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This research paper examines the complex interplay of trust, corruption, and governance during the COVID-19 pandemic, analysing how these sociopolitical factors influence public health outcomes. Utilising the Generalised Additive Model (GAM) for Corruption Risk and Trust, the study provides a fresh perspective on the pandemic’s multifaceted impact, extending beyond traditional biomedical approaches. Through an in-depth analysis of global data, the paper unveils the intricate links between public confidence in government and the perceived integrity of political systems, highlighting how these elements affect the pandemic’s fatality rates. It also sheds light on the role of misinformation and politicisation in moulding public perceptions and responses to the crisis. This work offers a crucial viewpoint for understanding the ongoing challenges posed by COVID-19, emphasising the critical need for transparent and reliable governance in managing public health emergencies. The findings underscore the significant influence of governance quality, societal trust, and corruption on health crises. Contributing to the broader discussion on the interaction between political, social, and health factors during emergencies, this study has important implications for policymakers, health professionals, and the international community.

The University of Arizona Libraries (UAL) has engaged in learning and applying trauma-informed concepts since 2020. These efforts followed conversations about how to compassionately uphold the libraries' Code of Conduct (CoC). Conversations occurred against the backdrop of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a national racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd and a series of local incidents including border control, racial aggression, insecure access to basic needs and mental health services, and the recent on-campus homicide of a faculty member. In response, the library's Diversity, Social Justice, and Equity Council (DSJEC) began working to identify resources for trauma-informed services and leadership. UAL has interrogated the ways in which the CoC serves both as a response to expressions of trauma and a potential perpetuating source of trauma for patrons and staff. Moreover, many staff members have experienced trauma that occurred either within or outside the workplace that affects their work experience. UAL contracted with relational healing and life coach Nisha Mody to deliver a series of webinars introducing trauma-informed concepts and connecting them to academic library work.

A result of trauma-informed training was a deeper knowledge of trauma-informed principles and their connection to systemic inequity and power. For this reason, UAL and other academic libraries may encounter challenges when applying trauma-informed practices within the administrative and cultural context of higher education.

This paper investigates the impact of public support on Moroccan small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) growth’ metrics in the post-COVID-19 era, focusing on subsidies, guarantee schemes and incubation services, among other firm characteristics and financing choices.

The paper employed a quantitative approach, gathering data through a survey administered to 109 SME managers and chief financial officers (CFOs) in the Casablanca-Settat region. The survey was designed to capture a comprehensive range of variables related to firm characteristics, financing sources, and growth indicators. To streamline and reduce the complexity of the dataset, principal component analysis (PCA) was utilized, allowing for the identification of key underlying factors. Following this dimensionality reduction, several ordinal probit regression models, including a stepwise approach, were applied to examine the relationship between the identified factors and the growth metrics of the SMEs. This multi-model strategy enabled the identification of the most significant determinants across various growth metrics, ensuring a robust and nuanced analysis of SME growth.

Our findings paint a complex picture: subsidies play a positive role in boosting sales and added value but don’t strongly impact job growth. Guarantee schemes help SMEs grow their workforce and sales but have a smaller effect on net income and added value. Incubation programs show limited impact overall, hinting at a need for stronger ongoing support. Financing options offer only modest growth benefits, while factors like family involvement and effective human resource practices stand out as key growth drivers. Innovation contributes gradually, underscoring the importance of a steady, long-term approach to supporting SMEs.

It is crucial to acknowledge that this analysis is conducted within the post-COVID-19 context, a period marked by significant instability, uncertainty and a lack of visibility for firms and economies worldwide. Therefore, the results cannot be generalized. Another limitation of our work is its geographic focus, which is confined to the region of Casablanca-Settat. This regional limitation may restrict the generalizability of our findings to other areas within Morocco or to different countries with varying economic environments and policy frameworks.

The findings of this study suggest actionable steps for policymakers and public actors aiming to enhance SME growth. Tailoring credit guarantee schemes to the specific needs of SMEs across various sizes and sectors can improve financial accessibility, while fostering stronger collaboration between public entities and financial institutions ensures consistent and responsive credit flows. Additionally, strengthening incubation programs with strategic financial guidance and capacity-building initiatives can empower SMEs to build sustainable financial foundations.

This research provides valuable guidance for policymakers and managers aiming to reinforce the resilience and stimulate the growth of Moroccan SMEs in a dynamic economic environment. Also, it's the first of its kind to our knowledge in the context of a developing country.

Disaster research is often geared towards logocentrism and has relatively few outputs that explore alternative forms of representation, particularly those using an artistic medium. This paper explores how the creative use of audio representation can enhance understanding of flooding experiences, challenging the predominant text-based approach within qualitative study.

