1,721,018 research outputs found
Professionals and the New Public Management - Multi professional teamwork in psychiatric care
No full textThis study examines the cooperative work of several professions in Swedish multi-professional teams in child and adolescent psychiatric open care units in an environment of strong economic and efficiency controls resulting from the so-called New Public Management (NPM) reforms. Previous studies indicate teamwork is a network of semi-independent professionals who tend to represent their professional organisations and groups despite sharing a mutual interest in the patients. The research problem deals with finding explanations for what promotes and what hinders cooperation in a multi-professional health care team.
A qualitative approach is used to study and interpret the individual professionals’ actions. Data were collected in interviews and from observations of planning and treatment discussions where it was possible to witness team members’ strategies and attitudes toward patients and their treatment.
The main theoretical concepts are exogenous and endogenous institutions, boundary objects, standardised procedures, service ideal, discretionary power and professional dominance. Two NPM elements are applied: customised care and increased accountability.
The study offers an actor perspective that complements the traditional cultural perspective. The latter perspective explains cooperation problems as the result of the professionals’ confusion over their expectations of themselves in their team roles and their expectations of others in their team roles. The actor perspective shows that while norms may influence cooperation, they are not determinative. Actors are aware of the institutionalised conditions, and take them into consideration; however, their actions are not determined by these conditions, nor even primarily guided by them. The determinative factor for actors’ actions is their context. Leaders and co-workers can create endogenous institutions that bridge their differences in professional norms and also bridge professional norms and NPM reforms. The institutionalised conditions are secondary factors that explain the outcome of cooperation efforts. This study offers an interpretation useful in understanding how the actors create endogenous institutions. Star and Griesemer’s theory on boundary-spanning objects does not address this aspect of cooperation.
Unintended consequences of NPM reforms for patients are traditionally said to imply that NPM reforms are ill conceived and unrealistic. In the light of this study the significance of such consequences may be reinterpreted to be a possible mechanism of driving the development of the public organisation.
Usually NPM reforms are regarded either destructive or harmless to professional autonomy. This is scarcely a realistic description of professionals’ long-term behaviour. This study offers co-optation as an alternative explanation, defined as the process by which actors absorb external strategic elements in their policy decisions. Co-optation of NPM reforms explains the gradual institutionalisation of NPM reforms.
Research investigating professions has not dealt with the fact that multi-profession cooperation has the same character as mono-professional cooperation, to preserve collegiality through co-existence. Such professionals do not wish to challenge others’ approaches and practices; nor do they wish to learn from them. This result challenges the general idea of professional dominance in theories on professions
Political board’s contribution to strategic management: a case study
No full text© 2018, The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This study examines the support, control and strategic functions of an executive hospital political board from the perspective of how institutionalised internal procedures influence board functions. Board members and leading hospital managers were interviewed about politicians’ ways of working, managers’ preparation of decision issues and board work under the presidency model. The politicians strengthened the decision-making processes by requesting additional supporting documents, and by defending the hospital from public criticism. However, the board exercises weak strategic and control functions; it absorbs the responsibilities of the hospital managers and the upper political levels as it reaffirms its executive authority. Nonetheless, the study suggests that abolishing or replacing the board with a non-political board may not improve organisational governance. The study gives insights in politicians’ contribution to strategic public management, an aspect lacking in existing literature
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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