Search results

Based on the knowledge-based view (KBV) and theory of planned behavior (TPB), the study aims to investigate the impact of sustainable leadership (SL) on knowledge management processes (KMPs) and the direct influence of KMPs on sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). Additionally, it aims to explore the mediating role of knowledge worker social responsibility (KWSR) in the relationship between KMPs and SCA. Furthermore, this study aims to evaluate the moderating effect of knowledge sabotage behavior (KSB) on the relationship between KMPs and KWSR.

The sample frame consisted of 354 academic and administrative workers from Pakistan’s higher education institutions. The hypothesized relationships were tested using the PLS-SEM approach.

The study found a significant positive effect of SL on KMPs as well as KMPs on SCA. Partial mediation of knowledge worker social responsibility between knowledge management processes and sustainable competitive advantage was confirmed. Furthermore, our findings indicate the negative moderating effect of knowledge sabotage behavior on the relationship between KMPs and KWSR.

The outcomes of this research strengthen the universities’ experience of Leadership and recommend how academics and administrators of higher education institutes can value knowledge management, which improves competitive advantage.

The originality of the study lies in elucidating the direct relationship of SL & KMPs with the moderating role of KSB in the link between KMPs and KWSR and the mediating effect of KWSR on the relationship between KMPs and SCA in the setting of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Pakistan. Furthermore, this study provides in-depth insights into the existing body of knowledge on the KBV and TPB about SL, KMPs, and SCA.

The higher education (HE) sector in Myanmar is currently in a fragile, backward-looking state. Its fragility is due to the 2021 coup with its consequent civil disobedience movement, continued conflict between the military and people’s defence force, the junta’s spurious delivery of a post-Covid and post-coup education system, and the junta’s apparent abandoning of the previous civilian government’s progress with the National Education Strategic Plan. It is backward-looking because the current junta, like previous juntas in Myanmar, use education as a tool for military propaganda and to populate the education system with civil servants that are loyal, or at least supine, to the military. The task of this chapter is to provide an overview of HE in Myanmar and how its current condition aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 4.3. This task is contextualised by considering the role of universities in the history of socio-political uprisings in Myanmar. Universities as theatres of communicative action have been and continue to be spaces of public resistance. This resistance and its accompanying vertical tension continue to shape the physical constitution of universities and the delivery of HE in Myanmar.

The present study developed an integrated model to evaluate the relationship between service quality, brand image, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in the context of Myanmar’s construction industry.

Data on the study variables were gathered from a cross-sectional survey of 210 client organizations that own private buildings in Myanmar. A factor analysis-validated structural equation model was developed to assess the research hypotheses and conceptual framework.

The results supported an integrated model in which brand image partly mediated the effects of service quality on customer satisfaction. Besides, the brand image and customer satisfaction fully mediated the impact of service quality on customer loyalty. Brand image exerted indirect effects on customer loyalty through customer satisfaction. The study further identified the direct effects of service quality on brand image and customer satisfaction, brand image on customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction on customer loyalty.

While prior studies have explored service quality in the construction industry, no integrated model has been developed to identify the relationship between service quality, brand image, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in construction project settings. This study filled this critical gap in the literature by offering a unique perspective on the study variables and their interrelationships.

This study aims to systematically review the current academic literature on supply chain transparency (SCT) to explore the impact of SCT on firm performance and identify factors that influencing SCT-related practices.

This review follows the six steps and 14 decisions of conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) to comprehensively review 91 identified papers published between 2007 and 2024.

Based on the content analysis of the selected papers, this study summarizes the antecedents, practices, outcomes as well as potential barriers of SCT. We develop a conceptual framework from the descriptive and thematic findings to enrich the relevant aspects of SCT and propose some critical gaps and directions for future research.

This study links SCT with several outcomes of firm performance, with a particular focus on how SCT affects sustainability in terms of its economic, social, and environmental dimensions as well as supply chain resilience. It proposes potential avenues for enriching SCT in future research.

This research investigates how to optimize storage location assignment to decrease the order picking time and the waiting time of orders in the staging area of low-temperature logistics centers, with the goal of reducing food loss caused by temperature abuse.

