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Consumers in a Metaverse have an immersive engagement with products and services. This study aims to explore the multidimensional features of the Metaverse that influence consumers’ usage and gratifications, leading to their purchase behavior.

This study uses uses and gratifications theory to examine how hedonic, utilitarian and social gratifications influence Metaverse consumers’ retail behavior. Empirical analysis (N = 291) using structural equation modeling via SmartPLS and PLSpredict validated the model’s robustness and predictive accuracy.

Metaverse retail authenticity and virtuality influenced hedonic gratifications; autonomy and virtuality affected social gratification. Hedonic and social gratifications drove purchases, while utilitarian gratification had no significant effect.

This study applies uses and gratification theory to identify Metaverse-specific motivation factors, contributing to literature and aiding the practical design and development of Metaverse retail environments.

Achieving sustainability and sustainable performance has emerged as a critical area of focus for both academic research and practice. However, this pursuit faces challenges, particularly concerning the inadequacy of supply chain information. To address this issue, our study employs the organizational information processing theory to explore how adopting blockchain technology enables firms to learn from and collaborate with their supply chain partners, ultimately facilitating their sustainable performance even in the presence of organizational inertia.

Underpinned by the organizational information processing theory and drawing data from 220 manufacturing firms in China, we use structural equation modeling to test our conceptual model.

Our results demonstrate that blockchain technology adoption can significantly enhance sustainable performance. Furthermore, supply chain learning acts as a mediator between blockchain technology adoption and sustainable performance, while organizational inertia plays a negative moderating role between blockchain technology adoption and supply chain learning.

These findings extend the existing literature on blockchain technology adoption and supply chain management, offering novel insights into the pivotal role of blockchain in fostering supply chain learning and achieving sustainable performance. Our study provides valuable practical implications for managers seeking to leverage blockchain technology to enhance sustainability and facilitate organizational learning.

This paper aims to consider the proliferation of journalistic articles that declare English Language Arts’ death –Heller’s, 2023 The New Yorker piece “The End of the English Major” as a most recent iteration. It puts recent mainstream publications in conversation, reading them as a genre of elegies that, while largely discussing English at the university level, contribute to a pessimistic milieu around the discipline of English Language Arts (ELA) and its teaching. This paper aims to trouble the common defenses against such “death sentences” to engage this cultural conversation from the field of English teaching to imagine a new conversation.

The paper foregrounds articles from major mainstream news outlets, ranging from 2009 to 2023, as data to take seriously how popular opinions of English, as a subject and a discipline, shape the field of ELA and its teaching. Six articles resulted from the search and were subsequently coded for thematic categories as they emerged.

The essay describes and discusses three major resonances that arose among each of the four texts: financial concerns, STEM and statistics as growing disciplines, and the notion that studying English is superfluous and/or “White.” Considerations of common refutations to the aforementioned resonances and potential positioning for ways forward conclude the essay, working to imagine a new conversation.

This paper engages a conversation affecting many English literacy practitioners, through shifting attitudes and public discourse, that is currently under-discussed in the field more broadly.

The rise of the mobile Internet has accumulated much text information in various online financial forums. Such information often contains the emotional attitudes of investors toward financial technology (fintech) platforms, so extracting the sentimental tendency information has great practical value for the development of fintech platforms. Based on the investor sentiment theory, the paper aims to analyze the relevant social media data and test the influence path of online news evaluation on the stock price fluctuation of fintech platforms.

Taking Oriental Fortune as the research object, this paper selects multiple variables such as stock bar popularity, snowball popularity, news popularity and news sentiment scores collected by UQER and combines the sentiment scores of single daily news into a daily sentiment score. Based on the period from November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020, during the emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as the background, the authors conduct the Granger causality test based on the vector autoregressive (VAR) model and analyze the relevant evaluation of Oriental Fortune through the empirical model.

The authors' results show that different online evaluations impact the rise and fall of stock prices differently, while news popularity has the most significant impact. Besides, news sentiment scores on share price fluctuation have a relatively substantial influence. These findings indicate that the authoritative news evaluation can strongly guide investors to make relevant investment behavior operations in the information dissemination process, significantly affecting stock prices.

