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The marketplace is becoming increasingly automated, with consumers frequently expected to interact with machines. Not all consumers are receptive to this trend. We examine how the individual difference of speciesism impacts consumer reactions to automation in the marketplace.

We conducted three studies, including an exploratory correlational survey and two two-factor studies.

Study 1 provides survey evidence of a positive relationship between one’s level of speciesism and their belief that customer service automation is justified. Study 2 finds that speciesists have more favorable attitudes toward brands using automated (vs human) customer service. Study 3 finds that the more speciesists perceive that tasks they are required to perform at their own work are illegitimate (i.e. unreasonable), the more favorable their reactions to automation, which provides support for our theorizing that speciesists appreciate automation’s ability to relieve humans of such work tasks.

We recommend that marketers target speciesists as early adopters of chatbots. Further, brands targeting customers likely to be high on speciesism can benefit from adopting chatbots for routine tasks, as this can improve this segment’s brand attitudes.

This research identifies that speciesists, people who strongly ascribe to the belief that humans are superior to other species, are particularly receptive to automation in customer service (in the form of chatbots). We provide evidence suggesting that speciesists appreciate that automation relieves their fellow humans of automatable tasks.

Understanding ways to foster wellbeing in postgraduate-research students (PGRs) requires focus especially with respect to positive relationship formation with supervisory teams. Hence, the purpose of this study was to explore six different ways of nurturing wellbeing; perceptions of positive relationships with supervisory teams; and interactions between these factors.

In total, 155 PGRs completed questionnaires at baseline and six months. The predictor variables were six ways of nurturing wellbeing; the outcome variable was psychological wellbeing appraisals overall; and the moderator variables were positive perceptions of relationships with key staff.

The most effective ways of nurturing wellbeing were Noticing and Being Aware; Discovering and Learning; Connecting with Others; and Being Healthy and Safe. Over time, Noticing and Being Aware predicted psychological wellbeing appraisals overall. Positive relationships with supervisors, co-supervisors and work peers were associated with wellbeing appraisals. Furthermore, positive relationships with co-supervisors most convincingly strengthened the relationships between wellbeing appraisals and Noticing and Being Healthy cross-sectionally, and Giving longitudinally.

It is concerning that PGRs are often overlooked when developing policies and strategies to combat mental health problems. Rather than simply focusing on diminishing mental health problems, the current work evidences ways of optimizing positive aspects of PGR experiences by actively nurturing wellbeing in tandem with enhancing relationships with supervisory team members. However, such initiatives have to be an investment at institutional, as well as individual levels.

Examining the interactions between nurturing positive wellbeing in PGRs and positive relationships with supervisory team members is under-researched.

Applying practices from online role-playing games with multiple players, we employed Reacting to the Past (RTTP) pedagogy to engage students at several universities in a multi-week experience. As a pedagogical method, RTTP is ripe for potential use across an array of leadership education initiatives, including interinstitutional collaborations.

In this essay, we describe this student learning and engagement experience as well as address innovations and potential applications in similar leadership education contexts, preliminary student and facilitator feedback and lessons learned.

As part of The Justice Challenge’s eight-week Colloquium, students developed an understanding of food justice, systems thinking and transdisciplinary collaboration, as well as skills in perspective-taking, persuasion and teamwork. Through the RTTP gameplay, students engaged firsthand with multiple perspectives and goals, differing ways of interpreting information and situations, diverse factions and political pressures.

We believe our use of RTTP in The Justice Challenge is novel for two reasons. First, although RTTP fits remarkably well with the basic philosophy of honors education, it is less explored as a pedagogical approach in leadership education contexts. Second, our use of RTTP in an online, multi-institutional program highlights it as a useful pedagogical tool to foster leadership learning that can work regardless of group size or modality.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the roles of employee experience and top management commitment in the relationship between human resource (HR) records management culture and HR records privacy control in organisations in Ghana.

Structural equation modelling was used in analysing the data. Following the specification of the model, three main types of analyses were carried out. They were reflective measurement model analyses to test reliability and validity; formative measurement model analyses to test redundancy, collinearity, significance and relevance of the lower-order constructs; and structural model analyses to ascertain the explanatory and predictive powers of the model, significance of the hypotheses and their effect sizes.

The study confirmed that communication, privacy awareness and training and risk assessment are dimensions of HR records management culture. Concerning the hypotheses, it was established that HR records management culture is related to HR records privacy control. Also, the study showed that employee experience positively moderated the relationship HR records management culture has with HR records privacy control. However, top management commitment negatively moderated the relationship HR records management culture has with HR records privacy control.

