As the current volunteer work force ages, hospitals are faced with the challenge of evolving their student volunteers into active adult volunteers. Engaged student volunteers may…
Abstract
As the current volunteer work force ages, hospitals are faced with the challenge of evolving their student volunteers into active adult volunteers. Engaged student volunteers may be nurtured by the hospital to become future employees, links to the community or potential donors. Currently, retention rates among student volunteers indicate that once the majority of students begin post secondary education, they discontinue their association with the hospital. Using a scientific marketing research approach, this paper addresses three questions aimed at producing a model to increase long‐term retention among student volunteers. Why do seemingly committed volunteers discontinue their association with the hospital? How does the hospital develop a system that allows and encourages students to maintain contact with the hospital? How can a hospital integrate a virtual volunteering model into its traditional volunteering model? The conclusions lead the reader to reassess the way they view student volunteers and strongly encourage the reader to view the students not just as volunteers, but also as long‐term potential active members of the hospital community.
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Charlotte Brøgger Bond, Mette Jensen Stochkendahl, Karen Søgaard and Lotte Nygaard Andersen
Health ambassadors are co-workers assigned to facilitate healthy choices amongst the ambassadors'' colleagues and are increasingly used in workplace health promotion. In a…
Abstract
Purpose
Health ambassadors are co-workers assigned to facilitate healthy choices amongst the ambassadors'' colleagues and are increasingly used in workplace health promotion. In a municipality in the southern region of Denmark, occupational health and safety (OHS) representatives were appointed as health ambassadors to facilitate the development of healthy lifestyle initiatives at the ambassadors' workplace and the uptake of various health offers from the municipality's workplace health programme amongst the ambassadors' colleagues. The aim of this study was to understand how employees and managers from the municipality experienced the health ambassador-facilitated implementation of the health programme.
Design/methodology/approach
The study was designed as an interview study with (n = 13) semi-structured interviews. Using purposeful sampling, the authors invited participants who held different positions (e.g. managers and regular employees) on two different work teams in the municipality. The work teams (a construction team and a healthcare team) differed in gender profile and work tasks but were both categorised as physically heavy work. Malterud's systematic text condensation was used to devise the strategy for the analysis.
Findings
The authors' findings show that the employees considered health a private matter that the workplace should not interfere with, and this challenged the implementation of the health programme. Secondly, the health ambassadors were not properly trained to facilitate health initiatives amongst the ambassadors' colleagues; instead, the managers were the driving force in the implementation of health initiatives.
Originality/value
The study provides useful insights into the processes of implementing health in the workplace and emphasises the importance of involving employees in design and planning of initiatives for workplace health promotion.
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This chapter argues the importance of ritualised family occasions in the moral economy of intergenerational families. The chapter draws on 34 semi-biographical interviews with 13…
Abstract
This chapter argues the importance of ritualised family occasions in the moral economy of intergenerational families. The chapter draws on 34 semi-biographical interviews with 13 men and 21 women aged 20–90, focussing on stories about troubled or failed rituals. The analysis shows that family members depend on the support and recognition of each other to maintain their moral identities. Ritualised occasions work as magnifying glasses, focussing and intensifying the ongoing relationship work, and forcing family members to take stock and signpost the state of their social bond, and as cultural reference points, providing a window into normative expectations of how parents and adult children should perform relatedness.
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In 1984, Local P‐9 of the United Food and Commercial Worker's Union (UFCW) launched a publicity campaign to protest wage cuts at the George A. Hormel Company of Austin, Minnesota…
Abstract
In 1984, Local P‐9 of the United Food and Commercial Worker's Union (UFCW) launched a publicity campaign to protest wage cuts at the George A. Hormel Company of Austin, Minnesota. This corporate campaign was followed in August, 1985, by a bitter strike. After P‐9 had been striking for nearly a year, the international officers of the UFCW placed the local P‐9 union in trusteeship, replaced its officers, and negotiated a new labor contract.
Georgia P. Saemann, Karen J. Crooker and Laura Jean Kreissl
Maureen Mayhew, Karen J. Grant, Lorena Mota, Setareh Rouhani, Michael C. Klein and Arminée Kazanjian
The purpose of this paper is to describe the patient level characteristics of government-assisted refugees (GARs) who had acquired family doctors after leaving specialized refugee…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe the patient level characteristics of government-assisted refugees (GARs) who had acquired family doctors after leaving specialized refugee clinics (RC).
