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This chapter delves into the biopsychosocial reasons behind offending behaviour. It provides an overview of key theories from the biological, psychological and social perspectives in psychology and criminology. The discussion includes different viewpoints on why people offend, focusing on Compassion-Focused Therapy and positive psychology. It explores how these approaches contribute to our understanding of offending behaviour.

This chapter explores the problems of social exclusion and inclusion in the fields of arts and culture. After a theoretical elaboration of the key concepts, the chapter investigates interconnected topics of (1) social features of cultural and creative work with the focus on the importance of economic, social and cultural capital, (2) the difficulties of achieving social inclusivity in the cultural and creative sector, and (3) the possibility of fostering communication amongst disparate social groups. The concepts of exclusion and inclusion deal with the ability and opportunities citizens have to participate in economic, social, political and cultural activities. Even though policy documents highlight the agenda of social inclusion, participation and the importance of opening cultural programs to wider social circles of workers and audiences, inclusion is still difficult to achieve. Research has shown that, even though this line of work is marked by atypical forms of employment, burnout syndrome and exploitation, cultural workers are still motivated by the idea of working for the community and bringing positive social change. However, previous research has also shown that the wider community often does not recognise these endeavours. The aim of the chapter is to articulate potential elements of exclusivity of cultural and creative work. In doing so, the ambivalent identity configuration of cultural and creative workers that simultaneously occupy social positions of symbolic privilege and economic deprivation is taken into consideration as a potential bridge for fostering communication and solidarity amongst other marginalised and disparate social groups.

This study investigates how firm-specific exposure to COVID-19 influences capital structure choices, a topic of significant importance due to the pandemic’s unprecedented economic disruption. We leverage a novel text-based measure of firm-specific COVID exposure to explore these dynamics.

Our research adopts an innovative text-based approach to measure firm-specific COVID exposure, developed by prior studies, which analyzes earnings conference call transcripts using advanced machine learning algorithms. The analysis is based on a comprehensive sample of US firms spanning over 20 years. Various statistical techniques, including firm-fixed effects, propensity score matching, entropy balancing and instrumental-variable analysis, are employed to ensure robust results.

Our findings indicate that firms with higher COVID exposure significantly alter their leverage, favoring debt financing over equity financing. This effect is less pronounced in larger and more profitable firms as well as those more vulnerable to climate change risk. The unique impact of COVID on leverage is contrasted with other infectious diseases, which do not exhibit similar effects.

Our study’s originality lies in its application of a novel text-based metric, borrowed from existing research, to measure firm-specific COVID exposure, marking a significant advancement in the field. This method provides a timely and precise assessment of exposure, offering insights that traditional metrics cannot capture. It is the first study to document the significant role of COVID exposure in determining corporate leverage, enhancing the understanding of capital structure dynamics in the context of unprecedented global disruptions.

This paper aims to unveil the greenwashing intention of green bonds issuing in Chinese enterprises through the lens of stock pricing efficiency.

Drawing on data of Chinese listed companies during 2012–2021, this study uses a difference-in-differences method to study how and through what mechanisms issuing green bonds impacts stock pricing efficiency.

Issuing green bonds lowers stock pricing efficiency, verifying the greenwashing intention of green bonds in China. Potential mechanisms underlie the increased investor attention and sentiment resulting from the information disclosures about corporate green and low-carbon development. This greenwashing issue is more pronounced in firms facing lower financing constraints, having stronger relations with the government, and located in highly marketized regions. In the context of uncertainty surrounding economic policies, especially trade policies, issuing green bonds can signal a weakening of the greenwashing effect.

The quality of information disclosure should be emphasized to ensure a substantive commitment to environmental responsibility signaled by green bond issuance, thereby mitigating greenwashing concerns.

Regulators and standard-setters should improve the issuance system for green bonds and promote the sustainable development of the green bond market through formulating unified certification criteria for green bonds and implementing a stringently periodic reporting system.

First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first study to draw on the quality of information disclosure and the perspective of stock pricing efficiency to identify whether firms issuing green bonds engage in greenwashing. Second, the study uncovers the black-box underlying this greenwashing issue through investor attention and sentiment and examines further the moderating role of economic policy uncertainties.