The research findings of this paper have good inspiration and reference values for investors and financial regulators.

This study uses bibliometric visualization techniques to comprehensively review the intertwined concepts of dark tourism, thana tourism and ghost tourism from 2000 to 2023. The research seeks to clarify the ambiguity and inconsistencies arising from the interchangeable use of these terms and sets forth a roadmap for future research endeavors.

This study meticulously extracts research keywords from 634 scholarly papers in the Scopus database. It undertakes a thorough bibliometric analysis utilizing the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer and RStudio to map the interconnectedness of these tourism phenomena.

The study identifies and explores contemporary theories such as self-categorization theory, stimulus-organism-response theory, embodiment theory, self-determination theory, socio-cognitive theory, risk perception theory, services theory, dark tourism theory, social and cultural theory, push-pull theory, performance theory, and wound culture theory. The research reveals four primary clusters through keyword co-occurrence and bibliographic coupling analyses: dark tourism insights, dynamics of dark tourism, dark tourism review and dark tourism experiences, illustrating their interrelationships and robustness.

Dark tourism insights can guide ethical practices, ensuring respectful site management and accurate historical representation. Integrating dark tourism into broader destination strategies can diversify offerings, attract niche markets and contribute to preserving historical memory through reflective experiences.

This study's outcomes significantly contribute to tourism literature by enhancing our understanding of the overlapping terminologies associated with dark, thana and ghost tourism. This improved comprehension sheds light on the importance of the research agenda surrounding the concept of dark, thana and ghost tourism.

The purpose of this study is to advance the application of pulverised cow bone ash (PCBA) as a partial replacement of cement in soil stabilisation for the production of bricks. The study investigated the impact of PCBA substitution on the characteristic strength of clay bricks under variant curing media.

Dried cow bones were pulverised, and an energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence test was conducted on PCBA samples to determine the chemical constituents and ascertain the pozzolanic characteristics. Ordinary Portland cement (OPC) and PCBA were blended at 100%, 75%, 50%, 25% and 0% of cement substitution by mass to stabilise lateritic clay at 10% total binder content for the production of bricks. The binder-to-lateritic clay matrixes were used to produce clay bricks and cylinders for compressive and splitting tensile strength tests, respectively.

The study found that PCBA and OPC have similar chemical compositions. The strength of the clay bricks increased with curing age, and the thermal curing of clay bricks positively impacted the strength development. The study established that PCBA is a suitable substitute for cement, up to 25% for stabilisation in clay brick production.

Construction stakeholders can successfully use a PCBA-OPC binder blend of 1:3 to stabilise clay at 10% total binder content for the production of bricks. The stabilised clay bricks should be cured at an elevated temperature of approximately 90°C for 48 h to achieve satisfactory performance.

The PCBA-OPC binder blend provides adequate soil stabilisation for the production of clay bricks and curing the clay bricks at elevated temperature. This aspect of the biomass/OPC binder blend has not been explored for brick production, and this is important for the reduction of the environmental impacts of cement production and waste from abattoirs.

Decision-makers often struggle to combine advice with their own intuition. This study examines how advice-giver traits and decision-makers’ intuition influence advice uptake. We present a novel typology based on decision-makers’ trust in advice-givers and their perceived expertise.

This qualitative study uses a sample of publicly available interview data with 51 elite performers. Using inductive and content analysis, we explore the mediation between decision-makers’ intuitive competence (ability to effectively deploy intuition in interface with advice) and their autonomy (self-endorsement from past performance).

We identify four sources of advice: mentor advice, specialist advice, confidant advice and commentator advice. Drawing on instances of different sources of advice along varying degrees of trust and expertise, we propose a framework for interaction between intuitional competence and advice characteristics.

We offer a novel way of contextualising nuanced forms of advice and provide a structured typology of sources, characterised by trust and expertise. This typology and our findings help reconcile contradictions in decision-making research. Finally, we offer practical guidance for the uptake of advice.