The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as a state of complete physical, social, and mental well-being, but not only the absence of disease and physical defects (Ray, 2016). The culture of health in any society is a part of the society’s vision, and family relations are of great importance for people’s health. The favorable moral and psychological climate of the family positively affects the health of its members.
The statistics show that in such families, people are less sick and live longer (Duncan & Goddard, 2017). At this point, the family is understood as the union of persons based on marriage or kinship and characterized by a commonness of life, interests, mutual care, help, and moral responsibility. The cultural heritage of the family concerns all the aspects of a person’s life, including spiritual well-being that is connected with intellect and emotions, social welfare that reflects social ties and interpersonal contacts, and physical well-being that is associated with the biological capabilities of a person and the state of his or her body.
Integrity and spiritual health are the key factors that promote family value. The values proposed in childhood and adolescence by the family members and related to the sphere of moral, ethical, religious, and other principles determine their further behavior in life, including the attitude to health and relationships. Thus, to create, maintain, and protect a healthy family, it is important to adhere to a healthy lifestyle, in which there will be a spiritual culture, a healthy psychological climate, and cultural enrichment (Kaakinen, Coehlo, Steele, Tabacco, & Hanson, 2014).
The family members are to learn their family traditions, understand the importance of the family in the life of a person, and master the norms and ethics of relationships with parents and other family members. The main task for parents is the formation of a child’s moral attitude toward his or her health, which is expressed in the desire and the need to be healthy and create one more healthy family (Ray, 2016). It is essential to realize that health is the most important value as it is the main condition for achieving any life goal, and everyone is responsible for maintaining and strengthening one’s health.
If adults teach children to appreciate, cherish, and strengthen their health from an early age and act as an example to demonstrate a healthy lifestyle, then the future generations will be more healthy and developed not only personally, intellectually, spiritually, but also physically. As it can be observed from the assessment of the three families, despite different ethnic and religious backgrounds, it is possible to develop and maintain family heritage by supporting all the cultures presented in the family (Ray, 2016).
For example, the Russian wife and the African husband may introduce characteristics of both cultures into their family life, so that their children would know both languages and participate in holidays. More to the point, it should be noted that the modern world driven by globalization processes tends to unite more and more people from different countries. Therefore, it is important to consider family heritage restoration, focusing on the ethnicities and religions involved in the family. A clear vision of the situation and understanding of each other’s cultural needs will contribute to the preservation and transition of cultural peculiarities from generation to generation. Otherwise, the case of the second interviewee shows that the lack of efforts to support family values leads to disintegration and steady loss of contacts with relatives.
References
Duncan, S. F., & Goddard, H. W. (2017). Family life education: Principles and practices for effective outreach (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Sage Publications.
Kaakinen, J. R., Coehlo, D. P., Steele, R., Tabacco, A., & Hanson, S. M. H. (2014). Family health care nursing: Theory, practice, and research. Philadelphia, PA: FA Davis.
Purnell, L. D. (2014). Guide to culturally competent health care (3rd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: FA Davis.
Ray, M. A. (2016). Transcultural caring dynamics in nursing and health care (2nd ed.). Philadelphia, PA: FA Davis.
Social Media Impact On Customers
In the contemporary world, free access to a large amount of information transformed customers from passive buyers to active consumers searching for the best ways of satisfying their needs. Therefore, social media have become a significant factor influencing customers’ choices since these technologies supply people with relevant data throughout the entire decision-making process. This paper will analyze how social media affect customers at each stage of their path to purchase by the example of people deciding to go on vacation.
The customer decision journey consists of five steps: information gathering, consideration set, preference, purchase, and post-purchase. At the first stage, a person realizes his or her need and starts to search for the existing ways of satisfying it. As for people planning to go on vacation, social media may be the cause of their emerged want. They are exposed to such incentives as their friends’ photographs in social networks or blog content related to traveling (Fotis, 2015).
Social media have also changed the way people search for the available options. Before the era of the internet, customers used to consult official travel guides, but now the main sources of information are “TripAdvisor … followed by Facebook, and Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter” (Varkaris & Neuhofer, 2017, p. 8). Thus, social media play the most significant role at the stage of information gathering.
After searching for the available options, customers come up with a consideration set. At this stage, they continue to look through social media to find evidence that will confirm or disapprove of their choices. As for people planning a vacation, they may search for other customers’ reviews of travel destinations, hotels, and transport companies. The news distributed on social media concerning the political or economic situation in the country of destination may also influence the consumers’ decisions.
