Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore an interactive teaching approach using an autoethnographic lens to enhance key competencies in sustainability. These competencies are integrated sets of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that facilitate effective task performance and problem-solving related to real-world sustainabiloity issues (Wiek, Withycombe, and Redman, 2011). Focusing on interpersonal competencies in higher education for sustainable development (HESD), this paper emphasiizes the possibilities of student-led discussions and self-reflection to inspire, support, and guide collaborative and participatory learning and problem-solving (Brundiers et al., 2020). Shifting from traditional lectures to student-led discussions transforms instructors into facilitators, showcasing the potential of this method.

Using an autoethnographic lens, this paper explores the student-led discussion approach to support the development of interpersonal competencies in the realm of the key competencies in HESD. Drawing from a blend of relevant literature and the author’s personal experiences spanning multiple years with this approach, this paper offers insights into its benefits and effective implementation. The student-led discussion approach involves the following:

• Assignment of relevant texts: University students are tasked with reading an engaging and pertinent piece of literature as homework;

• Written reading reflection: Students produce written reflections on the assigned reading in anticipation of a subsequent in-class discussion;

• In-class discussion: Each student arrives prepared to potentially lead the conversation. At the onset of the session, three student facilitator names are randomly selected. These chosen individuals bear the responsibility of steering the conversation, ensuring robust participation from their peers;

• Empowerment Tools: To bolster their facilitation, the instructor provides these students with tools and recommended strategies beforehand;

• Instructor's Role: Initially, the instructor adopts a passive stance, abstaining from any direct participation for the first 15-30 minutes of the discussion, allowing students to steer the discourse; and

• Post-Discussion Self-Assessment: After the discussion concludes, students engage in reflective self-assessment, evaluating their degree of participation. This paper unpacks how the process of student-led discussions, framed through an autoethnographic perspective, not only fosters interpersonal competence but also amplifies the pedagogical understanding of student-driven learning experiences.

Assignment of relevant texts: University students are tasked with reading an engaging and pertinent piece of literature as homework;

Written reading reflection: Students produce written reflections on the assigned reading in anticipation of a subsequent in-class discussion;

In-class discussion: Each student arrives prepared to potentially lead the conversation. At the onset of the session, three student facilitator names are randomly selected. These chosen individuals bear the responsibility of steering the conversation, ensuring robust participation from their peers;

Empowerment Tools: To bolster their facilitation, the instructor provides these students with tools and recommended strategies beforehand;

Instructor's Role: Initially, the instructor adopts a passive stance, abstaining from any direct participation for the first 15-30 minutes of the discussion, allowing students to steer the discourse; and

Post-Discussion Self-Assessment: After the discussion concludes, students engage in reflective self-assessment, evaluating their degree of participation. This paper unpacks how the process of student-led discussions, framed through an autoethnographic perspective, not only fosters interpersonal competence but also amplifies the pedagogical understanding of student-driven learning experiences.

Through the autoethnographic lens used in this research, it becomes evident that student-led discussions not only foster a deeper engagement with assigned content but also pave the way for transformative learning experiences. These discussions serve as a forum, challenging students to grapple with cognitive dissonance and gives them the space to witness and participate in diverse communication strategies. Moreover, in allowing students to shape the narratives they perceive as most pertinent, instructors catalyze the development of profound problem-solving capabilities and a sense of agency over their learning trajectories. Key insights gleaned include the following:

• Collaborative learning: The discussions nurture an environment where students reflect, analyze and learn collectively, deepening their grasp of the material;

• Empowerment through communication: Engaging in these sessions equips learners with the prowess to reconcile disparate viewpoints, thereby fortifying their collaborative and communicative proficiencies; and

• Critical thinking and sustainability: By delving into intricate sustainability challenges, students hone their critical thinking capabilities, preparing them to be future custodians of a more sustainable world. In essence, when viewed through an autoethnographic lens, the student-led discussion approach not only enriches learning outcomes but also accentuates the acquisition of pivotal interpersonal competencies within the framework of HESD.

