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This study explores the cross‐cultural impact of planning and control practices in the British and West German mechanical engineering industries. Based on over 100 face‐to‐face interviews with chief executives and the analysis of 210 postal questionnaires, the findings demonstrate that contrary to the popular image of West German managers, it is British managers who place more emphasis on control. This is reflected in their expressed attitudes, the adoption of a more formal approach to planning, and the frequency and types of control data that are supplied to management.

While the right to life, ‘personhood’, and the educability of people with profound and multiple learning disabilities are still under‐debated, service providers and research workers continue to extend the boundaries of expectation with respect to what such people can achieve. In this paper the messages of recent research are summarised and key references for fuller information suggested. The need to bring together such specialised knowledge in the framework of an ordinary life aimed at enhancing competence and quality of life is urged.

The paper discusses the potential impact of videoconferencing on practices and processes within the construction industry, based on analyses carried out on its use and impact in the healthcare sector – which like construction involves technology‐intensive processes which are dependent upon cross‐professional and cross‐disciplinary relationships and communications, operate within an increasingly regulatory and litigious climate, and involve organizationally fluid, virtual, teams spanning several subindustries. Recently published research evidence from the healthcare sector suggests that whilst videoconferencing and other advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) have pervasive capabilities, successes in their application may be shortlived and modest in achievement. In use, their actual uptake and application have been found to be fundamentally affected by a range of social and operational issues, such as fears over a new formalization and trackability of previously informal conversations; a rebalancing of power relationships (between professionals using the ICTs as well as between doctor and patient); pressures on social/cultural and procedural alignment between participants; and personal and corporate attitudes to the technologies (including simply disliking the ICT). There is also evidence from the healthcare sector to suggest that ICTs increase the complexity of the delivering healthcare, and that the limitations of the technologies emphasise an existing dependency of communications and processes on tacit knowledge which is not readily formalized for communication via ICTs. However, the paper also notes an increasing pressure on the construction industry to respond to the globalizing potential that ICTs offer for the supply and delivery of knowledge‐based services, and discusses the implications of the issues found in the healthcare sector for the use and potential abuse of ICTs in the construction industry that will have to be successfully addressed in order to avoid ICTs being perceived as threatening and to allow their use to help organizations address the globalising marketplace.

Job design researchers advocate that jobs should be interesting, that is they should involve tasks that are meaningful and have significance. However, all jobs contain tasks that may be meaningful and significant and essential to organizations’ operation but not enjoyed by the employee. We refer to these tasks as non-preferred work tasks (NPWT). In this chapter, we draw on Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory to develop a conceptual model proposing that the intensity and frequency of non-preferred work tasks reduces employees’ propensity to engage in extra-role discretionary work behavior, and that job crafting and emotional state moderate this relationship.

In the next decade, it is estimated that a large percentage of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) will become of working age. With this projection, there is an urgent need to expand employment opportunities and to find ways to support individuals with ASD on the job. However, very minimal research investigates organizational practices needed to integrate individuals with autism in the workplace successfully. Training is one company practice that can significantly impact the behavior and work outcomes of individuals with ASD. Despite the importance of training interventions, research focused on relevant training techniques for individuals with ASD is lacking and fragmented. This chapter summarizes the types of training that are appropriate and most often utilized to foster skill development and aid employment outcomes for Generation A.

Racial and ethnic minorities utilize less healthcare than their similarly situated white counterparts in the United States, resulting in speculation that these actions may stem in part from less desire for care. In order to adequately understand the role of care-seeking for racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, we must fully and systematically consider the complex set of social factors that influence healthcare seeking and use.

Data for this study come from a 2005 national survey of community-dwelling Medicare beneficiaries (N = 2,138). We examine racial and ethnic variation in intentions to seek care, grounding our analyses in the behavioral model of healthcare utilization. Our analysis consists of a series of nested multivariate logistic regression models that follow the sequencing of the behavioral model while including additional social factors.

We find that Latino, Black, and Native American older adults express greater preferences for seeking healthcare compared to whites. Worrying about one’s health, having skepticism toward doctors in general, and living in a small city rather than a Metropolitan Area, but not health need, socioeconomic status, or healthcare system characteristics, explain some of the racial and ethnic variation in care-seeking preferences. Overall, we show that even after comprehensively accounting for factors known to influence disparities in utilization, elderly racial and ethnic minorities express greater desire to seek care than whites.

