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Vocational education and training (VET) in Australia has for some time been driven by an agenda of “reasonable adjustment”, in which practices are modified to ensure equitable access and participation by disadvantaged students. However, the growing marketization of VET has instead encouraged the use of more flexible approaches to attract and retain students from diverse backgrounds. They have thus paralleled and confounded reasonable adjustment practices for inclusive development. This study sought to identify the moral dilemmas experienced by VET teachers arising from implementing reasonable adjustment practices.

This phenomenological research project used in-depth conversational interviews with 19 experienced VET teachers from a diversity of teaching fields to identify moral dilemmas experienced as arising from changes in their workplace contexts.

One of the identified dilemmas was responding flexibly to heightened student diversity, to which study participants largely responded by prioritising the economic imperative over social inclusion. Well-intended actions thus led to unintentionally damaging outcomes, raising important ethical questions about the relative value of economic and social development outcomes and the role of reasonable adjustment in their attainment. The study also highlights the lack of appropriate VET teacher training in managing ethical conflicts to minimise risks to themselves and their employing organizations.

As a case study of inclusive development policies in practice, this research may be seen as a cautionary tale for inclusive development policies in other countries with similarly strong VET economic and socially inclusive development policies for sustainability. The paper thus opens a dialogue for critical reflection on the current problems in a reasonable development approach in the field of comparative and international education. Those two parallel agendas have presented VET teachers and trainers with ethically challenging situations in which the economic and social development imperatives are experienced as being conflict with each other.

Using the lens of upper echelons theory, this study examines the degree to which National Collegiate Athletic Association athletic department performance outcomes are associated with the personal characteristics and experiences of the athletic director leading the organization.

The authors match organizational performance data with athletic director and institutional characteristics to form a robust data set spanning 16 years from the 2003–04 to 2018–19 seasons. The sample contains 811 observations representing 136 unique athletic directors. Fixed effects panel regressions are used to analyze organizational performance and quantile regression is used to analyze organizational revenues.

The authors fail to uncover statistically significant evidence that athletic director personal characteristics, functional experience and technical experience are associated with organizational performance. Rather, the empirical modeling indicates organizational performance is primarily driven by differentiation in the ability to acquire human capital (i.e. playing talent). The results also indicate that on average, women are more likely to lead lower revenue organizations, however, prior industry-specific technical experience offsets this relationship.

In opposition to upper echelons research in numerous settings, the modeling indicates the personal characteristics and experiences of the organization's lead executive are not an economically relevant determinant of organizational performance. This may indicate college athletics is a boundary condition in the applicability of upper echelons theory.

This paper aims to explore the links between being lonely and isolated, and increased risks of abuse for adults with care and support needs.

Thematic analysis was used to explore features of loneliness and social isolation present in South Yorkshire Safeguarding Adults Reviews (SARs) published since 2014.

Ten out of fifteen SARs indicated there had been issues of loneliness and/or social isolation for the person who was the subject of the SAR.

The limitations of this paper are that it only included SARs from the South Yorkshire area. Future research should explore national and international perspectives on these issues.

Safeguarding Boards should include actions to address loneliness and social isolation as part of prevention strategies and services to develop approaches that can minimise or prevent abuse before it occurs. Practitioners should routinely explore whether the people they work with feel lonely and/or isolated and support people to take appropriate action to mitigate these risks.

This paper uses the existing body of literature about loneliness and social isolation to explore the risks of abuse and neglect for adults with care and support needs.

The term non-place was originally coined by French ethnographer Marc Augé to refer to all spaces of anonymity where tradition and history are eradicated. A non-place not only seems to be the result of hyper-mobility but also the opposite of what Augé called “an anthropological place.” The non-place is also a place of no heritage, no history, and disengagement. These spaces of depersonalization and anonymity include bus stations, airports, hotel rooms, and even shopping malls. Going beyond any controversy, he argues convincingly that non-places radically alter the essence of belonging distorting the borders between here-and-there, or us and them. The expansion of globalization has changed not only the epistemological basis of anthropology but also the host–guest encounters. Given the problem in this term, Augé leaves the construction of a place to individual perception, but what is more important the opposite is equally true, since places engender individual rights, non-places assume non-rights. In developing countries and Latin America, non-places are dwelled by persons or citizens who have been debarred from the economic prosperity or the labor marketplace. If this is correct, all these hapless homeless are subject to non-rights. Today, non-place theory bodes well to offer a diagnosis of how these spaces are dwelled by homeless young people globally. Hence, we build a conceptual bridge between Marc Augé and Zygmunt Bauman and his notion of vagabonds/tourists.