During a series of visits to people who had been flooded in 2019 in the UK, interviews and ambient sounds were recorded, analysed and then intertwined with musical elements composed by the lead author. The result is a phonographic representation of the synthesised data. The process explores a tripartite, creative, sonic approach that comingles thematic spoken excerpts with local sounds and musical compositions.

This article presents three sonic vignettes that illustrate the use of audio as a medium for academic research outputs. It contributes to the current consensus that the interpretation, representation and dissemination of research findings should be broadened beyond the dominance of the written word to align with the ethos of the Disaster Studies Manifesto.

The research contributes to disaster scholarship by developing a transdisciplinary approach to explore people’s experiences. By retaining the participants’ voices at its core, it makes use of in-depth, rich data to illustrate individuality, rather than aiming to generalise.

Very little disaster research has focussed on pushing the boundaries of investigation by using the arts as a lens for both the researcher and their audience. Such work may connect with a wider range of people compared to a text-based “traditional” academic output. It can offer new opportunities for practical uses within Disaster Risk Reduction, for example as a communicative and educational tool.

This paper contributes to understanding the impact of developing audio representation as a medium for conveying people’s experiences of flooded homes.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings from the process evaluation of the Parallel Lives Programme (PLP), a child-to-parent abuse (CPA) prevention programme developed by the Media Academy Cymru in South Wales, UK. Whilst there has been a growing body of research examining CPA, empirical insight into interventions that support families experiencing CPA (including the children who use violence, their parent(s), siblings and wider family members) is lacking.

A process evaluation was used to examine the design and delivery of PLP from the perspective of the programme staff and the families who had completed the intervention. Several methods were used, including semi-structured interviews, online surveys, overt observations and file reviews. Forty-two people participated in the evaluation, including 6 practitioners, 19 parents and 17 children.

The findings highlight the need for specialised support/interventions for families that prioritise “children first”, relationship-focused, strength-based practices.

The study centres the experiences and voices of the parents and children who experience CPA and the practitioners who deliver support. Historically, these pivotal voices have been missing from practice and policy developments. The implications of this research extend beyond Wales, and it provides research, policy and practice recommendations aimed at addressing CPA in a therapeutic, non-punitive and responsive manner.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees had to switch to remote work. While some adjusted successfully to this transition, others have struggled. Leveraging information systems (IS) to adjust to major exogenous shocks is called digital resilience. The purpose of this paper is to understand what we can learn about employees' digital resilience from externally enforced transitions to remote work.

As digital resilience is challenging to measure, this study uses an embedded mixed methods approach. The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of 40 employees' statements on their remote work experience during the first six months of the pandemic and complemented these findings with scale-based digital resilience scores.

The authors find that employees' digital resilience largely depends on the amount of technical equipment and support they receive from their organizations as well as their ability and willingness to learn how to adequately use and communicate through information and communication technologies. Being self-disciplined and self-responsible positively affects digital resilience, while social isolation threatens it. Organizations can foster digital resilience building by encouraging digital networking, building a digital culture and netiquette, and treating digital resilience as a sociotechnical phenomenon.

This is one of the first empirical studies of digital resilience on a human level. It sheds light on the missing link between IS-enabled resilience and transitions to remote work. Specifically, it provides original insights into its development and manifestation in a remote work context during the COVID-19 pandemic. For researchers, it provides novel guidance on choosing appropriate measurement instruments to capture digital resilience.

The main purpose of this study is to test whether ethical financial behavior as a mediator promotes microfinance inclusion and survival of the poor young women microenterprises in rural Uganda.

The methods recommended by Kenny et al. (1998); Shrout and Bolger (2002); MacKinnon et al. (2004); and Preacher and Hayes (2004) were used to establish the existence of non-zero monotonic association between microfinance inclusion and survival through testing the mediating effect of ethical financial behavior in SmartPLS.

The results from the structural equation modeling revealed a significant full mediating effect of ethical financial behavior in the relationship between microfinance inclusion and survival of the poor young women microenterprises. Microfinance inclusion and ethical financial behavior explain 62 % of the variation in survival of the poor young women microenterprises in rural Uganda.

Whereas significant results were obtained from this study, the data were collected only from rural-based poor young women microenterprises located in northern Uganda. Extending the sample to cover the whole country may provide a more representative picture. Besides, it would be useful to compare results across developing countries as this may provide information about the generality of our findings.

The findings from this study can be useful to managers of microfinance institutions in developing countries to adopt practice that can promote financial discipline among rural poor young women microentrepreneurs. Routine financial education and business mentorship can be organized through workshops, trainings and seminars to teach rural poor young women microentrepreneurs how to manage money, especially business loans borrowed from the microfinance institutions to put it into right use. This can help them to meet timely loan repayment to increase access to future microfinance loans.

