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The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature and impact of leadership in relation to the local implementation of quality improvement interventions in health care organisations.

Using empirical data from two studies of the implementation of The Productive Ward: Releasing Time to Care™ in English hospitals, the paper explores leadership in relation to local implementation. Data were attained from in-depth interviews with senior managers, middle managers and frontline staff (n=79) in 13 NHS hospital case study sites. Framework Approach was used to explore staff views and to identify themes about leadership.

Four overall themes were identified: different leadership roles at multiple levels of the organisation, experiences of “good and bad” leadership styles, frontline staff having a sense of permission to lead change, leader's actions to spread learning and sustain improvements.

This paper offers useful perspectives in understanding informal, emergent, developmental or shared “new” leadership because it emphasises that health care structures, systems and processes influence and shape interactions between the people who work within them. The framework of leadership processes developed could guide implementing organisations to achieve leadership at multiple levels, use appropriate leadership roles, styles and behaviours at different levels and stages of implementation, value and provide support for meaningful staff empowerment, and enable leader's boundary spanning activities to spread learning and sustain improvements.

This paper aims to focus on facilitating large‐scale quality improvement in health care, and specifically understanding more about the known challenges associated with implementation of lean innovations: receptivity, the complexity of adoption processes, evidence of the innovation, and embedding change. Lessons are drawn from the implementation of The Productive Ward: Releasing Time to Care™ programme in English hospitals.

The study upon which the paper draws was a mixed‐method evaluation that aimed to capture the perceptions of three main stakeholder groups: national‐level policymakers (15 semi‐structured interviews); senior hospital managers (a national web‐based survey of 150 staff); and healthcare practitioners (case studies within five hospitals involving 58 members of staff). The views of these stakeholder groups were analysed using a diffusion of innovations theoretical framework to examine aspects of the innovation, the organisation, the wider context and linkages.

Although The Productive Ward was widely supported, stakeholders at different levels identified varying facilitators and challenges to implementation. Key issues for all stakeholders were staff time to work on the programme and showing evidence of the impact on staff, patients and ward environments.

To support implementation, policymakers should focus on expressing what can be gained locally using success stories and guidance from “early adopters”. Service managers, clinical educators and professional bodies can help to spread good practice and encourage professional leadership and support. Further research could help to secure support for the programme by generating evidence about the innovation, and specifically its clinical effectiveness and broader links to public expectations and experiences of healthcare.

This paper draws lessons from the implementation of The Productive Ward programme in England, which can inform the implementation of other large‐scale programmes of quality improvement in health care.

Worldwide, major projects often make the headlines as they suffer from a fourfold whammy of delays, cost blowouts, benefit shortfalls and stakeholder disappointments. It seems that error and bias can explain their underperformance. Which overarching explanation outweighs the other? It is the question this paper aims to address.

Insights are garnered from decades of research on thousands of major projects in developed and developing countries worldwide. In particular, two high-profile project cases, the Veteran Affairs Hospital in Aurora, Colorado (USA) and the Philharmonie de Paris (France), are explored.

The case projects show that error and bias combine to best explain project (under) performance. Applying best practices or debiasing project cost and benefit estimates is insufficient to prevent cost blowouts and benefit shortfalls. The confrontation of the two overarching explanations is not merely platonic. It is real and may lead to a media and legal battle.

This viewpoint calls practitioners to transcend the error versus bias debate and reconcile two key characters in the world of major projects: the “overoptimistic” who hold a bias for hope and firmly believe that, despite error down the road, many projects would, in the end, “stumble into success” as creativity may come to the rescue; and the “overpessimistic” who hold a bias for despair and think many projects should not have been started.

Few scholars have been cited as frequently as Pinto, Slevin, and Prescott for their contributions to project success and related critical success factors (CSF) in the 1980s. Studies since then built on their articles to broaden and refine our understanding of the topic. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the reasons for the impact of these seminal contributions and how the topic of project success continues to evolve.

The paper analyses the popularity of Pinto and his colleagues' contributions to project success and reviews the development of this field of research since then.

Project success remains a vibrant school of thought as do the earlier definitions, measurement scales and dimensions, and assessment techniques that Pinto and his colleagues developed. The authors view success more broadly and think of it strategically because they consider longer‐term business objectives. Some research is now based on managerial or organizational theories and reflects the multi‐dimensional and networked nature of project success.

