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Several Contexts (several + context)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences40%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting40%

Selected Abstracts

Hospital ownership and quality of care: what explains the different results in the literature?

HEALTH ECONOMICS, Issue 12 2008
Karen Eggleston
Abstract This systematic review examines what factors explain the diversity of findings regarding hospital ownership and quality. We identified 31 observational studies written in English since 1990 that used multivariate analysis to examine quality of care at nonfederal general acute, short-stay US hospitals. We find that pooled estimates of ownership effects are sensitive to the subset of studies included and the extent of overlap among hospitals analyzed in the underlying studies. Ownership does appear to be systematically related to differences in quality among hospitals in several contexts. Whether studies find for-profit and government-controlled hospitals to have higher mortality rates or rates of adverse events than their nonprofit counterparts depends on data sources, time period, and region covered. Policymakers should be aware of the underlying reasons for conflicting evidence in this literature, and the strengths and weaknesses of meta-analytic synthesis. The ,true' effect of ownership appears to depend on institutional context, including differences across regions, markets, and over time. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

MAKING SENSE OF CONCEPTUAL CHANGE

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2008
JOUNI-MATTI KUUKKANEN
ABSTRACT Arthur Lovejoy's history of unit-ideas and the history of concepts are often criticized for being historically insensitive forms of history-writing. Critics claim that one cannot find invariable ideas or concepts in several contexts or times in history without resorting to some distortion. One popular reaction is to reject the history of ideas and concepts altogether, and take linguistic entities as the main theoretical units. Another reaction is to try to make ideas or concepts context-sensitive and to see their histories as dynamic processes of transformation. The main argument in this paper is that we cannot abandon ideas or concepts as theoretical notions if we want to write an intelligible history of thought. They are needed for the categorization and classification of thinking, and in communication with contemporaries. Further, the criterion needed to subsume historical concepts under a general concept cannot be determined merely on the basis of their family resemblances, which allows variation without an end, since talk of the same concepts implies that they share something in common. I suggest that a concept in history should be seen to be composed of two components: the core of a concept and the margin of a concept. On the basis of this, we can develop a vocabulary for talking about conceptual changes. The main idea is that conceptual continuity requires the stability of the core of the concept, but not necessarily that of the margin, which is something that enables a description of context-specific features. If the core changes, we ought to see it as a conceptual replacement. [source]

On the Market Reaction to Revenue and Earnings Surprises

JOURNAL OF BUSINESS FINANCE & ACCOUNTING, Issue 1-2 2009
Itay Kama
Abstract:, This study extends Ertimur et al. (2003) and Jegadeesh and Livnat (2006a) by providing a contextual framework for the information content of revenue and earnings surprises. I find that the influence of earnings surprises (revenue surprises) on stock returns is lower (higher) in R&D intensive companies. Also, market reaction to earnings surprises is lower in the fourth quarter, and to revenue surprises it is higher in industries with oligopolistic competition. A comprehensive analysis indicates that, in contrast to previous studies for the full sample, in several contexts market reaction to earnings surprises is not higher than to revenue surprises. [source]

Capital at Home and at School: A Review and Synthesis

JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND FAMILY, Issue 4 2010
Toby L. Parcel
Human, financial, and social capital from several contexts affects child and adolescent well-being. Families and schools are among the most important, and research is increasingly studying how effects of capital across such contexts affect child and adolescent academic and social outcomes. Some research suggests that families may be more powerful than schools in promoting child and adolescent well-being. Additional research is needed to more fully understand how capital across institutions interacts in producing child well-being, when and why multiple institutions or levels of analysis are relevant, and how several contexts can form chains of causation. Theories of social capital may promote increased conversation among researchers who study the same outcomes yet focus their analyses on different contexts. [source]

ICTs adoption and knowledge management: the case of an e-procurement system

KNOWLEDGE AND PROCESS MANAGEMENT: THE JOURNAL OF CORPORATE TRANSFORMATION, Issue 1 2007
Silvia Massa
The purpose of the research is to articulate a framework for analysing the effects of e-procurement adoption in terms of knowledge management. Starting from this position, a case study in a leader firm in electronics devices was developed and a consolidated knowledge perspective was adopted. Empirical evidence confirms that it is not information and communication technology itself that can provide positive or negative effects on organizations but how the technology is used in conjunction with complementary human resources. In fact, according to the case study, two different phases emerged in the e-procurement (EP) adoption. Both are characterized by the same technology but different behaviours that determined very different results. While the framework can be applied to read EP development in several contexts, it would be a mistake to generalize the results from this example. While multiple informants from different hierarchical levels, triangulation using different types of data sources and a systematic data analysis serve to attenuate many of the problems with reliability, generalizability remains more of an issue. Finally, it is worth noting that studying adoption of inter-organizational systems-like EP systems are, has proved to be, difficult because such systems span the company boundaries. Consequently, future developments will aim at broadening the research along the entire supply chain. The proposed framework could be a useful tool to check an EP project in progress and to motivate the involved actors by suggesting a means to interpret how the project is impacting on organization, keeping in mind that effects on KM anticipate improvements in traditional procurement performances. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]