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Research in educational administration is in need of a general theoretical perspective which could be used to guide the development of an empirical base for a comprehensive, ecologically valid, theory of administration. This paper presents a description of Roger Barker's Behavior Setting Theory and attempts to argue its utility as a broad‐based conceptual framework for research on educational administration.

This study explores the effect of language on service satisfaction among Finland-Swedes, a national minority language group in Finland, in the context of early childhood education. Models of public service satisfaction hold standard process and outcome related factors, such as availability and quality, as drivers of the satisfaction. However, although research has shown significant variation in satisfaction between different groups of citizens (race, ethnicity, age etc.), research has largely overlooked group specific factors as explanations for the satisfaction.

A randomized survey experiment with a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design analyzed the impacts of language, service accessibility, and quality on service satisfaction. The data was analyzed with ANOVA.

The results revealed that language significantly impacts Swedish speakers’ satisfaction, suggesting that for minority groups, language may override typical satisfaction determinants like quality and accessibility. Interestingly, special linguistic needs are relatively more pertinent in low-quality services than in higher-quality ones.

The study shows how group related factors of public service, in our case language, in an important factor explaining satisfaction with the service. The findings have implications for the literature on citizens’ satisfaction with public services with demographic and identity facets, especially in a typical Nordic welfare state.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, through a comparative analysis, the applicability of lean manufacturing practices, such as value stream mapping (VSM), for productivity improvement in recycling centres (RCs) aided by multi-criteria decision analysis.

The study is carried out in five RCs that sort the municipal solid waste of Porto Alegre, one of the main cities in Brazil. Since all of the centres present their labour composed by poor communities’ members, cultural and social characteristics may represent an incremental challenge for lean implementation. Further, these centres are organised in cooperatives, in which decisions are taken through a participatory way and all their members are entitled to vote, undermining and retarding the decision-making process.

The integration of a multi-criteria decision-making tool to the lean practices enables the prioritisation of improvements, complementing the final stage of VSM. In particular, this contribution becomes especially important in cooperatives managed by community, where decisions are often complex and time-consuming. Finally, despite the increasing pressure for better performance of RCs, the existent mindset is still far from the private sector, where lean practices were conceived. Further, the findings suggest that, despite processes similarities, it is not feasible to declare the existence of a one-best practice to such scenario.

In theoretical terms, the authors demonstrate through a multi-case study the adequacy of analytic hierarchy process as a decision analysis tool complementary to the VSM, enabling a broader perspective about this subject. Concerning the practical contribution, the comprehension of the adaptation needs for lean practices implementation within the production context of solid waste RCs provides a framework with guidelines for this sector, when incorporating lean activities. Lean practitioners and eventual municipal authorities involved in improving productivity of community-managed RCs might benefit from this framework, since they will be able to emphasise the development of recommended and already tested lean practices that tend to improve their operational performance.

This paper aims to identify conditions affecting sustainability of Lean implementations in Swedish psychiatric healthcare, from a socio-technical perspective.

Longitudinal focus group interviews were conducted with 24 first-line managers within Swedish psychiatric healthcare. The analysis was made using Cherns’ ten socio-technical principles and a framework for sustainable development work in healthcare.

The most critical socio-technical principles for a sustainable Lean implementation were boundary location; power and authority; and compatibility. At hospital level, socio-technical principles were inhibited by the weak ownership of the Lean implementation. However, strong ownership at division level meant the same principles were supported. Unclear goals made follow-ups difficult which had negative effects on the learning processes in the Lean implementation. The role and responsibility of first-line managers were unclear in that they perceived they lacked power and authority resulting in negative effects on the participation – an important sustainability concept.

Empirically based papers assessing Lean implementations in psychiatry are rare. This study is a contribution to the research area of sustainable Lean implementations in healthcare. The practical implication of this study is that decision makers, senior managers, first-line managers and psychiatrists can be supported in reaching sustainable implementations of Lean.

The chapter attempts to evaluate the utility of applying multi-level governance outside of the EU, and also outside of the group of democratic states, to states that have defied the third wave of democratization and that are characterized by a so-called new authoritarianism. The case is the People’s Republic of China, and the focus falls on policy-making and implementation in the field of hydropower with special attention to the issue area of environmental protection.

