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At the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, health care was at the centre of the crisis. New demands made existing organizational practices and services obsolete. Primary health care had a great deal of responsibility for COVID-19-related care. The pandemic demanded effective leadership to manage the new difficulties. This paper aims to explore experiences and perceptions of managers in primary health care in relation to their efforts to manage the COVID-19 crisis in their everyday work.

The authors used a qualitative approach based on 14 semi-structured interviews with managers in primary health care from four regions in Sweden. The interviews were conducted during September to December 2020. Data were analysed using conventional qualitative content analysis.

Data analysis yielded three categories: lonely in decision-making; stretched to the limit; and proud to have coped. The participants felt lonely in their decision-making, and they were stretched to the limit of their own and the organization’s capacity. The psychosocial working conditions in primary care worsened considerably during the pandemic because demands on leaders increased while their ability to control the work situation decreased. However, they also expressed pride that they and their employees had managed the situation by being flexible and having a common focus.

Looking ahead and using lessons learnt, and apart from making wise decisions under pressure, an important implication for primary health-care leaders is to not underestimate the power of acknowledging the virtues of humanity and justice during a crisis. Continuing professional education for leaders focusing on crisis leadership could help prepare leaders for future crises.

Conducting research that is both practice- and theory-relevant is important for the service research community. Action research can be a fruitful approach for service researchers studying the transformative role of service research and wanting to make contributions to both the research community and to practical development. By exploring the current use of action research in service research, this study aims to make suggestions for enhancing the contribution to theory and practice development and to propose criteria for research quality for action research in service research.

This study builds on a systematic literature review of the use of action research approaches in service research.

The study makes three main contributions. First, it posits that any action research project needs to consider the four elements of problem identification, theorization, creating guiding concepts and intervention. Second, based on these elements mirrored in service action research, it outlines and analyzes three approaches to action research (i.e. theory-enhancing, concept developing and practice-enhancing). Third, it suggests a move from instrumental to a more conceptual relevance of the research and elaborates on the criteria for research quality.

This study contributes to the understanding of how action research may be applied for conducting high-quality collaborative research in services and proposes measures to enhance research quality in action research projects focusing services.

Over one million organisations have a quality management system (QMS) certified to the ISO 9001 standard; however, the system requires a lot of resources and its value has been questioned. This critique also leads to a questioning of the strategic relevance of quality management. The purpose of this paper is to explore how different types of uses of QMS correlate with management perceptions of quality management in terms of respect, cost and strategic importance.

The paper is based on a mixed method data collection strategy, quantitative data being collected from a survey in 8 organisations (n = 108) and qualitative data being collected from 12 interviews with quality managers in 12 different organisations.

The paper shows that a compliance-oriented QMS usage will more likely lead to a view of quality management as costly and of little respect, than a business or improvement-oriented QMS usage. Moreover, it nuances the view on compliance-oriented usage, showing that it is mainly documentation that negatively influences how management views quality management, whereas standardisation that is part of the compliance-oriented use is perceived as more value-adding.

This paper suggests three types of QMS use, namely, business management, improvement, and compliance-oriented use, and that a wise selection of how to use the QMS will affect the respect, strategic importance and cost that management associates with quality management.

Parental leave in Sweden can be taken both as paid and unpaid leave and often parents mix these forms in a very flexible way. Therefore, multiple methodological issues arise regarding how to most accurately measure leave length. The purpose of this paper is to review the somewhat complex legislation and the possible ways of using parental leave before presenting a successful attempt of a more precise way of measuring leave lengths, including paid and unpaid days, for mothers and fathers.

The study makes use of administrative data for a complete cohort of parents of first born children in 2009 in Sweden. The authors examine what characteristics are associated with the use of paid and unpaid leave for mothers and fathers during the first two years of the child’s life, focusing particularly on how individual and household income is associated with leave patterns.

Among mothers, low income is associated with many paid leave days whereas middle income is associated with most unpaid days. High income mothers use a shorter leave. Among fathers it is the both ends with high and low household income that uses most paid and unpaid leave.

A measure that includes unpaid parental leave will be important to not underestimate the parental leave and to prevent faulty comparisons between groups by gender and by socioeconomic status.

A measure of parental leave including both paid and unpaid leave will also facilitate international comparisons of leave length.

The purpose is to understand how the role of quality functions might evolve amidst digitalisation and an increased focus on services. This study focuses on customer feedback and how it can function as activation triggers for developing absorptive capacity, as well as how it relates to the value creation processes.

Following a qualitative research design, the authors gathered primary data from interviews with quality managers at 17 UK and Swedish firms and triangulated it with secondary information from the firms' web pages.

The findings show that customer feedback-based activation triggers can support development of absorptive capacity in the quality function if there are established processes for acting on customer feedback. This is often the case for codified feedback, which normally concerns products. However, digitalisation offers new opportunities of engaging in value co-creation, and firms need to develop digital capabilities to manage new technologies and data analytic tools. For personalised feedback (the main category of service-related feedback), established processes are missing.

