Collaborative Governance of Public Health: A Cultural and Ethical Perspective on Predicting Citizens' Trust in Public Health Services During Medical Emergencies

Over the years, citizens' expectations of the healthcare sector have increased, especially after the sudden outbreak of COVID-19. Additionally, citizens are becoming more conscious of having a healthier lifestyle based on several environmental and economic issues prevailing worldwide. Hence, empirically testing the predictors of providing excellent public healthcare services and enhancing the resultant citizens' trust in such services is of utmost significance. Simultaneously, the critical role of healthcare workers' capacity in providing quality services to patients in public health institutions and improving healthcare services to develop citizens' trust needs has been considered in this study. Based on a quantitative survey, the current study collected data from 460 individuals regarding three collaborative governance practices and resultant improved public healthcare services. The results revealed the significance of all three collaborative governance of public health practices. Citizen participation was the most impactful, followed by democratic accountability and procedural legitimacy. The study results are valuable to practitioners, policymakers, healthcare service providers, and governments. Among the recommendations are that collaborative governance practices should be developed, the healthcare system should be decentralized to provide the best services to citizens, and public healthcare workers' capabilities should be improved by providing proper training. © 2023, Florida Gulf Coast University. All rights reserved.

Ethical moments and institutional expertise in UK Government COVID-19 pandemic policy responses: where, when and how is ethical advice sought?

Background:The emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic has required a rapid acceleration of policy decision making, and raised a wide range of ethical issues worldwide, ranging from vaccine prioritisation, welfare and public health ‘trade-offs', inequalities in policy impacts, and the legitimacy of scientific expertise.Aims and objectives:This paper explores the legacy of the pandemic for future science-advice-policy relationships by investigating how the UK government's engagement with ethical advice is organised institutionally. We provide an analysis of some key ethical moments in the UK Government response to the pandemic, and institutions and national frameworks which exist to provide ethical advice on policy strategies.Methods:We draw on literature review, documentary analysis of scientific advisory group reports, and a stakeholder workshop with government ethics advisors and researchers in England.Findings:We identify how particular types of ethical advice and expertise are sought to support decision making. Contrary to a prominent assumption in the extensive literature on ‘governing by expertise', ethical decisions in times of crisis are highly contingent.Discussion and conclusions:The paper raises an important set of questions for how best to equip policymakers to navigate decisions about values in situations characterised by knowledge deficits, complexity and uncertainty. We conclude that a clearer pathway is needed between advisory institutions and decision makers to ensure ethically-informed debate.

DEMOCRACY AMID CRISES: Polarization, Pandemic, Protests, and Persuasion

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. Democracy amid Crises explains how these forces and the media messaging through which they were filtered shaped the election and post-election dialogue, as well as voter perceptions of both, with worrisome potential consequences for democracy. The book spotlights not one but several electorates, each embedded in a distinctive informational environment. The four crises affected these electorates differently, partly because the unique constellations of media in which they were advertently and inadvertently enmeshed contained dissimilar messages from the campaigns and other sources of influence. Awash in distinctive message streams, the various electorates adopted divergent perspectives on the crises, candidates, and state of the country. As a result, understanding voting behavior and attitudes about the events that followed requires an analysis of both the distinctive electorates and the informational environments that enveloped them. Importantly, our findings raise fundamental questions about the nation's future, occasioned by the contest over whether the 2020 presidential election was fairly and freely decided and by worrisome responses to the reality that the country's citizenry is becoming more multiracial, multiethnic, and, on matters religious, agnostic. © Oxford University Press 2023.

Development and Current Situation of Forest Use by Camping Sites in Japan

After the Second World War, camping and camping sites in forests have developed and increased significantly from the 1980 s to 1990 s in Japan, relying on the laws and institutions established from the 1950 s to 1970 s across multiple administrative sectors, obtaining social approval as a legitimatized outdoor activity and forest use. Since the 2000s, the management of these camping sites has deteriorated mainly owing to economic recession, which caused the movement of camping site renewal by the private sector. This movement directed the diversification of forest use by camping sites in recent years. Camping facilities have been developed in many ways to meet the needs of campers, including organized group camps that promote education and experience in forests, solo camps, glamping, and workcations under the spread of the COVID-19 that demand relaxing or productive environment, and leisure camps that require enrichment of outdoor activities. As a result of this diversification, possibilities for effective utilization of forests and regional revitalization through the management of camping sites have been observed. Many camping sites have utilized forest lands, standing trees, and forest spaces to develop facilities and services, and there are cases where firewood production for campers has promoted the reorganization and development of local forestry and securing of personnel for forest management. In addition to securing local employment brought by reorganization, local revitalization in rural and mountainous areas has been promoted through the linkage of the needs of campers to positive economic effects, increase of the visitors who deeply connected to local people, and comprehensive and sustainable use of resources in local societies. © 2023 Nihon Ringakkai. All rights reserved.

