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The US central government enactment of the 1866 Post Roads Act preempted state and municipal telegraph franchise entry barriers. Like present-day telecommunication companies, local franchise regulations were an entry barrier to US telegraph companies. These pre-1866 state and municipal telegraph laws were barriers of both entry and trade between states. Barriers that would of reduced the benefits of a common market if the barriers had not been preempted by the 1866 Post Roads Act. I document what laws were preempted by the 1866 Post Roads Act, explain how these laws increased entry barriers, provide evidence that preemption was enforced, and use two counterfactuals to calculate rough estimates of the decrease in entry costs from enforcement of the act.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between shared prosperity and financial well-being from the individual grassroot perspective in Malaysia through the mediating influence of technological empowerment and responsible citizenship. The study also incorporates the effects of political stability on developmental policies such as shared prosperity as well as behavioural mindset change on financial well-being.

This study employed the quantitative survey method using convenience sampling selected based on ethnicity and income levels. The questionnaire was developed for this study based on extant literature and the Malaysian Shared Prosperity Vision 2030 (SPV2030) policy document. The instrument was validated and data was then analysed using the Structural Equation Modelling approach.

The findings suggest that technological empowerment and responsible citizenship serve as mediators in ensuring that shared prosperity translates into financial well-being. Additionally, political stability and behavioural mindset are crucial in supporting SPV2030 and financial well-being, respectively.

The study highlights the need for political awareness and education, as well as the importance of revising legacy policies and enhancing policy feedback mechanisms to support financial well-being.

This study suggests that individuals need to shift their mindset to create opportunities and take risks to improve their financial status and in embracing shared prosperity. It also calls for the integration of more open policy feedback mechanisms and social mobility through technological empowerment.

Socially, this study underscores the importance of social cohesion and mobility, facilitated by technological empowerment, in the pursuit of shared prosperity and financial well-being. It also emphasizes the role of education in fostering political awareness necessary for sustaining these efforts.

This is a nascent study, with its focusing on individual grassroots perspectives and its identification of mediators like technological empowerment and responsible citizenship within the context of a developing, multi-ethnic nation. Methodologically, the study contributes a reliable and valid instrument for the further exploration of shared prosperity and financial well-being in literature.

The digital platform-based sharing economy has become ubiquitous all over the world. In this paper, we explore how market actors’ conflicting interpretations of digital platforms’ business models give form and shape value co-creation and capture practices in contexts marked by weak institutions and underdeveloped markets.

Integrating insights from the broader literature on digital platforms and the contemporary turn to “meaning-making” in social theory, we adopt a problematization method to unpack the collective contest over the interpretation of value co-creation and capture from ridesharing platforms in contexts marked by weak institutions and underdeveloped markets.

Collective contest over the interpretation of digital business models may give rise to competing meanings that may enable (or impede) digital platform providers’ ability to co-create and capture value. We present an integrative framework that delineates how firms caught up in such collective contests in contexts marked by weak institutions and underdeveloped markets may utilise such conditions as marketing resources to reset their organising logic in ways that reconcile the conflicting perspectives.

The paper presents propositions constituting a contribution to a meaning-making perspective on ridesharing digital platforms by offering insights into how digital business models could potentially be localised and adapted to address and align with the peculiarities of contexts. It goes further to present a theoretical model to extend our understanding of the different sources of contestation of meaning of digital platforms.

The meaning-making perspective on digital platforms extends our understanding of how the collective contest over interpretations of value co-creation and capture may offer a set of contradictory frames that yield possibilities for ridesharing platform providers, and their users, to assimilate the organising logic of digital business models into new categories of understanding.

In this study, the authors examine artificial knowledge as a fundamental stream of knowledge management for sustainable and resilient business models in supply chain management (SCM). The study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of artificial knowledge and digitalization as key enablers of the improvement of SCM accountability and sustainable performance towards the UN 2030 Agenda.