This study work contributes to knowledge about how quality functions respond to customer feedback on both products and services. It clarifies why the quality function sometimes struggles to contribute to service quality as much as to product quality. From a theory development perspective, the authors contribute to understanding customer feedback-based activation triggers, how they lead to development of absorptive capacity and their relation to value co-creation on a functional level.

Quality management (QM) can support organisations in contributing to sustainable development. As a result of an expanding focus from customers towards stakeholders within QM, the perspectives to consider multiply. Understanding how practices and tools for process management are specifically affected by this increase in perspectives is key to creating the right conditions for improvement initiatives that support sustainable development.

This paper constructs a typology wherein the use of process management practices and tools is described in nine distinguished system contexts. Inductive discrimination is used to differentiate the system contexts and different use cases for process practices and tools.

Using the system of systems grid (SOSG), mainstream business process management (BPM) practices are positioned in a simple unitary context, whilst sustainability challenges also involve more complex contexts. Addressing these challenges requires integrating new tools and methods from paradigms outside of traditional functionalist business process management practices.

This paper highlights the necessity to consider system contexts when developing feasible practices and tools for effective process management.

Practical implications are that quality practitioners aiming to exploit the potential in process management to support sustainability get support for planning and conducting process improvement initiatives aiming to consider several stakeholder perspectives.

This paper presents a new typology for understanding the context of QM process initiatives and BPM in light of a contemporary sustainability focus.

The purpose of this study was to describe experiences of working as a paid part-time firefighter (PTF) in Swedish rural areas.

An inductive explorative design was used, based on interviews with 18 paid PTFs in Sweden. Data were analyzed using qualitative latent content analysis.

Three themes emerged from the interviews and describe paid PTFs’ experiences. The findings provide insights into how firefighters share a strong commitment, how support plays a crucial role, and how training and call-outs contribute to their experiences. Paid PTFs’ experiences are nuanced, ranging from personal limitations and challenges to satisfaction and the contrast with ordinary life.

The implications for fire and rescue service organizations are that they can encourage firefighters’ commitment and pride, as well as the commitment and support of their families and main employers. Further, highlighting the importance of support and facilitating flexibility when on call is crucial. Finally, acknowledging and promoting personal development and facilitating an inclusive culture are important factors for both motivation and satisfaction.

Paid PTFs are under-represented in the literature, despite the reliance on them in Sweden, and this study begins to address the knowledge gap. To improve retention, it is vital to understand paid PTFs work situation: what motivates them, what barriers they face, and how those challenges influence their experiences.

The aim of this study is to identify the challenges and barriers to e-Government set up in developing/conflict countries, related to Information Communication and Technology (ICT) and social obstacles – that are common in developing countries like Afghanistan. In today's world e-Government plays an important role of providing easy access to government services that enable citizens in general to communicate faster. This very research concentrates on the implementation of e-Government challenges in developing countries, particularly in Afghanistan. This paper is covering (1) method of study; (2) research strategy; (3) finding and policy recommendation; (4) limitation; (5) theoretical implication; (6) recommendation and conclusion. Additional data related to e-Government in Afghanistan, acquired via a quantitative survey and interviews can also help this analysis.

This research incorporates both theoretical and empirical study; using both quantitative and qualitative method for data collection. Also, as already noted, the study reviews different literature and academic documents. The original work of the study is the collection of relevant first-hand information for empirical analysis from experts of both public and private institutions such as IT, CIO and management experts through the use of a survey tools. This was done using web-based surveying and delivery of hard and soft copies to the experts to obtain their notions about e-Government implementation obstacles. Finally, both quantitative and qualitative survey results are calculated and presented.

Empirical study has established that 5 obstacles out of 15 named by respondents, stakeholder involvement, with the highest mean, (4.1145), coordination (4.0038), information sharing (3.9962), ICT literacy (3.9822) and e-Government awareness (3.8830) are considered to be the major obstacles. This opinion was also expressed by the respondents to the in-depth interview which was explained in a paper with detail.

Most research record numerous limitations, therefore, it is important to note that this study is no exception. Some of the limitations were recorded in the course of the study will be counted for the purpose of placing the finding in the right perspective. The limitations of this study were time constraints and difficult to generate enough participation in the survey. Because of that, I did a quantitative survey but could include very few members of top management. Second, the study is limited due to the lack of participation by respondents from various sectors such as citizens, university students, academia, banks, businesses and NGOs. The third limitation was lack of research materials for this study. Many difficulties were encountered with respect to find materials of previous research studies on the topic and in particularly in the context of Afghanistan.

The studies conducted previously on e-Government and referenced herein highlighted implementation challenges in developing countries as a group. Applying this study in Afghanistan may contribute to our understanding of key challenges facing in implementing e-Government process specifically in Afghanistan. The current study contributes some significant findings to the academic field of studying e-Government implementation challenges. It adds the support and information from public and private sector's perspective regarding major challenges in e-Government implementation in Afghanistan.