Legitimacy versus efficiency: implementation of in-person work in Japanese companies during the COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeThis study aims to examine how companies persuaded their employees to be present at offices during the COVID-19 pandemic and how remote and non-remote work practices affected employee performance. Design/methodology/approachFirm strategies are assumed to follow the principles of legitimacy and efficiency. However, these principles are often contradictory and incompatible. This study explored how companies legitimized non-remote work during the pandemic in Japan, and how in-person work practices affected individual employee productivity. The authors conducted a survey in the country, and the collected data was quantitatively analyzed. FindingsOn the basis of our empirical study on institutional work providing rationales for maintaining existing business practices, the authors found that Japanese companies often used institutional logics that included the inevitability of employees' obedience to company policy, the lack of employees' digital resources at home and the necessity of face-to-face customer dealing to legitimize their non-adoption of telework, even amid the emergency. The findings also indicate that the adoption of in-person work was negatively related to individual employee performance. Originality/valueThe current study aims to make a theoretical contribution to the literature on institutional maintenance and institutional work, which, till now, has only focused on institutional change rather than institutional maintenance. Second, few studies have empirically investigated the contradiction between legitimacy and efficiency, although the literature on organizational legitimacy assumes that individuals and organizations are not always rational.

Fragmented Transparency: The Visibility of Agency Science in European Union Risk Regulation

Responding to mistrust in the European agencies' risk assessments in politically salient cases, the European Union (EU) legislator, the European Food Safety Authority and the European Medicines Agency alike have accelerated their efforts to foster EU regulatory science transparency. These simultaneous endeavours have, however, taken place in a fragmented legislative and administrative context, with each agency operating under a different legal framework. By focusing on authorisation procedures, from registration of studies to authorisation of novel foods, pesticides and human medicines, this article examines the resulting regimes governing the disclosure of scientific data by EU agencies to identify common trends and sectoral specificities. Against the background of an overall shift towards enhanced transparency, we shed light on, first, the circulation of institutional arrangements and practices among agencies and, second, the new dimensions of transparency emerging from these developments. We also highlight the remaining sectoral differences and argue that they could have potentially large impacts on the amount and type of information disclosed and on the level of transparency perceived by stakeholders and citizens. We argue that more coherence across the sectoral transparency regimes is needed, in particular in light of the agencies' contested legitimacy and of their increasing cooperation on cross-cutting issues like antimicrobial resistance and medicine and pesticide residues in food.

Technology-driven proctoring: Validity, social justice and ethics in higher education

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to rapid change, unprecedented in higher education. One such change has been the almost complete shift to online assessment. The simultaneous employment of online assessment and proctoring has not enjoyed the rigorous academic debate and research traditionally associated with such shifts in academia. This engagement is essential and this article aims to discuss aspects of social justice, ethics and the validity of digital proctoring to the burgeoning debate. Digital proctoring is a lucrative industry (Coghlan Miller & Paterson, 2021), notwithstanding the admitted opportunities for cheating, irrespective of the intensity of overwatch. Digital proctoring is marketed and has become entangled with issues of institutional reputation and the legitimacy of qualifications. The student seems to be a secondary consideration compared to the technocratic digital proctoring arena. However, the introduction of online assessment, specifically with digital proctoring, impacts the assessment's validity by introducing intervening variables into the process. The drive to detect and prevent online cheating has led to algorithmic proliferation. This technologically driven approach has embedded social injustice and questionable ethics and validity into the assessment systems. This article examines the social justice, ethical and validity issues around technological proctoring under the grouped themes: Emotional factors;Racial and/or skin colour;Digital literacy and Technology;and Disability. However, the COVID-19 pandemicdriven shifts have provided the unprecedented opportunity to elevate assessment from recall to critical thinking and applicationbased assessment. An opportunity to ensure that our assessment is valid, assesses higher-order learning, and truly evaluates the concepts we wish to assess.