The chapter draws on the notion of scales and indigenous Chinese governance concepts and brings these into a conversation with the concept of multi-level governance. Case studies on hydropower decision-making in China contribute empirical data in order to investigate the utility of multi-level governance in the Chinese governance context.

The chapter argues that if multi-level governance is to have utility in other cultural contexts it needs to move away from a consideration of pre-given scales as locus of authority and consider indigenous governance concepts and notions of scale, and it crucially needs to map power relationships in the making and implementation of policies in order to reach analytical depth.

The case of China shows that authoritarian regimes can be analysed in terms of multiple levels as authoritarianism no longer automatically implies strict top-down entities. Instead, autocracies can be highly fragmented and subject to complex decision-making processes that can arise during processes of administrative reform. This can lead to vibrant and reflexive systems of governance that exhibit adaptive skills necessary to ensure regime survival amidst a continuously diversifying society and changing external circumstances. As a consequence, a research programme looking at the new authoritarianism from a multi-level governance perspective has the capacity to uncover and describe new forms of governance, by bringing the concept into a conversation with indigenous governance concepts.

In China, informal networks between the energy bureaucracy and hydropower developers determine the hydropower decision-making process. This is particularly detrimental at a time when the Chinese government emphasizes the importance of the rule of law and social stability. Informal networks in which key government agencies are involved actively thwart the attempt of creating reliable institutions and more transparent and accountable processes of decision-making within the authoritarian governance framework.

The findings show the dominance of informal networks versus the formal decision-making process. This sidelines the environmental bureaucracy and fails to fully realize the importance of public input into the decision-making process as one potential element of institutionalized conflict resolution.

The chapter builds on existing multi-level governance approaches and fuses them with notions of scales and indigenous Chinese governance concepts in order to enable the applicability of the concept of multi-level governance outside of its area of origin. This advances the explanatory depth and theoretical reach of multi-level governance.

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is basically a synergistic association between two or more industries or businesses wherein the waste or by-product of one industry becomes the raw material or immediate material of another industry. IS is believed to bring in significant benefits to the organizations. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the competitiveness attained through IS.

Analytic hierarchy process was adopted to analyze the various organizational competitiveness of IS implementation. The conceptual model was developed to understand the interrelationship between 14 outcomes and 5 organizational competitiveness which are identified from the literature review. The attainment of these five organizational competitiveness was evaluated by computing the global priority score of the outcomes.

The global priority score suggests that the organizational collaboration (0.19) is the important output. Further, collective learning and growth (44 percent) have been identified as the important competitiveness attained through the implementation of IS.

The relationship matrix developed can be used by the practicing managers/researchers to understand the various interactions. Thus, systematic decision making and guidance for future implementation studies will be ensured.

In the past, few authors discussed the conceptualization of IS; however, the impact of IS on the organizational performance was not extensively studied. Therefore, a conceptual model was proposed to analyze the attainment of various competitiveness through the participation of industrial symbiosis network. Further, based on the computed scores, the relationship matrix developed between outcomes and organizational competitiveness is one of the significant contributions of this work.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether chief executive officer (CEOs) are paid for the systematic and/or unsystematic risks and whether there is any optimum risk premium level in the executive pay.

Firm and year fixed effect panel data regression was used to estimate the relationship between total CEO compensation and systematic (market) and unsystematic (firm) risks.

There is no nexus between CEO pay and unsystematic (diversifiable) risk; however, the association between CEO compensation and systematic (undiversifiable) risk is positively significant in line with agency theory. Moreover, it is revealed that this positive relationship has an optimum point (curvilinear).

This paper contributes to the controversial argument in the literature by investigating the situation in the Swiss market. Switzerland is an exemplary country because of its direct democracy (consensus) structure for executive pay. This study is limited by the fact that only total CEO compensation is analyzed.

As a practical implication, it is shown that after the optimal point, the higher compensation does not motivate the CEOs to take higher risks and does not provide the organizations with any additional benefit.

The finding of this study supports agency theory’s risk premium assumption and provides additional evidence to the contradictory results in the literature with a new country setting that has paramount importance in executive compensation phenomena. It is a comparative finding with prior literature also outlines the future research area in the risk and compensation literature.

