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The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges faced by rural women entrepreneurs in Lebanon and explore how stakeholder engagement strategies, guided by stakeholder theory, can mitigate these challenges. By analyzing the interactions between stakeholders and women entrepreneurs, the study aims to uncover effective solutions that contribute to the sustained success of women entrepreneurs in Lebanon's rural areas.

This study uses participatory action research (PAR) and narrative inquiry. PAR involves women entrepreneurs as active collaborators, fostering participation and enabling marginalized voices to address business challenges. Narrative inquiry delves into their experiences deeply, accessing multiple perspectives and insights.

This study uncovers challenges in resource accessibility, societal norms and market limitations for rural women entrepreneurs in Lebanon. Stakeholder influence, especially community support and tailored training programs, proves crucial. However, governmental involvement remains limited, relying more on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and expert mentorship. Targeted interventions and policies are essential for inclusive growth and gender equality in entrepreneurship.

This paper offers a unique perspective by focusing on rural women entrepreneurs in Lebanon, exploring their specific challenges within the country's socioeconomic landscape. Its interdisciplinary approach and actionable recommendations for practical strategies, along with a comprehensive stakeholder analysis, provide novel insights into women's entrepreneurship in rural settings.

This study aims to comprehensively analyze the current developments and applications of paper-based electrochemical platforms for blood glucose detection, focusing on their potential to revolutionize point-of-care testing through cost-effective and accessible diagnostic solutions.

The review systematically examines fundamental principles of paper-based platforms, including substrate properties, fluid transport mechanisms and electrochemical detection methods. It critically evaluates recent technological advances in materials science, fabrication techniques and signal amplification strategies while analyzing various case studies demonstrating successful implementations.

Recent innovations in paper-based glucose sensors have achieved remarkable performance metrics, with detection limits reaching sub-millimolar ranges and response times within seconds. The integration of nanomaterials, particularly graphene-based composites and carbon nanotubes, has significantly enhanced sensor sensitivity and stability. Advanced enzyme immobilization techniques using layer-by-layer assembly have demonstrated sustained activity for up to 10 weeks, while novel signal amplification strategies incorporating bimetallic nanoparticles have pushed detection limits into the sub-picogram range.

This review uniquely synthesizes the latest developments in paper-based electrochemical glucose sensing, providing critical insights into the synergistic integration of advanced materials, fabrication methods and detection strategies. It offers valuable perspectives on overcoming current technical challenges and highlights emerging opportunities in smart device integration and artificial intelligence applications, serving as a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners in the field of point-of-care diagnostics.

The existence of the advertising delay effect and its impact on supply chain operations have been demonstrated in the current study. Therefore, this study develops a timely inventory control strategy for the fresh produce supply chain to address the advertising delay effect in the fresh produce supply chain.

This study proposes a game model based on the Nerlove-Arrow time delay differential equation and Pontryagin's maximum principle. Through comparative analyses of the optimal equilibrium strategies, the authors compare the optimal equilibrium strategies, product goodwill and optimal inventory trajectories for suppliers and retailers under secondary replenishment decisions and decentralized decisions.

The authors find that (1) Only when the sales cycle meets certain conditions can the overall profit of the supply chain under the secondary replenishment decision be greater than that under the decentralized decision. As the price markup coefficient increases, the total profit of the supply chain first increases and then decreases. (2) With the increase in the delay time, the replenishment quantity during the initial period gradually decreases. After the delay time elapses, the inventory depletion rate under secondary replenishment decisions is faster than that under decentralized decision-making. (3) Although there is a continuously increasing maximum value of product goodwill with the increase in delay time, it becomes difficult to achieve this value for longer delays.

The authors’ findings provide a theoretical basis for supply chain members of fresh agricultural products to select replenishment and inventory control strategies when adopting different levels of delay in advertising marketing.

Firstly, this paper explains the impact of advertising delay effect on fresh produce supply chain from a dynamic perspective, and secondly, it provides guidance on advertising formulation and inventory replenishment for fresh produce retailers under the influence of advertising delay effect.

This research delves into the transformative potential of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly ChatGPT, in enhancing higher education. It aims to explore how these advanced AI tools can be integrated into different educational settings to improve interactive learning experiences and student engagement, addressing the current challenges and opportunities in academic and administrative applications. Adopting a qualitative approach, the research utilizes the case vignette method to simulate realistic scenarios in various academic disciplines. It examines the potential applications and outcomes of AI in higher education, structured around key areas like intelligent tutoring systems, assessment, personalization and student profiling. This study employs the 4Cs framework (Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication) to evaluate the effectiveness of AI integration in improving educational outcomes. The study reveals that ChatGPT can significantly enhance learning experiences by providing personalized tutoring, efficient assessment, tailored content and predictive insights into student performance. However, challenges such as ensuring content accuracy, ethical concerns and balancing AI with human interaction are also identified. Best practices for effectively integrating ChatGPT in higher education are proposed, emphasizing the complementarity of AI and human elements in education. This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge on AI in education by providing a nuanced understanding of generative AI's potential and challenges in higher education. It offers valuable insights and practical recommendations for educators and institutions, guiding the effective integration of AI technologies to enhance teaching and learning.