This paper aims to advocate for a paradigm shift that prioritizes a human-centered approach in the pursuit of innovation during crises, urging a departure from the prevailing dominance of the technology-centric approach. The incorporation of emotional capabilities as a dynamic capability is posited as a pivotal contribution, in harmony with the tenets of Society 5.0 and imperative for establishing a robust knowledge management foundation. This research underscores the significance of the human-centered approach, portraying women as exemplars in a novel paradigm of innovation development amid crises.

This research uses the framework of knowledge management for innovation to focus on the challenges presented by complex crises, now considered the new normal. The study employs a distinct, human centric approach to explore the nexus of gender, opportunities and innovation, during crises, with an emphasis on the founders’ emotional capabilities and resources as catalysts for innovation development.

This research utilizes mixed methods; qualitative findings driven from AI analyses reveal women’s positive approach toward innovation development in adversity, showcasing the influence of their emotional resources in their innovation pursuits. The subsequent quantitative findings, derived from a sample of 464 tech-founders navigating complex crises, emphasize the role of emotional capabilities as activators of opportunity exploitation for enhancing innovation development during crises, particularly among female founders.

The potential for future research lies in exploring diverse emotional dimensions, employing various measures and methodologies. Envisioning upcoming studies that extend our findings across institutional, national and crisis contexts, emotional capabilities and skills may emerge as critical assets relevant to all entrepreneurs, transcending gender boundaries. This paper’s framework sets the stage for promising avenues at the nexus of gender and emotional capabilities in the innovation pursuits, shaping entrepreneurial performance in both challenging and stable conditions.

This research contributes significantly in several key areas. Firstly, it explores innovation development and knowledge management within Society 5.0 during a polycrisis, emphasizing the crucial role of emotional capabilities in activating opportunity exploitation. Secondly, it champions a human-centric premise in innovation, highlighting women as role models for innovation during crises and introducing pathways to tap into external resources, ultimately enriching knowledge management. Thirdly, the innovative methodological approach using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to construct synthetic personas is groundbreaking. Finally, it advances effectuation, bricolage and dynamic capabilities frameworks, enriching their theoretical foundations and affirming their relevance for innovation development amid instability.

This study aims to synthesize the literature on shopping experiences of visually impaired consumers (VIC). The review probes the extent of the research done, highlights the shopping experiences of VIC documented in the existing literature, pinpoints gaps and provides directions for future research.

This study uses Arksey and O’Malley’s framework to conduct a scoping review. Articles related to VIC shopping experience were collected from Scopus databases. In total, 27 articles that met the inclusion criteria were selected for the review.

The results were divided into three sections. The analysis section conveys the extent of the research relevant to the methodology, study context, geographical location, timeline and citation analysis. The emerging themes portray the experiences VIC encounters while shopping. Finally, the consultation process revealed the current perspectives of VIC.

This review collates the existing literature and identifies the research gaps. These research gaps provide directions for future research. This study creates awareness of VIC shopping needs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to review the literature on VIC’s shopping experience.

In the realistic multi-project scheduling, resources are not always shared among multiple projects, nor are they available to perform activities throughout the planning horizon. Besides, according to construction technology, some architectural jobs cannot be interrupted for any reason. However, these characteristics of resources and activities have not been fully studied, which may lead to the reduction of engineering quality and the failure of scheduling work. Therefore, this paper aims to model a multi-project scheduling problem with the above characteristics and provide an effective method to meet the actual needs of the construction industry.

A three-phase CPLEX with quota auction mechanism (TPCP–QAM) is developed to solve this problem, which significantly improves the solving performance of CPLEX by adjusting the search strategy and implementing a distributed procedure. In this approach, resources are dedicated to individual projects through a global coordination mechanism, while each project is independently scheduled by a local scheduling algorithm.