Using the SCOPUS database and Google Scholar, the authors analyzed 135 English-language publications from 1990 to 2022 to chart the pattern of knowledge production and dissemination in the literature. The data were collected, reviewed and peer-reviewed before conducting bibliometric analysis and a systematic literature review to support future research agenda.

The results highlight that artificial knowledge and digitalization are linked to the UN 2030 Agenda. The analysis further identifies the main issues in achieving sustainable and resilient SCM business models. Based on the results, the authors develop a conceptual framework for artificial knowledge and digitalization in SCM to increase accountability and sustainable performance, especially in times of sudden crises when business resilience is imperative.

The study results add to the extant literature by examining artificial knowledge and digitalization from the resilience theory perspective. The authors suggest that different strategic perspectives significantly promote resilience for SCM digitization and sustainable development. Notably, fostering diverse peer exchange relationships can help stimulate peer knowledge and act as a palliative mechanism that builds digital knowledge to strengthen and drive future possibilities.

This research offers valuable guidance to supply chain practitioners, managers and policymakers in re-thinking, re-formulating and re-shaping organizational processes to meet the UN 2030 Agenda, mainly by introducing artificial knowledge in digital transformation training and education programs. In doing so, firms should focus not simply on digital transformation but also on cultural transformation to enhance SCM accountability and sustainable performance in resilient business models.

This study is, to the authors' best knowledge, among the first to conceptualize artificial knowledge and digitalization issues in SCM. It further integrates resilience theory with institutional theory, legitimacy theory and stakeholder theory as the theoretical foundations of artificial knowledge in SCM, based on firms' responsibility to fulfill the sustainable development goals under the UN's 2030 Agenda.

Employability skills have transformed from the acquisition of university degrees to possessions of cognate skills other than only degrees that can help employees secure employment in contemporary work environments. This study evaluates essential skills that will prepare millennia of youths and graduates for employment in the present job market. The study investigated four major hypotheses to underscore the employability opportunities of graduates in challenging 21st-century work environments.

To clearly gain an understanding of women’s disparity in society, the study employed a qualitative approach to evaluate the incidence of gender prejudice in a men’s dominant world. The study utilised two distinguished sampling strategies, purposive and snowballing sampling techniques, which were deemed suitable and useful due to the nature of the study. The study recruited 42 participants by conducting semi-structured interview sessions for the study. The study employed a deductive approach to analyse the data obtained from participants. A thematic content analysis was used to take away prejudice and establish an overarching impression of the interviewed data. Atlas.ti was used to analyse the transcribed interview data from the participants to establish common themes from the surveyed informants.

The results of this investigation indicated that there is a deep-rooted trend of institutionalised men’s dominance in politics and religious leadership. Women perceived less representation and men dominated the two domains of existence in their local environment. The study established that women are optimistic about a turnaround narrative on gender equality in politics and religious leadership. They expressed their concern about strengthened public debate and campaigns on women’s representation, and against gender discrimination. The study further shows that women are influencing the ethical and moral sense for change against women’s neglect in society. They expressed their concerns against the selection of people into political offices for elected political posts and observed the peculiarity of political godfathers fixing their favourite men into those offices.

The study discovered that women are leading campaigns for their representation in politics as well as church leadership today. The novelty of this study bothering around two domains of women’s lives – politics and religion, in particular, church leadership. These have not been evidence before in a study.

This study aims to address a substantial research gap regarding the implementation of regenerative business models (RBMs). Drawing on complementary organizational behaviour theories, it explores the role of middle managers in this process and how to move them to action.

A sample of 14 French companies, whose CEOs have publicly announced a transition to RBM, was identified. In each company, a middle manager involved in implementing RBM changes was interviewed using a qualitative expert interview methodology.

The findings confirm the pivotal role of middle managers in achieving business model changes. Three major influencing factors combine to form a typology of middle managers’ action-readiness profiles.

