A self-help method for solving fire problems /

Issued Oct. 1979.

Self-help stabilization programs with use of marketing agreements and orders : general explanation ; questions and answers.

Cover title.

Reviewing state and local collective bargaining agreements : a guide for use in training or self-instruction.

Cover title.

The self-instructional manual for tumor registrars /

Originally prepared for the Louisiana Regional Medical Program.

Self tests /

Mode of access: Internet.

Office of Government Ethics (OGE) standards of ethical conduct : self-study guide : ethics.

Shipping list no.: 93-214-P.

Self-instructional manual for tumor registrars /

Originally prepared for the Louisiana Regional Medical Program under the direction of C. Dennis Fink and Robert F. Ryan.

Work-related self-efficacy among community residents with psychiatric disabilities

A new measure of work-related self-efficacy for people with psychiatric disabilities is reported. The 37-item scale measures self-efficacy in four relevant activity domains: 1) vocational service access and career planning, 2) job acquisition, 3) work-related social skills, and 4) general work skills. The scale was developed in a 12-month longitudinal survey of urban residents diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (n = 104). Results indicate validity of both a four-factor structure differentiating four core skill domains, and a single factor representing total work-related self-efficacy. The favorable psychometric properties support further research and trial applications in supported employment and psychiatric vocational rehabilitation.

Environmental factors that influence the community participation of adults with aphasia: The perspective of service industry workers

Background: The loss of language and the inability to communicate effectively as a result of aphasia often affects community participation. Within the World Health Organisation International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, disability is recognised as a dynamic interaction between the individual's health condition, such as aphasia, and his or her personal and environmental factors. There has been little research identifying the environmental facilitators and barriers to participation for people with aphasia in the community, and no research focusing on the perspective of service industry workers. Aims: This study aimed to identify barriers and facilitators to community participation for adults with aphasia from the perspective of service industry workers. Methods & Procedures: Eight focus groups were conducted with 24 service industry employees. Transcripts of the focus group discussions were analysed using qualitative content analysis procedures, and barriers to and facilitators for participation of people with aphasia were identified. Outcomes & Results: Results revealed that the participation of people with aphasia in the community can be affected by many environmental factors within three broad categories: (1) people environmental factors, (2) physical environmental factors, and (3) business or organisational environmental factors. Conclusions: Service industry employees were able to identify a range of factors that would act as barriers and facilitators for people with aphasia. Some of the more significant findings include the lack of other people's awareness about aphasia, the willingness of service industry workers at the individual level to accommodate people with aphasia, and the difficulty in making the necessary system, policy, and procedural changes at the organisational level. Speech pathologists are encouraged to assist service industry providers to be more aphasia-friendly through education and training, in addition to assisting people with aphasia to become self-advocates.

'Looking good, feeling better': Consumption, Control and the Aesthetics of Exclusivity in the Service Encounter

The majority of ‘service’ literature has focused on the production side of service work (i.e. employees and management), while treating the role of the customer and/or consumer as secondary (Korczynski and Ott, 2004). Those authors who have addressed the role consumption plays in shaping and maintaining individuals' self- identity have tended to overemphasize the dominance of consumer culture in shaping ‘our consciousness’ (Ritzer, 1999), with little in the way of empirical evidence to support these assertions. This paper develops the conceptualization of service work and consumer culture literature, by placing more emphasis on the customer in the service encounter. Using an ethnographic study of a ‘high class’ department store, this paper addresses employee and customer identity and the nature of managerial, employee and customer control within this ‘exclusive’ context. Of particular interest is how employees and customer’s ‘embody’ this control. Using Bourdieu’s (1986) conception of class and habitus, the concept of exclusivity goes beyond the management /service worker dyad by providing a means of investigating identity control by the organization over both customers and service workers. However, an organization’s exclusivity is not a closed normative pursuit of control, and shows this enterprise is part of a contested terrain, while revealing the ambiguity and ‘openness’ of control practices and pursuits. In order to uphold the ideal of exclusivity, management, service workers and customers must all engage in a precarious quest for establishing and maintaining a sense of control and/or identity. This paper demonstrates the continuing contradiction between bureaucratic practices of control and consumer culture, and highlights the need for research that investigates the context -dependent nature of control in service-related and consumer studies.

The corporatization of community pharmacy:implications for service provision, the public health function, and pharmacy's claims to professional status in the United Kingdom

Background Pharmacy has experienced both incomplete professionalization and deprofessionalization. Since the late 1970s, a concerted attempt has been made to re-professionalize pharmacy in the United Kingdom (UK) through role extension—a key feature of which has been a drive for greater pharmacy involvement in public health. However, the continual corporatization of the UK community pharmacy sector may reduce the professional autonomy of pharmacists and may threaten to constrain attempts at reprofessionalization. Objectives The objectives of the research: to examine the public health activities of community pharmacists in the UK; to explore the attitudes of community pharmacists toward recent relevant UK policy and barriers to the development of their public health function; and, to investigate associations between activity, attitudes, and the type of community pharmacy worked in (eg, supermarket, chain, independent). Methods A self-completion postal questionnaire was sent to a random sample of practicing community pharmacists, stratified for country and sex, within Great Britain (n = 1998), with a follow-up to nonresponders 4 weeks later. Data were analyzed using SPSS (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) (v12.0). A final response rate of 51% (n = 1023/1998) was achieved. Results The level of provision of emergency hormonal contraception on a patient group direction, supervised administration of medicines, and needle-exchange schemes was lower in supermarket pharmacies than in the other types of pharmacy. Respondents believed that supermarkets and the major multiple pharmacy chains held an advantageous position in terms of attracting financing for service development despite suggesting that the premises of such pharmacies may not be the most suitable for the provision of such services. Conclusions A mixed market in community pharmacy may be required to maintain a comprehensive range of pharmacy-based public health services and provide maximum benefit to all patients. Longitudinal monitoring is recommended to ensure that service provision is adequate across the pharmacy network.

