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The purpose of this study is to explore the motivations and experiences of university academics who engage in open access publishing for survival and academic development.

This study employs a multiple-case qualitative approach, drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice to investigate the activities and experiences of seven academics as they strived to publish in indexed open access journals. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and observation, focusing on the academics’ strategies for obtaining cultural capital.

Findings reveal that they viewed this publishing community more as an imagined or virtual community from which they could obtain cultural capital and seek the sense of belonging to compensate for the outsider identity and peripheral positioning within their institutions. The acquired cultural capital not only helped them feel more connected but also influenced their institutional status, as increased visibility and recognition from publishing successes began to alter how they were perceived within their professional environments, sometimes enhancing their standing but also occasionally reinforcing marginalisation.

This study contributes to the existing literature by providing a refined understanding of the motivations and experiences of academics engaged in open access publishing. It offers a unique perspective on the formation and functioning of non-institutional communities in academia, highlighting the role of cultural capital and identity negotiation in shaping these communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on the challenges and opportunities faced by academics seeking to publish open access and provides insights for institutions seeking to support their faculty in this endeavour.

Organizational commitment could influence nurses’ turnover intention, but we know little about how effort recognition may enhance all three aspects of nurses’ organizational commitment and consequently reduce their turnover intention. This study adopts the self-affirmation theory to examine how the number of effort recognitions received by a nurse may impact the normative, continuance and affective aspects of their organizational commitment and their turnover intention.

We collected two-wave data from the survey responses of 481 nurses in a large medical center in Taiwan between June and August, 2017 and between January and February, 2018 as well as counting the number of times their efforts were recognized as excellent by using patient/family performance appraisal forms in 2016. Bivariate correlation was used to test the hypotheses.

We found that effort recognition is positively associated with nurses’ normative organizational commitment but not with their continuance or affective commitment. The three aspects of organizational commitment are negatively associated with turnover intention.

Nurse managers who hope to reduce nurses’ turnover intention could consider adequately recognizing nurses’ outstanding performance.

The present study is the first to employ the self-affirmation theory to examine the impact of effort recognition on the three aspects of organizational commitment and turnover intention.

Purpose: This study aims to explore the efforts of several Asian countries adopting blockchain-enabled letter of credit (LC) processes and highlight the key challenges hindering blockchain adoption into the entire LC system.

Need for the study: As trade volume among countries grows, nations should agree on the technology’s application mechanism to prevent disputes over discrete practices. As blockchain is a borderless approach, the global context of the applications should be considered, incorporating the cases of Asia, the hub of intraregional collaboration in trading.

Methodology: This chapter has surveyed the existing literature to identify the dichotomy between blockchain-enabled LC and traditional LC. Ten Asian countries were selected considering their adaptation motivations, number of use cases, and economic outlook. The case-study method was applied to compare the counties.

Findings: Countries reported blockchain-enabled LC as time-efficient, less costly, and secure. Interoperability, scalability, the absence of legal and administrative infrastructure, stress for new skills, and cyber security concerns are the most cited challenges among users. Instances of regulatory sandbox and collaborative effort were found among some countries, although some countries have yet to publish application guidelines.

Practical implication: The study provides comparative pictures of blockchain-enabled LC systems adopted by several Asian countries. This will contribute to future collaboration between Asian countries to create a unified and standardised trade financing platform. The study will also contribute to the future formulation of guidelines for administrative methodologies of the permissioned blockchain application in the trade finance section.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of global value chains (GVC) in industrial development of emerging economies, with particular focus on participating African countries. The findings of this study are expected to provide insight on the need for more developing countries to participate in GVC.

This study is built upon the neoclassical and endogenous growth theories, which postulate that savings, physical capital and human capital are the fundamental drivers of development in productive sectors of the economy. The investigation, covering the period 1980–2021, is carried out by using the unrestricted error correction model and dynamic ordinary least squares model.

The results of this study reveal that GVC stands as the dominant factor driving industrial development, compared to savings, physical capital and human capital. The findings, therefore, seem to contradict the postulation of conventional theories. The policy implications of the findings are not far-fetched. First, industrial development in the participating African countries has benefited largely from GVC; hence, it is necessary to encourage more participation. Second, industrial development also benefited from the control variables (savings, physical capital and human capital), hence the need to sustain their complementary role. Thirdly, only three African countries are actively participating in GVC, which suggests that more countries need to join, to facilitate industrial development.

Previous studies have not given adequate attention to African countries that participate in GVC, thus creating a void that needs to be filled. This study, therefore, produced results that are relevant to policy-making on industrial development in African countries.

This paper describes the development of the WECARE cross-national research alliance for investigating early childhood educators’ wellbeing, and details the experiences of some of WECARE’s 17 members.

The paper explores and situates the WECARE team’s experiences within extant literature on cross-national and collaborative research groupings alongside a strongly practical focus.

The study’s findings included effects of member mindsets and motivations, differentiated benefits and challenges of membership, cultural sensitivity, research capacity-building, leadership, communication, data security and planning.

Cross-national research is seen as an important part of academic researchers’ activities. Yet, little has been written about how cross-national research groups form and operate, and what benefits and challenges their members experience.

We aim to provide a systematic literature review of the determinants and consequences of labor investment efficiency in an international context. First, we offer a theoretical discussion of labor investment efficiency, followed by an examination of its measurement. Next, we review the determinants of labor investment efficiency, categorizing them into firm fundamentals including financial reporting quality, governance and controls, corporate social responsibility/environmental regulation and macroeconomic determinants. Finally, we review the limited empirical literature on the consequences of labor investment efficiency. We also provide some suggestions for future research.