This study has limitations that suggest directions for future research. Firstly, while qualitative methods offer valuable insights, they lack the generalizability of quantitative approaches. Secondly, as this study is limited to France, there is a need for similar research in other regions to understand cultural variations in middle managers’ interactions with RBMs.

The study identifies three levers to accelerate RBM implementation: introducing collaborative instances, developing strategies to enhance middle managers’ action readiness and ensuring an appropriate alignment between middle managers’ profiles and the demands of RBM transitions.

The study contributes novel insights into the challenges faced by companies in innovating their business model by taking a regenerative approach.

COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the nature of support available to new parents. Previously we conducted a study to explore parents' experiences of shifting to ‘digitalised’ caregiving specifically focussing on parents' access to online parenting groups. That study is re-examined in this chapter, presenting parents' narratives about their attempts to provide the best environment for their children while most of their face-to-face support networks were unavailable. The analysis aims to determine parents' constructions of the ‘COVID baby’, a term introduced by Brown (2021), although never defined in detail. Three themes were identified: ‘Hopes and fears for the babies’ future’; ‘Peaceful and oblivious babies’; ‘Babies as a perceived mirror of parents’ abilities’. Parents in this study depicted a positive portrait in which babies thrived at home; however, they expressed worries about their children’s future, as they lacked opportunities for development and socialisation usually offered by paid or unpaid group activities. To compensate, some parents engaged in extra labour at home in the face of home-made activities, inspired by previously attended group sessions. We argue that new parents, specifically mothers, are often pressured to display ‘intensive mothering’ to provide the best opportunities for development for their babies and fulfil gender and class expectations: such pressure leads to increased consumerism. Limitations of this approach have been emphasised by the simpler life that the lockdown forced on them, with apparent benefits to the babies' well-being. On the other hand, the need for new parents to be connected to nurturing networks of support remains essential.

The purpose of this article is to meet Professor Paul T.P. Wong, PhD, CPscyh, who is based at the Department of Psychology, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Wong represents an interesting case of how a racial/cultural minority could achieve success in a hostile environment consisting of the systemic biases of injustice, discrimination and marginalization. His life also epitomizes how one can experience the paradoxical truth of healing and flourishing in an upside-down world through the positive suffering mindset (PSM).

This case study is presented in two sections: a positive autoethnography written by Wong, followed by his answers to ten questions. The core methodology of positive autoethnography allows people to understand how Wong’s life experience of being a war baby in China, a constant outsider and a lone voice in Western culture, has shaped a very different vision of meaning, positive mental health and global flourishing.

Wong reveals how to live a life of meaning and happiness for all the suffering people in a difficult world. He has researched the positive psychology of suffering for 60 years, from effective coping with stress and searching for meaning to successful aging and positive death. According to Wong’s suffering hypothesis and the emerging paradigm of existential positive psychology (Wong, 2021), cultivating a PSM is essential for healing and flourishing in all seasons of life.

An expanding literature has been developed to illustrate why the missing link in well-being research is how to transcend and transform suffering into triumph. Wong reveals how this emerging area of research is still not fully embraced by mainstream psychology dominated by the individualistic Euro-American culture, and thus why, in an adversarial milieu, existential positive psychology is limited by its inability to attract more researchers to test out Wong’s suffering hypothesis.

The wisdom and helpful tools presented here may enable people to achieve mature happiness and existential well-being even when they have a very painful past, a very difficult present and a bleak future.

This autoethnographic case study offers new grounds for hope for all those who are injured by life, marginalized by systemic biases or tormented by chronic illnesses and disorders. It also provides a road map for a better world with more decent human beings who dare to stand up for justice, integrity and compassion.

Meaning as reflected in suffering is according to Wong the most powerful force to bring out either the worst or the best in people. The new science of suffering shows us how the authors can achieve positive transformation through cultivating a PSM, no matter how harsh one’s fate may be.