Practically, the classic contributions in project success continue to be valid. The authors see diversity in how success is defined and measured. The CSFs vary by project types, life cycle phases, industries, nationalities, individuals, and organizations.

The paper relates earlier understandings of project success to subsequent research in the field and underscores the significant findings by Pinto, Slevin, and Prescott.

This article provides an introduction and assessment of the English and Spanish literatures on gender relations in disaster contexts. We analyze regional patterns of differences and similarities in women’s disaster experiences and the differing research questions raised by these patterns in the scholarly and practice‐based literature. The analysis supports the claim that how gender is theorized makes a difference in public policy and practical approaches to disaster risk management. We propose new directions in the field of disaster social science and contribute a current bibliography in the emerging gender and disaster field.

There has been a growing call regarding broad criteria for assessing qualitative methods' reliability and validity in international marketing (IM) research. In response, this study synthesizes the past literature to present an overarching, yet adaptable, trustworthiness verification framework for assessing the rigor of various qualitative methods used in IM.

The paper draws on qualitative research from various disciplines. It uses content analysis to examine how trustworthiness is conceptualized in qualitative studies in International Marketing Review (IMR) from 2005 to 2019.

The analysis reveals that strategies to ensure rigor and trustworthiness of qualitative research in IMR are partially applied. There remain gaps in implementing quality criteria across the trustworthiness dimensions of credibility, transferability, dependability, conformability and ethics.

This paper highlights the importance of incorporating strategies for assessing the quality of qualitative research in IM research. Since the analysis only focused on IMR, future research should explore and test the framework in other IM and business journals to reach a broader consensus in assessing qualitative studies' rigor.

IM researchers have yet to develop a consensus regarding broad criteria for assessing qualitative methods' reliability and validity. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap.

This paper discusses findings from qualitative research exploring young asylum seekers' (aged 18‐25) definitions and experiences of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ at a time of transition to adulthood and adjustment to life in a new country. Previous research on refugees and asylum seekers has focused largely on either children or adults, often failing to highlight the particular experiences of those in young adulthood. It will be argued that young asylum seekers of this age have specific needs and experiences associated with the dual transition they face, in both adapting to life in the UK and becoming adults, and the changing support network and entitlements available to them as they go through this process.

Ancient and universal, fantasy was most likely the first mainstream literature rather than the naturalism later recognized as mainstream. Every generation of every culture tells and retells tales based on psychological archetypes, the elements of fantasy. For instance, the Celtic tale “Leir and His Daughters” has been reworked and updated by authors ranging from Shakespeare to Diana Paxson (The Serpent's Tooth, Morrow, 1991). One of the old English/Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child in the late 19th century (Child ballad No. 37) has recently reappeared as the novel Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner (Morrow, 1991). Similarly, retellings of the Arthurian legend are legion, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Malory to Tennyson to such modern writers as T.H. White, Mary Stewart, Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon, Knopf, 1982), and Guy Gavriel Kay (The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road, Collins, 1986).

Many older adults engage in volunteer activities, drawing meaning and purpose through such efforts. Social distancing restrictions, put in place during Covid-19 surges to reduce the risk of transmission, disrupted older adult volunteers’ lives and volunteer experiences. Social distancing measures provide a unique opportunity to explore what happened when the choices around pausing or stopping volunteering were not entirely within the control of older adults. This paper aims to explore the experiences of older adult volunteers as they navigated uncertainties and made difficult decisions around balancing their safety and their desire to continue volunteering.

The authors conducted interviews with 26 community-dwelling older adults, age 50+, who had engaged in volunteer activities for at least 1 h a week prior to the start of the pandemic. The interviews were conducted on the phone or via Zoom. The authors used thematic analysis to help us analyze the data and identify patterns from participants’ experiences.

Despite the risk presented by Covid-19, most participants volunteered during the pandemic. They continued some or all of their previous activities with safety-related adjustments, with some seeking new or different opportunities. Participants’ discussions highlight the challenges of volunteering during the pandemic and the importance of engagement to their resiliency and subjective well-being.

This paper provides original contributions to understanding how and why older adults volunteered during the Covid-19 pandemic. The social distancing measures provide a novel opportunity to enrich our understanding of the meaningfulness and value of volunteerism to older adults’ lives and subjective well-being.