We perform a systematic literature review using the Preferred Reporting Items for a Systematic Review of Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines to examine archival studies investigating the determinants and consequences of labor investment efficiency. Using a Boolean search strategy on the Scopus and PRISMA selection criteria, we review 86 published archival research articles from 2014 to the end of August 2024.

Our review highlights that firm-level fundamental factors including financial reporting quality have profound implications for labor investment efficiency. Effective governance mechanisms also help mitigate agency conflicts and information asymmetries and alleviate labor investment inefficiencies. Furthermore, the influence of regulations including ESG-related regulations and macroeconomic factors play a crucial role in shaping labor investment decisions. We find very little research on the consequence of labor investment efficiency.

Our review has highlighted that well-functioning corporate governance tools are effective in mitigating inefficient labor investments. Stakeholders, therefore, should ensure that firms have effective internal governance mechanisms in place and that external governance regulations complement and where necessary act as substitutes for internal governance mechanisms to optimize labor investments.

To the best of our knowledge, this study represents the first systematic review of extant research on labor investment efficiency. Our review highlights some research gaps, particularly about the consequences of labor investment efficiency and offers some suggestions for future research.

This study aims to identify key contributors, research themes, research gaps, and future directions in hospitality innovation by conducting bibliometric and content analyses of peer-reviewed articles in this field.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted using VOSviewer software on 2,698 peer-reviewed English-language articles retrieved from the Web of Science database, published between 1995 and 2023. Key contributors were identified based on publication volume, citation, and co-citation analysis. Co-occurrence analysis of index keywords and content analysis of influential articles were used to identify research themes.

The study identified four distinct research themes in hospitality innovation: (1) digital technology adoption primarily among customers, (2) innovation management within hospitality firms, focusing on knowledge management and eco-innovation, (3) service innovation primarily among employees, and (4) business model innovation involving multiple stakeholders. Additionally, the study determined key contributors, highlighted research gaps, and provided suggestions for future research directions.

This study contributes to the existing literature by providing a systematic and in-depth review of hospitality innovation research. It identifies key contributors, research themes, and potential gaps for future research, offering valuable insights for both industry practitioners and scholars.

The Inherent Jurisdiction of the High Court (the IJ) is used in safeguarding adults work to protect “vulnerable adults” whose autonomy is compromised but who have mental capacity as defined by the Mental Capacity Act 2005. Safeguarding Adult Reviews (SARs) frequently call on practitioners to develop legal literacy, including regarding the IJ. This study aims to explore and discuss how the IJ is presented in SARs and argues that there are systemic problems beyond legal literacy to consider in this area.

Relevant SARs (n = 29) were located through the National Network of Safeguarding Adult Board Chair’s library. These were thematically analysed to identify patterns regarding how the IJ is covered in these documents.

The reviews converged around specific experiential clusters (familial and domestic abuse, community-based exploitation and self-neglect). They entailed accounts of complex mental capacity issues and raised concerns about legal literacy. It was common to find situations where many other avenues for intervention had been exhausted and the IJ was proposed as a measure of last resort. The discussion of the IJ in SARs occasionally differs from prevailing legal accounts of its application, particularly regarding self-neglect and situations where a third party is not exerting coercion or control. The authors close the study with a discussion about legal literacy.

The IJ is an evolving area of law, and practitioners may therefore struggle to grasp its applicability. SARs are important resources for practitioners to learn lessons concerning this less commonly used legal mechanism. As a result, independent reviewers should be cautious about how they frame this legal remedy and consider whether this really is a case of “legal literacy”.

This study aims to define a “technological statecraft” concept to distinguish tech-based measures/sanctions from an array of economic measures ranging from restrictions of rare earth elements and natural gas supplies to asset freezes under the wider portfolio of economic statecraft. This concept is practically intended to reveal the USA’s “logic of choice” in its employment of technology as an efficient instrument to deal with China in the context of the great power rivalry.

This study follows David A. Baldwin’s statecraft definition and conceptualization methodology, which relies on “means” rather than “ends.” In addition to Baldwin and as an incremental contribution to his economic statecraft analysis, this study also combines national political economy with statecraft analysis with a particular focus on the utilization of technological measures against China during the Trump administration.

The US rationale for choosing technology, namely, emerging and foundational technologies, in its rivalry against China is caused at least by two factors: the nature of the external challenge and the characteristics of the US innovation model based largely on radical innovations. To deal with China, the USA practically distinguished the role of advanced technology and followed a grammer of technological statecraft as depicted in the promulgated legal texts during the Trump administration.

Despite a growing volume of literature on economic statecraft and technological competition, studies focusing on countries’ “logic of choice” with regard to why and under what conditions they choose financial, technological or commodity-based sanctions/measures/controls are lacking. Inspired from Baldwin’s account on the “logic of choice” from among alternative statecrafts (i.e. diplomacy, military, economic statecraft, and propaganda). This study will contribute to the literature with a clear lens to demonstrate the “logic of choice” from among a variety of economic statecraft measures in the case of the US technological statecraft toward China.

The aim of this paper is to investigate and define employees' professionalism in the hotel industry. A professional employee has specific core competencies and personal attributes that improve the quality of service by resolving guest complaints, ensuring guest satisfaction and gaining a competitive advantage. In the hospitality industry, interaction with customers necessitates providing services of high standards that are characterised by professionalism.

This research deployed a quantitative methodology with self-administering questionnaires to hotel managers of 4-star and 5-star hotels.

The results of the study suggest that employees' professionalism in hotels includes skills combined with personality characteristics along with a passion for the profession. Thus, to attest to professionalism, managers must ensure that skills are adjusted to subject-specific knowledge and expertise while incorporating “social consciousness” as a constituent dimension of professionalism.

This study investigates the concept of professionalism as the main prerequisite for the delivery of exceptional hotel services and introduces the notion of “social consciousness” as an additional dimension of professionalism.