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The purpose of this article is to highlight manufacturing challenges faced by firms and present a framework that can be used to guide managers on the benefits and risks of balancing between social and human capital to address firm goals and outcomes related to quality or productivity.

The article provides a brief review of the literature and provides guidance to managers on how to best align human and social capital with the firm's strategic orientation.

Firms must balance their investments in the development and leveraging of their employees' human and social capital for maximum impact on the firm's strategic goals.

As more manufacturing jobs continue to return to the US, firms will need to learn or re(learn) how to best prepare and leverage their workforce to support the firm's overall strategic goals. This article provides managers with an intuitive conceptual framework for making those decisions.

Given the detrimental effects of job content plateau, the paper aims to study the impact of job content plateau on employees’ career commitment. In doing so, the authors examine whether the lapses in job content plateau can be addressed through developmental i-deals. A final purpose is to examine whether proactive employees are better positioned to obtain work arrangements that help them develop and remain committed to their careers.

Data were collected from full-time working executives employed in different organizations. These executives enrolled in a part-time MBA program. Data was collected at different time points and analyzed using the process macro (Preacher and Hayes, 2004).

The results suggest that developmental i-deals mediated the relationship between job content plateau and career commitment. In addition, proactive employees were better disposed to seal the deal and develop themselves – helping them to stay committed to their careers.

Prior studies highlight the negative consequences of job content plateau because it does not provide avenues to learn and develop. This paper addresses the gap in locating opportunities to learn and develop (an aspect that was missing in the job content plateau) through developmental i-deals. First, the study helps answer how to address learning gaps in jobs. Second, who can capitalize on their efforts once the organization sponsors learning opportunities.

Burnout has been known to negatively affect volunteers. However, information involving various factors that influence their burnout is severely lacking. This study aims to examine how volunteers displayed adaptability, the ability to change their thoughts, actions and/or behaviors in uncertain situations, to offset the negative relationship with burnout. This study also examined the amount of training a volunteer reported as one factor that may act to moderate this negative relationship between adaptability and burnout.

Using the conservation of resources (COR) theory, the author investigated how volunteers try to maintain their current level of resources, which aids in coping with stress and lowering their risk of burnout.

Using regression, the author discovered that adaptability was negatively related to burnout and this relationship was stronger for volunteers who reported less training. Training was confirmed as a moderator in this relationship. In sum, training acted as a buffer in the negative relationship involving adaptability and burnout.

The current study is one of the few to adopt theories often used to understand employee experiences, and apply them to volunteers. Interestingly, across a variety of volunteer environments, these employment theories and relationships, including adaptability, appear to matter.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how fractional derivatives affect the transient and steady-state behaviour of nonlinear transmission lines. This problem is of significance for high-frequency design of systems such as high-speed sampling systems and radar systems.

This paper shall consider the transient and steady-state responses of nonlinear transmission lines when fractional derivatives are considered. A lumped-parameter model is considered and the product-integration implicit trapezoidal rule shall be used for simulations.

The important observation is that small deviations of the order of the derivative from an integer order can have a significant effect on the transient and steady-state behaviour. This includes a change in the speed of the wave on the transmission line and on its damping.

The work is novel as it uses a lumped-parameter model with nonlinear capacitors and explores the effect on the dynamical behaviour when fractional derivatives are present. This is in contrast to the typical approach of using a partial differential equation derived under certain assumptions such as the nature of the nonlinear capacitor.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are tools in the hands of governments for the pursuit of their political agendas. This feature is driving accounting scholars’ attention to SOEs’ relationship with the United Nations Agenda 2030. However, few contributions in literature have approached the topic. This study aims at understanding which determinants impact the contribution of SOEs to Agenda 2030.

To analyse SOEs’ contribution to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) through their disclosures, this study adopted a panel data analysis to explore two levels of drivers impacting SOEs practices. Furthermore, to highlight SOEs’ differences from private sector entities, this study used a comparative approach.

Results revealed how hybrid and private environments are differently impacting the contribution to the SDGs. Moreover, it emerged how hybridity through board characteristics impacts SOE disclosure quality.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to empirically test how corporate governance characteristics influence SDGs’ contribution via sustainability reporting in SOEs.

Despite great consensus on the positive impact of big-data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) analytics (BDAI) on a firm’s performance, it still appears to be a black box mechanism through which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) strengthen their dynamic competencies to innovate and expand their global footprint. To fill this theoretical and empirical gap we examine the relationship between BDAI affordances, digital marketing capabilities (DMCs), value-chain innovation and international market goals.

The study incorporates the dynamic capability view an extension of the resource-based view and the knowledge-based view to empirically examine the primary data collected from marketing managers and executives of SMEs in cultural and creative industries utilizing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis.

