Search results

Clinical governance (CG) is an important foundation for a high-performing health care system, with many countries supporting its development. CG policy may be developed and implemented nationally, or devolved to a local level, with implications for the overall approach to implementation and policy uptake. However, it is not known whether one of these two approaches is more effective. The purpose of this paper is to probe this question. Its setting is Ireland and New Zealand, two broadly comparable countries with similar CG policies. Ireland’s was nationally led, while New Zealand’s was devolved to local districts. This leads to the question of whether these different approaches to implementation make a difference.

Data from surveys of health professionals in both countries were used to compare performance with CG development.

The study showed that Ireland’s approach produced a slightly better performance, raising questions about the merits of devolving responsibility for policy implementation to the local level.

The Irish and New Zealand surveys both had lower-than-desirable response rates, which is not uncommon for studies of health professionals such as this. The low response rates mean the findings may be subject to selection bias.

Despite the importance of the question of whether a national or local approach to policy implementation is more effective, few studies specifically focus on this, meaning that this study provides a new contribution to the topic.

This study aims to explain how the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) used its power over rail rates as part of an effort to promote the growth of economically underdeveloped regions of the USA. This was accomplished by subsidizing shipments of food and fuel staples to major domestic and world markets and by offsetting the burden of high protective tariffs through low transportation rates on imported goods, from its inception in 1887 until the disruption of ocean transport with the outbreak of First World War in 1914.

Through examination of contemporary ICC studies and cases, this study shows how the ICC condoned rate practices that promoted the socioeconomic welfare of sparsely populated regions primarily in the Southern and Western USA.

The study illustrates that the ICC facilitated exports by authorizing rates that subsidized the transport of overseas food and fuel staples from the interior while at the same time allowing preferential rail–sea contracts on imports that partially offset the burden of protective tariffs on these regions. The focus on regional social welfare within the ICC largely ended by 1914, with the end of protective tariffs and the start of First World War.

This new interpretation explains how international trade patterns in the USA were influenced in significant ways by the ICC to achieve regional social welfare objectives and to promote greater national economic integration.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an innovative model of teacher professional learning that has evolved over a decade (2006 to 2016).

Working in a range of different school contexts, in conjunction with an ongoing engagement with the research literature, has enabled the development over three phases of a robust yet flexible framework that meets teachers’ expressed needs. At the same time, the framework helps to shift teachers’ pedagogical orientations, as the learning design supports school-focused, job-embedded teacher professional learning, which challenges more traditional instructional environments by infusing digital technologies and other elements of twenty-first century skills into teaching and learning.

Building on the experiences of the first two phases, the paper reports the most recent phase which expands on the emergence of a fourth wave of online learning to design and develop a massive open online course (MOOC) that potentially enables the massive scaling up of access to this already validated model of teacher professional development. The importance of maintaining key elements, threshold concepts and signature pedagogies in the design of MOOCs for teacher professional learning are discussed, and the paper concludes with early lessons from this latest work in progress.

Challenges are identified relating to the design of the social supports within the MOOC structure to sustain the collaboration, dialogue and ongoing reflection observed across Phases 1 and 2 that are necessary for the changes in pedagogical orientation and classroom practices.

This paper revisits old questions of the proper subject and bounds of economics: does economics study “provisioning”? or markets? or a method of reasoning, self‐interested rational optimization?

A variety of scholars and others in many fields make use of a taxonomy of society consisting of three “spheres”: markets, governments, and communities. It is argued here that this tripartite taxonomy of society is fundamental and exhaustive. A variety of ways of understanding this taxonomy are explored, especially Fiske's (1991, 2004) “Relational models theory.” Then – after communities and their products, social goods, are defined more thoroughly – a visual model of interactions among the three spheres is presented.

The model is first used briefly to understand the historical development of markets. The model is then applied to understanding how economic thinking and market ideology, including the notion of social capital, can be destructive of communities and their production of social goods (and their production of social capital as well).

It is not possible to measure these effects monetarily, so calculating precisely “how this affects results” in a standard economic model is impossible.

Nevertheless we could better prepare students for real‐world analysis, and better serve our clients, including the public, if – whenever relevant, such as in textbook introductions and in benefit/cost analyses – we made them aware of the limitations of economic analysis with respect to communities and social goods.

The three‐spheres model offered here, based on Fiske's “Relational models theory,” facilitates this awareness.

This research seeks to explore current attitudes, motivations and behaviours in relation to student credit and debt consumption in the UK and Ireland.

Key qualitative consumer research based on 20 interviews with Irish and UK higher education students is presented.

The findings highlight that, while the UK and Irish student contexts are significantly different in terms of accommodation costs, tuition fees and living expenses, many Irish students reported relatively high debt levels, with some exceeding their UK counterparts. The research identifies key contextual factors associated with the credit‐friendly environment in which students live in addition to shedding light on student orientation towards credit and debt, with specific conclusions for future student debt.

Given the rise in debt and its detrimental consequences, the study has far‐reaching implications for policy makers, consumer agencies financial providers and marketers in terms of creating an environment where good student financial capability and management is developed and facilitated through increased financial education and regulation. The research has implications for other western countries in terms of predicting comparative trends in student credit and debt attitude and behaviour.

This paper addresses the lack of analytical and academic commentary exploring the dynamics and nature of student credit and debt, particularly within an Irish context, in addition to providing a cross‐cultural comparison between credit and debt consumption in Ireland, where debt is a relatively new phenomenon, and the UK, a country well‐entrenched in debt.

We provide new measures of relative UK and US GDP per capita and output per worker for the crucial years between 1830 and 1870. Our estimates are current price comparisons that compare expenditure on GDP for five benchmark years using new price data. They show that the US leads in income per capita and output per worker compared to Great Britain and the United Kingdom. We check our estimates against sectoral productivity data and real wages.

In his incisive analysis of academic tribalism, Stephen Balch (2004) argues that schools of thought can be catalysts or barriers to disciplinary inquiry, depending on the institutional setting. He cites physics, chemistry, and mathematics as fields in which competing schools of thought generally enhance the marketplace of ideas by increasing the scope and value of intellectual exchange (ibid., p. 2). Balch deems these disciplines “collegial” because, though “rivalries exist among hypotheses and investigators, there is general agreement on the means of resolving them and a strong sense of shared intellectual mission” which enable “internalized checks” to “keep things on the straight and narrow” (ibid., p. 4). By contrast, Balch describes the social sciences and humanities as “adversarial disciplines” in which paradigmatic rivalries “shade into enmities, bear heavily on methods of verification as well as the substance of disputes, involve judgments of value as well as of fact, often reveal an absence of shared mission, and produce results whose employment outside academe is very frequently polemical” (ibid., p. 4). In these contexts, schools become impediments to “serious academic discourse about the human condition” (ibid., p. 2) as the collegial ideal of a “free and open marketplace of ideas” (ibid., p. 1) gives way to balkanized disciplines “divided into enduring factions whose partisans frequently treat their opponents more as foes than colleagues” (ibid., p. 4).