The authors applied ABC clustering to the products in a simulated database of historical orders modeled after the actual order pattern of a large cold logistics company; then, the authors mined the association rules and calculated the sales volume correlation indices of the ordered products. Finally, the authors generated three different simulated order databases to compare order picking time and waiting time of orders in the staging area under eight different storage location assignment strategies.

All the eight proposed storage location assignment strategies significantly improve the order picking time (by up to 8%) and the waiting time of orders in the staging area (by up to 22%) compared with random placement.

The results of this research are based on a case study and simulated data, which implies that, if the best performing strategies are applied to different environments, the extent of the improvements may vary. Additionally, the authors only considered specific settings in terms of order picker routing, zoning and batching: other settings may lead to different results.

A storage location assignment strategy that adopts dispersion and takes into consideration ABC clustering and shipping frequency provides the best performance in minimizing order picker's travel distance, order picking time, and waiting time of orders in the staging area. Other strategies may be a better fit if the company's objectives differ.

Previous research on optimal storage location assignment rarely considered item association rules based on sales volume correlation. This study combines such rules with several storage planning strategies, ABC clustering, and two warehouse layouts; then, it evaluates their performance compared to the random placement, to find which one minimizes the order picking time and the order waiting time in the staging area, with a 30-min time limit to preserve the integrity of the cold chain. Order picking under these conditions was rarely studied before, because they may be irrelevant when dealing with temperature-insensitive items but become critical in cold warehouses to prevent temperature abuse.

The purpose of this study is to examine the “Top 100” articles that received the highest online attention in 2023.

The author examined data obtained from the Dimensions database. They determined the top 100 articles with the highest Altmetric Attention Score published in 2023 using the Dimensions database. The search was done on December 31, 2023, and the publication type was limited to articles. Furthermore, articles were analyzed to identify online attention platforms, subject categories, publication sources, access types and authorship patterns. The data were organized in Microsoft Excel for eventual examination.

The most discoursed article in 2023 has an Article Attention Score of 26156. The “Top 100 List” is dominated by COVID-19-related studies. X (249,064), Mendeley (2,445) and News (1,977) are the most prominent sharing and discussion platforms. There is an unequal distribution of articles in 28 subject categories. The top 100 articles were published in 67 journals. The majority of articles are accessible under the open-access model. The top 100 articles are written by 1,323 authors, with an authorship range of 1 to 308. The majority of articles are the result of collaborative work, and the correlation analysis between citations and AAS indicates a weak positive correlation possibly because of different factors influencing each metric and their methods of measuring scholarly impact.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to present online attention to academic articles published in 2023. This study examines the effect of online attention platforms on research, which may be used as a measure of research outcome.

This study was conducted to assess the alignment of the strategic plans of the Cavendish banana grower cooperatives to business excellence models (BEMs) and to determine its financial impact to elucidate the performance of the respective cooperatives. This is anchored on the primary objectives of cooperative business sustainability, expansion and sustained competitiveness, all of which are significantly impacted by the strategic plans. The BEMS establish the parameters that are useful in determining how well the strategic plans correspond.

Qualitative and quantitative methods were used in this study. Strategic plans and audited financial statements (FS) for calendar year (CY) 2021 and 2022 of two Cavendish banana grower cooperatives in Region XI on the context of BEMs were evaluated and examined using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and Philippine Quality Award. Of the seven criteria, only five were considered as follows: organizational profile, leadership, strategy, workforce, process and result. The first four were taken from strategic plans, while result was from audited FS.

The strategic plans of the two cooperatives selectively satisfy some of the sub-criteria of each of the four criteria. Furthermore, the cooperatives followed the usual basic contents of and briefly presented in the strategic plans the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis, strategic objectives, plans, targets and timelines. This suggests that the cooperatives are not familiar with the BEMs which could be attributed to the educational qualifications of the directors and officers, or possibly not introduced by the Cooperative Development Authority (CDA). On the financial performance, one cooperative has impressive records but generally had lower performance in 2022 compared to 2021.

