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This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health and wellbeing of academic and professional Higher Education (HE) staff in the UK.

A mixed-method survey questionnaire was sent to almost 300 UK HE staff to secure qualitative and quantitative data to enable data triangulation.

The study found an adverse impact on academic and professional staff's mental health and wellbeing, further resulting in stress and anxiety. Several reasons for the increased stress and anxiety levels were identified, but social isolation and the increased workload were the most commonly reported. The most affected groups by the pandemic were females, younger staff, full-timers and those with disabilities or caring responsibilities.

This study offers a range of strategies to support staff's mental health and wellbeing; as such, it is of great interest to policymakers to inform their decisions of similar crisis events in the future. It also addresses some of the COVID-19 areas of research interest for the UK parliament.

The study's originality derives from exploring the pandemic's impact on UK HE staff's mental health and wellbeing by including professional staff's experiences alongside those of academics. It also expands the scant evidence concerning the pandemic's impact on HE staff in the UK.

This case was written with publicly available information about Nintendo.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Nintendo dominated the video game industry with a market share of 90%. In 2020, Nintendo’s market share dropped to nearly 31%. This case examines a 40-year history of Nintendo, including its core strategy of video game and video game console development and its growth strategy using its intellectual property. Throughout its history, Nintendo has faced and continues to face stiff competition from Sony, Microsoft and new emerging technologies like virtual reality video games. Nintendo has the challenge of competing in a rapidly changing industry with changing customer preferences where it once had a dominant market share. Can Nintendo continue competing, relying on its core competency of developing new video games and consoles? Or moving forward, should it further define itself more broadly by continuing to leverage its intellectual property in the entertainment industry?

This case is suitable for undergraduate courses in marketing, marketing management and business strategy, or where an instructor focuses on strategic decision-making. This case will provide valuable in-class discussions on the importance of defining what a business should do and how it should grow. Additionally, this case will be useful for courses that include advanced discussions on tradeoffs between focusing on core competencies and growth by expanding into other opportunities that are not necessarily part of a business’s core strategy. A portion of this case was tested in an undergraduate marketing strategy and marketing principles course. The case created an excellent environment for critical thinking and analysis.

Technological innovation is crucial for businesses to achieve development and profitability through enhancing core capabilities and differentiating competitive advantages. The key to organisational survival is boosting innovation performance focused on technological innovation, as SMEs lack resources and competencies compared to large companies. Entrepreneurship is a topic of active research to overcome SMEs’ resource and size limits. This is because entrepreneurs’ capabilities are considered more important in small and medium-sized enterprises closely related to corporate success than in large enterprises that can receive organisational support. In addition, a company’s holding capacity is a direct driver of creating differentiated competitiveness because it can pursue product differentiation through high levels of market capabilities and technology capabilities. Therefore, this study attempts to demonstrate entrepreneurship and technological innovation for SMEs. Reviewing previous studies, the authors derive the organisational capabilities needed by the organisation for innovation and examine how these organisational capabilities (technological, market, and operational capabilities) relate to entrepreneurship and technological innovation.

Since its introduction by Anthony Giddens in the early 1980s, the use of the concept of “agency” as a way to accommodate an irreducible element of voluntarism into sociological explanations has grown exponentially in the literature. In this chapter, we examine the most prominent theoretical justifications for adopting the notion of “agency” as an integral part of such explanations. We distinguish three broad sets of justifications: the meaningfulness/intentionality of social action, the need for “agency” to explain change in social structures, and the link between agency, social accountability, and human dignity. We find that none of these provides a convincing rationale for the analytical utility of agency. This raises the question of what work it actually does perform in the sociological literature.

While studies have highlighted the benefits of athlete endorsement as a means of strategic marketing communication and public relations, there are risk factors associated with the practice, especially when a celebrity endorser is involved in immoral incidents or social activism. This study examined the impacts of athlete endorsers’ controversial behavior on sponsors. It scrutinized the change in publicly traded corporations’ shareholder value when their athlete endorsers were implicated in either immoral conduct or social activism.

