1,721,004 research outputs found
Il piano esecutivo di gestione strumento burocratico-legale o strumento aziendale?
No full textIl contributo mira ad evidenziare il rischio di un'applicazione meramente adempimentale del piano esecutivo di gestione e la conseguente vanificazione degli sforzi di adottare uno strumento potenzialmente utile per migliorare la performance degli enti local
The role of performance measurement in assessing the contribution of circular economy to the sustainability of a wine value chain
No full textPurpose: This study aims to ascertain the extent to which a cooperative controlling a wine supply chain implements a performance measurement system (PMS) that monitors the effects of a circular economy (CE) strategy, developed through partnerships, on the economic and environmental sustainability of the value chain. Design/methodology/approach: The study analyzes the characteristics of the closed-loop business model and uses the PMS to assess the contribution of CE partnerships to the sustainability of the value chain. The case study is based on interviews conducted on the cooperative's top management and supplemented with an analysis of external reports, related documents and direct observations. Findings: The PMS was underpinned by enterprise resource planning (ERP), through which CE indicators control for the benefits generated on behalf of the cooperative and its CE partners. Originality/value: Given the paucity of the studies that address the performance measurement of CE at the supply chain level and its relation to sustainability, this study sheds light on the role that PMS can play in tracking the contribution of CE partnerships to the sustainability of a wine value chain operating in agro-waste valorization. Furthermore, the performance measurement of the CE strategy contributes to an assessment of the responsible production of sustainable development goals at the supply chain level. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited
Intellectual Capital In The Context of Healthcare Organizations
No full textHealthcare organizations are different in time and space. Based on the nature of the State’s choice to guarantee health protection to the citizens, it is possible to observe different kind of healthcare organizations, whose management process is driven by different criteria. Likewise, differences would be observed when a longitudinal analysis is conducted. Mark (2006: 851) argues “the scope of healthcare provision ranges from traditional healers in the developing world to medical consultants practising in the most sophisticated western hospitals. What they have in common is participation in an activity that requires trust between the parties concerned, to deliver a change in the patients’ well-being”. Historically what shaped the organisation of provision was different (Porter, 2003); so, for example, the purpose of hospitals historically changed from segregation to clinical intervention, especially once anaesthetics and antisepsis arrived to change the practice of medicine and outcomes for patients. However, observing healthcare organizations located in different country contexts today, allows at highlighting that somehow “the past still exists”. Therefore, what matters in healthcare team working today in the Western countries is different from what matters, at the same time, in strife-ridden countries, where a lack of any sense of the future and an aversion to risk changes behaviour (Mark, 2006: p. 852).
During late 80’s and early ‘90s, many Western countries changed the relationship between states provision and the private sector, the latter being used as a new template for designing public organisations, including those in healthcare (Hood, 1991). The approach, originally named New Public Management (Ferlie, 1999), brought changes to the context of health delivery in several countries (Barzelay, 2002). Similar reforms were implemented in diametrically opposed country’ system, aiming at increasing efficiency, and at introducing managed care and managed competition criteria (Toth, 2010). The reforms introduced the role of the clinical director and new accounting technologies to both measure results, and monitor the healthcare organizations’ ability to challenge efficiency objectives (Llewellyn, 2001). Sheaff et al. (2003) pointed out that measurement was focusing only on what goes in and what comes out without looking at the process inside, so the healthcare organization appeared to be as a black box.
Health services’ delivery is the result of a complex process; a number of knowledge exchanges occurs among the actors of the process; and many individuals participate sharing values, routines, protocols, etc. Any person perceives the crucial role of the healthcare organizations for his/her wellbeing, and the quality of the healthcare experience is mainly linked to the process dimension. The accounting literature has often depicted the healthcare organizations from a financial perspective, highlighting the role of the accounting technologies for management control. Thus, both the healthcare organization as a whole and its sub-units have been examined (Vagnoni and Oppi, 2015). This approach has rooted the new concepts and knowledge among the clinical directors, whose performance has been often assessed based on their ability to contain costs and respect the budgets’ cap. Furthermore, financial issues have sometimes become the main drivers of healthcare organizations’ strategic management. Nevertheless, many countries have recognized that the future of universal coverage health care systems depends on their ability to keep abreast of changing needs and respond to these in an appropriate way in order to sustain public confidence. The ability of the healthcare organization to cope with patterns such as innovation, knowledge management, communication, treatments’ decision, appear to be crucial (Coulter and Jenkinson, 2005). Thus, intellectual capital is a comprehensive framework for valuing those patterns. One of the main peculiarity of healthcare organizations lie on developing value creation processes through a combination of both tangible and intangible assets. The latter plays a dominant role in a knowledge-driven organization such as the healthcare one; as a consequence managing intellectual capital determinants would leverage the organizations’ ability to create value and be responsive to health needs.
