Today in developed nations, the public pays for most medical care, with the state and the medical profession or providers determining its nature, form, and level. But there is no well-defined institutional framework for revealing consumer preferences and enabling client choice about the nature and form of public entitlement. This thwarts the efforts of health system reformers to satisfy their c...

The South African economy has for some time been characterised by high unemployment, income inequality and a skills mismatch, all of which have contributed to conflict between business, government and labour. The co-operative model of stakeholder management is examined as a possible mitigating organisational form in this high-conflict environment. International experience indicates some success...

Martin Luther succinctly summarized his theology in sola statements, such as sola scriptura, viewing the Bible (scriptura) as the only valid source of information about God rather than what he viewed as the extraneous, corrupting church doctrine of the time. As a secular side effect of this focus on individual reading skills, the Protestant territories were the first to acquire high literacy ra...

of existing good practices and their relevance and effectiveness, particularly in a local setting, would be important enablers, whereas unavailability of trained manpower and lack of understanding of HT processes and their usefulness and impact on improvement of health care would be major barriers for future activities.4 They felt the need for health professionals, health managers from departme...

This paper looks at the challenges posed by ICT critical infrastructures in their interaction with governance processes. The authors argue that, in order to develop better understanding of how (global) governing arrangements are made in a highly mediatised environment, adequate frameworks should be elaborated to study the interrelation between institutional and technological infrastructures. In...

For many higher education institutions (HEIs), identity and access management (IAM) has proven to be a key enabling technology which does not only automate the handling of user accounts and their privileges to a large extend, but also allows a very tight integration into the existing business processes and offers comprehensive interfaces to IT service management processes. The Munich Scientific...

This paper investigates how, in a developing country, where credit market and legal institutions are weak, firms' choice of organization form, i.e., noncorporate versus corporate, affects their access to capital markets. I use data from Indonesian manufacturers from 1992 to 1998 to show that incorporated firms are less reliant on internal financing than unincorporated firms. Moreover, a 1995 re...

The primary inquiry of this study is to identify and understand the underlying factors that enable smallholder farmer groups to improve their market situation. The specific objective of this paper is to examine to what extent certain group characteristics and asset endowments facilitate collective action initiatives to improve group marketing performance. This objective is approached through an...

This paper introduces Muse, an interactive visualization of publications to explore the collaborations between institutions. For this, the data on co-authorship is utilized, as these signify an existing level of collaboration. The affiliations of authors are geo-located, resulting in relations not only among institutions, but also between regions and countries. We explain our ideas behind the v...

The rapidly increasing number of Web-based courses and degrees has sparked renewed interest in distance education. Educational institutions and private companies are moving to online delivery. The number and variety of Web-based courses and programs is escalating at a frenetic pace as providers compete to capture market share. Marketing of online learning is carefully framed as delivering educa...