We suggest that future research examine social factors such as unmeasured wealth differences, cultural frameworks, and role identities in healthcare interactions in order to understand differences in care-seeking and, importantly, the relationship between care-seeking and disparities in utilization.

This study represents a systematic analysis of the ways individual, social, and structural context may account for racial and ethnic differences in seeking medical care. We build on healthcare seeking literature by including more comprehensive measures of social relationships, healthcare and system-level characteristics, and exploring a wide variety of health beliefs and expectations. Further, our study investigates care seeking among multiple understudied racial and ethnic groups. We find that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to say they would seek healthcare than whites, suggesting that guidelines promoting the elicitation and understanding of patient preferences in the context of the clinical interaction is an important step toward reducing utilization disparities. These findings also underscore the notion that health policy should go further to address the broader social factors relating to care-seeking in the first place.

The purpose of this paper is to question the conventional wisdom that China fails to produce distinctive innovation; its capabilities limited merely to copying and reverse engineering. The author postulates that the lack of innovation is a delayed activity since China is undergoing a process of building absorptive capacity (AC) as a precursor to innovation.

The author probes this question by drawing on the concept of AC, a competence separate from innovativeness and a precursor to it. By drawing on the AC literature three propositions are established. Subsequently, these propositions are examined, in part, with data drawn from 34 interviews conducted in China with CEOs, other senior corporate officers and government officials. In this way, the author explores the challenges to innovating.

Thomson Reuters 2015 Top Global Innovators report listed no Chinese company among its top 100 list of innovative companies. The author’s belief, however, favors China to become a source of innovation. A positive tilt derived from both interviews and recent reports published by Bain & Company, Booz and Co as well as McKinsey & Co. This evidences, the author argues, China is acquiring AC, a competence independent of innovation but a necessary antecedent to decoding and deploying the intellectual property in its portfolio. The collective effect of this is that the perception of China as a source of innovative activity will show an uptick when the AC threshold is reached.

This is a viewpoint paper grounded on an exploratory study.

Guidance on AC development is valuable to government policy makers promoting innovation in China and those attempting to arbitrage these developments. Similarly, policy makers in competitive nations should also be aware that their innovation-focused industries may need nurturing and bolstering since they may be at risk of being swept away by a tsunami-like innovation wave from China.

This is an original take on the relationship of AC and innovativeness in China. The author argues that in contrast to the conventional wisdom China has the potential for innovativeness.

Using a complexity-informed approach, we aim to understand why introduction of a mobile service delivery model for osteoporosis across diverse organisational and country contexts in the UK National Health Service (NHS) met with variable success.

Six comparative case studies; three prospectively in Scotland using an action research-informed approach; and three retrospectively in England with variable degrees of success. The Non-adoption, Abandonment, Scale-up, Spread and Sustainability framework explored interactions between multi-level contextual factors and their influence on efforts to introduce and sustain services.

Cross-boundary service development was a continuous process of adaptation and evolution in rapidly shifting healthcare context. Whilst the outer healthcare policy context differed significantly across cases, inner contextual features predominated in shaping the success or otherwise of service innovations. Technical and logistical issues, organisational resources, patient and staff actions combined in unpredictable ways to shape the lifecycle of service change. Patient and staff thoughts about place and access to services actively shaped service development. The use of tacit “soft intelligence” and a sense of “chronic unease” emerged as important in successfully navigating around awkward people and places.

“Chronic unease” and “soft intelligence” can be used to help individuals and organisations “tame” complexity, identify hidden threats and opportunities to achieving change in a particular context, and anticipate how these may change over time. Understanding how patients think and feel about where, when and how care is delivered provides unique insights into previously unseen aspects of context, and can usefully inform development and sustainability of patient-centred healthcare services.

This study has uniquely traced the fortunes of a single service innovation across diverse organisational and country contexts. Novel application of the NASSS framework enabled comparative analysis across real-time service change and historical failures. This study also adds to theories of context and complexity by surfacing the neglected role of patients in shaping healthcare context.