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The purpose of the study was to determine if representatives of small and large businesses in New Jersey believe portfolios would be valuable for evaluating applicants as part of the hiring process and whether portfolios would help applicants in the hiring process.

Representatives from 109 small and 71 large businesses in New Jersey were surveyed about using portfolios in the hiring process.

Representatives from both small and large businesses believe that the submission of a portfolio of exemplary work may help the applicant and the employer in the hiring process.

The study limitations are that the respondents had different definitions of ePortfolio, it was a convenience survey, and the researchers used two sets of data. For future research, conducting a study in a major region of the world would be a significant contribution to learning about the views of business representatives globally regarding the use of ePortfolios in the hiring decision process.

The authors recommend that educational institutions encourage students to create portfolios as part of their career preparation to gain an edge as applicants in the job market. EPortfolios are an emerging tool to help employers in the hiring decision process.

EPortfolios would provide evidence of the employee's fit to the position, thus eliminating a mismatch of the employee's skill set and qualifications to the job. The ePortfolio aids the employer in seeing the candidate's skills for the position.

This paper adds to the limited research about the emergence of ePortfolios having a role in human resource decision making.

State environmental agencies have been organized independently with a variety of structural schemes, and are responsible for the bulk of administration of federal environmental policy, such as the Clean Air Act. Using statistical models of air quality outcomes, this research compares three competing typologies for capturing agency differences: Ringquist (1993b), Lester (1990), and Wilson (1989). The findings indicate the most commonly used measure of organization, Ringquist (1993b), may be the weakest in comparison. Additionally, both Lester (1990) and Wilson (1989) show interesting advantages in comparison to each other. The findings provide some interesting insights into the difficult task of measuring organization.

The purpose of this study contributes to literature on marketing communications by empirically contrasting the effectiveness of a new form of covert promotions (product placement in recipes) and an overt promotion (traditional advertisement). The mediating role of perceived believability of promotional materials and the moderating roles of advertising skepticism and brand awareness were examined based on a conceptual model.

A Web-based experiment with 2 (form of promotion: overt versus covert) × 2 (brand awareness: low versus high) between-subjects full factorial design was used. A public sample of 537 participants had participated in the study. The conceptual model was further tested on 106 participants using stimuli of a fictitious brand.

A two-stage moderated mediation analysis shows that the perceived believability of promotional materials was a significant mediator of the form of promotion and brand evaluations. Consumers showed a higher level of believability toward covert promotion, which, in turn, led to more positive evaluations of the promoted brand. Advertising skepticism and brand awareness were found to significantly moderate the relationship between form of promotion and attitudes toward the promoted brands. A similar pattern of results was obtained when stimuli of a fictitious brand were used.

This research addresses an important issue in marketing communication and extends the understanding of the perception of overt and covert promotions by examining the underlying mediating and moderating variables, which have rarely been explored before. The results guide marketers in developing effective marketing communication strategies for well-known, less well-known and even new brands. It also directs policymakers to consider whether integrated branded content in recipes should be disclosed to protect consumers from surreptitious promotions, which may help to lower consumers’ skepticism toward advertising in the long run.

This study uses the most recent national data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), 2011–2012 and Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS), 2012–2013 to investigate attrition trends among Black teachers, and Black female teachers in particular, to inform a qualitative analysis of proposed and adopted teacher retention policy interventions. This study asks: Why do Black teachers report leaving, and what would bring them back to the classroom? What working conditions are associated with Black teacher attrition? What policy interventions can meet the needs of Black teachers in having successful and supported teaching experiences? How have these interventions been successful, and what are the considerations for applying them more broadly? We find that Black teacher turnover rates are significantly higher than those of other teachers and that there are several substantive differences in their preparation, school characteristics, and reasons for leaving. We describe policy interventions that target these conditions, such as teacher residencies, loan forgiveness, mentoring and induction, and principal training programs. We include in that discussion the relative benefits and challenges of each implications for policymaking.

Studying Cuban urban agriculture is important because empirically investigating existing, innovative projects geared toward sustainability can illuminate the processes that facilitate and inhibit environmental reform. I assess the social costs and benefits, achievements, and ongoing challenges at one urban farm. I highlight the interconnection of societal institutions – including gender relationships and gendered economic structures – that can foster or undermine sustainability projects. My analysis of the social dimensions of environmental problems is based on Ariel Salleh’s theoretical work. She argues that women’s invisible reproductive labor mediates paid labor by maintaining the viability of such labor. My contribution is to add an empirical dimension to her work.

To assess the challenges of urban sustainability, I spent two months conducting participant observation and semi-structured interviews with workers at an urban farm in Havana, Cuba.