After studying all the options in the consideration set, customers decide on the best-suited variant. At this stage, which is called preference, people deciding to go on a holiday start planning their exact itinerary. This step transitions to the next one, purchase, during which customers book tickets and prepare for the future trip. According to Fortis (2015), people often use social media to share the news about their choice “to show-off, to express feelings and emotions, to seek utility, or simply for fun” (p. 278). Thus, at the stages of preference and purchase, social media also influence people.
The final stage is post-purchase, during which customers evaluate their experience and share their opinion with others. Again, social media give an excellent opportunity to write a personal review of goods or services, which then will influence other people’s choices. Regarding people returning from their vacation, they are likely to post pictures from their holiday and share their impressions with their friends. If the travel experience was negative, reporting it on social media may be regarded as compensation for the customers’ expectations that were not met.
In conclusion, it should be said that social media have a significant influence on people during their decision-making process. They affect customers’ behavior at all stages of the customer decision journey. Social media also serve as a platform for sharing the experience after a purchase, which should be taken into consideration by goods producers and service providers. Reviews of other people nowadays mean more than companies’ advertisements, so it is crucial to be aware of the reputation of the organization in social media.
References
Fotis, J. N. (2015). The Use of social media and its impacts on consumer behaviour: the context of holiday travel. Web.
Varkaris, E., & Neuhofer, B. (2017). The influence of social media on the consumers’ hotel decision journey. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, 8(1), 101-118.
Responsibility Accounting, Managerial Action And ‘a Counter-Ability’ Article Critique
Summary
Responsibility accounting has a direct effect on the direction and outcomes of decision-making in the corporate environment. Therefore, studying how it influences a managerial action and how it can be utilized to improve decision-making in the organizational environment is critical. The study by Lennon (2019) seeks to research the correlation between the spatial context in which responsibility accounting is used and the effects thereof on corporate decision-making. Lennon (2019) explains that control over physical space increases the extent of responsibility accounting within an organization.
However, Lennon (2019) warns that, when failing to encompass the opportunities and threats that a particular physical space contains for a project, a manager is likely to face a rapid demise of a project or, at the very least, deal with numerous problems arising in the process. The dynamism of the physical environment suggests that managers should be able to connect multiple factors into a single entity in order to produce effective decisions and lead the organization to success. The inability to embrace the notion of dynamism of the corporate setting, in turn, leads to a drop in the extent of responsibility accounting levels in the organizational setting (Lennon, 2019).
Therefore, the author advises strongly focusing on the assessment of dynamic components of the workplace environment. Although guaranteeing an entirely fraudulence-free corporate setting is barely possible, the introduction of responsibility accounting based on the principles of decision rights mediation and similar strategies will help to reduce the threat of fraud in accounting. Thus, the problem of trust as the foundation on which relationships within an organization should be built is addressed appropriately.
However, Lennon (2019) warns that the problem of dynamism analysis has become much more complicated with the transfer of organizational processes from the traditional setting into the digital environment, where the notion of physical space no longer exists. Therefore, the concept of responsibility accounting needs to be altered to shape the calculative agency of accounting and promote effective performance in the target area (Lennon, 2019). By reconsidering the shareholder concerns in the digital environment and adjusting the principles of responsibility accounting respectively, one will be able to maintain corporate efficiency within a specific business setting.
Reaction
The article by Lennon (2019) has offered new and exciting insight into the notion of responsibility accounting. The transfer to the digital context, which most organizations have already experienced in the modern economic setting, makes the article especially important for contemporary businesses and their managers.
Therefore, the article can be used to emphasize the significance for businesses to transition from the spatial understanding of responsibility accounting to a more general and ubiquitous concept thereof, thus allowing every company employee and team member to build the required amount of loyalty toward the organization (El-Mousawi & Trabulsi, 2019). Moreover, the article provides a subtle commentary on the problem of corporate fraud as the outcome of a poorly established idea of responsibility accounting.
Finally, the issue of decision rights needs to be touched upon as an important aspect of organizational performance according to Lennon (2019). The article results can be used to introduce strategies for delegating decision-making in large companies, which may lead to a conflict of respective rights between managers and employees. Therefore, making decision rights looser while enhancing the importance of corporate ethics seems to be the most appropriate solution. Thus, the principles of responsibility accounting will be successfully implanted into the corporate context, whereas the issue of decision-making and the management of corporate issues will be addressed accordingly.
References
El-Mousawi, H., & Trabulsi, H. (2019). Potentials of applying social responsibility accounting in the banking sector in Lebanon: An empirical study. Journal of Finance and Accounting, 7(2), 32-39. Web.
Lennon, N. J. (2019). Responsibility accounting, managerial action and ‘a counter-ability’: Relating the physical and virtual spaces of decision-making. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 35(3), 1-13. Web.