Beyond an increase of the studies related to the use of intellectual capital for organizations’ management, the healthcare organizations still appear to be as black boxes: costs and financial results are well known, but how intellectual capital interacts to pass knowledge, to create innovation and value, is not known, nor monitored. In spite of the centrality of the efforts to mobilize knowledge and innovation to legitimize the healthcare organizations’ strategic role in the society, accounting literature has surprisingly devoted limited attention to capture their drivers, the intellectual capital dimensions.
Therefore, the chapter aims at discussing the importance of IC framework for healthcare organizations’ management purposes. To that end, section 2 describes the characteristics of the healthcare organizations’ context; section 3 focus on the role of knowledge in professional based organization such as the healthcare ones; section 4 analyses the contribution of the IC accounting framework for managing the healthcare organizations; section 5 includes an analysis of the accounting literature on IC in the studied context; and finally section 6 presents some concluding remarks
Innovative work behaviour in public organizations: Does human capital play a role?
No full textStudies deepening our understanding on the association between innovative behaviour and creativity at both individual and collective levels are scarce, specifically in knowledge-intensive organizations such as healthcare.
Focusing on the healthcare setting, this study hypothesizes a direct effect between individual creative self-efficacy, creative collective efficacy, and innovative work behaviour.
The hypotheses are tested using survey data from 446 clinicians working in public healthcare organizations in 6 different Italian regions. Findings suggest that both managers’ creative self-efficacy and their perceptions about creative collective efficacy are determinants of their innovative work behaviour.
The research enters the debate of creativity and innovation behaviour with a focus on the healthcare settings. Our findings provide both theoretical and practical implications and highlight the importance of constructing and developing managers’ efficacy in creativity at both individual and team levels in order to incentivise the emergence of innovation behaviour in knowledge-intensive organizations in general and healthcare organizations in particular. Further research is needed to assess the existence of mediating and/or moderating mechanisms underlying that relationships emerging from this study in order to provide decision-makers with suggestions about how to diffuse innovation and creativity in healthcare organizations
Correction to: Entrepreneurial Competencies of SME Owners: A Comparative Exploratory Analysis Between Iran and Italy
No full textThe Economic Burden of Emergency Abdominal Surgery in the Elderly: What Is the Role of Laparoscopy?
No full textThe elderly might differ from the general population when facing surgery, due to their lack of reserve, comorbidities and other frailty conditions. This is also related to the emergency abdominal surgery. Considering that almost half of all emergency surgical procedures are performed in the elderly and given the increasing ageing population, an analysis of the implications of the economic burden of emergency abdominal surgery in the elderly needs to be undertaken. To this regard, both direct and indirect costs that may emerge when the focus is on this specific group of patients are considered. Through a narrative literature review, this paper aims at identifying the economic consequences of emergency abdominal surgery in the elderly given the conventional procedures and the laparoscopy. The finding will shade lights on the role of the laparoscopy procedure and will contribute to raise the awareness about the need to undertake dedicated actions from the health professionals’ perspective as well as from the hospital managers’ one
Enterprises and Entrepreneurial Dynamics. The Combinatory Systems View.
No full textI propose an interpretation of business dynamics in terms of the spatial co-localization of firms in a circum-scribed area in order to form clusters of various types. I interpret clustering by adopting the methodology of combi-natory systems: that is, systems formed by collectivities of agents that, by combining their micro behaviour, give rise to a macro behaviour and a macro effect that refers to the collectivity considered as a whole. Due to the presence of an internal feedback the macro behaviours direct or condition the subsequent micro behaviours, even though they derive from these.
There are two business dynamics that lead to the formation of clusters: the exogenous dynamics, where the out-side entrepreneurs locate their firms in a given area, and the endogenous dynamics, where there are new entrepre-neurs generated from within a preexisting cluster.
The firm is considered as an intelligent cognitive system that evaluates its own fitness on the basis of a system of performance indicators; it estimates the effective or potential fitness for various possible areas of intervention and on the basis of the fitness levels assigns an index of attractiveness to the area.
We maintain that if an area has advantages in terms of fitness, then clusters will form there as a result of the co-localizations of firms that assign these areas a high attractiveness index.
If the attractiveness landscapes appears flat, because no element stands out from the other areas to favor fitness, then if by chance an initial core of firms co-localize in the area, and their presence produces economic advantages in terms of economic efficiency or profitability with respect to other areas, these acquire the force of attraction and a combinatory system forms that by necessity increases the cluster. This process lasts as long as recombining factors maintain or increase the perceived advantages.
We also present the idea that if a cluster has fitness advantages for new firms, then usually new entrepreneurs are formed within it and the cluster widens due to the endogenous genesis of new firms
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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