Organisations committed to the privacy control of HR records need to ensure the retention of their employees, as the longer they stay with the organisation, the more they embody the HR records management culture which improves the privacy control of HR records. For top management commitment, it should be restricted to providing strategic direction for HR records privacy control, as the day-to-day influence of top management commitment on the HR records management culture does not improve the privacy control of HR records.

This study demonstrates that communication, privacy awareness and training and risk assessment are dimensions of HR record management culture. Also, the extent of employee experience and top management commitment required in the relationship between HR records management culture and HR records privacy control is revealed.

Race and gender – and their intersection – play an important role in mentorship. In the current study, informed by critical race theory (CRT) and intersectionality, we identified and explored helpful and harmful mentoring experiences among Black women undergraduates.

Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with Black female undergraduate students (n = 18) from five undergraduate institutions in the United States. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, a codebook was developed through a series of team meetings, and inductive qualitative coding was performed.

Eight major themes were revealed, with three indicating positive mentorship experiences and five indicating negative mentorship experiences. Participants expressed appreciation for effective mentor support concerning professional development, personal concerns, and race-specific support. Experiencing ineffective mentorship compounded other systemic barriers that the participants faced and led them to censor their self-expression while communicating with their mentors.

This examination of mentoring perspectives from Black women undergraduate students provides a foundation for future directions in mentorship improvement for Black women.

The purpose of this study is to test for the mediating effect of debt literacy in the relationship between microcredit access and the survival of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) owned and operated by young women in rural sub-Saharan Africa post COVID-19.

This study uses a five-point Likert scale questionnaire to collect data from young women entrepreneurs with MSMEs located in rural northern Uganda. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and SmartPLS with bootstrapping are used to test the magnitude and level of the mediation effect as recommended by Baron and Kenny (1986) and Hair et al. (2022).

The results reveal that debt literacy increases the impact of microcredit on the survival of young women entrepreneurs with MSMEs in rural sub-Saharan Africa post COVID-19 based on data collected from rural northern Uganda.

A questionnaire was used to collect data for this study. Future studies could collect data using interviews and the experimental research design to evaluate the effect of debt literacy over time.

This study provides valuable insights on the importance of debt literacy in microcredit access and the survival of MSMEs. The results of this study can be used to inform policy and guide practitioners on how to integrate debt literacy into the national educational and literacy curriculum.

This study brings into the limelight the important role of debt literacy in helping young women microentrepreneurs learn to be more cautious when taking on future debts and helping them become more resilient in the post COVID-19 pandemic situation. This topic of debt literacy is limited in the microcredit literature and the theory of microfinance in rural Uganda post COVID-19.

With reference to the global financial crisis and lessons learned, advocacy for distributing suitable financial products by financial intermediaries remain key if consumers, especially the illiterate in underdeveloped financial markets, are to be absorbed into the formal financial system. Financial intermediaries such as microfinance banks should provide suitable financial products, with full disclosure of information and customer protection relating to distribution of all financial products within the financial market to prevent financial vulnerability. The main purpose of this study is to establish the mediating role of financial product suitability in the relationship between access to microfinance products and survival of women micro-agribusinesses in rural Uganda.

SmartPLS with bootstrap based on 5,000 samples was used to test for the mediating role of financial product suitability in the relationship between access to microfinance products and survival of women micro-agribusinesses in rural Uganda.

The results revealed that financial product suitability improves access to microfinance products by 29 percentage points to promote survival of women micro-agribusinesses in rural Uganda. In reality, delivering suitable financial products that suit the economic condition of poor women micro-agribusiness borrowers, can allow them to use these products to generate income to meet timely repayment obligations and business demands.

The current study selected samples from only women micro-agribusinesses operating in rural Uganda, with a specific focus on the northern region. Thus, studies involving samples selected from other rural developing countries may be necessary in future. Additionally, while the findings are significant, the data were collected from only women microenterprises who are clients of microfinance banks. Future studies focusing on women microenterprises who are clients of other financial institutions may offer insightful comparative data.

The findings from this study offer strategies for managers of microfinance banks to invent and design financial products that suit the economic status and condition of different microcredit clients, especially the women micro-agribusinesses. This can help them to solve the problem of defaults in loan repayment and delinquency common while lending to the rural poor. In fact, microfinance banks should adopt a customized loan pricing model that can promote the operational sustainability and commercial viability of women micro-agribusinesses in the current situation of mission adrift.

