Suchergebnisse

"Interviews with women struggling with infertility, many of whom come from a wider range of social backgrounds than most researchers have studied, and who experience deep ambivalence about motherhood and non-motherhood, never actually choosing either path"--

Organizations face a key challenge in dynamic environments: the contexts in which experience is gained will not always match the contexts in which experience will be applied. This challenge has been investigated largely in terms of progressive environmental change, which increasingly invalidates learning from prior experience. A great deal of environmental dynamism, however, involves cycling through a limited set of environmental conditions that appear and then give way to other conditions, only to later reappear. We argue that cycles create some of the same problems for organizations as progressive change but also provide organizations an opportunity to reapply lessons as the cycle moves from phase to phase. We develop hypotheses about how cycles affect what organizations learn and how cyclical conditions affect how organizations learn. We test the resulting hypotheses in the highly cyclical context of construction lending by community banks using a panel of nearly 40 years of local real estate cycles. The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1239 .

In the early 1990s, St. Louis County had multiple foodservice worker-related hepatitis A outbreaks uncontrolled by standard outbreak interventions. Restaurant interest groups and the general public applied political pressure to local public health officials for more stringent interventions, including a mandatory vaccination policy. Local health departments can enact mandatory vaccination policies, but this has rarely been done. The study objectives were to describe the approach used to pass a mandatory vaccination policy at the local jurisdiction level and illustrate the outcome from this ordinance 15 years later. A case study design was used. In-depth, semi-structured interviews using guided questions were conducted in spring, 2015, with six key informants who had direct knowledge of the mandatory vaccination policy process. Meeting minutes and/or reports were also analyzed. A Poisson distribution analysis was used to calculate the rate of outbreaks before and after mandatory vaccination policy implementation. The policy appears to have reduced the number of hepatitis A outbreaks, lowering the morbidity and economic burden in St. Louis County. The lessons learned by local public health officials in passing a mandatory hepatitis A vaccination policy are important and relevant in today's environment. The experience and lessons learned may assist other local health departments when faced with the potential need for mandatory policies for any vaccine preventable disease.