Measuring caring--the next frontier in understanding workforce performance and patient outcomes

Caring is not generally considered in structured and scientific analysis of situations. But this may be a mistake. Caring likely has a return on investment that surpasses all other technology, pharmacotherapy, or system that has been developed to date for health care. As the puzzle of caring as an intervention of healing continues to come together, the outcomes of care for self and others will become clear. It is apparent by the number of studies generated by just one group, the Caring International Research Collaborative, there is a shared belief caring is healing and has a potential for return on investment that has yet to be realized.     

The Impact of Land-Use Change on Ecosystem Services,Biodiversity and Returns to Landowners: A Case Study in the State of Minnesota

Land-use change has a significant impact on the world’s ecosystems. Changes in the extent and composition of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems have large impacts on the provision of ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation and returns to landowners. While the change in private returns to landowners due to land-use change can often be measured, changes in the supply and value of ecosystem services and the provision of biodiversity conservation have been harder to quantify. In this paper we use a spatially explicit integrated modeling tool (InVEST) to quantify the changes in ecosystem services, habitat for biodiversity, and returns to landowners from land-use change in Minnesota from 1992 to 2001. We evaluate the impact of actual land-use change and a suite of alternative land-use change scenarios. We find a lack of concordance in the ranking of baseline and alternative land-use scenarios in terms of generation of private returns to landowners and net social benefits (private returns plus ecosystem service value). Returns to landowners are highest in a scenario with large-scale agricultural expansion. This scenario, however, generated the lowest net social benefits across all scenarios considered because of large losses in stored carbon and negative impacts on water quality. Further, this scenario resulted in the largest decline in habitat quality for general terrestrial biodiversity and forest songbirds. Our results illustrate the importance of taking ecosystem services into account in land-use and land-management decision-making and linking such decisions to incentives that accurately reflect social returns.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Demand for Imports in Three CARICOM Member Countries: An Application of the Bounds Test for Cointegration

This paper provides fresh estimates of income and price elasticities of import demand in Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago using a bounds test for cointegration. In addition, the paper also provides estimates of the consumption, investment, and exports elasticities of import demand. These latter elasticities were all found to be positive and statistically significant with values ranging from 0.16 to 0.55 in the long-run.     

Does a Crisis Matter? Forest Policy Responses to the Mountain Pine Beetle Epidemic in British Columbia

“[a]n epidemic of catastrophic proportions”?Larry Pedersen, Chief Forester in 2003, in describing the impact of the outbreak. What factors are responsible for the introduction of new policies (especially those involving substantive change) is a phenomenon that is still poorly understood. Researchers have identified policy windows where a confluence of events, such as a change in government, the emergence of a new issue, and ongoing policy processes, come together to create the opportunity for new policy development. Natural disasters can open such policy windows by drawing attention to an issue and mobilizing political will. Yet at the same time, even if policy windows do open, they may not result in effective policy development. The institutional setting in which such policies are developed also plays a key role. In the case of the Canadian forest sector, the combination of public resources and private capital make policy development especially challenging. Although the scale of the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic in British Columbia is unprecedented, and will change the nature of the forest resource (and by extension the industry and communities that rely upon it), the policy response has been limited to short‐term measures. Although some policy reform was introduced, policy makers have yet to address the question of whether more fundamental changes are required in order to address the full consequences of the epidemic. La détermination des facteurs responsables de l’introduction de nouvelles politiques (particulièrement celles qui comportent des changements substantiels) demeurent un phénomène mal compris. Des chercheurs ont déterminé des fenêtres d’opportunité politique où divers événements, tels qu’un changement de gouvernement, l’émergence d’une nouvelle préoccupation et des processus politiques continus, convergent pour créer l’occasion d’élaborer de nouvelles politiques. Les catastrophes naturelles peuvent créer ces fenêtres d’opportunité politique en attirant l’attention sur une préoccupation et en mobilisant la volonté politique. Pourtant, même si des fenêtres d’opportunité politique s’ouvrent, elles peuvent ne pas se solder par l’élaboration de politiques efficaces. Le cadre institutionnel dans lequel ces politiques sont élaborées joue aussi un rôle important. Dans le cas du secteur forestier canadien, la combinaison de ressources publiques et de capitaux privés rend l’élaboration de politiques particulièrement délicate. Bien que l’étendue de l’épidémie de dendroctone du pin ponderosa en Colombie‐Britannique soit sans précédent et modifiera la nature de la ressource forestière (et par extension, l’industrie et les collectivités qui en dépendent), la réaction politique s’est limitée à des mesures à court terme. Malgré une certaine réforme des politiques, les décideurs doivent s’interroger sur la nécessité d’apporter ou non des changements fondamentaux supplémentaires pour surmonter les conséquences de l’épidémie.     