The current study uses the suitability rule and economic theory to elucidate the importance of microfinance product suitability to increase microfinance inclusion of women micro-agribusinesses in rural areas in developing countries. The novelty in this paper is in combining the suitability rule and economic theory with microfinance theory to promote access to microcredit by the women micro-agribusinesses in rural Uganda under the situation of mission adrift. This is limited in the existing microfinance literature and theory, especially in developing countries like Uganda.

We explored whether (1) an informational intervention improves ratings of individuals on the autism spectrum (IotAS) in a job interview by curbing salience bias and whether expert-based influence amplifies this effect (Study 1); (2) the effect of disclosure of autism on ratings depends on a candidate’s presentation as IotAS or neurotypical (Studies 1 and 2) and (3) social desirability bias affects ratings of and emotional responses to disclosers (Study 2).

In two studies, participants, randomly assigned to experimental conditions, watched a mock job interview of a candidate presenting as an IotAS or neurotypical and reported their perception of his job suitability and selection decision. Study 2 additionally measured participants’ traits associated with social desirability bias, self-reported emotions and involuntary emotions gauged via face-reading software.

In Study 1, the informational intervention improved ratings of the IotAS-presenting candidate; delivery by an expert made no difference. Disclosure increased ratings of both the IotAS-presenting and neurotypical-presenting candidates, especially the former, and information mattered more in the absence of disclosure. In Study 2, disclosure improved ratings of the IotAS-presenting candidate only; no evidence of social desirability bias emerged.

We explain that an informational intervention works by attenuating salience bias, focusing raters on IotAS' qualifications rather than on their unexpected behavior. We also show that disclosure is less helpful for IotAS who behave more neuronormatively and social desirability bias affects neither ratings of nor emotional responses to IotAS-presenting job candidates.

Disaster research is often geared towards logocentrism and has relatively few outputs that explore alternative forms of representation, particularly those using an artistic medium. This paper explores how the creative use of audio representation can enhance understanding of flooding experiences, challenging the predominant text-based approach within qualitative study.

During a series of visits to people who had been flooded in 2019 in the UK, interviews and ambient sounds were recorded, analysed and then intertwined with musical elements composed by the lead author. The result is a phonographic representation of the synthesised data. The process explores a tripartite, creative, sonic approach that comingles thematic spoken excerpts with local sounds and musical compositions.

This article presents three sonic vignettes that illustrate the use of audio as a medium for academic research outputs. It contributes to the current consensus that the interpretation, representation and dissemination of research findings should be broadened beyond the dominance of the written word to align with the ethos of the Disaster Studies Manifesto.

The research contributes to disaster scholarship by developing a transdisciplinary approach to explore people’s experiences. By retaining the participants’ voices at its core, it makes use of in-depth, rich data to illustrate individuality, rather than aiming to generalise.

Very little disaster research has focussed on pushing the boundaries of investigation by using the arts as a lens for both the researcher and their audience. Such work may connect with a wider range of people compared to a text-based “traditional” academic output. It can offer new opportunities for practical uses within Disaster Risk Reduction, for example as a communicative and educational tool.

This paper contributes to understanding the impact of developing audio representation as a medium for conveying people’s experiences of flooded homes.

The purpose of this research is to undertake a bibliometric analysis of financial performance research in of higher education sector. The study examines papers over the last 2 decades and performed performance analysis, co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling and scientific mapping.

The study examines 616 documents retrieved from the Scopus database using bibliometric analysis, performance analysis and thematic clustering. The study looked at the scientific productivity of papers, prolific authors, most influencing papers, institutions and nations, keyword cooccurrence, thematic mapping, co-citations and authorship and country collaborations. VOS viewer was employed as a tool in the research to conduct the performance analysis and thematic clustering.

This study delves into the recent advancements in financial performance research within higher education, focusing particularly on the year 2023, characterized by a peak of productivity with 46 significant articles. Notable institutions contributing substantially to this discourse include the University of Sussex (UK), and Ratio Institute Stockholm (Sweden), each referenced 227 times. The United Kingdom has emerged as a leader in financial performance research, amassing 3,850 citations from 92 publications. Key journals driving this conversation include “Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice” and “The British Journal of Political Science.” The most cited study examines the impact of business-university partnerships on innovation and financial outcomes.”

This is the first study that provides a performance analysis and scientific mapping of the financial performance literature in the higher education sector. In addition, this study is the initial one to do a thorough analysis and organized representation of financial performance in the higher education sector, providing an unparalleled understanding of a hitherto uninvestigated area of academic research.