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Risk management has become one of the major issues facing nurses. Its role in healthcare organisations has gained increased recognition as the consequences of risky decisions have become more visible. The project was primarily concerned with exploring issues that confront one particularly group of professionals - psychiatric nurses - as they experience a particular approach to risk management. The study used the advancement of the risk management agenda as an opportunity to examine the nature of risk management and consider what nurses understood to be the nature of a proficient risk management. Case studies analyses were provided of four psychiatric units. Data were collected over four years through observation, interviews and documents. It used an integrated approach to examine the development of risk management processes in its social, environmental and clinical contexts. Drawing on sociological theories of risk, it introduced the theoretical framework of arena concept and explained how this concept affect the decision making process. It was suggested that the decision making process is a social process in which regulative, normative and institutional effects influence the perceptions and management of risk. The processes were shown to involve a dynamic interweaving of certain structured interests mixing with both clinical and societal considerations inside and outside the healthcare settings. Risk was considered to be the outcome of a complex process of social construction comprising of cultural and political elements in which both the influence of institutions and individual evaluation can be discerned. The findings showed that psychiatric nurses presented a creative and critical understanding to the issues involved in risk management by adopting and absorbing new approaches to risk management in order to advance their professional work. This study formulates a new conceptual framework of understanding risk management in organisational context and contributes by drawing together previously unrelated research and shows how it provides the basis for a theoretical model risk management that is more complete.

6 pp. / Firewise Series / This bulletin describes the specific characteristics and fire history of Arizona interior chaparral which distinguish it from California chaparral, and provides landscaping guidelines both to mitigate structural damage from wildfire and to maintain the health of this important vegetation type.

I explore whether inter-firm linkages affect firms' credit risk. After controlling for the endogeneity between a firm's credit risk and its dependence on customers and suppliers, I find that supply-chain relationships affect firms' credit risk. My results indicate firms with exposure to major customers have lower ratings, and the level of firm dependence on major customers is negatively associated with firms' credit ratings. Further, I show when a firm's customers also depend on it, this mitigates the negative effect of dependence on credit risk. Finally, I document a negative association between a customer's reliance on its dependent suppliers and the customer's credit rating. Overall, my results provide insights regarding how inter-firm relationships between corporate customers and suppliers affect credit risk.

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