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This study aimed to understand the effect of repeated exposure to personal threats on hospital security guards' well-being.

A single site, qualitative study using a convenience sampling approach to recruit hospital security guards who attend code black (staff, patient or visitor exposed to a personal threat) calls.

Five interviews were held with eight hospital security guards. Seven of the eight participants were male. Seven were Caucasian. All had extensive experience in the industry. Six consistent themes emerged from the data covering well-being, coping and support; concerns about physical safety; compassion and compassion fatigue; effective communication is crucial; role/s; and training and equipment.

This study used a convenient sampling approach to recruit security guards from one acute hospital in Australia, limiting the applicability of the findings to other contexts. Although the majority of hospital security guards were interviewed, the format of interviews varied between one-to-one interviews and focus groups, based on the availability of guards to participate and attend.

We recommend that the role of the hospital security guard in Code black situations is documented in policy and practice documents, and articulated in multidisciplinary aggression management training. There should be clear statements on the importance of strong communication and clinical leadership in code black situations. Hospital security guards should attend Mental Health First Aid training, which teaches on and off the job coping strategies. There is a need for debriefing and consideration should be given to supporting “time-out”. Hospital security guards require education on infection control and the risks associated with blood and body fluids.

Hospital security guards play an important role in the safety of patients and staff in code black situations. When they are well supported, they experience high levels of job satisfaction and are able to maintain their compassion towards people who are aggressive and violent towards them. However, repeated exposure to code black situations has the potential to erode the well-being of hospital security guards.

The aim of the paper is to report on application of Appreciative Inquiry to the evaluation of a management development programme involving 72 managers from an organisation delivering further and higher education. The structure and ethos of Appreciative Inquiry resulted in stories of both individual and collaborative learning and the resultant impact on organisational performance. The evaluation data were compared with the outcomes of a previous appreciative inquiry and the discourse generated by participants indicated a shift to a more collaborative culture.

Part one of this article outlined a successful application of Appreciative Inquiry to the diagnosis of individual and organisational development needs involving the collaboration of participating managers. The same managers agreed to be part of a second Appreciative Inquiry, in 2012, to generate evaluation data on the impact of their management development on college performance. Content analysis was used with the qualitative data produced to formulate key themes. Deeper meanings and insights into organisational culture were derived from a later discourse analysis.

Evidence of a significant change in cross college collaboration was seen in both the content and discourse of the 2012 Appreciative Inquiry. The impact of this collaboration was demonstrated through stories of strategic thinking, innovative solutions and tangible performance improvement. Impact stories also revealed an interesting discursive shift amongst the management population and indicated a greater sense of personal accountability. Discourse analysis also revealed an emerging realisation that interdependent nature of college business was the source of learning about individual and organisational performance.

The workshop teams from the second Appreciative Inquiry were not the same configuration as the original diagnostic workshops described in part one of this article. During the management development programme, action learning sets were created with team coaching support. The impact of team coaching on the sustainability of learning became clear during the second Appreciative Inquiry. The teams were more experienced at working collaboratively and their self-management of the process more confident and effective.

Appreciative Inquiry can be used to diagnose development needs, create an evaluation framework and later conduct an impact evaluation. In this case study, a management population of 72 were actively engaged in all three outcomes.

Appreciative Inquiry used as an evaluation tool ensured that managers had an active role in creating impact stories. The resultant discourse was the collaborative effort of 72 managers. The evaluation research was the co-creation of managers working in cross business and multi level action learning sets.

Greater attention to and anxiety about farm animal welfare emerged at the end of the 20th century, as worries over food safety and food quality (connected to the BSE, FMD, avian influenza and other epidemics) pushed farm animal welfare into public discourse and political debate. This chapter looks at one of the ways in which consumers’ concerns and anxieties about animal welfare are addressed by the Soil Association (the United Kingdom), whose standard is based on a scheme of production that endorses animals’ natural life in the case of certification of organic eggs in the United Kingdom. Drawing on STS approaches it addresses the processes of producing ‘naturalness’ as food ‘attribute’ (to borrow from economics) and how ‘the natural life of hens’ is achieved in the context of eggs’ production.

The purpose of this paper was to determine whether a model utilizing a number of economic variables in combination with financial ratios results in a model superior to the traditional models including the financial ratios alone. A sample of 110 manufacturing companies which had become bankrupt between 1990 and 1997 were identified from the F & S Index and matched to 110 non‐failed companies on the basis total assets, financial statement date and four digit industry code. The proposed model predicted correctly 87.82 and 87.50 percent of the estimation and holdout samples, respectively. The significance of the coefficients in each year’s model was evaluated by using the t‐statistic corresponding to each coefficient’s value. The overall models are significant at ∝‐level of 0.05.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

How sustainability messages have diffused into mainstream discourse?

The role of behavioural economics, specifically nudge theory, in encouraging sustainable behaviours.

The visual elements in marketing that support nudge theory.

How businesses are aligning with consumer concern for sustainability to illustrate their ‘wokeness’ to social issues.