The study highlights the significant role of BDAI affordances such as intelligent process recommendations, customer intelligence and market intelligence on DMCs, where DMCs significantly affect value-chain innovation and international market strategy both directly and indirectly.

The study minimizes the gap in identifying the BDAI affordances to drive innovation and international market strategy in the context of SMEs in cultural and creative industries. Marketing managers can incorporate these findings to enhance their digital capabilities for competitive advantages in international markets.

The study proposes a holistic framework of BDAI affordances for the strategic use of digital resources and knowledge to transform digital capabilities into new forms of value to expand in the international market. These insights are robust and grounded in findings provided by marketing practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a decision support model to prioritize equity crowdfunding (ECF) evaluation criteria under an uncertain environment.

The proposed decision support model first identifies a holistic list of evaluation criteria and subcriteria. These criteria are then analyzed using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method in an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy (IVIF) environment to identify the relative importance attached by crowdfunding investors to five sets of evaluation criteria (fundraiser, platform, project, campaign and investment characteristics) and their associated subcriteria. The proposed decision support model and ECF evaluation criteria were empirically examined using a real-life case study from January to February 2023.

The case study illustrated that the decision support model enhanced fairness and transparency in the prioritization of ECF evaluation criteria. Project characteristics were the most important criterion, followed by fundraiser characteristics and investment characteristics. These results can serve as a benchmark to help crowd investors choose ventures more wisely and make better investment decisions.

The tasks of modeling and prioritizing ECF evaluation criteria are relatively rarely addressed in the literature, especially under uncertainty. This study is one of the first attempts to use the AHP to explore ECF evaluation criteria in an IVIF environment; in particular, it sheds light on the importance that crowd investors attach to criteria related to fundraiser, platform, project, campaign and investment characteristics.

This chapter examines how entrepreneurs are addressing some of society's greatest challenges by taking over some of the functions of government and charities. It's driving change, but is it the kind of change we want to see? The chapter examines the growing body of literature on entrepreneurship which looks at this question and focuses on some key areas. These areas, including entrepreneur values and motivation, prosocial behaviour, entrepreneurial education and more form the concepts that underpin both the research and the online training intervention I've developed. The chapter highlights one of the most important findings from a review of the existing literature; that the world needs people with prosocial values and motivations, and entrepreneurs as a group could make a significant contribution to society. In the chapter, there's also a discussion about what needs to happen to enable them to make that contribution and an examination of what the existing research says.

The purpose of this study is to map the intellectual structure of sustainable finance and accounting (SFA) literature by identifying the influential aspects, main research streams and future research directions in SFA.

The results are obtained using bibliometric citation analysis and content analysis to conduct a bibliometric review of the intersection of sustainable finance and sustainable accounting using a sample of 795 articles published between 1991 and November 2023.

The most influential factors in the SFA literature are identified, highlighting three primary areas of research: corporate social responsibility and environmental disclosure; financial and economic performance; and regulations and standards.

SFA has experienced rapid development in recent years. The results identify the current research domain, guide potential future research directions, serve as a reference for SFA and provide inspiration to policymakers.

SFA typically encompasses sustainable corporate business practices and investments. This study contributes to broader social impacts by promoting improved corporate practices and sustainability.

This study expands on previous research on SFA. The authors identify significant aspects of the SFA literature, such as the most studied nations, leading journals, authors and trending publications. In addition, the authors provide an overview of the three major streams of the SFA literature and propose various potential future research directions, inspiring both academic research and policymaking.

In the field of engineering, the fractional moments of random variables play a crucial role and are widely utilized. They are applied in various areas such as structural reliability assessment and analysis, studying the response characteristics of random vibration systems and optimizing signal processing and control systems. This study focuses on calculating the fractional moments of positive random variables encountered in engineering. This study focuses on calculating the fractional moments of positive random variables encountered in engineering.

By integrating Laplace transforms with fractional derivatives, both analytical and practical numerical solutions are derived. Furthermore, specific practical application methods are provided.

This approach allows for the stable and highly accurate calculation of fractional moments based on the integer moments of random variables. Data experiments included in this study demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in solving fractional moment calculations in engineering. Compared to traditional methods, the proposed method offers significant advantages in stability and accuracy, which can further advance research in the engineering field that employs fractional moments.

(1) Accuracy: Although the proposed method does involve some error, its error level is significantly lower than traditional methods, such as the Taylor expansion method. (2) Stability: The computational error of the proposed method is not only minimal but also remains stable within a narrow range as the fractional order varies. (3) Efficiency: Compared to the widely used Taylor expansion method, the proposed method requires only a minimal number of integer-order moments to achieve the desired results. Additionally, it avoids convergence issues during computation, greatly reducing computational resource requirements. (4) Simplicity: The application steps of the proposed method are very straightforward, offering significant advantages in practical applications.