for online and hybrid undergraduate courses at Reykjavik University.

By adopting a socio-technical perspective, the programme encompasses teacher support and digital platform use. Additionally, the programme aimed to enhance the student experience by increasing course consistency and facilitating data collection for future research on learning analytics.

The findings demonstrate the programme’s successful adoption, effectively strengthening teachers’ practices. Key contributions include a teacher-centric perspective on technology challenges and a socio-technical conceptualisation informed by teachers’ experiences during the pandemic.

This research provides valuable insights for teachers, administrators and researchers developing similar initiatives for effective professional development of faculty in online and hybrid teaching environments.

Facing the burden of chronic diseases has become a priority for health-care systems’ economic and social sustainability. To this end, this paper aims to focus on adopting Health Lean Management (HLM), a widely used managerial approach, to improve the performance and quality of care provided in chronic care pathways. HLM addresses not only efficiency and timeliness issues but also care effectiveness and integration. Indeed, the lack of continuity and co-ordination of care constitutes a major challenge for chronic pathways. This research provides an innovative contribution, by extending the implementation of HLM to chronic pathways developed across hospital and territorial care. Indeed, HLM scope typically regards hospital units and departments; hence, analysing the interaction between different levels of care represents a novelty from an academic and practical perspective.

With the aim of understanding how to extend the adoption of HLM towards the territory, an action research project has been developed. In particular, an improvement project focused on breast cancer care pathways has been launched in a Spanish hospital. The research investigates which HLM activities, tools and practices need to be accomplished in this kind of project, grasping insights into emerging wastes. To this end, the HLM project followed the Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control (DMAIC) cycle, supporting the project team in effectively conducting a preliminary context analysis, qualitative and quantitative data collection, the current state analysis and the countermeasure proposals.

The analysis conducted on the breast cancer care pathway highlighted major criticalities in managing the diagnosis of new patients. In particular, waiting times to obtain diagnostic imaging and breast specialist consultations highly impacted the care pathway effectiveness and efficiency. Specific wastes that caused these delays have been investigated, leading to the definition of specific countermeasures that could minimise the inefficiencies: an 85% reduction of the staging process lead time was estimated.

The achieved results contribute to enhancing the quality of care delivered to breast cancer patients. This paper enriches the theoretical knowledge about HLM, extending its typical field of application; provides practical support to health-care providers, managers and leaders with a case demonstrating how to develop HLM projects adopting the DMAIC cycle; and finally, it has valuable social implications, addressing the global threat of chronic disease.

This research links the global advance of the franchise model to the geohistorical foray of shopping malls through an empirical longitudinal study in the largest emerging market in Latin America, Brazil.

We conducted an analysis of a multi-year set of qualitative interviews with the same franchised mall tenants (23 interviews in 2017 and 12 follow-up interviews in 2022) via an iterative procedure of transcript data coding and theme identification.

Shopping malls were key catalysts in the pre-pandemic growth of franchising in Brazil, yet during the pandemic, malls became liabilities. Attitudes towards malls as franchise hosts changed, flipping the mall perception from catalytic host to burdensome trap. Mall management companies, as key gatekeepers, deserve more research attention.

Our study reveals the detrimental role shopping malls, with their static rules and high cost structures, have played as franchise businesses struggled to survive during the global pandemic. While franchising represents one of the most influential retail business models today, shopping malls have been among the most important brick-and-mortar retail institutions since the 1950s. Jointly, they constitute a unique retail symbiosis with little attention in the academic literature.

The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the consumer payment behavior in Italy by correlating financial literacy with digital payment awareness, examining media anxiety and financial security, and including a gender analysis.

Consumers’ attitudes toward cashless payments were investigated using an online survey conducted from November 2021 to February 2022 on a sample of 836 Italian citizens by considering the behavioral characteristics and aspects of financial literacy. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the hypotheses and to determine whether the model was invariant by gender.

The analysis showed that the fear of contracting COVID-19 and the level of financial literacy had a direct influence on the payment behavior of Italians, which was completely different in its weighting. Fear due to the spread of news regarding the pandemic in the media indirectly influenced consumers’ noncash attitude. The preliminary results of the gender multigroup analysis showed that cashless payment was the same in the male and female subpopulations.

This research is noteworthy because of its interconnected examination. It examined the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s payment choices, assessed their knowledge, and considered the influence of media-induced anxiety. By combining these factors, the study offered an analysis from a gender perspective, providing understanding of how financial behaviors were shaped during the pandemic.