This study will determine the impact COVID-19 closures had on the Megalithic Temples of Malta. The physical, economic, social and conservation impacts will be discussed.

This study relies mainly on field observations of the effects managerial and state decisions had on the sites. A timeline from February to July 2020 will outline all major events and changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic happening in Malta and specifically within Heritage Malta sites.

The pandemic impacted the sites under study economically, and socially, whilst the impact on the sites attributed to visitors and other agents of deterioration were variable. These findings affected the way sites reopened to the public with restrictions and additional safety measures.

This article highlights the effect the pandemic had on archaeological sites in Central Mediterranean islands which are heavily reliant on tourism. It also highlights the important role such open-air sites have within the local community.

Encouraging college students to volunteer is a supposed but uncharted way to contribute to their career commitment. Clarifying the ways of the contribution is therefore necessary. From the social capital perspective, volunteering and network density among friends represent social capital to reinforce each other. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to study the enhancement of the contribution by the density.

The examination employs a two-wave panel survey of 410 university students to estimate the effects of volunteering and friend network density at Wave 1 on career commitment at Wave 2. Essentially, the examination adjusted for biases due to sample attrition and self-selection into volunteering.

Volunteering at Wave 1 showed a significant contribution to career commitment at Wave 2. Moreover, the contribution significantly increased with friend network density at Wave 1.

Findings from this panel survey of university students in Hong Kong require future research for substantiation. For instance, such research can apply an experimental design to volunteering to guarantee the internal validity of the contribution of volunteering.

Social capital theory is applicable to the promotion of career commitment. Specifically, optimizing the strength of social capital through the combination of volunteering and friendship is promising.

Empirical support for the application of social capital theory to career development is evident. Particularly, the joint contribution of volunteering and friendship is demonstrable.

This study aims to investigate the effect of acquisition modes on customer behavioral loyalty to enrich our knowledge of the effectiveness of acquisition modes and how to better target customers in the service industry.

Using a data set from a large commercial bank in China, this study conducts a series of empirical analyses to examine the impacts of two types of acquisition modes (i.e. the gift acquisition mode and customer referral) on customer behavioral loyalty.

Gift acquisition has a negative effect on customer behavioral loyalty, as measured by the dropout probability, consumption amount and consumption frequency. Furthermore, this negative relationship could be weakened if the customer is referred by an existing customer.

Although prior studies have investigated the effectiveness of some acquisition modes in terms of customer loyalty, customer acquisition through the provision of gifts, which is widely implemented in marketing practice, has not been well investigated. This study addresses this research gap and identifies the joint influence of acquisition modes on customer behavioral loyalty, further enriching our knowledge of the effectiveness of different acquisition modes.

This paper investigates the prospects and difficulties of multi-professional teamwork in human services from a professional identity perspective. The purpose of this paper is to explore the mutual interplay between professional identity formation and team activities.

This is a process study of two cases of multi-professional teamwork in family care. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with team members and managers. The analysis follows a stepwise approach alternating between the individual and team levels.

In showing the mutual interplay between teamwork processes and individual identity formation, the study contributes knowledge on professional identity formation of mature professionals; in particular showing how unique individual identification processes have different consequences for multi-professional team activities. Further, alternative shapes of interplay between individual identity formation and team-level processes are identified.

Despite the fact that the sample is small and that collaboration intensity was relatively low, the paper succeeds in conceptualising the links between professional identity formation and multi-professional teamwork.

In managing multi-professional teams, team composition and the team’s early developments seem determining for whether the team will reach its collaborative intentions.

This paper is original in its exploration of the ongoing interplay between individual identity formation and multi-professional team endeavours. Further, the paper contributes knowledge on mature professionals’ identity formation, particularly concerning individual variation within and between professional groups.

The purpose of this paper is to ask how we can think about critical reflection as a pedagogical practice given the “confessional turn”. By the “confessional turn” the author refers to the idea that “subjective, autobiographical and confessional modes of expression” have expanded exponentially across a wide range of social spheres, including education, the legal system, the media and the workplace. Examining these developments, this paper asks what these debates on critical reflection and confession mean for pedagogical practice.

The main approach is a review of key debates in the literature on critical reflection and also in the wider social sciences.

The discussion compares different debates. Thus it shows that for critics, the turn to the “first person” technologies is narcissistic, psychologistic and de‐politicising. On this view, critical reflective practice might be understood as an individualistic and individualising pedagogy in spite of its claims to be critical. The paper discusses how in contrast, others see this move to talk about the subjective and the self as an extension of the feminist project of the personal is political – i.e. that personal stories, feelings and issues have social and political roots and consequences. For them, reflection can be critical, leading to political consciousness‐raising, i.e. a new awareness about social, political and personal processes. It finishes by examining the view that the idea of reflexivity might help us out of the conflict between these debates.

The paper poses a number of questions in relation to critical reflection that can be taken up by practitioners in the field.

The paper brings new literature to bear on the practice of critical reflection and raises important questions relevant to academics and practitioners.