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This paper aims to examine the impact of a board-level governance bundle (i.e. size, independence, expertise, meetings, gender diversity and multiple directorships) on the non-financial performance of National Health Service (NHS) hospitals – and, separately, by hospital type (i.e. trusts hospitals and foundation trusts hospitals).

A logit regression for panel data is used for a sample of 128 NHS trusts and foundation trusts across England from 2014 to 2018. The data was hand-collected from NHS hospitals’ annual reports and Care Quality Commission reports. The cancer waiting time target (i.e. 62-day cancer referral and treatment target) is used to measure non-financial performance.

The main findings for NHS hospitals indicate that multiple directorships positively and significantly affect non-financial performance. However, board expertise and gender diversity have a negative and significant influence. When the sample is partitioned, the results remain the same for the NHS foundation trusts hospitals. For NHS trust hospitals, except for multiple directorships having a positive and significant effect, all remaining governance attributes have an insignificant impact.

The findings have implications for policymakers and practitioners as they move to implement measures to improve hospital performance against the cancer waiting time targets in the English NHS.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of corporate governance on cancer waiting time targets in public hospitals. Overall, this paper contributes to the corporate governance literature, especially in the context of public hospitals, and has significant practical and theoretical implications.

The food supply chain worldwide has suffered severely due to the COVID-19 pandemic countermeasures. Previous research suggests that business model innovation (BMI) could be a viable solution for recovering from the pandemic and fostering organizational resilience. This study analyzes the capabilities that enable food companies to innovate their business model and thereby increase organizational resilience.

Results were obtained using a multiple-case study approach consisting of 15 companies along the entire food supply chain. Managers and decision-makers were interviewed, and the collected insights were enriched with additional material.

The results show several capabilities that enable companies to innovate their business model due to disruption. These capabilities are categorized into four phases based on the processual representation of BMIs.

This study contributes to the understanding of BMI in the food supply chain and provides empirical evidence on the potential for business recovery through BMI.

Organizations often utilize external sources to acquire knowledge, and one such area of interest has been the transfer of knowledge between universities and industry (U-I). This topic has gained significant attention in recent years because U-I cooperation brings companies innovation to remain in the market and be competitive. This paper aims to develop and deepens the topic, providing a Bibliometric-Systematic Literature Review (B-SLR) on knowledge transfer (KT), cooperation and U-I, interactions, links and interdependencies of new research streams. This research pretends to summarize the state of the art of the past literature using a rigorous methodological approach.

A bibliometric analysis was performed using the Web of Science database, specifically employing Bibliographic Coupling analysis.

The literature systematization enabled the identification of four distinct clusters: (1) Drivers and Motivational Factors, (2) Specificities in the Selection of Knowledge Transfer Channels, (3) Strategic Challenges and (4) Mechanisms and Contexts.

The analysis highlights significant trends and gaps in current research, providing a comprehensive understanding of the field. Based on the literature analyzed, it was possible to outline lines for future investigation, offering valuable insights for academia and industry practitioners to enhance U-I knowledge transfer.

The purpose of this article is to report on a university’s internally funded research that was set up to examine the success of assessing learning within inclusion strategies across business studies courses. It also presents the responses that were needed and highlighted as a result of the disruption to students’ learning by the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19).

Within the social mobility model of disability, people are disabled by the barriers they face, not their impairment. A multi-method, qualitative approach was undertaken, with our discussion framed from within a reflective critical, conceptualised and sociological perspective.

While the findings revealed how the researched university had made considerable progress in many aspects of its inclusion strategies, the research also revealed some further barriers to inclusion. Some of the barriers were shown to be “cracks in the digital curriculum” that affected not just disabled but all students, whereby students were unintentionally excluded. In this article, we report on how the university had responded to students’ requests, and through a series of small steps, we discuss the positive impact of these actions. Although the changes instigated did help to improve inclusion, the small steps taken also highlighted the need for much more work to be undertaken on the journey to a fully inclusive university. The recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic forced and/or accelerated the implementation of digital learning. This, in turn, instigated a rise in the awareness of mental illness and the effects of social isolation, which is now much higher than pre-COVID-19.

