Andrew Ellison, Graham Squires and Patrick Dempsey
There are some 487,000 places in long-stay residential care and nursing homes in the UK representing an industry worth some £15.2 billion per annum. Creating leases with…
Abstract
Purpose
There are some 487,000 places in long-stay residential care and nursing homes in the UK representing an industry worth some £15.2 billion per annum. Creating leases with guaranteed rental uplifts, a property bond in all but name, now attracts significant investment into healthcare. This is argued to be unsustainable, as evidenced by the collapse of Southern Cross Healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into institutional investment for sustainable healthcare provision.
Design/methodology/approach
It is carried out via a range of unstructured and semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of a small elite of professionals involved at the summit of this investment market and analysis of secondary literature concerning the wider international property market regarding the way in which advisers and investors view the security and value of these new instruments.
Findings
It is found that the differentiation between rental growth and indexed rental uplifts reveal a misunderstanding of the nature of the investment vehicles currently being marketed.
Practical implications
The implication of the research, is that much modern private healthcare provision is financially unsustainable, as has begun to be recognised in recent government regulation and guidance.
Originality/value
This research provides new and original insight into institutional investment for sustainable healthcare provision
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Eniola Abe, Pamela Dawson and Jason Scott
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic the United Kingdom Government implemented a policy to rapid discharge hospital patients into care homes. This study aimed to examine how the…
Abstract
Purpose
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic the United Kingdom Government implemented a policy to rapid discharge hospital patients into care homes. This study aimed to examine how the media in the United Kingdom portrayed hospital discharge to care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design/methodology/approach
This study was a qualitative document analysis. Four sources (Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian and BBC News) were selected to represent political orientations encompassing right-wing, centrist and left-wing perspectives, and were searched for mention of hospital discharge, care homes and Covid-19 pandemic between 1st January 2020 and 24th February 2022. Article text was copied verbatim into Microsoft Word documents prior to analysis. Data were thematically analysed, followed by coding the sentiment in the included articles as well as coding the sentiment of themes and sub-themes.
Findings
Of 722 identified articles, 133 were eligible for inclusion as the final corpus. Data represented a moralistic narrative consisting of four themes: (1) Government as villain, (2) care homes as antiheroes, (3) patients as ideal victims and (4) moral outcomes. Most of the corpus had a negative sentiment (78.1%). One theme, moral outcomes, had considerably more positive sentiment (32.4%) than others (range 15.1%–21.9%).
Originality/value
A moralistic argument for improving cross-boundary interactions between health and social care services is provided, and the media can play a role pushing cross-boundary working higher up the policy agenda. Future work should examine how direct stakeholders, including those working in healthcare and care home settings, perceived the discharge policy.
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Andrew Robson, David Yarrow and Jane Owen
The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence to assess the nature and extent of the link between employee satisfaction and organisational performance.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence to assess the nature and extent of the link between employee satisfaction and organisational performance.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper examines the link between staff satisfaction and organisational performance, presenting findings from 21 colleges of Further Education that have participated in both a survey of staff satisfaction (covering over 2,600 staff from these colleges) and in a diagnostic benchmarking exercise using the “Learning PROBE” methodology.
Findings
The results suggest that whilst each of the measured aspects of work are regarded as being important by a majority of survey respondents, the level of “satisfaction” displayed in each of these attributes is indicated by only a minority of those surveyed. The findings support the existence of a link between staff satisfaction and organisational excellence. Staff satisfaction levels are most strongly associated with the leadership and service processes indices, and even more so with the overall organisational diagnosis. This suggests that colleges that are implementing “good practices” covering a range of managerial aspects, and who are achieving corresponding organisational results, are likely to be closer to satisfying their staff. Practices relating to people, performance management and organizational results also show association with staff's satisfaction gap, although not as significantly as above. The results suggest an holistic approach to implementing business practices appears to be more effective than concentrating only on deploying good practices in only a single area of the managerial process.
Originality/value
The value of the paper is to the UK Further Education Sector in that it identifies those organisational practices, which improved, can in combination address to some extent the work satisfaction levels of their employees.
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Xuguang Li, Andrew Cox and Zefeng Wang
Social network sites are emerging as a popular communication tool for knowledge sharing and construction. LinkedIn, which concentrates on professional networking, is reported to…
Abstract
Purpose
Social network sites are emerging as a popular communication tool for knowledge sharing and construction. LinkedIn, which concentrates on professional networking, is reported to generate great informational benefits to its users. The purpose of this paper is to explore product users’ knowledge construction in solving technical problems on LinkedIn, which was chosen as a case example.
Design/methodology/approach
Discussion threads with rich knowledge elements were selected from an interest group about solving technical problems with laptops. Adopting a qualitative content analysis method, selected threads were analysed with a prior analysis framework built in the context of traditional IT company sponsored peer user support forums.
Findings
The analysis revealed that the iterative and progressive knowledge construction process and associated trial-and-error strategy used on LinkedIn are similar to those found in peer support forums. However, LinkedIn members are more engaged in knowledge construction episodes. Meanwhile, the sub-category “proposing a new idea” accounts for a larger portion of discussions reflecting the high-level of expertise. One-to-one direct interaction is quite salient. Therefore, LinkedIn can support knowledge construction in a more efficient way due to the character of its social capital, including trust, sense of belonging, norms of cooperation, visible identity, knowledge articulation skills, one-to-one direct interaction and suitable strength of ties.
