Making compassion count: equal recognition and authentic involvement in mental health care

Compassionate care within mental health services is often taken for granted as something that can be made visible and authentic. However, recent government reports and policy suggest that we are far from providing compassionate care and may be more focused upon risk and surveillance. This paper will discuss the visibility of compassionate care and explore outcomes that consumers and practitioners could measure in practice. Separating the fact from fiction within compassionate care will make authentic involvement practices more visible and open to discussion around consumer collaboration. In a qualitative analysis of a small study with mental health consumers, compassion was found to be a major factor in whether consumers became more involved in their own health care. Demonstrating compassionate care may therefore also demonstrate consumer participation and engagement. This paper will argue that compassionate care can be observed in the relationships between practitioners and consumers that are collaborative and use presence and persistence as methods of practice. Emancipatory practices can be made more visible in mental health care in order to make compassion measurable and to encourage consumer participation and engagement.     

Customers acting badly: Evidence from the hospitality industry

The activities of misbehaving customers represent a significant problem for organizations across diverse sectors and industries. Customer misbehavior signifies behavior within the exchange setting that deliberately violates the generally accepted norms of conduct in such situations. The core aim of this study is to advance understanding of the antecedents to past customer misbehavior and examine the relationship between past misbehavior and future misbehavior intentions. Although prior studies offer insights into individual events or types of customer misbehavior, to date, empirical evidence of the antecedents to past misbehaviors and future behavioral intentions is lacking. Synthesizing literature from varied theoretical backgrounds, this study puts forth five personality-based variables (consumer alienation, Machiavellianism, sensation seeking, aggressiveness, and self-esteem) and four demographic variables (gender, income, age, and education) as antecedents to past customer misbehavior. In turn, this study reveals an association between past customer misbehavior and future misbehavior intent. Structural equation modeling procedures using a sample of 380 respondents reveals support for eight of the nine specified hypotheses. The article concludes with a discussion of the study's implications for theory and practice.     

Barriers to Marketing Development in the Barristers’ Profession

This paper focuses on the marketing of professional services, and on the very specific context of barristers in the British legal professions. We examine the background provided by this sector of professional services, and then present the results of a set of qualitative investigations into the role of marketing as it is perceived by members of this profession, and identify a series of perceived by members of this profession, and identify a series of considering the implications of our findings for how marketing concepts can be productively employed in this area of activity and the needs for conceptual as well as practical extension, but remain largely pessimistic about the current prospects for extending marketing activities into the area of barristers’ marketing.     

Amalgamations of universities:are there economics of scale or scope?

This paper estimates a multiple-output cost function for Australian universities. The estimates are used to evaluate the cost savings arising from the amalgamation of two or more institutions. These cost savings in turn are decomposed into those due to economics of scale and those due to economics of scope, using a new measure of economics of scope associated with the amalgamation of two institutions.     

Partial‐ and General‐Equilibrium Measures of Trade Restrictiveness

New partial‐equilibrium forms of the Trade Restrictiveness Index and the Mercantilist Trade Restrictiveness Index have recently been used by the World Bank and others. In this paper we examine the bias in the partial‐equilibrium forms due to the neglect of general‐equilibrium effects. We propose “semi‐general‐equilibrium” measures that capture those general‐equilibrium effects due to vertical input–output relations without the need for a computable general‐equilibrium model. These measures also incorporate nontariff measures. Australian data are used to compute the semi‐general‐equilibrium measures. These estimates indicate that the partial‐equilibrium forms generally underestimate the true value of the indices, and by a large margin in some cases.     

Length of stay and economic consequences with rivaroxaban vs enoxaparin/vitamin K antagonist in patients with DVT and PE: findings from the North American EINSTEIN clinical trial program

Objective:

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) (deep vein thrombosis [DVT] and pulmonary embolism [(PE]) represents a substantial economic burden to the healthcare system. Using data from the randomized EINSTEIN DVT and PE trials, this North American sub-group analysis investigated the potential of rivaroxaban to reduce the length of initial hospitalization in patients with acute symptomatic DVT or PE.

