Angelo Rosa, Nicola Capolupo, Emilia Romeo, Olivia McDermott, Jiju Antony, Michael Sony and Shreeranga Bhat
This study aims to fully assess the readiness for Lean Six Sigma (LSS) and Quality Performance Improvement (QPI) in an Italian Public Healthcare ecosystem.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to fully assess the readiness for Lean Six Sigma (LSS) and Quality Performance Improvement (QPI) in an Italian Public Healthcare ecosystem.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing from previously established survey development and adaptation protocols, a replication study was carried out; Lean, Six Sigma and QPI were extracted and validated through confirmatory factor analysis in an Italian Public Healthcare setting, with a sample of health professionals from the Campania region.
Findings
This study reports the adaptation of an existing scale for measuring LSS and QPI in an Italian public healthcare organisation. This analysis extracts six conceptual domains and constitutes an original adaptation of an existing scale to assess the readiness to adopt Lean, Six Sigma and Quality Performance in Italian Public Health Organizations. The constructs show strong levels of internal consistency, as demonstrated by each item factor loading and each subscale reliability.
Practical implications
Managers, policymakers and academics can employ the proposed tool to assess the public healthcare ecosystem’s capability to implement LSS initiatives and strategies to improve quality performance.
Originality/value
This is one of the first studies to assess cross-regional organisational readiness for LSS and QPI in an Italian Public Healthcare environment at this scope and level.
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Maria Vincenza Ciasullo, Alexander Douglas, Emilia Romeo and Nicola Capolupo
Lean Six Sigma in public and private healthcare organisations has received considerable attention over the last decade. Nevertheless, such process improvement methodologies are…
Abstract
Purpose
Lean Six Sigma in public and private healthcare organisations has received considerable attention over the last decade. Nevertheless, such process improvement methodologies are not generalizable, and their effective implementation relies on contextual variables. The purpose of this study is to explore the readiness of Italian hospitals for Lean Six Sigma and Quality Performance Improvement (LSS&QPI), with a focus on gender differences.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey comprising 441 healthcare professionals from public and private hospitals was conducted. Multivariate analysis of variance was used to determine the mean scores on the LSS&QPI dimensions based on hospital type, gender and their interaction.
Findings
The results showed that public healthcare professional are more aware of quality performance improvement initiatives than private healthcare professionals. Moreover, gender differences emerged according to the type of hospital, with higher awareness for men than women in public hospitals, whereas for private hospitals the opposite was true.
Research limitations/implications
This study contributes to the Lean Six Sigma literature by focusing on the holistic assessment of LSS&QPI implementation.
Practical implications
This study informs healthcare managers about the revolution within healthcare organisations, especially public ones. Healthcare managers should spend time understanding Lean Six Sigma as a strategic orientation to promote the “lean hospital”, improving processes and fostering patient-centredness.
Originality/value
This is a preliminary study focussing on analysing inter-relationship between perceived importance of soft readiness factors such as gender dynamics as a missing jigsaw in the current literature. In addition, the research advances a holistic assessment of LSS&QPI, which sets it apart from the studies on single initiatives that have been documented to date.
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Anna Fyrberg-Yngfalk, Bernard Cova, Stefano Pace and Per Skålén
Confessions are said to be important for members’ tribal experiences and they are usually ascribed religious meanings in existing research on consumer tribes. This suggests that…
Abstract
Purpose
Confessions are said to be important for members’ tribal experiences and they are usually ascribed religious meanings in existing research on consumer tribes. This suggests that confessions have a regulative role for tribal life. By employing the Foucauldian notion of pastoral power, the present study explores confession practices and examines how control is manifested.
Methodology
The study is based on a netnographic study and analysis of tribal members’ confessions across three online consumer tribes devoted to opera (Loggionisti, who are opera aficionados of the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy), sports (football and hockey fans of Djurgården, Sweden), and cars (Alfa Romeo owners).
Findings
We demonstrate how confessions align consumers with the common tribe ethos and how this constitutes members into various subject positions, which are fundamental social processes for reinforcing the tribe. More specifically, it demonstrates four types of subject positions: the ‘pastor’, ‘regular sheep’, ‘good sheep’ and ‘black sheep’, and how these subject positions regulate the actions of tribe members.
Research implications
The present study theorizes how control is manifested and facilitated in consumer tribes. The study also explicates the confession and its role as a religious regulating practice fundamental for the life of a consumer tribe.
Practical implications
Community managers can recognize the different subject positions that emerge within a community and help facilitate the interactions among community members.
Originality/value of chapter
Previous studies are silent about how confessions reproduce control in consumer tribes. The present study highlights confession practices and the constitution of subject positions, which regulate as well as reinforce consumer tribes.
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A MAN'S LAST WORDS carry presumption of credibility not associated with utterances made earlier in life. William Shakespeare acknowledged this credibility in at least three of his…
Abstract
A MAN'S LAST WORDS carry presumption of credibility not associated with utterances made earlier in life. William Shakespeare acknowledged this credibility in at least three of his plays. When the physician, Cornelius, told Cymbeline that the Queen had confessed that she loved him not, Cymbeline declared, ‘She alone knew this;/And, but she spoke it dying, I would not/Believe her lips in opening it.’
