Search results

A seemingly obvious solution to improve resilience of built structures facing natural hazards is enhanced structural integrity. One program designed to achieve this is the building code effectiveness grading schedule (BCEGS) which rates communities on the strength and enforcement of local building codes. However, little is known on how well this program has fared in terms of community participation. The purpose of this study is to use the BCEGS program in Florida (a hurricane at-risk state) to provide tangible evidence of whether participatory achievement occurred and identify characteristics that predict high performance in the program.

Data is used from the Insurance Services Office, a division of Verisk Analytics to compare characteristics of communities with high levels of participation to communities with lower levels of participation. This is done using descriptive statistics and regression models.

Communities more likely to have high BCEGS ratings are more urban, have higher wealth and a younger, more educated population. Discussed also is the role risk exposure and public policy play in both maintaining higher ratings and overall improvement in BCEGS ratings across time.

Identifying what motivates communities to enhance their construction standards is a useful tool in attracting interest to enhance resilience. The results show that resilience can be improved by public policy initiatives and knowledge by communities of their risk profile.

BCEGS data is proprietary, so no study of this type has been conducted on what motivates communities to adopt higher standards in the strength and enforcement of local building codes.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which a cause-brand alliance (CBA) leads to improved attitude toward cause-brand alliance, which in turn leads to improved brand identification.

The approach uses a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design to examine the interaction effect of the brand ally, the non-profit ally, and the perception of cause controversy on a customer’s attitude toward the CBA, which in turn affects identification with the brand ally.

On average, customers’ perception of cause controversy influences attitude toward the CBA and subsequently the level of identification with the brand ally. When a non-profit organization is connected to a controversial issue, managerial options for building a successful CBA are more limited than when the non-profit is noncontroversial.

We contribute to consumer learning theory in the context of CBA research by identifying an important boundary condition – perceived cause controversy. Perceived cause controversy impedes the customer’s learning about partners in CBA. Moreover, fit and cue consistency are separate constructs.

CBAs help build customer brand identification. Brand managers must include the customer’s perceived cause controversy, the ally’s unique information, and the customer’s attitude toward the nonprofit in the decision calculus. Brands have an opportunity to demonstrate corporate social responsibility and build identification by helping a less well-established nonprofit to build positive customer attitudes. If the non-profit is linked to controversy, this opportunity is constrained.

A boundary condition-perceived cause controversy influences how the partners in a CBA differentially influence the customer’s attitude toward the CBA and, ultimately, brand identification.

The PMI Risk Framework (PRF) is introduced as a guide to classifying and identifying risks which can be the source of post-merger integration (PMI) failure — commonly referred to as “culture clash.” To provide managers with actionably insight, PRF dissects PMI risk into specific relationship-oriented phenomena, critical to outcomes and which should be addressed during PMI. This framework is a conceptual and theory-grounded integration of numerous perspectives, such as organizational psychology, group dynamics, social networks, transformational change, and nonlinear dynamics. These concepts are unified and can be acted upon by integration managers. Literary resources for further exploration into the underlying aspects of the framework are provided. The PRF places emphasis on critical facets of PMI, particularly those which are relational in nature, pose an exceptionally high degree of risk, and are recurrent sources of PMI failure. The chapter delves into relationship-oriented points of failure that managers face when overseeing PMI by introducing a relationship-based, PMI risk framework. Managers are often not fully cognizant of these risks, thus fail to manage them judiciously. These risks do not naturally abide by common scholarly classifications and cross disciplinary boundaries; they do not go unrecognized by scholars, but until the introduction of PRF the risks have not been assimilated into a unifying framework. This chapter presents a model of PMI risk by differentiating and specifying numerous types of underlying human-relationship-oriented risks, rather than considering PMI cultural conflict as a monolithic construct.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions are reflected on the official corporate Facebook pages from 259 organizations on Fortune magazine’s Global 500 list. This is the first attempt to create a conceptualization of Hofstede’s dimensions for organizational social media use.

To determine how Facebook is used by the Global 500 corporations, a content analysis was carried out based on the 2013 listing of the highest revenue corporations throughout the world. As a research method, content analysis allows researchers to examine the actual practices of communication by focusing on the information provided through textual and visual messages.

The results paint a mixed picture indicating that the global nature of these corporations is echoed in a somewhat similar overall presence on Facebook; but when the individual elements (About Us, updates, and media) are examined, statistical differences emerge in relation to the reflection of the cultural dimensions.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work to match Facebook behaviors with Hofstede’s dimensions. This work needs to be replicated with other organizations to determine its staying power. In addition, future research might tap into agency and any consciousness on the part of social media managers in a specific direction. Depending on those findings, they might make important statements on the emergence of a global social media culture.