Covid-19 CSR Activation by Malaysian Companies: Evidence from Online News

The novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) has badly affected individuals and organizations all around the globe. There are many efforts undertaken by organizations to assist governments in combating the pandemic. This include spending funds to curb the Coronavirus which is the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. This paper aims to investigate the extent of CSR activation by Malaysian companies in battling the Covid-19 pandemic via content analysis of online news during the implementation of the Movement Control Order by the government using the legitimacy theory and coercive isomorphism under the umbrella of institutional theory. The analysis includes the examination of online news which was captured from a Google search from a period 18 March to 17 May 2020. There were 95 online news captured during the period. The results found out that the types of CSR activation were classified into: monetary, non-monetary and both. It is also found that the CSR activation reported on online news is part of the companies' legitimation strategies in addition to the on-going business's marketing strategies. Several implications and limitations are also provided in this paper. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Peacekeeping Operations: Challenges and Opportunities in the Midst of Health Crises

The COVID-19 crisis has brought about significant challenges to international organizations operating in fragile contexts. Among others, the case of United Nations (UN) and its peacekeeping operations (PKOs) counting more than 80, 000 personnel from 121 countries is certainly prominent. Not only do PKOs rely on international personnel's frequent rotations, but they also rely on freedom of movement to carry out their mandate. How have PKOs adapted and responded to the crisis? How do PKOs balance the need to protect vulnerable civilians with support to governments' responses to the crisis and safeguard legitimacy? This chapter explores the impact of the health crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic on PKOs by focusing on two key aspects. First, it evaluates the current PKO efforts in managing the crisis in light of two previous health emergencies occurring in the midst of PKOs, namely Ebola in Western Africa and cholera in Haiti. It will reflect on the legitimacy costs associated with the risk of UN personnel being seen as vector of the disease. Second, it identifies challenges and opportunities created by the emergency. The key challenges stem from the inevitable delay or interruption of ongoing negotiation processes, and the associated risks of armed groups taking advantage of the uncertain situation. But there are some opportunities to consider. Operational adaptation becomes a need as missions have to prioritize civilians' protection without violating governments' policies on movement. Furthermore, halting frequent personnel rotations has likely increased cohesion within missions among soldiers but also between soldiers and missions' leaders. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Reputation management during a public health crisis: Overcompensating when all else fails

Although reactions to reputational threats have been studied before, there is still an opportunity to understand the dynamics of reputation management facing a crisis. This study seeks to understand how the legal-procedural, moral, performative, and technical dimensions of reputation change during the management of an extended crisis in a public health organization. We explore the communication of the Mexican Health Secretariat by analyzing its press conferences and releases before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on the situational crisis communication theory and considering public interest, we conducted two exploratory examinations based on text-as-data methods to capture reputation-related language. Our analysis suggests that factors influencing reputational threat, such as crisis severity, legitimacy, leaders' individual reputation, and coalition support, may be important for choosing between strategies. We argue that the Secretariat radically changed its reputation management strategy during the pandemic-they first stressed the technical and, as damage rose, the performative dimensions.

(Il)legitimacy of international intellectual property regime?

The recent Covid-19 global health crisis not only brings into sharp relief the current problems afflicting the international intellectual property regime (IIPR) but also calls into question its legitimacy as an international authority. Against this backdrop, the article aims to launch an investigation into the legitimacy of the IIPR, as an international co-ordinative authority, designed to protect IP rights without prejudice to international trade norms. Drawing on Raz's service conception of authority, it explores whether the IIPR lives up to its promises by enabling co-ordination between states over IP rights without undermining the initial balance on which it is founded, struck between developing and developed countries, as well as between international protection of IP- cum-trade rights and domestic regulatory autonomy. It does so by classifying the historical evolution of the IIPR under three different phases: (i) its foundation, (ii) before, and (iii) after the TRIPS-plus. Upon showing the legitimacy challenges inherent in its undemocratic foundation, the article points to the success of the regime in finding a balance between conflicting interests before the TRIPS-plus era. Later, it underlines the many challenges that come with linking the IIPR to the investment regime and argues that the FTAs and frequent regime-shifting activities put further pressure on the authority and legitimacy of the regime. Stressing the importance of democratic participation for the legitimacy of any co-ordinative authority, the article casts doubt on the IIPR's legitimacy and concludes by raising some points to overcome the ongoing legitimacy challenges.

Presenting, Representing, and Misrepresenting COVID-19 in the Five Central Asian States: The Political Underpinnings of Official State Coronavirus Websites in Authoritarian Regimes

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, each of the five Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) took notably different approaches to presenting coronavirus-related information on the internet through official websites. To understand these differences, this chapter engages with literature that looks at how states use websites for self-promotion, what shapes the decision-making of those elites in control of a state, and who sanctions the creation of those websites. Pairing a quantitative presentation of these websites' qualities with an analysis of text and images, the differences among these coronavirus websites are sketched out before they are situated in the political circumstances of the states which designed them. This analysis finds that coronavirus websites developed by Central Asian states are not solely depoliticized platforms for disseminating information to the public, but, rather, are inexorably linked to the concerns and objectives of state elites;in turn these elite agendas are reflected in each state's online response to the pandemic. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