Dynamic QoS management and optimisation in service-based systems

Service-based systems that are dynamically composed at run time to provide complex, adaptive functionality are currently one of the main development paradigms in software engineering. However, the Quality of Service (QoS) delivered by these systems remains an important concern, and needs to be managed in an equally adaptive and predictable way. To address this need, we introduce a novel, tool-supported framework for the development of adaptive service-based systems called QoSMOS (QoS Management and Optimisation of Service-based systems). QoSMOS can be used to develop service-based systems that achieve their QoS requirements through dynamically adapting to changes in the system state, environment and workload. QoSMOS service-based systems translate high-level QoS requirements specified by their administrators into probabilistic temporal logic formulae, which are then formally and automatically analysed to identify and enforce optimal system configurations. The QoSMOS self-adaptation mechanism can handle reliability- and performance-related QoS requirements, and can be integrated into newly developed solutions or legacy systems. The effectiveness and scalability of the approach are validated using simulations and a set of experiments based on an implementation of an adaptive service-based system for remote medical assistance.

The definition, theoretical modelling and empirical research of front-line service employee corporate identity within a UK national grocery retailer:determining the FLE corporate brand identification construct

Over the past forty years the corporate identity literature has developed to a point of maturity where it currently contains many definitions and models of the corporate identity construct at the organisational level. The literature has evolved by developing models of corporate identity or in considering corporate identity in relation to new and developing themes, e.g. corporate social responsibility. It has evolved into a multidisciplinary domain recently incorporating constructs from other literature to further its development. However, the literature has a number of limitations. It remains that an overarching and universally accepted definition of corporate identity is elusive, potentially leaving the construct with a lack of clear definition. Only a few corporate identity definitions and models, at the corporate level, have been empirically tested. The corporate identity construct is overwhelmingly defined and theoretically constructed at the corporate level, leaving the literature without a detailed understanding of its influence at an individual stakeholder level. Front-line service employees (FLEs), form a component in a number of corporate identity models developed at the organisational level. FLEs deliver the services of an organisation to its customers, as well as represent the organisation by communicating and transporting its core defining characteristics to customers through continual customer contact and interaction. This person-to-person contact between an FLE and the customer is termed a service encounter, where service encounters influence a customer’s perception of both the service delivered and the associated level of service quality. Therefore this study for the first time defines, theoretically models and empirically tests corporate identity at the individual FLE level, termed FLE corporate identity. The study uses the services marketing literature to characterise an FLE’s operating environment, arriving at five potential dimensions to the FLE corporate identity construct. These are scrutinised against existing corporate identity definitions and models to arrive at a definition for the construct. In reviewing the corporate identity, services marketing, branding and organisational psychology literature, a theoretical model is developed for FLE corporate identity, which is empirically and quantitatively tested, with FLEs in seven stores of a major national retailer. Following rigorous construct reliability and validity testing, the 601 usable responses are used to estimate a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model for the study. The results for the individual hypotheses and the structural model are very encouraging, as they fit the data well and support a definition of FLE corporate identity. This study makes contributions to the branding, services marketing and organisational psychology literature, but its principal contribution is to extend the corporate identity literature into a new area of discourse and research, that of FLE corporate identity

A language for self-adaptive system requirements

Self-adaptive systems have the capability to autonomously modify their behaviour at run-time in response to changes in their environment. Such systems are now commonly built in domains as diverse as enterprise computing, automotive control systems, and environmental monitoring systems. To date, however, there has been limited attention paid to how to engineer requirements for such systems. As a result, selfadaptivity is often constructed in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we argue that a more rigorous treatment of requirements relating to self-adaptivity is needed and that, in particular, requirements languages for self-adaptive systems should include explicit constructs for specifying and dealing with the uncertainty inherent in self-adaptive systems. We present some initial thoughts on a new requirements language for selfadaptive systems and illustrate it using examples from the services domain. © 2008 IEEE.

Market-awareness in service-based systems

Service-based systems are applications built by composing pre-existing services. During design time and according to the specifications, a set of services is selected. Both, service providers and consumers exist in a service market that is constantly changing. Service providers continuously change their quality of services (QoS), and service consumers can update their specifications according to what the market is offering. Therefore, during runtime, the services are periodically and manually checked to verify if they still satisfy the specifications. Unfortunately, humans are overwhelmed with the degree of changes exhibited by the service market. Consequently, verification of the compliance specification and execution of the corresponding adaptations when deviations are detected cannot be carried out in a manual fashion. In this work, we propose a framework to enable online awareness of changes in the service market in both consumers and providers by representing them as active software agents. At runtime, consumer agents concretize QoS specifications according to the available market knowledge. Services agents are collectively aware of themselves and of the consumers' requests. Moreover, they can create and maintain virtual organizations to react actively to demands that come from the market. In this paper we show preliminary results that allow us to conclude that the creation and adaptation of service-based systems can be carried out by a self-organized service market system. © 2012 IEEE.