This paper problematises the experience of trainee teachers in further education (FE) colleges in England. It focuses on colleges as employers and developers of their own teaching staff, 90 per cent of whom are trained “in‐service”, while in paid employment. The paper aims to explore how a shift towards more expansive workplace practices could better develop these teachers and contribute towards enhancing the learning culture in FE.

The paper draws on data gathered from two instrumental case studies of FE colleges focusing on the experience of in‐service teachers training in the workplace. Using Fuller and Unwin's expansive‐restrictive framework, the paper draws on qualitative data from interviews with trainee teachers, teacher educators and human resource managers. It critiques the current practice of colleges as employers and considers alternative strategies for workforce development.

This research finds that in‐service trainee FE teachers are expected to cope with heavy workloads almost immediately upon commencing employment and that these trainees are required to quickly make the transition to full practitioner. Consequently, opportunities to develop are restricted, often leading to conservative practice. There is evidence of the prioritisation of expedience over the development of professional knowledge and creative practice, a scenario that this paper challenges.

This is a small‐scale qualitative research project based upon two colleges within a large and diverse sector of employment. As such, its findings do not claim to be representative of workplace practices experienced in all FE colleges. However, the research gives informed insight into some of the challenges trainee teachers are likely to face during the early stages of their employment.

The paper identifies strategies to challenge current practice and to enhance the work‐based learning experience of trainee teachers.

This paper considers FE colleges primarily as employers and explores the consequences of their employment practices on new teachers as both trainees and employees.

Workload is a critical concept in the evaluation of performance and quality in healthcare systems, but its definition relies on the perspective (e.g. individual clinician-level vs unit-level workload) and type of available metrics (e.g. objective vs subjective measures). The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of objective measures of workload associated with direct care delivery in tertiary healthcare settings, with a focus on measures that can be obtained from electronic records to inform operationalization of workload measurement.

Relevant papers published between January 2008 and July 2018 were identified through a search in Pubmed and Compendex databases using the Sample, Phenomenon of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research Type framework. Identified measures were classified into four levels of workload: task, patient, clinician and unit.

Of 30 papers reviewed, 9 used task-level metrics, 14 used patient-level metrics, 7 used clinician-level metrics and 20 used unit-level metrics. Key objective measures of workload include: patient turnover (n=9), volume of patients (n=6), acuity (n=6), nurse-to-patient ratios (n=5) and direct care time (n=5). Several methods for operationalization of these metrics into measurement tools were identified.

This review highlights the key objective workload measures available in electronic records that can be utilized to develop an operational approach for quantifying workload. Insights gained from this review can inform the design of processes to track workload and mitigate the effects of increased workload on patient outcomes and clinician performance.

Many multi‐business companies apply one performance management approach to all their businesses despite differing needs. This study proposes a flexible approach to managing performance that allows for variation across businesses and over time.

Based on a study of over 100 consulting projects in performance management and interviews at 15 major organisations.

The best way to simplify performance management is to recognize that it has been approached from the dimensions of people and process for years. The people dimension considers how to get the best out of people and the way they interact with each other. The process dimension is about formal mechanisms for executing strategy and tracking the more quantifiable aspects of performance.

An insightful framework to help companies develop the right kind of approach to managing performance.

Based on unique and extensive consulting experience and research data. Distinguishes between performance per se and the process of managing performance. A new framework that combines people and process dimension for selecting the right approach to managing performance.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine student interns’ experience by considering perceived value, satisfaction and loyalty in the context of the Disney College Program internship experience for international students. The study incorporates the perceived value of the learning experience based on the interrelationships with satisfaction and loyalty intentions for students from various hospitality colleges in Korea and China.

Asian university students who had completed an international internship experience responded to a post-internship survey. The survey gauged the students’ perception of their internship experience, overall satisfaction, loyalty intentions and value dimensions. The proposed model was estimated by using partial least squares path modeling.

The findings of the hypotheses testing show that the value interns get and give is a significant indicator of satisfaction and loyalty intentions. The value of an international internship experience, especially the get component, has a significant effect on the students’ loyalty intentions for their international internship experience and satisfaction with their experience. Overall, students demonstrate a high degree of attitudinal loyalty.

No other study has examined international student interns’ value, satisfaction and loyalty intentions perceptions of the Disney College Program internship program. Students’ loyalty is expressed mainly as favorable word of mouth for their university and the internship program. They recommend not only their university but also the international internship program in which they participated. They also recommend the internship university to other students.