The legacy of the Eurozone crisis and how to overcome it

I argue first that the Eurozone crisis has left a legacy of unsustainable government debt levels. These will continue to exert a deflationary dynamics in the Eurozone. Second, I argue that the institutional innovations since the start of the debt crisis fall short of what is needed to solve the design failures of the Eurozone. In addition, they are not sustainable, mainly because they have led to a situation where bureaucratic institutions have been vested with more responsibilities without a concomitant increase in the democratic legitimacy of these institutions.     

Medicare payment: how low it will go and how to prepare

Hospitals should begin preparing now for a decade of reductions in Medicare payment with strategies aimed at: Partnering with clinical leadership, Performing detailed margin analysis, Engaging with service line managers and physicians, Revamping care coordination, Ensuring efficient operating room utilization, Improving emergency department operations.     

The hospital: how will it survive?

The federal government is under pressure to implement and enforce a program to provide economic and social relief from the rapidly escalating health care costs which now consume 8.5% of the Gross National Product. Glick predicts that within the next twenty years, the character of health care institutions will be reshaped and only the most adaptable hospitals, health maintenance organizations and health-related governmental organizations will survive. He urges hospitals to develop appropriate strategies to deal with the problems of cost-containment, state-operated cost review and control agencies, and the competition for limited health care resources. The author warns the health care industry that if it does not adjust to these changes, it runs the risk of becoming heavily rgulated. It is suggested that health care institutions be integrated into comprehensive health care systems and the article includes a model for assigning patients to medical care facilities on a regional basis. Glick forecasts that hospitals will enter into a competition for survival, resulting in mergers of some and the closing of others. He believes that as the number of health care institutions decreases, the remaining ones will become more specialized and geographically dispersed.     

Assessing risk-taking: what to measure and how to measure it

Abstract

Risk-taking has been a major field of interest for scientists and for applied purposes since decades. However, many researchers have noted that the current measurement instruments fail to show adequate validity and predictive power. Given the recent calls to develop new measures, this paper aims to highlight six key points that should be kept in mind when constructing or using measures of risk-taking concepts. Specifically, we encourage risk-taking scholars (a) to pay close attention to the terminology used in studies, (b) to distinguish measures of general and specific risk-taking, (c) to distinguish risk-taking from the appeal of risky activities, (d) to keep in mind the subjectivity of risk-taking, (e) to consider the measurement of passive risk-taking, and (f) to favour more realistic risk-taking tasks. Overall, these recommendations should help researchers to design and use more relevant risk-taking measures.     

Balancing act: how to capture knowledge without killing it

Everyone knows that the way things are formally organized in most companies (their processes) is not the same as the way things are actually done (their practices). The difference between the two creates tension that can be very difficult for managers to handle. Lean too much toward practice and new ideas may bubble up and evaporate for lack of a structure to harness them. Lean too much toward process and you may get no new ideas at all. The goal, then, is to tap into the creativity at work in every layer of an organization with a combination of process and practice. Take, for example, the community of people who fix Xerox machines. Large machines, it turns out, are not as predictable as Xerox's documentation would suggest. So when following the service manual is not enough, the reps come together--over breakfast, at breaks, at the end of the day--and talk about their own best practices. So far so good. But Xerox goes a step further. It has set up a process similar to an academic peer-review system to gather, vet, and share those best practices across the company. The reps get much-welcome recognition for their creativity, and local best practices are deployed companywide. Dot-com companies are a hotbed of innovative practices. But as they mature, they, like Xerox, may find that they need seasoned managers who can harness those practices through the judicious application of constructive processes.     

原油期货离中国有多远?

原油作为一种十分敏感的战略性物资,它与国际经济、政治关系极大,被称为发达国家的经济血液.和平发展是当今世界的潮流,但在这个潮流背后,局部性冲突不断,特别发生于世界主要产油区中东地区的冲突经常引起世界原油价格激烈波动,今年以来中东地区以巴冲突加剧,世界原油价格上涨30%以上,前不久伊拉克宣布以停止出口原油为方式支持巴勒斯坦,并要求阿拉伯国家予以响应,虽然阿拉伯事件没人理会伊拉克,但世界原油价格维护于今年以来的高位仍然没变.     

Play it again: how game-based learning improves flow in Accounting and Marketing education

ABSTRACT

Flow theory is used in this article [Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). The domain of creativity ] to determine whether gamified resources, named Accountingame and Marketingame, possess certain characteristics which, in the form of educational games, increase the performance of Portuguese undergraduate students attending Accounting (N?=?816) and Marketing (N?=?195) curricular units for the first time. A structural equation model was used to look into the direct effects of the characteristics of the game, such as Concentration, Clarity, Feedback, Challenge, Autonomy, Social Interaction, and Perceived Learning, on students’ learning Flow. Results clearly show that, with the exception of Feedback, all the other dimensions were Flow predictors. Overall, by introducing games into the curriculum, students’ motivation and interest increased and demonstrates that games can be an effective way for students to learn.     

Consumerism's sea change: how it will affect your company in the coming years

Consumerism and care management are the cost-containment strategies most employers say they will focus on over the next five years. This article reviews the growth of these strategies and the different ways employers have implemented them. The author then delineates the ten key ways that consumerism may affect companies over the next five- to ten-year time period, as these strategies continue to move health benefits toward greater transparency, flexibility and accountability.     

Choosing how to pay: The influence of foreign backgrounds

Is having a foreign background a relevant factor in choosing between payment instruments in consumer point-of-sale transactions after migration? We analyze this question using a unique diary survey in which both participants with a Dutch and a foreign background documented their daily purchases. We present several pieces of evidence suggesting that foreign backgrounds still influence the choice between payment instruments after migration to the Netherlands. For instance, we find that first-generation migrants from a number of countries that can be seen as cash-oriented are more likely to use cash in the Netherlands. At the same time, second-generation migrants have similar payment habits as individuals with a Dutch background. This finding suggests that payment behavior is not passed on between generations, but affected by host country payment habits. Finally, we suggest that, in this context, special information campaigns to increase debit card usage will not have clear net social benefits.     

The risk organisation: or how organisations reconcile themselves to failure

Over the last decade, the ideas, concepts and tools of risk management have colonised the way that organisations frame potential adverse outcomes associated with their activities. Intended as a means of optimising the tolerance, rather than elimination, of adverse organisational outcomes, risk management has been promoted as a means of challenging organisational practice, particularly in the context of heightened accountability pressures that can readily make organisations risk averse. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the extent to which risk ideas are able to challenge traditional organisational ways of understanding and responding to adverse outcomes. In this article, therefore, we examine the implementation of risk management practices in two contrasting organisational contexts; the UK Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the English university sector. Our studies suggest that risk management processes can be readily filtered and reinterpreted through a series of ideological, methodological and organisational mechanisms to reflect and reinforce organisational understandings and practices. We build on this analysis to point to what might tentatively be termed ‘Risk Organizations’, which are distinctive, at least in principle, by the way in which they seek to identify, but also come to terms with, failure. As such, rather than providing a means of organisational challenge, the systematic application of risk management practices tends to act as a conservative force of organisational continuity.