This study covers only Cavendish banana grower cooperatives particularly located in the Southeastern part of Mindanao (CDA, 2021) in the Philippines where people are mostly of similar culture. This does not represent much diverse culture; thus, this may work only in organizations with similar culture. In other industries or organizations where cultural diversity occurs, there may be a need to conduct study to determine the level of adoption of BEMs by the cooperatives. On the other note, the samples are very limited that generalizability cannot be made. Conducting a similar study involving many cooperatives is suggested.

This study explores the alignment of the Strategic Plans of the Cavendish banana grower cooperatives to BEMs which has long been neglected.

Scientific impact is traditionally assessed with citation-based metrics. Recently, altmetric indices have been introduced to measure scientific impact both within academia and among the general public. However, little research has investigated the association between the linguistic features of research article titles and received online attention. To address this issue, the authors examined in the present study the relationship between a series of title features and altmetric attention scores.

The data included 8,658 titles of Science articles. The authors extracted six features from the title corpus (i.e. mean word length, lexical sophistication, lexical density, title length, syntactic dependency length and sentiment score). The authors performed Spearman’s rank analyses to analyze the correlations between these features and online impact. The authors then conducted a stepwise backward multiple regression to identify predictors for the articles' online impact.

The correlation analyses revealed weak but significant correlations between all six title features and the altmetric attention scores. The regression analysis showed that four linguistic features of titles (mean word length, lexical sophistication, title length and sentiment score) have modest predictive effects on the online impact of research articles.

In the internet era with the widespread use of social media and online platforms, it is becoming increasingly important for researchers to adapt to the changing context of research evaluation. This study identifies several linguistic features that deserve scholars’ attention in the writing of article titles. It also has practical implications for academic administrators and pedagogical implications for instructors of academic writing courses.

The post-COVID-19 scenario has presented significant learning challenges for university students worldwide. The swift shift from face-to-face to online classes posed greater difficulties because students were not mentally, financially, or physically prepared for this change, nor were they provided with adequate training to operate the learning management system (LMS). Online learning necessitates a school-like environment at home, which is challenging for students to replicate. This study aimed to determine the effect of online learning on students’ academic achievement and to explore the challenges they faced in adapting to this new mode of learning. A quantitative research approach was employed, gathering primary data from 230 respondents in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad. This was done using a validated closed-ended questionnaire featuring a five-point Likert scale. The collected data underwent analysis via the Friedman test using SPSS 20v. The results revealed that online learning negatively impacted students’ academic achievement due to factors such as lack of internet accessibility, decreased motivation towards academics, low satisfaction levels, and difficulties in understanding academic concepts, particularly in the natural sciences. The study recommends a focus on implementing new teaching methods such as reciprocal teaching, digitalizing classrooms, offering remedial classes, and enhancing student motivation through teacher engagement.

Sustainable development goal 2 (SDG2) is about creating a world free of hunger by 2030. Southern Africa faces a myriad of challenges affecting food and nutrition security, from population expansion, old and emerging pandemics, increased frequency of climate-induced natural disasters, ageing infrastructure, and challenging service delivery. The increased shocks and hazards and inadequate social safety nets have changed the dimensions of food and nutrition insecurity, giving rise to new roles for higher and tertiary education. Higher education (HE) institutions are expected to play a more active role in capacity building and producing goods and services that can contribute to the achievement of SDG2. This chapter assesses the role of HE towards the attainment of SDG2 which seeks to eliminate hunger and all forms of malnutrition. The chapter will highlight an insect-based value chain project as an example of HE contribution to reducing food insecurity. Through the case study, the chapter will explore the role of HE in community engagement, human capital development, and conducting research that informs policy and programming decisions. Furthermore, the chapter explores the role of North–South Collaborative research, interdisciplinary collaborations, and innovation hubs in developing innovations that can transform food systems and help build resilience in the face of the increasing climate and health shocks. Within these spaces, the contribution of HE to the achievement of food and nutrition security in Africa can be realised, and this approach replicated in other African institutions seeking to engage in such work.