Design/methodology/approach
A cross-sectional telephone survey of GARs households, three to six years after arrival to British Columbia, that used logistic regression to identify GAR characteristics associated with having a family doctor compared to having no family doctor or remaining at a RC.
Findings
Contact rate was 52 percent. Of 177 interviewed GARs who spoke 24 languages, only 61 percent had secured a family doctor. Only 57 percent were educated; 46 percent spoke English and 40 percent worked consistently. Central Asian or African origin was associated with having a family doctor (OR 10.6 (95 percent CI 3.1-36.8) for RC; OR 10.3 (95 percent CI 2.2-47.8) for no family doctor). Other significant characteristics in the comparison with GARs at a RC included English proficiency (OR 15.6 (95 percent CI 4.3-56.9)), and female sex (OR 4.0 (95 percent CI 1.4-1.1)). When compared to those with no family doctor, additional significant characteristics included Health Authority A compared to B (OR 8.9, 95 percent CI 1.4-55.6) and having recently visited a doctor (OR 7.7 (95 percent CI 1.9-30.7)).
Research limitations/implications
The results of this study are limited to a specific environment and the low contact rate may have resulted in bias.
Originality/value
This study described characteristics of GARs who had successfully transitioned to a family doctor and those who had not. This population is rarely captured in studies because they are difficult to contact, ethnically diverse and not proficient in English.
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Alireza Moghayedi, Kathy Michell, Karen Le Jeune and Mark Massyn
Safety and security (S&S) are critical concerns in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, one of the country’s most crime-ridden cities. The University of Cape Town (UCT)…
Abstract
Purpose
Safety and security (S&S) are critical concerns in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, one of the country’s most crime-ridden cities. The University of Cape Town (UCT), situated on a large, open campus, has experienced increased malefaction. Facilities management (FM) services at universities bear the primary responsibility for providing S&S to their communities. To comprehensively understand and address the community’s demands regarding S&S, the current study was conducted to investigate the challenges specific to open universities. This study aims to determine whether implementing community-based FM (CbFM) principles and using technological innovations could offer a more effective and sustainable solution.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopted interpretivist overarching case study methodology, which is ontologically based. A mixed-method approach was used to incorporate the strengths and limitations of the weaknesses of both methods. The data collection took the form of an online survey of the university community and semi-structured interviews with university executive management to obtain data from the single case study of UCT. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data, and thematic analysis was used to identify emergent themes from the qualitative data.
Findings
The study presents an overall view of the provision of S&S at UCT, the unique challenges faced by management and the main S&S issues affecting the community. Moreover, the study reveals that UCT has implemented community participation processes in the past with limited success. This is because the strategies implemented constitute a narrow perspective of community participation. Therefore, a much smarter and more inclusive perspective using technological innovation is required for successful community participation to occur and to be successfully used in providing S&S toward achieving future-proofing facilities.
Originality/value
This research has demonstrated the influence of CbFM and innovative technologies on the S&S of the open campus. Hence, future-proof facilities can be achieved when FM actively engages university communities in managing campuses through technological innovation.
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The monograph analyses (a) the potential impact of informationtechnology (IT) on organisational issues that directly concern thepersonnel function; (b) the nature of personnel’s…
Abstract
The monograph analyses (a) the potential impact of information technology (IT) on organisational issues that directly concern the personnel function; (b) the nature of personnel’s involvement in the decision making and activities surrounding the choice and implementation of advanced technologies, and (c) their own use of IT in developing and carrying out their own range of specialist activities. The monograph attempts to explain why personnel’s involvement is often late, peripheral and reactive. Finally, an analysis is made of whether personnel specialists – or the Human Resource Management function more generally – will play a more proactive role in relation to such technologies in the future.
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Dillon Berjani, Karen Verduijn and Elco van Burg
Motivated by the need to reflect upon the role of entrepreneurship in the economy and society, we seek to understand entrepreneurship as having the potential to “produce” new…
Abstract
Motivated by the need to reflect upon the role of entrepreneurship in the economy and society, we seek to understand entrepreneurship as having the potential to “produce” new possibilities for living when departing from a critical awareness. We consider existing critical entrepreneurship research as necessary but insufficient in adequately bringing about new perspectives of entrepreneurship as it often tends to be a position “against entrepreneurship,” discrediting the phenomenon from the many possible values it may invoke. We suggest affirmative critique (Dey & Steyaert, 2018; Weiskopf & Steyaert, 2009) to “turn critique into creativity,” thus making critique productive and exploring how actual transformation (e.g., alternatives) can be invoked when adopting such a stance.