Essay based on a Presentation to International Stakeholder Forum, Convened by the Board of Directors of the Fair Labor Association, Washington D.C. June 26, 2009. There is much concern about the current crisis. Indeed the fall in consumption in developed countries is steep, anything between 15 to 25% over the first months of 2009 in most countries. This is double the decline of sales in previous recessions. However to this cyclical crisis and concerns two new concerns are being added. The first new concern to fashion, mainly amongst retailers and brands, is related to their impact on manufacturing in developing countries and to the employment and social conditions of workers. The second concern new to fashion, which is broadly shared amongst industries, is that after the crisis more structural changes in consumption will happen.
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Talk by members of executive hospital boards influences the organizational positioning of nurses. Talk is a relational leadership practice. Using a qualitative‐ interpretive design we organized focus group meetings wherein members of executive hospital boards (7), nurses (14), physicians (7), and managers (6), from 15 Dutch hospitals, discussed the organizational positioning of nursing during COVID crisis. We found that members of executive hospital boards consider the positioning of nursing in crisis a task of nurses themselves and not as a collective, interdependent, and/or specific board responsibility. Furthermore, members of executive hospital boards talk about the nursing profession as (1) more practical than strategic, (2) ambiguous in positioning, and (3) distinctive from the medical profession. Such talk seemingly contrasts with the notion of interdependence that highlights how actors depend on each other in interaction. Interdependence is central to collaboration in hospital crises. In this paper, therefore, we depart from the members of executive hospital boards as leader and “positioner,” and focus on talk— as a discursive leadership practice—to illuminate leadership and governance in hospitals in crisis, as social, interdependent processes.
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This paper presents the design and the results of a comparative study of multidisciplinary on-scene command teams at work in virtual emergency training exercises. The principal goals of the study were to understand how "on-scene command teams" coordinate on multidisciplinary objectives and tasks, and how the manner in which this is done affects their performance. The study involved 20 on-scene command teams consisting of various individuals, such as police, fire and medical services personnel, municipal officers and infrastructure operators, drawn from a Safety Region in The Netherlands. Integrated video recordings by five synchronized cameras captured the coordination processes during the virtual exercises. The integrated and synchronized video recordings were then transformed into numerical data for analysis. Performance was operationalized by scoring the progress and completion of emergency management tasks for which individual members and/or teams as a whole were responsible. Team coordination was operationalized using network centrality and density measures. The significant findings are the following: (i) emergency management performance and coordination patterns within and among on-scene command teams have considerable variation; and (ii) teams that use less coordination during the intermediate phases of emergency management perform significantly better than teams that do not, moreover, actors who have central positions in a network are better able to achieve their performance goals.
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