Collaborative learning: The discussions nurture an environment where students reflect, analyze and learn collectively, deepening their grasp of the material;

Empowerment through communication: Engaging in these sessions equips learners with the prowess to reconcile disparate viewpoints, thereby fortifying their collaborative and communicative proficiencies; and

Critical thinking and sustainability: By delving into intricate sustainability challenges, students hone their critical thinking capabilities, preparing them to be future custodians of a more sustainable world. In essence, when viewed through an autoethnographic lens, the student-led discussion approach not only enriches learning outcomes but also accentuates the acquisition of pivotal interpersonal competencies within the framework of HESD.

From an autoethnographic perspective, this research stands distinctively within the literature on higher education for sustainable development. While the pedagogical strategy of student-led discussions is not entirely novel, the unique application and deep introspection of this method within the realm of HESD indeed carve out new terrain. By interweaving lived experiences and educational theory, this paper offers fresh insights into how student-led discussions can be an effective way to cultivate key sustainability competencies in higher education. As such, it provides educators, scholars and practitioners a valuable reference point for fostering interpersonal skills and nuanced understandings crucial for sustainable development.

In an era of blurred moral boundaries, brands face “moral dilemma crises”, which are distinguished from traditional crises. Based on expectancy violations theory, this study aims to explore how consumers interpret (inferred goodwill) and evaluate (consumer regret) the precrisis committed brands, reinforced by corporate ability and responsibility (expectancies) during moral dilemma crises and whether self-brand connection moderates this relationship.

The main study used a scenario-based online survey with a purchased beauty brand, analyzed via structural equation modeling and PROCESS macro, to examine the effects of corporate ability and responsibility on regret, mediated by inferred goodwill and moderated by self-brand connection. A validation study with a fictitious brand used an online experimental design, analyzed with t-tests and ANCOVAs.

When corporate ability and corporate responsibility are considered together, corporate ability negatively impacts inferred goodwill (boomerang effect), whereas corporate responsibility positively impacts inferred goodwill (buffering effect). Inferred goodwill acts as a mediator that reduces regret. The negative impact of corporate ability on inferred goodwill and regret becomes stronger among consumers with strong self-brand connections. However, self-brand connection does not moderate the relationship between corporate responsibility and inferred goodwill.

This research extends the application of expectancy violations theory to moral dilemma crises, differentiates between the effects of corporate ability and responsibility, highlights the role of inferred goodwill and regret and explores the moderating effects of self-brand connection, providing tailored insights for brand management.

Because brand addiction is one of the most intense forms of consumer–brand relationships, this type of behavior has recently attracted the attention of researchers in the field of consumer behavior management. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the antecedents and consequences of brand addiction among Iranian consumers.

This research used a cross-sectional study based on a questionnaire to collect data from a sample of 401 people in Iran. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

This study found that brand love and brand involvement significantly influence brand addiction. Brand addiction was also positively associated with contingent self-esteem (CSE), compulsive shopping and resilience to negative information. Additionally, the results revealed a positive and significant effect of brand involvement on brand love and a similar positive and significant effect of CSE on compulsive shopping.

By examining the antecedents and consequences of brand addiction in an Islamic country, this research offers valuable insights that can enrich the literature on brand addiction in consumer behavior and brand management.

Driven by the need to deepen understanding of the mechanisms driving teacher collaboration for enhancing teacher learning and practices, this study aims to investigate the influence of collaborative organizational conditions, network intentionality and efficacy for leading curriculum learning on teachers’ professional growth within the context of New Zealand’s Communities of Learning-Kahui Ako (CoL) policy.

The study employs survey design collecting perceptual data from teachers within two CoLs comprising 12 schools in New Zealand. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the relationships between collaborative organizational conditions, teachers’ network intentionality, leadership efficacy and teacher professional growth.

