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The purpose of this paper is to define the roles of the key health industry constituents – patients, employers, health insurers, hospitals, physicians, Government, pharmaceutical companies and other industry suppliers, plagued with the decline of the health status and affordability in the USA.

Reviews literature to back up the author's views.

As health‐care demands increase and the constituent roles blur, the industry will experience a gradual convergence. Convergence will redefine and create overlap in the boundaries between the traditional health industry suppliers and in the end this convergence will reshape the future of the health industry.

Predicts that the drivers of change – deteriorating public health, poor quality and safety, and unaffordable health care – will continue to accelerate. Convergence will be gradual and the impact may not be immediately obvious, but the long‐term outcome will dramatically reshape the industry. For the major suppliers in the industry, recognizing convergence is only the first step. Navigating convergence so the decisions made by an organization are both productive and profitable, rather than debilitating, is a far more complicated endeavor. The decisions made will not only affect the future of each supplier but also significantly impact the constituent at the center of this industry – the patient.

We develop and validate measurement instruments for the business partner, watchdog, and scorekeeper roles of controllers. This study addresses calls to enhance the quality of survey research in management accounting by devoting more attention to scale development and especially to construct validity. By focusing on the activity sets of the controllers’ roles, we provide a theoretically and empirically grounded picture of their current roles. The measurement instruments presented in this study enable systematic research progress on controller roles, their relationships, antecedents, and performance outcomes.

Investigates the differences in protocols between arbitral tribunals and courts, with particular emphasis on US, Greek and English law. Gives examples of each country and its way of using the law in specific circumstances, and shows the variations therein. Sums up that arbitration is much the better way to gok as it avoids delays and expenses, plus the vexation/frustration of normal litigation. Concludes that the US and Greek constitutions and common law tradition in England appear to allow involved parties to choose their own judge, who can thus be an arbitrator. Discusses e‐commerce and speculates on this for the future.

Librarians have been concerned about the long‐term success of library automation vendors, and their concerns have been confirmed by the decline and fall of a number of library system vendors, or, at least, by the demise of their products. This paper is an attempt to document the history of events in the library automation marketplace, and to put these events into meaningful business perspective. Among the issues examined here are: a) Who are the players? b) How can vendors be characterized? c) How do these characteristics reflect present and future success in the marketplace? d) How can the marketplace be characterized? e) How do these characteristics influence the success or failure of vendors? f) Is current success of a vendor indicative of a good product, of sound management, of customer satisfaction, and of future success? g) How, in fact, is success measured? h) Are there quantitative measures that can be applied to estimate the likely future success of a vendor?

System designers concerned with bibliographic storage and retrieval systems have, in the past, followed one of three approaches — simple data structures, with the handling of the inherent complexity of bibliographic data embedded in the programs; free text (inverse file) systems of which the ‘online database’ systems may be seen as a specialised extension; and structured database (DBMS) methods, of which some MARC systems are a special subset. The form of storage of the bibliographic data affects not only the efficiency of retrieval by various fields of the record, but also the space used in storage, the cost of maintenance and addition of new material, and especially, the nature of the retrieval language and the flexibility of response to users' needs. The choice of design approach involves study of each proposed application, and guidelines are offered for consideration in matching functional requirements with the varying strengths and weaknesses of the software techniques. Hybrid database structures offering both free text and DBMS features are becoming acceptable, at least for small systems, and the likely paths for future development are noted.

This paper examines a user categorisation of documents related to a particular literary work. Fifty study participants completed an unconstrained sorting task of documents related to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas carol. After they had finished the sorting task, participants wrote descriptions of the attributes they used to create each group. Content analysis of these descriptions revealed categories of attributes used for grouping. Participants used physical format, audience, content description, pictorial elements, usage, and language most frequently for grouping. Many of the attributes participants used for grouping already exist in bibliographic records and may be used to cluster records related to works automatically in online catalogue displays. The attributes used by people in classifying or grouping documents related to a work may be used to guide the design of summary online catalogue work displays.

Quality, an abstract concept, requires concrete definition in order to be actionable. This chapter moves the quality discussion from the theoretical to the workplace, building steps needed to manage quality issues.

The chapter reviews general data studies, web quality studies, and metadata quality studies to identify and define dimensions of data quality and quantitative measures for each concept. The chapter reviews preferred communication methods which make findings meaningful to administrators.

The chapter describes how quality dimensions are practically applied. It suggests criteria necessary to identify high priority populations, and resources in core subject areas or formats, as quality does not have to be completely uniform. The author emphasizes examining the information environment, documenting practice, and developing measurement standards. The author stresses that quality procedures must rapidly evolve to reflect local expectations, the local information environment, technology capabilities, and national standards.

This chapter combines theory with practical application. It stresses the importance of metadata and recognizes quality as a cyclical process which balances the necessity of national standards, the needs of the user, and the work realities of the metadata staff. This chapter identifies decision points, outlines future action, and explains communication options.

The literature on post-completion reviews (PCRs) either does not deal with the tying of PCRs to extrinsic rewards or provides scant theoretical reasoning or empirical analysis to back up its recommendations.

Based on research from psychology and empirical studies, the present chapter proposes that several effects of a PCR, which must be deemed rather dysfunctional, will increase when extrinsic rewards are linked to such a review. At the same time some possibly functional effects, however, are likely to remain constant. The propositions, therefore, call the usefulness of tying PCRs to rewards into question and call for further investigation.

This study examined the relationship among perceived job characteristics, job evaluation factors, and salary in twenty jobs from two job families. The Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS) and the Job Characteristics Inventory (JCI) were used to assess job characteristics. The results revealed high agreement across the 445 individuals who described their jobs, but substantial divergence between pairs of common dimensions across instruments in their relationship with job worth. While the major findings are consistent with previous research on the relationship between job characteristics and job worth, it is proposed that job‐level explanations for the motivating properties of jobs are conceptually limited The concept of job‐role differentiation (Ilgen & Hollenbeck, 1991) was offered as a potentially useful explanatory mechanism for understanding the structure of work, particularly those concepts pertaining to motivation and satisfaction.

The purpose of this literature review is to reorient empirical research on the causal links between corporate ecological sustainability (CES) and corporate financial performance (CFP). Toward this end, we summarize the findings of four meta-analyses (conducted between 2012 and 2016), which indicate that there is, on average, a small positive association between CES and CFP. In addition, these empirical associations seem to be contingent on the firm’s strategic approach with regard to ecological sustainability (e.g., proactive vs reactive approach) and on the operationalization of both constructs. We conclude that future research may benefit from an even more explicit, analytic shift to the circumstances under which it pays for firms to go green. The main research limitations we point out are model misspecifications, endogeneity, and problems in the measurement of both CES and CFP.