This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of ethnically targeted ads in developing consumer–brand relationships through an application of social identification theory and elaboration likelihood model among African American consumers in the service sector.

Study 1 used a 2 (service type: hedonic vs utilitarian) × 2 (strength of ethnic identification: high vs low) between-subjects experimental design. Study 2 used the same experimental design, procedure and ads as Study 1.

Taken together, the findings from these two studies demonstrate how ethnically targeted advertising, in conjunction with service type, can influence consumer–brand relationships. The results showed that those with high strength of ethnic identification had more brand love, as well as higher intentions to spread positive word-of-mouth, purchase intention and brand loyalty for hedonic services, but that this effect was not significant for utilitarian services.

The environments in which advertisements appear (e.g. in an in-store display or a magazine advertisement) is important, and consumers’ reactions to targeted ads in various environments should be considered in future research. Future studies should also examine the role of individuals’ personality traits and level of acculturation in determining their relationships with brands.

Across two studies, the authors demonstrated that ethnic ads are more effective for African American individuals with high level of ethnic identification especially for hedonic services.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

This study aims to explore Augmented Language Models (ALMs) for synthetic data generation in services marketing and research. It evaluates ALMs' potential in mirroring human responses and behaviors in service scenarios through comparative analysis with five empirical studies.

The study uses ALM-based agents to conduct a comparative analysis, leveraging SurveyLM (Bickley et al., 2023) to generate synthetic responses to the scenario-based experiment in Söderlund and Oikarinen (2018) and four more recent studies from the Journal of Services Marketing. The main focus was to assess the alignment of ALM responses with original study manipulations and hypotheses.

Overall, our comparative analysis reveals both strengths and limitations of using synthetic agents to mimic human-based participants in services research. Specifically, the model struggled with scenarios requiring high levels of visual context, such as those involving images or physical settings, as in the Dootson et al. (2023) and Srivastava et al. (2022) studies. Conversely, studies like Tariq et al. (2023) showed better alignment, highlighting the model's effectiveness in more textually driven scenarios.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first to systematically use ALMs in services marketing, providing new methods and insights for using synthetic data in service research. It underscores the challenges and potential of interpreting ALM versus human responses, marking a significant step in exploring AI capabilities in empirical research.

The vulnerability of customers to malware attacks through weak supplier links has prompted a need for collaboration as a strategic alternative in improving supply chain cybersecurity (SCC). Current studies overlook the fact that the effectiveness of cybersecurity strategies is dependent on the form of interfirm relationship mechanisms within which supply chain digital assets are embedded. This paper analyses the association between interfirm collaborative cybersecurity management capabilities (ICCMC) and cybersecurity parameters across a supply chain and proposes an agenda for future research.

A systematic literature review (SLR) is conducted, employing text mining software to analyse content extracted from 137 scholarly articles on SCC from January 2013 to January 2022.

The co-occurrence analysis strongly confirms the potential of ICCMC to reinforce SCC. Furthermore, we establish that relational factors could have multiple roles: as antecedents for ICCMC, and as factors that directly affect SCC parameters. The analysis reveals knowledge gaps in SCC theory grounding, including a fragmented and sparse representation of SCC parameters and the potential presence of an omitted variable – SCC – that could improve subsequent testing of causal relationships for theory development.

The paper’s contribution is at the intersection of interfirm collaboration and mandating cybersecurity requirements across a supply chain. Our paper contributes to closing a social-technical gap by introducing social aspects such as the Relational View and the importance of developing ICCMC to reinforce SCC. We offer a method for testing co-occurrences in SLRs, a comprehensive definition of SCC, and a framework with propositions for future research on increasing the effectiveness of collaborative cybersecurity management. We position collaboration as a necessary condition for the transition from cybersecurity of a firm to cybersecurity across a supply chain, and its ecosystem.