I find that culturally prescribed gender divisions of labor are entrenched in Cuban urban agriculture. Women continue to do most of the important, yet unacknowledged, domestic work that maintains the health of agricultural labor. Additionally, the heavier burdens women experience during the second shift restrict their ability to participate in local democratic decision-making processes, thereby limiting their capacity to modify oppressive cultural norms and maintaining the status quo.

Socially just environmental change does not automatically happen when the barriers of capitalism are removed, even if the society bases economic progress on increasing quality of life rather than profit. Instead, socially just environmental change must be a deliberate process that is constantly negotiated, reassessed, and prioritized.

Introduction: The world is passing through a technology explosion phase where one technology is being replaced by another very quickly. Emerging technologies play more important roles in the insurance sector directly or indirectly. These technologies have a high potential to change the insurance paradigm.

Purpose: In this chapter, we discuss emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, blockchain, the internet of things (IoT), mobile technology, predictive analytics, social media, telematics, chatbots, low codes, and drones in the context of the insurance industry.

Methodology: To carry out our analysis, we searched for data using the keywords for each technology from the Web of Science (WoS) coral database. Certain inclusion and exclusion criteria were followed to select the articles for further analysis. R-studio was used for the data analysis and visualisation.

Findings: It was found that the highest number of research articles published are related to big data, followed by AI and social media. The first article on AI in insurance appeared in 1975. Social media is the highest cited new technology, whereas the low codes are the undiscovered paradigm for the insurance sector with no published research. Research on the impact of chatbots, drones, and mobile technology in the insurance industry is still at a nascent stage. We also noticed that the United States is leading the research on emerging technologies in the insurance sector.

Implications: This chapter audits the emerging technologies in the insurance sector and identifies technological areas with the highest, least, or no research, dominant journals, authors, and countries. This holistic overview empowers managers and academicians to decide the future course of action.

Japan’s civic environmentalism combines a tradition of local protest and activism with a national environmental movement that is limited in size and policy influence. A strong legislative and administrative response to the country’s severe pollution crisis of the 1960s and 1970s helped tamp down that era’s wave of protests and keep the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in power. While the state has generally supported local organizations engaged in environmental improvement activities, it has erected barriers that limit the scope of non-governmental organization (NGO) activities and inhibit the development of an influential national environmental movement. The 1990s reforms, inspired in part by the citizen response to the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, made it easier for NGOs to attain legal status and raise funds. Yet Japan’s civic environmentalism – by most measures – still lags well behind that of peer industrialized countries. The 2011 tsunami and nuclear crisis brought another opportunity for major reforms to the nation’s civic environmental culture – but the evidence to date indicates that the much anticipated transformation is turning out to be of a lesser magnitude than many had initially expected.

The research examines how contextual coaching (Gorrell and Hoover, 2009; Valentine, 2019) can act as a lever to build collaborative professionalism (Hargreaves and O'Connor, 2018) and lead to school improvement.

The multi-case study (Stake, 2013) draws on two bespoke examples of contextual coaching in education and uses the ten tenets of collaborative professionalism as a conceptual framework for its abductive analysis. Data from both cases were collected through interviews, focus groups and documentation.

The findings demonstrate that effective contextual coaching leads to conditions underpinning school improvement. Specifically, there are patterns of alignment with the ten tenets of collaborative professionalism. Whereas contextual coaching is found on four of these tenets (mutual dialogue, joint work, collective responsibility and collaborative inquiry), in more mature coaching programmes, three others (collective autonomy, initiative and efficacy) emerge. There is also evidence that opportunities exist for contextual coaching to be further aligned with the remaining three tenets. The study offers insight into how school improvement can be realized by the development of staff capacity for teacher leadership through contextual coaching.

The impact of coaching in education is enhanced by recognizing the importance of context and the value of iterative design and co-construction.

The principles of contextual coaching are generalizable, but models must be developed to be bespoke and to align with each setting. Collaborative professionalism offers a useful framework to better design and implement contextual coaching programmes.

The research introduces contextual coaching in education, and how coaching can enhance collaborative professionalism in schools.

Rural schools have typically been strong on community but weak on professional learning. Their small size and geographical isolation have meant that much of the recent reform movement focused on professional learning communities has passed them by. But there is no reason why rural educators cannot participate in professional learning networks (PLNs) and benefit from heightened levels of collegiality that can be experienced across schools. However, intentional design for deeper collaborative work and face-to-face connection is necessary for PLN members to reap the benefits from increased professional capital and teacher leadership opportunities. This chapter describes the work of the Northwest Rural Innovation and Student Engagement (NW RISE) network in the United States. NW RISE brings together rural educators in gatherings that take place every six months, helps them to form “job-alike” groups focused on academic subject matter or cross-contextual themes, and provides support for shared curriculum design. This chapter describes how rural educators have seized upon the resources in NW RISE to promote student engagement and to develop their professional capacity across the network’s schools.