The main limitation of the study was that the sample was small; however, the in-depth qualitative approach showed how the issues that had been problematic had been resolved and illuminated the further areas for future research.

The research reported here presents the practical steps that were taken in response to the students’ inclusion requests. The students’ requests were addressed, where practical and/or possible, for students to have assessment choice, further support from the well-being team and a further strengthening of local partnerships with the National Health Service and local charities.

The research supports inclusion initiatives in higher education and society.

This study strengthens and/or builds upon the existing literature on the impact of COVID-19 on the teaching and learning of all students, and specifically those with invisible disabilities, by presenting the small steps in changes to the curriculum that can improve inclusion practices.

This study aims to document the incidence and causes of deaths in custody in Senegal from 2017 to 2019 and to describe the demographic and criminal justice characteristics of decedents.

The authors examined medical records and death reports relating to all deaths occurring between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2019 during a period of incarceration in Senegal.

Among the estimated 83,568 people incarcerated in Senegal during the study period, 83 deaths were recorded in custody; 24 in 2017, 32 in 2018 and 27 in 2019. This resulted in a rate of 1.0 deaths per 1,000 incarcerated people. Of the 83 decedents identified, 79 (95%) were males. Similar proportions of decedents were serving custodial sentences (n = 44; 53%) and awaiting trial (n = 39; 47%) at the time of death. Most deaths were recorded as being because of natural causes (n = 67; 81%); the most common causes recorded were cardiovascular disease (n = 22; 27%), cancer (n = 12; 15%) and infectious diseases (n = 11; 13%). Two people (2.4%) died by suicide, and one (1.2%) died as a result of interpersonal violence. Most deaths (n = 59; 71%) occurred in hospitals, 14 (17%) occurred in prisons and 7 (8%) occurred in prison health centers.

The authors observed a higher rate of death and a markedly lower proportion of deaths in custody in Senegal because of suicide and violence, when compared with similar studies from high-income countries. The findings of this study point to a need for greater investment in screening, health care and health promotion in custodial settings to reduce potentially preventable deaths among people in custody in Senegal.

This paper aims to reconsider the role of universities in the context of the grand challenges of the Anthropocene era, namely, climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystems collapse, growing inequalities, welfare deficiencies and social unrest.

The paper uses the “idealized design” methodology, which suggests imagining what the ideal solution would be and then working backward to where the authors are today. In line with this methodology, the paper redefines the idea of the university in the context of the Anthropocene and analyzes the shortcomings of today’s universities. Then, it proposes a solution framework for transforming universities to become planet-positive institutions and discusses the internal and external barriers of this transformation.

This study advances a view of the university as an autonomous learning community and redefines its functions as follows: to generate an universal orientation across disciplines and cultures, to assist the whole person development of its members, to create a new holistic understanding of planetary challenges, including transdisciplinary codesigned, stakeholder engaged and solutions-oriented research, to bring forth responsible practitioners, to enhance the problem-solving capabilities of society and to catalyze progressive changes in human–Earth systems.

The paper presents examples of transformative university initiatives from the USA, Europe and India. It discusses the required changes in university actions, research and policy to cope with the new reality of the Anthropocene era.

To argue current calls to address grand challenges like income inequality are unlikely to succeed until the academy acknowledges how accounting is constitutive of these problems. We demonstrate how accounting is part of the problem because of its adherence to a legal model of the corporation erected on false suppositions.

Using multiple disciplines, e.g. history, economics, law and philosophy, pertaining to the nature of the corporate form, we present a logical argument that the official telos of accounting obstructs any fruitful effort to address grand challenges.

The global legal concept governing corporations (an aggregate of members) makes corporations a major cause of the grand challenges humans face. Adherence to a legal theory of the corporation leads accounting policy to rationalize income and wealth inequality by subsuming the legal powers of corporations to expropriate wealth into a singular maximand labeled “earnings.”

Though accounting is essentially “of” law, scholarly efforts to understand accounting’s social role are based on an information metaphor. We provide reasons for skepticism of any efforts addressing grand challenges until accounting acknowledges the legal nature of its social role as a regulator of business conduct. There are no accounting solutions to grand challenges without acknowledging how the accepted legal nature of the corporate form makes the corporation the cause of the grand challenges we face.