The findings reveal that collaborative organizational conditions significantly impact teachers’ professional growth such as their new learning and enhanced practices. Furthermore, teachers’ network intentionality and efficacy for leading curriculum learning serve as mediators, amplifying the effects of collaborative organizational conditions on teacher professional growth. Specifically, teachers who are more confident in their leadership abilities and intentionally build professional relationships are better at using collaborative opportunities to address teaching challenges and bring innovation to their schools.

This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the interplay between organizational conditions, internal motivational drive for collaboration, and teacher professional growth within the context of CoL policy in New Zealand. It sheds light on the mechanisms driving teacher professional growth and offers insights for enhancing teacher collaboration and professional learning experiences within CoL networks.

This paper investigates the meaning of spirituality and empowerment from the perspective of women of color (WOC) in Fortune 500 companies how it impacts their leadership.

Detailed data were collected through in depth semi-structured interviews documenting their experience as lived in the context of their daily work environments. Twelve WOC in leadership positions were interviewed, and transcripts analyzed using thematic analysis. Their narratives provide insight into the experiences of discrimination and bias and the stress and disenfranchisement that result from these experiences.

Analysis shows that for these women, spirituality was more than a philosophical orientation but comprised a core facet of their identity, empowering them to cope with adversity and uplift others through a leadership style defined by compassion, trust, strong interpersonal relationships and purpose.

Implications for creating more compassionate and inclusive environments that draw on principles of empowerment and spiritual leadership are provided.

This study contributes uniquely to the literature by exploring the perspectives of understudied women leaders who identify as African American, South-Asian and Latina on spirituality and empowerment and their impact on their leadership.

This paper aims to explore how employees reconceptualized their time and space to order and structure their lives in an unprecedented scenario of nonvoluntary work from home.

Set in the context of lockdowns due to the pandemic scenario, the study uses a constructivist approach to collect data through in-depth online interviews to understand how employees coped with the challenges emanating in a nonvoluntary work from home situation. The respondents were purposively selected to reflect a diverse pool in terms of gender, familial responsibilities and age/tenure.

The findings present temporal and spatial themes that provide several insights into how employees made sense of time and space as resources to navigate their challenging work-home roles.

In the present study, the authors found that when boundaries get violated, it does not necessarily manifest in the form of dissatisfaction with one or the other domain. The respondents in the current study show-cased adjustment mechanism to cope with the boundary permeability that happened. They adopted ways in which they could safe-guard their multiple identities in the situation they found themselves in, do justice to the salient roles in their lives, emerge as more empathetic humans and look forward to a brighter and more hopeful future. This opens-up a possibility of studying the theory behind human behavior in crisis-like situations and the degree of acceptance that people show when they find themselves in undesirable-unalterable situations.

A mental reorientation is required on the part of both employees and employers to navigate smoothly in this new “normal” and find more sustainable solutions to the problem if the remote working or hybrid mode of working becomes mainstay. Clear demarcations between work and nonwork time are a key element to ensure proper work schedules for remote workers. Offline meetings and get-togethers can be organized on a periodic basis to facilitate employee interaction and engagement. Participation of employees in key decisions becomes more important in such situations as it makes employees feel more connected with their work space.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is original as it is set in a completely unprecedented situation of lockdowns (during the pandemic) that affected the lives of everyone in some way or the other. The findings of the study are unique and insightful, as they help understand the sense-making mechanism adopted by people to successfully navigate through the crisis.

In the realm of innovation systems and technology transfer (TT), the emergence of open innovation and complex market dynamics has amplified innovation intermediaries’ prominence of their role and involvement in TT projects. This study delves into private consultants’ involvement in TT projects, namely in what got them involved by the project’s key stakeholders.

An iterative two-phased research approach was followed, including exploratory interviews and a quantitative case study of a consultancy firm engaged in 219 TT projects.

Five main key motivators were found to lead TT stakeholders to involve private consultants in their TT projects, being the most relevant, the proactivity of private consultants.

The case study and results provide an alternative perspective of TT endeavours, emphasising the importance given by TT stakeholders (mostly recipient companies) to private consultants’ involvement as innovation intermediaries.