Using the event study analysis, this study investigated the sponsored corporations’ abnormal returns around athlete endorsers’ involvement in immoral incidents and social activism. Total 34 cases (18 immoral scandals and 16 social activism) were collected from 2009 to 2019.

The data analysis revealed a significant difference in abnormal returns between the two different types of incidents for the four different windows (2, 4, 8 and 15 days) after the date of the focal event. While scandals of immoral conduct did not cause significant loss in shareholder value, cases of social activism showed negative abnormal returns for sponsoring corporations.

This study presented the first comparative analysis of how endorsers’ immoral behavior and social activism impacted on the shareholders’ value of sponsoring firms. Using stock performance data, the findings provided the empirical evidence in stock markets’ different reactions regarding scandals and social activism. The study contributes to the relevant body of literature by comparing the different contexts in celebrity endorsement.

This study aims to directly compare risk and protective factors of male and female gang-involved youth.

This study uses the 2022 Arizona Youth Survey data. Gang-involved boys and girls are compared through multivariate logistic regression analyses to examine the relationship between risk and protective factors and youth gang membership.

Multivariate analyses reveal significant differences in risk and protective factors between gang-involved boys and girls in connection with family conflict.

There is a need for semi-specialized prevention and intervention programming for male and female gang youth. Gang programs should emphasize addressing issues with family and home life more for girls than for boys. School-based gang programs need to similarly emphasize educational commitment and positive peer influence for both gang-involved boys and girls. Improving positive neighborhood attachment through community programming will be beneficial for reducing the likelihood of gang involvement for both girls and boys.

There is a need to improve comprehension of the similarities and differences among male and female gang youth. Few studies directly compare the two groups, and by focusing on risk/protective factors, the results can help to provide direct applications to existing intervention and prevention programming.

This commentary aims to explore the theme of Tier 1 support within the UK context and abroad by the associated article by Hardiman and Harding (2025; this issue).

This commentary considers the literature regarding high-quality support as a Tier 1 approach within positive behaviour support (PBS) model in the UK and abroad. It also considers potential infrastructure that services could use to develop and sustain high-quality support.

This commentary highlights how the UK may be guided by the framework of school-wide PBS in the USA to inform the implementation of system-wide PBS in UK contexts.

This commentary explores how system-wide PBS can be applied.

Organizational scholars studying compensation often place an emphasis on certain employee groups (e.g., executives). Missing from this discussion is research on the compensation systems for low-wage jobs. In this review, the authors argue that workers in low-wage jobs represent a unique employment group in their understanding of rent allocation in organizations. The authors address the design of compensation strategies in organizations that lead to different outcomes for workers in low-wage jobs versus other workers. Drawing on and integrating human resource management (HRM), inequality, and worker literatures with compensation literature, the authors describe and explain compensation systems for low-wage work. The authors start by examining workers in low-wage work to identify aspects of these workers’ jobs and lives that can influence their health, performance, and other organizationally relevant outcomes. Next, the authors explore the compensation systems common for this type of work, building on the compensation literature, by identifying the low-wage work compensation designs, proposing the likely explanations for why organizations craft these designs, and describing the worker and organizational outcomes of these designs. The authors conclude with suggestions for future research in this growing field and explore how organizations may benefit by rethinking their approach to compensation for low-wage work. In sum, the authors hope that this review will be a foundational work for those interested in investigating organizational compensation issues at the intersection of inequality and worker and organizational outcomes.

In this chapter, we focus on specially designed instruction (SDI) as a core value for the field of specific learning disabilities (SLD). SDI is at the heart of special education, and the field of LD has been built on the core value that effective instruction improves student outcomes. We describe a two-step test and an extended example of what is and is not SDI for Matt, a student with an SLD. Finally, we discuss some of the confusion surrounding SDI and the need for the field to return to its core value of individualized, intentional, targeted, evidence- or high leverage practice–based, and systematic instruction for students with SLD.