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This study aims to conduct a comprehensive analysis of poverty salaries and minimum wage in light of virtue ethics and a new natural law perspective on work.

Existing approaches to poverty wages are critically examined, including the nonworseness claim and legal minimalism. This paper introduces a more nuanced framework, taking into account the concepts of merit and participation in light of virtue ethics.

We argue that the fairness of minimum wage policies can be assessed as a matter of contributive-distributive justice by considering individual contributions to an organization's outcomes within an approach that provides a robust foundation for reconciling the dignity of work with the operational realities of organizations.

Empirical research is needed to validate the practical application of the proposed conceptual framework for addressing poverty wages.

The paper provides better decisional arguments for employers concerned with poverty salaries in their organizations considering the moral dimensions of wage policies and employee well-being, offering guidance for potential adjustments in compensation practices. It also contributes to the discourse on social and economic justice by emphasizing the moral obligations of organizations in fostering a just and dignified work environment without the employee's participation.

This paper presents a novel approach that blends virtue ethics and new natural law principles, emphasizing the moral responsibilities of employers and organizations in addressing the conditions of the working poor. It also highlights the potential for a “lesser evil” situation, morally acceptable when it serves as a transitional phase aimed at improving working conditions and employee well-being.

This chapter is an exploratory study of business ethics as it relates to family firms; it primarily aims to explore virtue ethics as an alternative proposal for the ethical concerns that family firms face in their management, thus overcoming the limitations of relevant business ethics approaches and integrating them into an overarching paradigm. Ethics can be classified into three main streams: (1) deontology, (2) utilitarianism, and (3) virtue ethics. The former two approaches have been widely used in the realm of business and family firms for many years and they tend to instrumentalize ethics for business purposes. Yet, they are mostly powerless to explain and promote the ethical concerns surrounding the family firm’s culture. Virtue ethics regained philosophical interest in the second half of the twentieth century, shifting the focus of morality from “the right thing to do” to the “best way to live.” By bringing together two consolidated research fields, family firms and virtue ethics, this chapter contributes a rich perspective to current research in both fields and opens up new ways of answering many of the cultural questions that family firms bring to the table.

Purpose – This chapter sketches the major historical shifts in American circumcision discourse and examines the sociopolitics of those shifts.

Methodology/approach – The chapter centers on a critical analysis of competing narratives and knowledge claims about circumcision. It re-examines these narratives and claims, most of which are packaged in a rhetoric of health, specifically for their political valence.

Findings – The medical necessity of circumcision in the United States cannot be ascertained without attending to the disciplinary systems designed to produce and maintain religious, sexual and other cultural norms.

Contribution to the field – The chapter provides a clear and focused synthesis of many different literatures and contentions about circumcision that have yet to be brought together into a single narrative accessible for students and scholars of the medical humanities and medical politics.

This paper aims to investigate the consequences of the coercive regulations for performance measurement and comparability that strengthened regional health authority’s control over organizations’ activities on management accountants’ relationship with clinician managers, who are the recipients of accounting information for decisional processes in health-care organizations. To achieve this aim, the research focuses on management accountants’ perception of their role and whether they perceive role conflict and role ambiguity.

A case study was undertaken in a public university hospital in the Emilia-Romagna region, Italy; 9 management accountants and 11 clinician managers were interviewed and secondary data analyzed.

Management accountants show low capabilities to support clinician managers’ decisional processes. Following the enactment of regulations, management accountants perform their role with a primary focus on functional responsibility. The focus on the provision of information to address regulations influenced management accountants’ capability to act as business partners in the organization. Because of the conflicting information needs from regulations and clinician managers, management accountants experience role conflict and ambiguity.

The paper has implications for policymakers, underlining the consequences of strict regulations on management accountants’ role. It also emphasizes the importance of revising accounting techniques to satisfy both regional requirements and clinician managers’ needs for decision-making.

The article contributes to knowledge related to the role of management accountants in health care. It explores, in particular, the consequences of coercive regulations in health-care organizations, adding knowledge to a field that remains quite unexplored.

Purpose – This paper focuses on efficiency as a central theme of the Italian health care reforms, combining macrolevel policies with microlevel (i.e., operating room) perceptions of the concept.

Design/Methodology/Approach – According to the phenomenographic approach, this analysis investigates how the components of a surgical team (22 semistructured interviews) experience efficiency in their daily workflows.

Findings – The main findings show that the concept of efficiency is multidimensional. According to participants’ perspective, several categories of efficiency collected in an outcome space emphasize an holistic view of efficiency driving health policies and strategies.

Social implications – The suggestion of further relationships between perspectives and other constructs (i.e., quality, safety, patient focus, process) at micro and macro level could enhance the impact of health reforms.

Originality/Value – A qualitative approach conducted at microlevel help to recognize the phenomenon (of efficiency), engaging the individual conception that practitioners have of the health efficiency.

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the government-incentivised i-Ready programme in alleviating youth unemployment in terms of the transition from education to the labour force market.

Focus group discussions are conducted to reveal the perceptions and experiences of the apprentices in the i-Ready programme. The SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis framework is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the i-Ready apprenticeship model in building a future-ready human capital.

The study found that the JobCentre agency utilises online recruitment technology and proactively promotes work-based training in the public and private sectors. However, the apprenticeship still needs to improve programme coordination and provide an inclusive regulatory framework. The study also discovered that internships could enhance in-demand skills training and establish apprentices as a crisis-recovery workforce.

The findings are based on a small-scale focus group study and represent the current state of the i-Ready programme. Future research integrating data from multiple stakeholders is recommended to provide a more thorough picture.

In terms of efficacy, the findings indicate that i-Ready has made significant contributions to local employment and, with certain modifications, is on the correct route to producing future-ready youth.

To date, there has been no research on the effectiveness of the national i-Ready programme system as a strategy that may help alleviate Brunei's youth unemployment crisis.