(1) For the proposed problem, CPLEX 2019's default search strategy. (Auto) is far inferior to another search strategy (Multi-point) in optimizing the project total cost and average resource capacity. (2) Compared with other two algorithms, TPCP–QAM has obvious advantages in the multi-project total cost (MPTC) and CPU time, especially for large-size instances. (3) Even though the number of non-working days may not be changed for the protection of labor resources, managers can reduce MPTC or shorten the multi-project total makespan (TMS) by appropriately adjusting the distribution of non-working days.

This paper fulfils an identified need to investigate how to complete a multi-project portfolio with the minimum cost while ensuring engineering quality under a practical multi-project scheduling environment.

This paper aims to enhance the predictability of stock returns. Existing studies have used investor sentiment to forecast stock returns. However, it is unclear whether high-frequency intraday investor sentiment can enhance the forecasting performance of low-frequency stock returns.

Thus, we employ the MIDAS model and the high-frequency intraday sentiment extracted from the Internet stock forum to forecast Chinese A-shares returns at daily frequency.

The results illustrate that high-frequency sentiment data are better than daily sentiment data in predicting daily stock returns, and the sentiment in non-trading hours has been proved superior to those in trading hours.

First, our study adds to the growing literature on investor sentiment. We are the first to construct a proxy for high-frequency investor sentiment using intraday postings collected from Chinese Internet stock forum. Second, we confirm that sentiment in non-trading hours has a stronger predictive ability than those in trading hours. Third, we also contribute to the performance comparison of MIDAS-class models. The good performance of U-MIDAS is confirmed in our empirical applications.

Entrepreneurship across sectors has been impacted by the paradigm of open innovation in the last few decades. Although Open Innovation is argued to impact firm performance the strategic building blocks of open innovation are not discussed in the prior literature. This study aims to conceptualize open innovation and identify the antecedents and outcomes of open innovation.

Using a qualitative study based on open-ended essays solicited from 47 SMEs and startups based out in Europe and the USA, the authors propose an overarching conceptual framework using a theoretical sampling approach adopted to establish data saturation and data analysis was carried out using thematic coding. Market place evidence was used for triangulation of the authors’ research framework and to establish the validity of the constructs.

Building on the entrepreneurial bricolage theory, this study proposes bricolage and Platformization of innovations as antecedents to open innovation. The study also conceptualizes open innovation by identifying three underlying dimensions for open innovation. Next, the study proposes a positive association between open innovation and firm performance. Finally, the authors discuss relevant implications with future research directions of the study.

The practical implication is the development of a sustained competitive advantage enhancing framework for entrepreneurial ventures with the help of open innovation.

With the application of the developed framework for the entrepreneurial ventures, a set of strategic activities related to open innovation can be proposed that would help these ventures to enhance their innovation and marketing capabilities, thereby helping them with a sustained competitive advantage. The present study would also help the policymakers to frame policies that help the firms with a shift toward open innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical understanding germane to ethical climate’s contingent, nonlinear relationship with salesperson performance. While research shows a positive relationship between a firm’s ethical climate and salesperson performance, current examinations of this effect have been limited to linear hypothesizing and testing. The job demands-resource model, however, suggests that the relationship between ethical climate and salesperson performance is nonlinear.

To test the theorized nonlinear and moderated nonlinear relationships, the authors use a sample of 485 business-to-business salespeople and structural equations path modeling.

Results reveal an increasing incremental threshold effect between ethical climate and salesperson performance. Findings further support postulations that conditions which increase (e.g. competitive intensity) or decrease (e.g. role autonomy) the extent to which the sales environment is challenging correspondingly increase or decrease the magnitude of the nonlinearity.

Because the study required variance in environmental-level (e.g. competitive intensity) and organizational-level (e.g. role autonomy) moderators, data used to test the hypotheses came from a cross-sectional, self-reported survey.

The results produce the managerial insight that there are increasing returns to salesperson performance as the ethical climate increases. Insights from the analysis of moderating conditions further inform managers that in highly competitive industries they should be especially attuned to their ethical climate.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the findings are the first to advance insight into ethical climate’s curvilinear and contingent salesperson performance implications. Furthermore, this study advances moderated nonlinear relationships suggested by theory.