This paper aims to investigate whether executive compensation, corporate social responsibility (CSR)-based incentives, environmental social and governance (ESG) performance and firm performance are the significant predictors of CSR committees, in addition to CEO, firm and corporate governance characteristics, from the tenet of stakeholder and managerial power theories.

Switzerland is an exemplary country from the perspective of corporate governance and executive compensation. This empirical study includes a panel data set of listed Swiss companies, so fixed-effect logistic regression has been used.

It has been found that the companies that offer CSR-based incentives and higher compensation to their CEOs and have better ESG performance are more likely to have CSR committees.

This empirical paper fills the gap in the literature, guides practitioners about the factors that influence the creation and efficiency of CSR committees, and inspires regulatory bodies to ponder on a mandatory CSR committee to form resilient and sustainable organizations worldwide.

COVID-19 has re-emphasized the prominence of sustainability and the stakeholder approach. Thus, this paper indicates that CSR committees require the adaption and implementation of a holistic sustainability policy that integrates both external and internal factors and thereby provides a whole process for sustainability issues.

The impact of CSR committees on corporate social performance (CSP) has already been investigated. However, the predictors of CSR committees have been less scrutinized in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is twofold, first, to shed light on the different patterns in which international marketing and purchasing (IMP) and national innovation system (NIS) were embedded into the Swedish policy context, where the first approach must be regarded as a relative failure and the second a success, second, to compare their analytical lenses and policy implications through the study of a number of seminal texts of the two approaches.

First, a Swedish case is selected since it provides an example of a policy context where both approaches have been considered and used as sources of inspiration for the design of policy measures. Second, the authors study a selection of the seminal texts of the two approaches in order to identify their basic theoretical assumptions. The emphasis here lies on how the schools view the importance of relations between companies, how they perceive the innovation process, their attitude towards the neoclassical market model and the explicit and implicit implications of their theoretical assumptions for policy.

IMP and its notion of the heterogeneity of resources can provide a much more context grounded analysis than is possible within the NIS/Lundvall framework. However, it requires deep contextual knowledge of individual companies, industries and national and international settings to understand the value of these resources. IMP is “tied to the ground” and radically critical of the atomistic abstractions characterising the neoclassical market view. NIS, on the other hand, requires contextual knowledge on a more superficial level and can co-exist with neoclassical economics.

While the authors mainly focus on IMP and NIS, which date back to the 1980s, a later wave of concepts from the 1990s and onwards involve clusters (Porter, 1990), and triple helix (Etzkowitz and Leidesdorff, 1998). However, these latecomers share with NIS the ability to co-exist with neoclassical economics.

IMP requires high demands on any policy maker that would adopt it, in terms of acquiring deep contextual knowledge and giving up established views on how the economy works

The paper reveal that while both IMP and NIS like to present themselves as rebels radically departing from neoclassical economics and the linear model, NIS can still co-exist with neoclassical economics. Furthermore, IMP places high demands on any policy maker that would adopt it, in terms of acquiring deep contextual knowledge and giving up established views on how the economy works. NIS, on the other hand, requires contextual knowledge on a more superficial level.

While transition programs are widely used to facilitate newly graduated nurses transition to healthcare settings, knowledge about preconditions for implementing such programs in the hospital context is scarce. The purpose of this study was to explore program coordinators’ perspectives on implementing a transition program for newly graduated nurses.

An explorative qualitative study using individual interviews. Total of 11 program coordinators at five acute care hospital administrations in a south-west region in Sweden. Data was subjected to thematic analysis, using NVivo software to promote coding.

The following two themes were identified from the analysis: Create a shared responsibility for introducing newly graduated nurses, and establish legitimacy of the program. The implementation process was found to be a matter of both educational content and anchoring work in the hospital organization. To clarify the what and why of implementing a transition program, where the nurses learning processes are prioritized, was foundational prerequisites for successful implementation.

This paper illustrates that implementing transition programs in contemporary hospital care context is a valuable but complex process that involves conflicting priorities. A program that is well integrated in the organization, in which responsibilities between different levels and roles in the hospital organization, aims and expectations on the program are clarified, is important to achieve the intentions of effective transition to practice. Joint actions need to be taken by healthcare policymakers, hospitals and ward managers, and educational institutions to support the implementation of transition programs as a long-term strategy for nurses entering hospital care.