Originality/value
This research is novel in empirically revealing how LinkedIn attributes and its social capital attributes interact with each other and together facilitate an efficient knowledge construction process.
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Compares race relations in two suburban communities in order to show that middle‐class blacks meet with some success when they temporarily exchange their racial identity for a…
Abstract
Compares race relations in two suburban communities in order to show that middle‐class blacks meet with some success when they temporarily exchange their racial identity for a class‐based identity. Collects data through ethnography and individual interview to examine the conditions under which middle‐class blacks construct and assert a sub‐urban identity. States that success varies with the racial composition of the suburban community and the white neighbours’ level of the satisfaction with the community.
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Ainulashikin Marzuki and Andrew Worthington
– The purpose of this paper is to compare the fund flow – performance relationship for Islamic and conventional equity funds in Malaysia.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to compare the fund flow – performance relationship for Islamic and conventional equity funds in Malaysia.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use panel regression models to estimate the relationship between fund flows and performance for Islamic and conventional equity funds in Malaysia from 2001 to 2009. The data for each fund include fund flows, assets under management, management expenses, fund age, portfolio turnover, fund risk and return and the number of funds in the fund’s family. The authors also include market returns and year effects. The sample consists of 127 Malaysian equity funds with at least 65 per cent domestic equity holdings comprising 35 Islamic and 92 conventional equity funds.
Findings
Islamic fund investors respond to performance in much the same way as conventional fund investors, increasing fund flows to better performing funds and decreasing fund flows to poorer performing funds. However, there is also evidence that Islamic fund investors are relatively less responsive toward poorly performing Islamic funds, suggesting an asymmetry in the expected positive fund flow – performance relationship, but only for Islamic fund investors. When choosing funds based on other fund attributes, Islamic fund investors again exhibit similar behaviour, and like conventional fund investors direct larger percentage fund flows into smaller funds as well as funds with larger past fund flows and higher expense ratios.
Research limitations/implications
The authors were only able to access data on annual net fund flows not quarterly or monthly fund inflows and outflows as usual in developed markets and this may obscure some important aspects of investor decision-making. There is also insufficient data for matched-sample techniques, which may better control for fund-specific characteristics.
Practical implications
Islamic funds like conventional funds will experience increased fund flows with better performance and vice versa. However, Islamic fund investors appear somewhat less likely to remove monies from poorly performing funds. The authors believe this is because investors either place a premium on the non-return attributes of Shariah-compliant funds and/or wish to avoid search costs in finding another suitable Islamic fund. Apart from this, Islamic and conventional fund investors behave in a similar manner, and the authors believe that this is possible in Malaysia given the size and diversity of its Islamic fund sector.
Originality/value
This paper is one of the very few empirical studies concerning the behaviour of Islamic investors, particularly in Malaysia, primarily because of limitations in data availability.
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Andrew James Crawley and Stephen Hill
The purpose of this paper is to examine changes in manufacturing agglomeration in a small open economy over the last decade. This is done during a time when manufacturing in most…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine changes in manufacturing agglomeration in a small open economy over the last decade. This is done during a time when manufacturing in most developed countries is in relative decline.
Design/methodology/approach
This work adapts the methodology developed by De Propris to measure the relative level of manufacturing agglomeration across space and time. It combines different measures utilising the location quotient technique, thereby allowing the relative strengths of manufacturing in different areas to be compared with the national (UK) level. The work goes further by also calculating the EG index to compare the levels of concentration and specialisation.
Findings
This research shows that manufacturing agglomeration has increased in Wales at a time when manufacturing employment is decreasing. Concentration and specialisation have continued to increase across the last decade despite manufacturing's steady decline.
Originality/value
This work details for the first time the relative intensity of agglomeration across space and time in a small open economy. This is often neglected in other economic “cluster” work but may be key to understanding economic development in the twenty‐first century.
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By now, you have surely heard of the Network Computer or NC. The author has been poking fun at the NC in “Trailing Edge Notes” (Library Hi Tech News) for several months. This…
Abstract
By now, you have surely heard of the Network Computer or NC. The author has been poking fun at the NC in “Trailing Edge Notes” (Library Hi Tech News) for several months. This article takes a more serious look at NCs and related “simple computers.” While the author considers the grand conception of NC to be universal appliance is probably nonsense, there are niches for which some form of NC may make sense—and other niches, some large, where administrators may prefer NCs for various reasons. The author considers the NC and related devices as dispassionately as possible, notes some of the reasons for the absurd hype surrounding NCs, and suggests where they might offer legitimate promise.
Yongfang Li, Si Shi, Yuliang Wu and Yang Chen
The purpose of this review is to systematically understand the development of enterprise social media (ESM) research, quantitatively analyze the landscape and track the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this review is to systematically understand the development of enterprise social media (ESM) research, quantitatively analyze the landscape and track the development of ESM literature and reveal new trends and challenges in ESM research.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on 321 relevant literature studies (2005–2020) collected from the Web of Science core collection, the visualization tool CiteSpace is used to conduct bibliometric cocitation and cooccurrence analyses to quantify and visualize the landscape and evolution of ESM research.
Findings
Through analyzing the author cocitation network, document cocitation network, journal cocitation network and keywords cooccurrence network, this review proposes an integrated research framework, which highlights major purposes, antecedents and consequences of ESM use in organizations and presents future research trends of ESM research.
Originality/value
Different from the existing qualitative review of ESM, this review adopts bibliometric review to quantify and visualize the landscape of ESM research.