The isomorphism of educational providers in the New Zealand tertiary market

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explain how aspects of institutional theory can be used to explain how tertiary educational providers must necessarily adopt the same features while competing in the market for students. Using new institutional sociology (NIS), the authors seek to explain this phenomena and how such diverse private providers have borrowed from the polytechnics and universities to share the same institutional features.Design/methodology/approachThis paper employs NIS to explain how tertiary educational providers must necessarily adopt the same features while competing in the market for students. In the last few decades, the Auckland tertiary market for overseas students has enjoyed strong growth before Covid-19.FindingsDecoupling provides a link between NIS and legitimacy theory in that it explains how symbolic strategies are aimed at some kind of legitimization rather than directed at technical efficiencies. It is argued that the public tertiary providers are more prone to decoupling than PTEPs because they are less attentive to costs due to their more monopolistic position in the market.Originality/valueOriginally, the market was dominated by the local universities and polytechnics with few private providers. Currently, private providers cater for a large share of the certificate and diploma market and have a growing stake in the degree market. As these changes came about so, more diverse private providers entered the market. This paper explains how these diverse entrants came to share the same organizational features.

Liquid sovereignty and tests of autonomy

replacing rigid and solid concepts of the state and of a community of states with the open and flexible notion of global governance, a «liquid sovereignty», which has become evident during the COVID emergency. This process did not mean the end of sovereignty, but rather a multiplication and interreference of sovereignties, in the sense that the seats of political choice have multiplied and shattered and the exercise of power has been overturned. Some regulatory instruments have mixed sanctioning systems with references to autonomy of choice and therefore to individual responsibility. This shows that the common good is not an ion: the encounter between the descending path of power and the ascending path of the community is fixed at a point where political decisions and legal norms intersect the self-discipline strength of men. Public safety depends on this intersection. © 2022, Ragion Pratica. All Rights Reserved.

Biopolitics After COVID: Notes from the Crisis

In this essay we take stock of the shortcomings, successes, and promises of 'biopolitics' to understand and frame global health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global history of populations' politics of life and health to situate present and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue for an affirmative biopolitics, that at once de-securitizes current approaches to our biosocial condition and expands the politics of the human estate to other molar and molecular dimensions.

Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History by Jaipreet Virdi (review)

The book begins with bacterial meningitis, an infection the author contracted in early childhood that left her with "profound-to-severe" hearing loss (Virdi, 7). Not only do we see her as a scholar in the archive, requesting permission to try a Victorian ear trumpet, we also see her as a child with her d/Deaf classmates, being fitted for hearing aids "as we squirmed and giggled when the wet silicone mold was injected into our ears," and as an adult, experiencing difficulty switching from analog to digital hearing aids (258). When Virdi's first pair of behindthe-ear hearing aids make her six-year-old ears stick out, and her hair "tied in a long braid as per the Sikh tradition, did little to disguise them," it is the hearing aids, not the braid, that provoke "snickers, puzzled glances, and finger-pointing from younger children" (18).

"Sustainab-lization": Sustainability and Digitalization as a Strategy for Resilience in the Coffee Sector

COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on the world. This study aims to investigate the possible implications of COVID-19 on sustainability and digitalization initiatives, by exploring a sample of 15 Italian coffee companies located in Northern, Central and Southern Italy, to highlight any differences and at the same time identify which are the main strands of their resilient behaviors. "Sustainab-lization" is our idea to define a business model in which sustainability and digitalization are closely related in companies' strategic initiatives. We have analyzed the various actions which have been undertaken to get out of the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on initiatives related to sustainable development and digitalization, critical also to fulfilling some of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda. Most of the companies have invested in sustainability and digitalization. The results show, for most of them, a resilient approach towards a sustainable business model, and also through increased digitalization.

The authoritarian narrator: China's power projection and its reception in the Gulf

This article argues that transregional communication mechanisms and the diffusion of narratives are important co-drivers towards autocratization. Offering a look beyond the 'material' in the study of global authoritarianism, it makes two conceptual arguments. It shows show transregional authoritarian practices are often discursively reinforced. Moreover, it demonstrates how narratives and their transregional diffusion are a form of authoritarian image management and a tool for fostering authoritarian stability. Departing from the basic assumption of authoritarian diffusion, the article is guided by two questions: which narratives of supremacy are used by the Chinese government in the context of the pandemic? And how are these narratives received, reproduced and contested in the Gulf? Based on a qualitative analysis of more than 3,000 media outlets (March-May 2020) from China and the Gulf region, the article shows how China strategically promotes authoritarian narratives regarding its international role, by telling stories of supremacy and heroism and by narratively conjuring a new world order. Moreover, it shows how the Chinese narratives are diffused to Iran, Saudi-Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar and depicts the different patterns of reception, reproduction and contestation.