Assessment of institutional autonomy of higher education institutions: methodical approach

The paper investigates the offshore crisis 2015–2017 and its impact on central international offshore oil and gas related maritime cluster, the Blue Maritime Cluster, located at the North-Western coast of Norway.
This complete maritime cluster, heavily involved in offshore petroleum operations, it experienced an almost devastating blow, as it lost almost one-third of its employees as its value added contracted by 39 percent.
When the crises is basically seen as a result of falling of oil prices and lower activity and squeezed profit margins, this paper investigates the crisis in the light of financial instability and reactions down the maritime supply chain.
By collecting data from the Blue Maritime Cluster and the Norwegian central company register one is able both to trace the fall in the activity due to the crisis and measures of financial strength. The study approaches the data by using a structural time series analysis in order to map cycles as deviations from polynomial trends.
The findings ascertain that financial instability was dominant within the Blue Maritime Cluster during its boom before the crisis. Debt ratios and thereby gearing (leverage) were high. Thus, the companies could not meet their obligations when the crisis hit.
The paper also finds that narrow focused supply chain management made the cluster fall deep into the abyss. Companies with a more diversified portfolio were able to meet the hard years better than others.

The study aims to explore the role of total quality management (TQM) in enhancing the service quality of the private healthcare sector in the Northern Area of West Bank Palestine. The study involves a questionnaire-based survey, private hospitals, and healthcare centers selected in North West Bank. The administrative employees are the population of the study, 200 employees were selected via stratified sampling method. By using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), the findings show that all TQM factors are positively and directly related to each other in the private healthcare sector. There is a positive and direct relationship between four TQM factors (customer satisfaction, employee involvement, continual improvements, and top management commitment) and service quality, while there is a negative direct relationship between processes and service quality. TQM factors (customer satisfaction, employee involvement, continual improvements, processes, and top management commitment) explained 95% of the variance in healthcare service quality (R² = 0.950, P < 0.05). Continual improvements is the main pillar in TQM application in healthcare sector, and it is highly associated with the private healthcare processes (R² = 0.907, P < 0.01), while top management commitment is the most significant factor in improving the service quality. Full understanding and commitment by the managers across all levels and activating the effective communication between employees at all levels in the organization are the key factors of a successful TQM implementation; it helps in strengthening the teamwork efficiency. Top management is required to avoid the monotonic managerial practices, especially in the organizational processes, as it has a negative impact on the private healthcare service quality.

The crisis in the world financial markets, the capitalization of bank profits, the size of which is insufficient to maintain the existing level of the banking system of Kazakhstan, has actualized the quality problem not only in terms of forming credit portfolios of banks, managing banking risks, but also offering high-quality banking services.
Despite the fact that the banking services quality cannot directly affect the financial sphere, the production sphere, and also affect the sharp decline in the economy, the economic losses from poor banking services can significantly increase, causing significant losses to banks. At the same time, it should be considered that the financial losses of the firms as active participants in financial markets are significant in the amount of losses. Consequently, the banking services quality can cause not directly, but indirectly both the success of the banking business and the possible losses of banks. In order to manage the quality of banking services, it is necessary to have certain methods for analyzing and assessing the quality of banking services. This article attempts to solve this issue.
Using various research methods, based on obtaining real assessments of respondents, the present paper presents a methodology for the comprehensive assessment of banking services quality. The developed mechanism includes consolidation of organizational and methodological and economic and statistical methods of research: a five-step SERVQUAL model, integral and general indices, a multiple queue system, instruments of correlation and regression analysis that determine the level of customer satisfaction and problem characteristics of the quality of services offered.