Accurate predictions of the steady-state corrosion phase and service life to achieve specific safety limits are crucial for assessing the service of reinforced concrete (RC) structures. Forecasting the service life (SL) of structures is imperative for devising maintenance and repair strategy plans. The optimization of maintenance strategies serves to prolong asset life, mitigate asset failures, minimize repair costs and enhance health and safety standards for society.

The well-known empirical conventional (traditional) approaches and machine learning (ML)-based SL prediction models were presented and compared. A comprehensive parametric study was conducted on existing models, considering real-world conditions as reported in the literature. The analysis of traditional and ML models underscored their respective limitations.

Empirical models have been developed by considering simplified assumptions and relying on factors such as corrosion rate, steel reinforcement diameter and concrete cover depth, utilizing fundamental mathematical formulas. The growth of ML in the structural domain has been identified and highlighted. The ML can capture complex relationships between input and output variables. The performance of ML in corrosion and service life evaluation has been satisfactory. The limitations of ML techniques are discussed, and its open challenges are identified, along with insights into the future direction to develop more accurate and reliable models.

To enhance the traditional modeling of service life, key areas for future research have been highlighted. These include addressing the heterogeneous properties of concrete, the permeability of concrete and incorporating the interaction between temperature and bond-slip effect, which has been overlooked in existing models. Though the performance of the ML model in service life assessment is satisfactory, models overlooked some parameters, such as the material characterization and chemical composition of individual parameters, which play a significant role. As a recommendation, further research should take these factors into account as input parameters and strive to develop models with superior predictive capabilities.

Recent deployment has revealed that ML algorithms can grasp complex relationships among key factors impacting deterioration and offer precise evaluations of remaining SL without relying on traditional models. Incorporation of more comprehensive and diverse data sources toward potential future directions in the RC structural domain can provide valuable insights to decision-makers, guiding their efforts toward the creation of even more resilient, reliable, cost-efficient and eco-friendly RC structures.

This paper aims to explore the factors influencing the behavioural intention of Gen Y consumers to avail omnichannel service and to identify the relative influence of predictors in explaining the behavioural intention of Gen Y consumers to use omnichannel service.

Data collected through surveys from 287 Gen Y consumers has been analysed through structural equation modelling to examine direct and mediated relationships between the constructs influencing behavioural intention to use omnichannel service.

Findings indicate that perceived ease of use, social influence, perceived trust, and personal innovativeness positively affect behavioural intention to use omnichannel service, with the result accounting for 48% of the variance. We also demonstrate that perceived value and perceived ease of use mediate the association between personal innovativeness and behavioural intention to use omnichannel service.

The study provides valuable insights into adopting technology-based offerings for Gen Y customers. The presented model can be extended for analysing consumers' behavioural intentions by considering additional variables, such as consumer personality traits and diverse cultural settings. The study may help managers and policymakers formulate a consumer-focussed strategy to win over modern retail consumers.

This study explores the behavioural intention of Gen Y consumers in availing omnichannel services. Further, the study contributes to the technology acceptance model (TAM), unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) or UTAUT2 theories that may need to be extended in the omnichannel shopping context.

The aim of this study is to perform a systematic literature review on retail agglomeration literature and present an agenda of future research in this domain.

To synthesize and evaluate the retail agglomeration literature, the study adopts a structured systematic literature review approach. Additionally, the study employs the Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology (TCCM) framework to present future research directions in the retail agglomeration domain.

This review proposes a conceptual framework showing the relationships between the antecedents, mediators and consequences reported in the retail agglomeration literature. Lexicometric analysis shows that the key themes of retail agglomeration research are retail store selection and retail performance, retail location strategy and store format, customer perceptions, behavior and expectations.

Specific criteria used for the inclusion of literature limits articles considered for the current systematic review. Also, only those articles published in English were considered.

Based on the proposed model, this review presents strategies to enhance the performance of retail agglomeration.

This study has systematically synthesized the retail agglomeration literature to explore its development over time and proposes a research framework which provides a comprehensive understanding of retail agglomeration literature.