Chapter 6 continues the Jordan case study by providing an important assessment of the theory’s expectations over time. Drawing on archival documents, internet search data, elite interviews, and secondary sources, the chapter shows that Jordan’s kings have shared power more credibly when they have more reasons to be concerned about popular discontent. Furthermore, it also demonstrates that Jordanians have responded to these changes as the theory expects, becoming more likely to blame the king for their grievances when the monarchy controls the decision-making process more directly, and less likely to blame the king when he delegates more credibly to other political elites. Not only do these findings demonstrate the theory’s utility for explaining changes in authoritarian decision-making over time, but they also help to account for alternative explanations to the argument, such as the possibility that the Jordanian monarchy benefits from traditional legitimacy that protects its reputation from popular anger.

In Chapter 3, we offer a brief review of the history of organizational control – from ancient bureaucracies to the behavioral theory of the firm – as well as a discussion of the theoretical foundation underlying organizational control research. We also present the results of a co-citation analysis examining 1,148 organizational control articles published between 1938 and 2022 to illuminate the field’s intellectual base and emerging research fronts. Based on the uncovered intellectual structure of the organizational control field, we review its constituent theories, outline its underlying assumptions, and briefly discuss the critical perspective on organizational control.

For most transnational companies, the twenty-first century offers exciting prospects of continued growth and prosperity. Yet, in the poorest nations on Earth, the reputation of large MNEs from the world’s most developed countries was shaky from 2000 onwards, and in some quarters, in complete tatters. Indeed, a series of widely publicized events in the early decades of the twenty-first century led many to ask what additional constraints and controls needed to be placed on their largely unregulated activities.

Health system spending, and the consequent impact on health are increasingly a focus of governments around the world. Given the strain on resources and systems, increasingly scarce resources require targeting more effectively. Measuring efficiency and productivity are increasingly the focus of government gepartments, both nationally and locally. Thus, assessing how efficiency is measured and how valid and robust results are is critical to those involved in policy and service delivery. This chapter presents revised guidelines as to how users should set up such studies to be as useful as possible and how end users can assess how useful they actually are to them in their specific setting. Conclusions are drawn as to how these can be used in a fast-changing world, and potential consequences of not following guidance are discussed.

At mid-century, the north bank companies faced two main problems: wharf competition and the failure of earnings to keep pace with an increase in the shipping and cargoes handled. Adding to these challenges from the 1860s was accommodating steam shipping by investment in facilities, including new docks, and in the 1880s, a resurgence of fierce rivalry between themselves and a financial crisis created by the new Tilbury dock resulted in effective amalgamation. Their common response to diminishing profitability was the introduction of sub-contracting – to the detriment of the lives and livelihoods of a resistant workforce. Skilled port workers were unionised, unskilled generally not, but strikes by particular groups were not uncommon. Port-wide action by dock workers in the 1850s failed but stoppages in the early 1870s achieved wage rises, as also did the port-wide 1889 Great Dock Strike.

In this chapter, we investigate how a couple where one of the spouses is diagnosed with dementia handle challenges in narrations of past shared events that arise when the spouse with dementia has limited access to these events. Partners of people diagnosed with dementia recurrently have to take into consideration that their spouse may not remember details in stories they tell, even though the person with dementia is a main participant in the events being retold. The design of such stories is complex as the interactants must keep track of both the content of the story and manage the potential sensitivity of telling a story that should already be known to both spouses. We show how the spouse without dementia (re)organizes the participation framework in resourceful ways and delicately deals with her spouse’s limited memory using a variety of face-saving practices. The analyses highlight how issues related to knowledge and dementia can benefit from using an interactional and distributed perspective. While access and rights to knowledge is usually divided between participants depending on the knowledge domain and the participants’ relation to the topic, in the case of a dementia disease a more flexible approach towards such divisions could be advantageous.

This chapter begins by distinguishing among prevention, intervention, and promotion efforts, giving particular attention to how these processes operate in the context of schools. One example of a school-based, evidence-based practice – City Connects – is used to illustrate how prevention, promotion, and intervention can be operationalized in the contexts of schools and their local communities. As a clinical/public health model, City Connects is responsive to every child in the school, without an exclusive focus on either the subset of students who are in severe crisis or those who are highest performing. The authors argue that prevention-in-action requires working across polarities, such as intervening at both the individual and group levels, targeting challenges while fostering strengths and interests, and promoting healthy development while simultaneously intervening in existing difficulties. The chapter concludes with a summary of challenges and possibilities in implementing high-quality prevention and promotion approaches, such as developing a theory of change based on developmental science that includes measurable outcomes.

Conditional frontier models, including full and partial, robust frontiers, have evolved into an indispensable tool for exploring the impact of exogenous factors on the performance of the decision-making units in a fully nonparametric setup. Nonparametric conditional frontier models enable the handling of heterogeneity in a formal way, allowing explanation of the differences in the efficiency levels achieved by units operating under different external or environmental conditions. A thorough analysis of both full and robust time dependent conditional efficiency measures and of their corresponding estimators allows unravelling the compounded impact that exogenous factors may have on the production process. The nonparametric framework does not make assumptions on error distributions and production function forms and avoids misspecification problems when the data-generation process is unknown, as is common in applied studies. This chapter proposes a comprehensive review and journey through the conditional nonparametric frontier models developed so far in the efficiency literature. The authors show how this nonparametric dynamic framework is important for evaluating efficiency in the healthcare sector. They provide numerical illustrations on datasets from the Italian healthcare system, including summaries of practical implementation details.