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Media reporting is one of many circumstances that nursing homes have to relate to, because of the reputational risks. The aim of this article is to investigate media representations of Swedish nursing homes in relation to reports on an annual national user survey.

The empirical data consist of 381 Swedish newspaper articles about the survey results. The questions guiding the analysis were: what messages on nursing homes are communicated, and how are claims organized in order to appear factual?

The data show that press reports focus on comparisons of care units' survey results, eldercare representatives' explanations of the results, and what improvements will be made in order to do better in the next year's survey. With their use of truth-making rhetoric, press articles construct survey results as credible and valid, thus mirroring user perceptions and ultimately nursing home quality. The selection of nursing home representatives' comments equally reinforces the validity of claims.

Given nursing homes' problems with demonstrating success, the authors argue that media reports on the user survey is a way for eldercare organizations to achieve results in an otherwise resultless field, and while media reports might be seen as prompting change in nursing home care, what is ultimately achieved is the legitimation of a costly survey with low response rate.

In Sweden, the care of older people and people with disabilities is increasingly carried out by informal carers, often family members, who are unpaid and outside a professional or formal framework. While there is an increasing awareness of the role of carers within service systems and their own needs for support, their involvement in research is underexplored. The purpose of this paper is to explore carers’ views and experiences of involvement in research and development (R&D) work.

A qualitative study was conducted, consisting of 12 individual interviews with carers from different local Swedish carer organizations.

Core findings included carers’ discussions of the perceived challenges and benefits of their involvement in research, both generally and more specifically, in the context of their involvement in the development of a national carer strategy.

Limitations included the relative lack of male carer participants and the convenience sample.

Authentic carer involvement in research demands a high level of engagement from researchers during the entire research process. The provided CRAC framework, with reference to the themes community, reciprocity, advocacy and circumstantiality, may help researchers to understand and interpret carer involvement in research and provide the prerequisites for their involvement.

There is a dearth of studies that systematically examine carer involvement in research. This paper attempts to redress this gap by providing a nuanced analysis of carer involvement in R&D work from the perspective of carers themselves.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between social-material interaction and the monetary aspects of business relationships in the construction industry. The authors term the formal financial agreements necessary for such activities “deals”, and this paper seeks to open a research avenue to further investigate the multifaceted interaction processes among business actors. The construction industry is a suitable empirical setting for this purpose; its project-based character and societal position of linking business with the construction of essential community infrastructure imply that different types of money-handling activities need to be managed continuously with both short-term and long-term effects taken into account.

To investigate the deals, i.e., the interface between socio-material interaction and the money-handling processes in the construction industry, as well as studying the potential interrelatedness of deals, the authors performed a case study involving three interrelated housing projects in Uppsala, Sweden.

The study shows that deals do not only have an intricate relationship to the social-material interaction processes among construction actors, but they also become interrelated in specific ways to form “deal structures” as actors engage in different business relationships over time. This means, for instance, that a single deal can enable several other deals, and involved actors have different abilities in performing deals. Hence, most deals are part of a “broader” interaction pattern of social and material resources spanning the organizational borders of individual companies.

Within the industrial marketing and purchasing, the socio-material interaction among actors has been well studied, but less attention has been paid to the monetary dimension and its relationship to the socio-material interaction processes. In particular, this study provides an understanding of monetary agreements in the construction industry.

The purpose of this study was to expand available knowledge on predictors of male inmate violence by examining a large set of variables offered by the importation, deprivation and threat appraisal and coping theories.

A total of 465 male inmates from five medium-security prisons in Wisconsin completed surveys to report demographics, violence, personality, social stressors and healthy coping behaviors to help manage risk by identifying key factors.

Inmates reported more violence with the “imported” characteristics of younger age, less incarceration, no college experience and personality patterns of impulsiveness, hostility and internal locus of control. More violence was reported by inmates with social stressors experienced from family and correctional staff. Additionally, less violence was reported by inmates with more healthy coping behaviors of exercise and social support, especially from family and other inmates.

One must remain uncertain about whether similar patterns of demographics, personality, social stressors and coping behaviors associated with inmate violence would be found in other US prisons. Future research can determine whether similar predictors of violence are found for women inmates and the consideration of ethnicity should be warranted when examining predictors of inmate violence.

Prison administrators can develop new programs to reduce social stressors and increase healthy coping behaviors found by this study to be significantly associated with reduced violence, exercise and social support from other inmates and family.

This research recommends that educating and training correctional staff for a trauma-informed care approach is an integral part of lessening the effects of “pains of imprisonment” on inmate violence and healing the effects of trauma.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first direct comparison of social stressors from other inmates, correctional staff or family members outside the prison as possible predictors of male inmate violence.

The outcome of product development, i.e. the product design, together with the packaging solution, has a great impact on the logistics performance of supply chains. Despite this, packaging has traditionally been given a very modest role in the product development literature as well as in the logistics literature. The aim of this paper is to show how logistics performance and product design can be affected, and improved, by the packaging organization within a company.

A single case study has been conducted at IKEA, including on‐site interviews and review of internal documents. Along with the case study, a literature study has been conducted within the areas of product development, packaging and logistics.

The IKEA case suggests that the packaging function should have a strong link to both the logistics function and the product development function within a product‐developing company to be able to improve the logistics performance.

As the evidence is collected through a single case study, the results are not to be seen as generalizable but should be regarded as a first step to future research within the interface of product development, packaging and logistics.

Packaging and logistics are usually considered late in the product development process with the result that possible logistics solutions are constrained. Through considering “the whole package” – i.e. the product, the packaging and the supply chain characteristics – at an early stage in the product development process, savings can be made.

This paper includes the aspects of product development, logistics and packaging, an interface with very limited research contributions.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the development of the quality movement in Sweden since the mid-20th century. The authors are convinced that a summary of the Swedish quality journey so far will offer important lessons for further quality improvements in Sweden and elsewhere.

The authors study how the quality movement has been included in the industrial agenda and how it has been adopted in student curricula and in research. The authors have a focus on how business leaders have learnt, adopted, adapted and innovated with respect to quality development. often in collaboration with academia.

Although the quality movement has fit well with the Swedish culture and that successful corporate leaders have successfully used the specific cultural characteristics there is still a lot to be learnt with respect to the public sector, where the ideas from the quality movement have problem to overcome institutional barriers.

The study is limited to the Swedish context.

There is a serious need to revitalize the public sector by getting leaders and politicians to understand the need for systematic quality improvement.

If future Swedish achievements with respect to healthcare and other social welfare elements are to once again become world-class, the public sector needs to be open-minded and collaborate with the industrial sector and academia to find cost-effective strategies for making quality improvements. However, the private sector must also be alert not to be overtaken by some highly active Asian countries.

Swedish large companies have been very successful in applying quality leadership – however, in the public sector, this has not been the case. Suggestions for improvement are made.