Methods:

A post-hoc analysis of hospitalization and length-of-stay (LOS) data was conducted in the North American sub-set of patients from the randomized, open-label EINSTEIN trial program. Patients received either rivaroxaban (15?mg twice daily for 3 weeks followed by 20?mg once daily; n?=?405) or dose-adjusted subcutaneous enoxaparin overlapping with (guideline-recommended ‘bridging’ therapy) and followed by a vitamin K antagonist (VKA) (international normalized ratio?=?2.0–3.0; n?=?401). The open-label study design allowed for the comparison of LOS between treatment arms under conditions reflecting normal clinical practice. LOS was evaluated using investigator records of dates of admission and discharge. Analyses were carried out in the intention-to-treat population using parametric tests. Costs were applied to the LOS based on weighted mean cost per day for DVT and PE diagnoses obtained from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project dataset.

Results:

Of 382 patients hospitalized, 321 (84%), had acute symptomatic PE; few DVT patients required hospitalization. Similar rates of VTE patients were hospitalized in the rivaroxaban and enoxaparin/VKA treatment groups, 189/405 (47%) and 193/401 (48%), respectively. In hospitalized VTE patients, rivaroxaban treatment produced a 1.6-day mean reduction in LOS (median?=?1 day) compared with enoxaparin/VKA (mean?=?4.5 vs 6.1; median?=?3 vs 4), translating to total costs that were $3419 lower in rivaroxaban-treated patients.

Conclusion:

In hospitalized North American patients with VTE, treatment with rivaroxaban produced a statistically significant reduction in LOS. When treating DVT and PE patients, clinicians should consider newer anti-coagulants with less complex treatment regimens.     

Role Playing,Collective Bargaining,and the Measurement of Attitude Change

Using what scholars have identified as the major explanations of industrial unrest in the United States, Lloyd measures changes in attitudes of students engaged in mock collective bargaining negotiations. By testing before and after the bargaining sessions, he is able to show the influence of role playing upon perception.     

Book Reviews

Idris F. Sulaiman, G. Hanafi Sofyan and Shannon Luke Smith (eds) (1998), Bridging the Arafura Sea: Australia-Indonesia Relations in Prosperity and Adversity, Asia Pacific Press, Asia Pacific School of Economics and Management, The Australian National University, pp. xxi + 325.

David C. Cole and Betty F. Slade (1996), Building a Modern Financial System: The Indonesian Experience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. xxvii + 379. Cloth: US$59.95; paper, US$25.

Chris Manning (1998), Indonesian Labour in Transition: An Indonesian Success Story?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. xxii + 323.

Hal Hill and Thee Kian Wie (eds) (1998), Indonesia's Technological Challenge, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, paper, pp. xxv + 414.

Steven J. Keuning (1996), Accounting for Economic Development and Social Change, IOS Press, Amsterdam, Oxford, Tokyo, Washington DC, pp. x + 233. NLG100; £39; DM90;US$58.

Thomas Brandt (1996; English trans. 1997), Kunci Budaya. Business in Indonesia: The Cultural Key to Success, goasia Verlag, Bad Oldesloe, Germany.     

Managing organisational culture: insights from the hospitality industry

Despite the widespread criticism of the culture management approach by respected academics, recent surveys indicate that managers are continuing to engage in planned cultural interventions. Indeed, reports demonstrate that managing organisational culture is one of the most popular forms of managerial intervention, with one survey concluding that over 90 per cent of organisations engage in planned cultural change. This study describes and analyses organisational culture interventions in four companies within a single industry. It argues that the conceptualisation of organisational culture and culture change should be differentiated in ways that recognise the significance of contextual factors. It presents an analysis of interventions in the hospitality industry and delineates four insights from this sector that are pertinent to the theory and practice of managing cultural change.