Carlo Ciccarelli and Stefano Fenoaltea
This paper presents the first annual estimates for the rail-guided vehicles industry in post-Unification Italy. Nationally, maintenance was naturally trend-dominated, while new…
Abstract
This paper presents the first annual estimates for the rail-guided vehicles industry in post-Unification Italy. Nationally, maintenance was naturally trend-dominated, while new construction followed a Kuznets cycle; overall, maintenance exceeded new construction, while freight cars represented the largest component of the latter. The limited production of locomotives over the initial decades seems tied to high raw material costs rather than to technical inadequacy. Regionally, new construction was concentrated in the industrial triangle, and in Campania; maintenance was more widely diffused, as repair work tended to follow local traffic, but it too was largely absent from the swath of mostly Southern regions without major urban centers.
Carlo Ciccarelli and Stefano Fenoaltea
This article presents estimates of social-overhead construction in Italy's regions. The new-construction series point to a largely common cycle in non-railway work, and largely…
Abstract
This article presents estimates of social-overhead construction in Italy's regions. The new-construction series point to a largely common cycle in non-railway work, and largely idiosyncratic bursts of railway building. Maintenance doubles as an index of the underlying stock, which cannot be calculated from the flows alone; one finds limited convergence, and only in railway infrastructure. Industrial and overall growth are increasingly correlated both with the initial stock, and with its increment. Direct measures of welfare improvements are uncertain, but the relative increases in draftees’ mean heights correlate in particular with social-overhead investment.
Carlo Cafiero, Monica Palladino, Claudio Marcianò and Giuseppa Romeo
This paper aims to provide evidence on the extent to which traditional agri-food products (TFPs) constitute a leverage to promote tourism in the province of Reggio Calabria…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to provide evidence on the extent to which traditional agri-food products (TFPs) constitute a leverage to promote tourism in the province of Reggio Calabria, Italy, and discuss ways in which community-led local development governance institutions might enhance it.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on a review of existing information on Calabrian TFPs to classify them by area of production and identify those that are specific or relatively small areas, in addition to a qualitative analysis of the content of the texts of a sample of websites promoting tourism in the region.
Findings
Though food is one of the leverages used to promote tourism in Calabria, TFPs are not yet sufficiently exploited to attract tourists to the province of Reggio Calabria, in spite of their potential as a vital expression of local culture and traditions.
Research limitations/implications
The selection of the websites used in the study may not be exhaustive of the full spectrum of Web-based promotion of tourism in Calabria.
Practical implications
The results provide useful insights to public and private institutions responsible for rural development and tourism promotion in Calabria. The database on the TFPs of the province of Reggio Calabria permits an easy reading of the geographical distribution of the different categories of products, useful as a resource for further studies and as a local development policy support tool.
Social implications
Promoting a form of culturally sensitive, food-based tourism in the interior areas of Calabria may constitute an important factor to revert the trend towards impoverishment, migration of young people and depopulation of the interior areas of Calabria. This is a particularly sensitive issue in Italy today, in view of the difficulties that other strategies pursued in the area are facing.
Originality/value
Existing literature on typical food products in Italy focuses on those labelled by denomination of origin and geographic protection. This is one of the first papers focusing on TFPs labelled as Prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali in the Italian legislation. By exploring the role of local food and traditions in promoting tourism, this paper expands the scope of existing studies of rural tourism and on rural development in Calabria, and beyond.
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Vladimir M. Moskovkin, Emilia A. Bocharova and Oksana V. Balashova
– The purpose of this paper is to introduce and develop the methodology of journal benchmarking.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce and develop the methodology of journal benchmarking.
Design/methodology/approach
The journal benchmarking method is understood to be an analytic procedure of continuous monitoring and comparing of the advance of specific journal(s) against that of competing journals in the same subject area, together with the application of best practices defined in order to improve a journal's own advance and gain a position among leading scientific journals.
Findings
As a realization of this method, it is suggested to build up a journal scoreboard, which is a matrix of journal indicators, distributed for different journals. For the journal scoreboard on the subject of lasers and optics (36 journals, five indicators) a series of regression equations was built up that allow forecasts to be made for journals’ impact factor levels, depending on the International Collaboration and Reference per Document indicators included in the SCIMAGO database.
Practical implications
The detailed journal scoreboard and prediction calculations allow elaborating strategies and policies for the promotion of journals in the Web of Science and Scopus databases.
Originality/value
The research presents the building up of a journal scoreboard in combination with prediction calculations that can be helpful for improving journal positioning in international Scientometric databases.
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Veronica Gabrielli and Ilaria Baghi
The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of a shift in brand architecture strategy on corporate brand equity. The change is from a house of brands to a branded house…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of a shift in brand architecture strategy on corporate brand equity. The change is from a house of brands to a branded house approach in which the corporate brand is prominent. The study proposes two alternative approaches in order to explore how consumers build the corporate brand equity from single product brand equities in the portfolio: the dilution process or the bookkeeping/subtyping cognitive process.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected through a questionnaire administered to 150 Italian consumers. All the items were related to a real corporate brand – Procter & Gamble (P&G) – and to seven of the product brands in its portfolio. The choice of the Italian context and the P&G brand was motivated by the fact that P&G has recently adopted a shift in its brand strategy, starting to give prominence to the corporate brand in its communication campaign in Italy.
Findings
The dilution process does not describe the effect of a change in strategy on corporate brand equity, but the bookkeeping/subtyping cognitive process does. This suggests that consumers tend not to revise corporate brand equity when they perceive many product brands behind it.
Originality/value
The value of the present paper is to deal with a relevant and current topic: the brand architecture dynamism. This research is an exploratory step to satisfy the need for theory-based research on consumer responses to the shift in the brand portfolio architecture strategy.