There is an urge worldwide that school leaders’ mental health and well-being must be prioritised within the education recovery at the local, national and global policy levels. This research identified the intentional well-being practices that school leaders cultivated as they faced unprecedented challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data was collected through one-to-one in-depth semi-structured interviews with ten senior school leaders from primary and secondary schools in England. During the pandemic, online interviews were organised using Zoom. An inductive followed by deductive approach qualitative data analysis was employed to offer insights into the multidimensional and sensitive nature of school leaders’ well-being.

The findings indicated that despite a reported decline in well-being, the participants intentionally engaged in well-being cultivation practices which were both relational: developing multi-faceted support networks, and individual: developing self-care and self-regulation skills. These practices provided different psychological and practical needs necessary for maintaining their well-being and work functioning facing the pandemic.

This study affirms school leaders’ well-being cultivation is an intentional and effortful process involving relational and individual practices to support their multidimensional well-being during extreme challenges. These practices can be mindfully and strategically cultivated. This study enhances the theoretical understanding of school leader well-being and offers timely insights into well-being initiatives in leadership development programmes for educational leaders and policymakers amid global challenges.

Social networks (SNs) have recently evolved from a means of connecting people to becoming a tool for social engineering, radicalization, dissemination of propaganda and recruitment of terrorists. It is no secret that the majority of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) members are Arabic speakers, and even the non-Arabs adopt Arabic nicknames. However, the majority of the literature researching the subject deals with non-Arabic languages. Moreover, the features involved in identifying radical Islamic content are shallow and the search or classification terms are common in daily chatter among people of the region. The authors aim at distinguishing normal conversation, influenced by the role religion plays in daily life, from terror-related content.

This article presents the authors' experience and the results of collecting, analyzing and classifying Twitter data from affiliated members of ISIS, as well as sympathizers. The authors used artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning classification algorithms to categorize the tweets, as terror-related, generic religious, and unrelated.

The authors report the classification accuracy of the K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Bernoulli Naive Bayes (BNN) and support vector machine (SVM) [one-against-all (OAA) and all-against-all (AAA)] algorithms. The authors achieved a high classification F1 score of 83\%. The work in this paper will hopefully aid more accurate classification of radical content.

In this paper, the authors have collected and analyzed thousands of tweets advocating and promoting ISIS. The authors have identified many common markers and keywords characteristic of ISIS rhetoric. Moreover, the authors have applied text processing and AI machine learning techniques to classify the tweets into one of three categories: terror-related, non-terror political chatter and news and unrelated data-polluting tweets.

Social media has revolutionized marketing communication (MC). Rugby is South Africa’s most professionalized sport, leading the industry in its business management structure as well as its high-performance achievements. However, below the professional level, local rugby clubs face a large disparity compared to their professional counterparts, often relying on volunteers or part-time employees to manage the organizations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate how non-professional rugby clubs use social media as a MC tool.

The study was exploratory, and a cross-sectional sample of twelve organizations was selected and employed a multiple case study approach. Club managers responsible for MC or social media participated in semi-structured interviews. The qualitative data analysis software, ATLAS.ti, facilitated the researchers’ use of an inductive approach to develop codes and themes for further analysis.

The findings revealed a high level of adoption of social media by the multiple cases (i.e. rugby sports club respondents), with only slight variations in the usage of specific social media applications (viz., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp). The sports clubs perceived that employing social media added substantial value to their MC. There were six emergent themes related to the organization’s perceived benefits from adopting social media MC, namely: brand awareness, relationship-building, player recruitment, attracting sponsors, storytelling, and information sharing.

The study makes a novel contribution in terms of how rugby clubs use social media as an MC tool. The paper advances scant knowledge and awareness of the relationship between South Africa’s sports marketing and social media. The conclusions will aid non-professional sports organizations in enhancing the effectiveness of their social media marketing by ensuring that their objectives and target audiences are well-defined.