Determinants of process innovation introductions: Evidence from 115 developing countries

This paper examines determinants of process innovation introductions across 115 (mostly) developing countries. Empirical research on process innovations lags behind product innovations. Accounting for firm characteristics, R&D, regulations and taxes, and corruption, results show that sole proprietors and R&D‐performing firms were more likely to introduce innovations, whereas greater prosperity made them less likely to do so. Corruption had a greasing effect, whereas firms in island nations were less likely to introduce, ceteris paribus. Effects of regulations and taxes and other firm characteristics were largely insignificant. Finally, some differences existed across manufacturing and service industries and across prevalence of innovation introductions.     

Accounting student characteristics: Results of the 1993 and 1994 Federation of Schools of Accountancy (FSA) surveys

This article updates the results of an ongoing, longitudinal study on characteristics of accounting students, conducted by the Federation of Schools of Accountancy (FSA). The annual survey measures many attributes of accounting seniors and masters students, including student quality, provenance, future educational plans, career plans, plans for professional certification, extra-curricular involvement, attitude toward the accounting profession, attitude toward learning, attitude toward the 150-hour requirement, and various demographic dimensions. Subjects included 2,512 and 1,507 seniors, and 969 and 670 masters students, at 39 and 27 FSA schools, in the years 1993 and 1994, respectively. Results of these surveys, which appear in a comparative format below, have implications for many currently debated topics in accounting education. Results of the 1991 and 1992 surveys appearing in the spring 1992 and fall 1993 issues of the Journal of Accounting Education (Vol. 10, pp, 25–37 and Vol. 11, pp. 211–225), respectively.     

Dimensions of Chinese culture values in relation to service provision in hospitality and tourism industry

Factor and reliability analyses were employed in this exploratory attempt to investigate and refine the structure and dimensions of Chinese cultural values (CCVs) in relation to service provision. Based on the results of factor analysis, CCVs could best be conceptualized as a five-component construct that influences the attitude or behavior of employees in providing service. These five factors were identified as follows: Integration 1 (attitude towards work); Integration 2 (attitude towards people); moral discipline; status and relationships; and moderation. The identification of these dimensions has two major implications to human resource development and service management practice in the hospitality and tourism industry. First, Chinese cultural values play a critical role in determining specific interventions, challenges and barriers in service organizational management. Second, given the profound influence of Chinese cultural values on service provision, international tourism and hotel managers, particularly in human resource development, should realize the importance of ensuring that Western management practices are adopted critically in Chinese organizations. Given the limited amount of research on this topic, the findings generated from this study are very important in guiding future research and providing insights into an area that deserves more academic attention.     

Analysis of the Service Dominant Logic network,authors, and articles

The present study analyses research conducted in Service Dominant Logic (S-D logic), providing an overview of its intellectual structure. For that purpose, a structured approach was adopted through the implementation of bibliometric methods, using co-citation analysis combined with performance analysis and an integrative science mapping approach, which considered a timeline, a graph, and a distance-based perspective. This allowed the identification of the leading authors and of six clusters of articles based on bibliographic coupling, along with the most prominent research themes clustered in five subdomains of research based on co-occurrence of terms. The networks extracted show the associations between the main articles and concepts treated by the S-D logic community, unveiling the salient challenges and prospective expansion facing its future theoretical and practical context.     

Factorial and discriminant analyses of environmental sensitivity and initiative of Nigerian firms

The issue of environmental protection has been of interest to Africa just as it is to the rest of the world. Such rising interest in environmental protection has resulted in a number of environmentally friendly initiatives, such as landscaping, by firms in Nigeria. This article adopts the organizational buying behavior theory to study a comprehensive list of potential facilitators of landscaping adoption and to discriminate between organizational adopters and nonadopters in Nigeria. The data were factor‐analyzed to determine the key dimensions of facilitators. On the basis of the resulting dimensions, discriminant analysis was conducted. The results show that environmental factors, organizational factors, and managerial factors are important discriminants. The findings are salient in environmental management in Africa, and in designing strategies for landscaping services marketing and landscaping diffusion. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.