• Faculty and Staff

• Research
  • Journal of Bus Research
  • Publications (Univ.-wide)
  • Publications and Outreach
  • Target Journals
  • Working Paper Series

• Journal of Bus Research

• Call for Papers
• Guidelines

• About the College
  • Accreditation
  • College Administration
  • College Policies
  • Dean's Message
  • Directory
  • Facilities
  • Faculty in Brief
  • Faculty Positions
  • Fast Facts
  • Past Events
  • Web Site

• Prospective Students
  • Academic Programs
  • Application
  • e-Campus/WebCT
  • Financial Aid
  • Online Forms
  • Requirements
  • Tuition and Fees

• Current Students
  • Academic Honesty/Integrity
  • Academic Programs
  • Careers/Internships
  • e-Campus
  • FTP Site
  • Graduation
  • Newsletter
  • Online Forms
  • Past Events
  • Student Organizations
  • WebCT

• Visitors
  • Business Advisory Council
  • Dean's Award
  • Careers/Internships
  • Committees
  • Executive Forum
  • Hall of Fame
  • Newsletter
  • Past Events
  • Research Centers
  • Review Reports

• Directory

• Giving

Call For Papers

Special Edition of the Journal of Business Research on

Reliability, Mindfulness, and Managing Healthcare

Paper submission deadline is July 4, 2009

Healthcare providers and organizations (including but not limited to hospitals, clinics, health insurance providers, and pharmaceutical manufacturers) make decisions in an extremely dynamic and unpredictable environment and rely upon complex interactions for highly reliable outcomes. If one or more of these organizations, individuals, or interactions is unreliable then errors or omissions often occur that may result in catastrophic consequences: high costs, denial of needed medical treatment, unnecessary infections and injuries, and even death. How then can organizations and individuals achieve highly reliable performance when working in this dynamic and unpredictable environment?

The goal of this special issue of the Journal of Business Research is to provide leading-edge research on applying individual or collective mindfulness concepts in studies of healthcare management that contribute to highly reliable performance outcomes in healthcare organizations.

For the purposes of this special edition, studies relating to individual mindfulness should focus upon factors that Langer (1989) develops: (1) creating new categories, (2) openness to new information, (3) sensitivity to different contexts, (4) awareness of multiple viewpoints, and (5) process orientation. Weick and Sutcliffe (2001) develop the key aspects of organizational mindfulness: (1) preoccupation with failure, (2) reluctance to simplify, (3) attention to operations, (4) focus on resilience, and (5) the migration of decisions to expertise.

This special edition of the Journal of Business Research encourages quantitative and qualitative studies on reliability and mindfulness in the management of healthcare from the widest variety of business disciplines. Theoretical and empirical advances from fields such as (but not limited to) accounting, finance, information systems, marketing, operations management, organizational behavior, and risk and insurance are considered for publication.

Original contributions utilizing diverse research methods are welcome including empirical, analytical, numerical, and conceptual approaches. In relation to reliability and mindfulness in managing healthcare, sample topics include, but are not limited to:

• Measures of effectiveness and performance
• The role of technology
• The transfer of principles and methods from manufacturing to healthcare
• Managing organizational and technological change in hospital settings
• Supply chain management in the healthcare sector
• The role of lean and six sigma
• Current examination of safety management, quality management, and error reduction
• The role of organizational structure
• High reliability organizations
• Benchmarking
• Learning from catastrophe

Special Editor: Paul Mangiameli, University of Rhode Island. Send papers in WORD format to the special issue editors at: mangia@uri.edu

References

Langer, E. J. Mindfulness (1989), Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing.

Weick, K., and Sutcliffe, K. H. (2001), Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity, University of Michigan Business School Series, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.