Extreme weather events are on the rise around the globe. Nevertheless, it is unclear how these extreme weather events have impacted the supply chain sustainability (SCS) framework. To this end, this paper aims to identify and analyze the aspects and criteria to enable manufacturing firms to navigate shifts toward SCS under extreme weather events.

The Best-Worst Method is deployed and extended with the entropy concept to obtain the degree of significance of the identified framework of aspects and criteria for SCS in the context of extreme weather events through the lens of managers in the manufacturing firms of a developing country-Nigeria.

The results show that extreme weather preparedness and economic aspects take center stage and are most critical for overcoming the risk of unsustainable patterns within manufacturing supply chains under extreme weather events in developing country.

This study advances the body of knowledge by identifying how extreme weather events have become a significant moderator of the SCS framework in manufacturing firms. This research will assist decision-makers in the manufacturing sector to position viable niche regimes to achieve SCS in the context of extreme weather events for expected performance gains.

Users' knowledge contribution behaviors are critical for online Q&A communities to thrive. Well-organized question threads in online Q&A communities enable users to clearly read existing answers and their evaluations before contributing. Based on the social comparison and peer influence literature, the authors examine peer influence on the informativeness of knowledge contributions in competitive settings. The authors also consider three levels of moderating factors concerning individuals' perception of competitiveness: question level, thread level and contributor level.

The authors collected data from one of the largest online Q&A communities in China. The hypotheses were validated using hierarchical linear models with cross-classified random effects. The generalized propensity score weighting method was employed for the robustness check.

The authors demonstrate the peer influence due to social comparison concerns among knowledge contribution behaviors in the same question thread. If more prior knowledge contributors choose to contribute long answers in the question thread, the subsequent contributions are more informative. This peer influence is stronger for factual questions and questions with higher popularity of answering but weaker in recommendation-type and well-answered questions and for contributors with higher social status.

This research provides a new cue of peer influence on online UGC contributions in competitive settings initiated by social comparison concerns. Additionally, the authors identify three levels of moderating factors (question level, thread level and contributor level) that are specific to online Q&A settings and are related to a contributor's perception of competitiveness, which affect the direct effect of peer influence on knowledge contributions. Rather than focus on motivation and quality evaluation, the authors concentrate on the specific content of online knowledge contributions. Peer influence here is not based on an actual acquaintance or a following relationship but on answering the same question. The authors also illustrate the competitive peer influence in subjective and personalized behaviors in online UGC communities.

The impact of enterprise social media (ESM) on employees is not always beneficial. The constant connectivity of ESM can trigger emotional issues, threatening employees' psychological states. This study aims to explore the potential risks of ESM usage on thriving at work by examining how ESM usage affects thriving and for whom this relationship is amplified.

Drawing on Affect Event Theory, this study proposes a research model for investigating the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions of the negative impacts of different ESM usage patterns on employees' thriving at work. This study employed Smart-PLS 4.0 with structural equation modeling to analyze multi-wave survey data from 255 employees, testing the proposed model.

The results indicate the following: (1) ESM usage triggers employees' workplace fear of missing out (WFoMO), increasing their online vigilance and consequently hindering their thriving at work. (2) The impact of ESM usage on employees' WFoMO and thriving at work varies with their ambition levels, with high-ambition employees being more susceptible to negative effects and (3) Different types of ESM usage exert distinct effects on employees.

This study substantiates the potential negative impact of ESM usage on employees' thriving at work, contributing to the literature on the “dark side” of ESM usage and thriving at work. This study confirms the critical mediating role of emotion, offering a novel theoretical perspective on understanding the mechanisms linking ESM usage and its outcomes. Additionally, this study identifies the moderating role of employee ambition, complementing the boundary conditions of ESM usage.

This study aims to assess how ethical sales behaviour affects switching costs typology, mediated by trust and moderated by brand affiliation, monthly contributions and the number of dependent beneficiaries in medical schemes in South Africa.

A quantitative study targeted a non-probability judgement sample of 250 main members of medical schemes, elicited near health-care facilities in South Africa’s Gauteng province. Data was collected in a face-to-face survey and analysed using structural equation modelling on AMOS version 29 and PROCESS procedure for Statistical Package of Social Science release 2.041.

The results show that ethical sales behaviour negatively affects trust and positively affects evaluation, monetary and personal relational loss costs. Trust positively affects personal relational loss costs, economic risk, evaluation, monetary and benefit loss costs. Moreover, trust mediates the effect of ethical sales behaviour on evaluation, monetary and personal relational loss costs. Finally, the number of dependent beneficiaries, monthly contributions and brand affiliation significantly moderate these interactions.

The paper validates the application of commitment-to-trust theory in mediating how the effects of the general theory of marketing ethics on switching costs typology differ according to the number of dependent beneficiaries, monthly contributions and brand affiliation with medical schemes.