This study provides the first evidence on the use of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and theory of reasoned action (TRA) to explain microfinance inclusion of the poor young women microentrepreneurs in rural Uganda. The study uses a blend of TPB and TRA derived from psychology and sociology to explain repayment intention and ethical behaviors of the poor young women borrowers, which determines the microfinance lending cycle to make microcredit available for them to engage in entrepreneurship to come out of poverty to attain wellbeing.

This paper aims to investigate the use of social media platforms compared to IT-enabled communication in the context of dispersed teams.

We draw on the millefeuille theory to develop a model that examines the impact of multiple media use (namely the millefeuille effect) on team performance. Data were collected from 70 dispersed teams.

We showed dispersed teams are more likely to improve their performance when relying on diverse media, including social media platforms and other IT-enabled communication. We provide empirical evidence that the millefeuille effect does not necessarily impede performance.

An increasing number of companies are implementing social media platforms as part of their media portfolio in addition to the already existing IT-enabled communication, such as email. However, we lack understanding of how the use of different media impacts team performance. Drawing on the millefeuille theory, this study investigates the use of social media platforms in dispersed teams by examining how their use with other IT-enabled communication can lead to team performance. This research introduces and differentiates two measures of the millefeuille effect to explain the different impacts of the millefeuille effect: millefeuille size (the number of non-overlapping media used) and millefeuille diversity (the variety of media used).

This paper aims to shed light on the relevant benefits that collaborations with external innovation drivers can offer to companies in traditional sectors to embark on a twofold path oriented toward both a sustainable horizon and digital transformation (DT) goals.

This work describes the outcomes of the METROPOLIS project, financed by the Economic Development Ministry (MISE), to support small and medium enterprises in the DT process. The project involves the collaboration between the University of Naples Federico II and Palescandolo Lavorazioni Siderurgiche (PLS), an enterprise in the shipbuilding sector.

The project’s results highlight the complexity of the required interventions and show that DT is necessary but not sufficient condition to improve performance. Therefore, it is crucial to implement an appropriate decision support system based on advanced methodologies that can efficiently handle the system’s complexity, managing objectives oriented on efficiency and sustainability. Hence, the authors developed an original optimization approach to combine the need to ensure good production performances with sustainability-oriented objectives.

This study emphasizes the complex path necessary to radically transform companies’ processes across digital and sustainable paradigms through a real project experience. In particular, it demonstrates that efficiency and sustainability objectives may conflict, and multicriteria approaches may help overcome this. Hence, it may provide insights for stakeholders and researchers involved in DT and green transition processes.

Critical realism presents a philosophical and paradigm shift in forensic mental health scholarship and practice with youth convicted of sexual offences, which addresses current deficits in the risk management approach. Through universalism and essentialism, the dominant risk management approach classifies diverse youth by criminal behaviour and risk through predictive algorithms with a failure to account for history and oppression. In contrast, critical realism addresses identity, environment and adolescent development in practice with youth convicted of sexual offences while providing explanatory depth and a focus on social justice. The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative perspective through critical realism and address deficits in the risk management approach with youth convicted of sexual offences.

From a critical realism perspective, this paper critiques the applicability of the risk management approach with youth convicted of sexual offences by addressing tensions in the existing scholarship and practice. This paper provides clinical examples and practical application of critical realism to ground the conceptual perspective.

The authors argue that critical realism provides a critical alternative to tensions in the existing scholarship and practice with youth convicted of sexual offences through the addition of context, explanatory depth and a focus on social justice.

Intersectionality and developmental life course theoretical perspectives offer nuanced contextual approaches to incorporate complexity and diversity into practice with YCSOs. Explanatory depth through critical realism urges scholars to go beyond empiricism to the deeper structures and explanations for a phenomenon. A focus on social justice includes analysis of history, power and oppression in scholarship and practice with youth convicted of sexual offences. Quantitative criticalism is an example of an emerging theory that informs methods which emphasize social justice. Practice recommendations include moving beyond conceptualizing culture as a responsivity factor alone to the incorporation of diverse knowledges and ways of being. Desistance scholarship and practice approaches that include narrative redemptive scripts are examples of approaches consistent with critical realism that focus on strengths and intersectionality theory.

Critical realism is an under-utilized paradigm within forensic mental health, which is heavily focused on the dominance of the risk management approach. In scholarship and practice with youth convicted of sexual offences, a critical realism perspective adds context, explanatory depth, and a focus on social justice.