As per looking to the experience of developed and developing countries, this study emphasizes the following key initiatives to be performed in parallel with the running projects by Ministry of communication and IT [18]. 1-Pilot projects, 2-Simplification of Business Processes, 3-A strong committed national leadership, 4-Involvement of Stakeholders, 6-To granting incentives for involvement of local ICT companies, 7-Exemption of basic ICT, 8-To develop a standard ICT infrastructure

Governments around the world are under the pressure from rapid globalization, fiscal, social and technological changes to provide services that are citizen-centric, efficient, transparent, effective, one stop, any time and nonstop. Post-conflict countries are under even greater pressure to create such services because they replace the vacuum caused by the violence and will be the only services offered, rather than simply an upgrade of current government offerings that already meet citizen needs. The adoption of technology is the most efficient way to integrate the public and private sector and to provide services with accountability, transparency and efficiency, but this is not an easy task, especially for developing countries. This research looks at e-Government implementation challenges in developing countries and particularly in Afghanistan. A literature review shows many challenges common among developing countries: a lack of ICT literacy, incomplete infrastructure, a digital divide existing between the rural poor and the emerging urban middle class, an uncertainty about data privacy and data security, the absence of comprehensive ICT policies and legislation, lack of an ICT culture in government and the traditional components of the economy, questions regarding the government's ongoing financial commitment to the project, e-Government awareness, willingness of ministries to engage in information sharing, a void of ICT leadership outside the technologically oriented ministries, resistance to change, an historic lack of intergovernmental coordination and low stakeholder involvement are just some of the many challenges identified. The author belief that developing countries realize the importance of e-Government and consider the implementation of e-Government to be the critical tool for economic stability and growth as well as developing a more transparent, less corrupt government. The survey questionnaires were developed based on the challenges found in literature review. The survey questionnaire was translated into local languages (Pashto and Dari) and an English version served as control indicator by a professional local translator. At first a pilot version was sent to 10 officials from the Ministry of Communication and IT. After attesting period, the survey was circulated to 150 respondents who were experts in various fields such as CIO, Management and IT in Afghanistan. All respondents agreed that stakeholder involvement, coordination, information sharing, ICT literacy, awareness, resistance to change, ICT, finance issues, ICT policy, leadership, data privacy, legislation, ICT culture and digital divide are some of the major challenges for e-Government implementation in Afghanistan. Respondents (3.1412) on ICT security were impartial in their response on whether to include this indicator into challenges. Many projects are run by the Ministry of Communication and IT and within completion of these projects most of the challenges that identified in the analysis of the quantitative survey will be addressed, although the government is also vigorously pursuing legal and policy modifications. As per looking to the experience of developed and developing countries, this study emphasizes the following key initiatives to be performed in parallel with the running projects by Ministry of communication and IT [18]. Pilot projects should be implemented in two ministries as test beds prior to general roll out to ensure the efficient use of money needed for E-government projects. This will have two benefits from one side it will save money in terms of failing projects as argued by *19+ “E-government in developing countries fail, with 35% being classified as total failures (E-government was not implemented or was implemented but immediately abandoned), and 50% as partial failures (major goals were not attained and/or there were undesirable outcomes)”. On the other hand, in case.

Este artículo tiene por objeto analizar uno de los casos más importantes en los últimos años en los que se han declarado nulas ciertas cláusulas abusivas incluidas por las aerolíneas en los contratos de transporte aéreo con los consumidores, en concreto, se trata de la Sentencia de la Audiencia Provincial de Madrid, sección 28, de 26 de julio de 2017 y, especialmente, se estudiará la cláusula de cargo por remisión de la tarjeta de embarque.

A través del estudio de la mencionada sentencia, este trabajo mostrará cómo el contrato de transporte aéreo de personas siendo uno de los contratos más importantes actualmente, presenta una situación de especial desequilibrio y desprotección de los consumidores frente a las aerolíneas.

La falta de poder de negociación de los consumidores, las escasas alternativas que tienen en muchos casos y los precios generalmente altos de este contrato de transporte, hacen imprescindibles dispensar una protección adecuada a los consumidores en este contexto. Esto se puede lograr a través de leyes tuitivas que protejan sus intereses económicos y, especialmente como se analiza en el artículo, mediante la prohibición de cláusulas abusivas en los contratos de transporte aéreo.

El artículo hace un recorrido por algunas de las cláusulas abusivas incluidas en los contratos de transporte aéreo de pasajeros en los últimos años y muestra cómo debe evitarse que las aerolíneas impongan estas cláusulas que perjudican a la parte más débil del contrato y advierte que estamos aún lejos de conseguir una efectiva protección del consumidor en este ámbito como se explica con algún ejemplo final.

Call centers generate stress and absenteeism in staff and the literature suggests that people-oriented leadership is the right way of supervision for such a situation. This study compared its effects versus those of other types of leadership.

Absentee data of 379 representatives of customer services of a Peruvian call center were analyzed and the representatives answered a questionnaire about the Framework of Values in Competition and its four types of leadership. Day and night work shifts were compared.

It was observed that absenteeism declines with people-oriented leadership, although only during the day shift, and the addition of leadership oriented to change, results and control devalues models.

Future studies should cover the performance of the worker. The findings suggest a need to re-focus the theoretical focus on environmental contingencies that affect leadership effectiveness.

Leadership theorists will ask themselves in what circumstances the multiple leadership is effective. Call center managers will appreciate the organizational value of people-oriented leadership at the first level of supervision.