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Incorporating conservation of resources theory into the sustainable career framework, this study empirically examines how social support at work, harmonious passion and strengths use interact to bolster work–home enrichment.

This study tested hypotheses through a two-wave research design with a final sample of 357 academic respondents from public universities in Vietnam.

We found positive relationships between social support, harmonious passion and work–home enrichment. Strengths use significantly moderated these relationships.

Organizations should cultivate a supportive environment and opportunities to help individuals utilize social support and exert their strengths to be more passionate and enrich their work–home activities.

This study addresses the knowledge gap regarding the crucial interdependence and interactions between contextual and personal resources in promoting work–home enrichment, an underexplored aspect in sustainable career literature. It highlights how social support and harmonious passion enhance work–home enrichment. Using strengths is a fundamental boundary condition for these associations. The findings offer invaluable implications for leveraging work-related resources and personal qualities to enrich work and home domains for a sustainable career.

This research proposes a new construct towards the job crafting theory, termed job crafting agility. The study provides the potential contributions of job crafting agility in the context of rethinking behaviours in organizations during times of disruption and change.

A conceptual analysis is followed to present the construct of job crafting agility, based on a review of job crafting and agility literature.

The research proposes job-crafting agility as a dynamic and proactive process of balancing job demands and resources in response to changing or fluctuating circumstances. The study provides four propositions on job-crafting agility. This research contributes to the existing literature by proposing a new construct, job-crafting agility that can help organizations and employees adapt to changing circumstances during disruption and change. It highlights the unique components of job-crafting agility and its theoretical foundations and distinguishes the new construct from other forms of job crafting.

The construct of job crafting agility is new and requires further empirical validation. It presents several propositions as recommendations for future studies.

The paper provides practical implications for organizations and managers on promoting job crafting agility among employees. It emphasizes the importance of creating a work environment that encourages flexibility, experimentation and learning to enable employees to adjust to changing circumstances effectively.

This research makes a novel contribution by introducing and defining job crafting agility, and advances job crafting theory by exploring how job crafting agility can foster resilience and positive organizational outcomes amid continual change and disruption.

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of widely adopted but under-studied synthetic humanlike spokespersons (SHS) compared to organic human spokespersons in workplace training videos. The primary aim is to evaluate whether employees will rate training videos more negatively when they perceive their trainer to be synthetic such as those videos made with the AI-powered tools Synthesia or HeyGen. Results suggest that while ratings are more negative when the viewer perceives syntheticness, the change is only mild across most measures deployed here. When measures were calculated by using actual modality and not perceived modality, no significant change in rating was found. This study deployed three measures: actual knowledge transfer, perceived effectiveness and brand impression. It is guided by a convergence of AI Literacy Theory, the Technology Acceptance Model and the Theory of Reasoned Action.

Over 250 professionals assessed the effectiveness of training videos in a 2 × 2 trial design. Participants were randomly assigned to view one of four training videos featuring either a synthetic or organic spokesperson for a fictional business. After watching the video, participants answered Likert-scale survey questions and multiple-choice quiz-style questions to provide comparative measurements of actual knowledge transfer effectiveness, perceived effectiveness, brand impression and the effectiveness of the synthetic deception. The study used both ANOVA and multiple regression analyses to control for potential confounding variables and ensure the robustness of the findings.

The results indicate no significant differences between SHS and organic human spokespersons in terms of actual effectiveness (quiz scores), perceived effectiveness or brand impression, based on actual modality comparisons. However, when respondents perceived syntheticness, the avatar triggered the negative uncanny valley phenomenon and slightly decreased overall scores in perceived effectiveness and brand impression. Notably, more than half of respondents did not detect that the SHS was synthetic. Demographic variables such as gender, age or household income had no significant impact on the results.

Organizations can justifiably consider incorporating SHS into their training programs, leveraging these synthetic agents to deliver cost-effective and scalable learning solutions. The findings suggest that SHS can be used effectively for goals such as actual knowledge transfer without compromising training quality, and that other perceptual goals may be within reach as well. This may offer a viable alternative to traditional, organic human spokespersons, opening up new opportunities for enhancing training efficiency and accessibility across various industries.

Synthetic avatars, as outlined here, are a demonstrably effective new option in the array of available learning technologies. They are being adopted en masse but without significant study of their effectiveness. This research provides foundational quantitative assessments designed to address that gap in the literature and practice. The data presented here is highly valuable for practitioners and scholars interested in cutting-edge learning tools. Given the rapid advancement of technology, this study provides an important benchmark for evaluating future improvements in these tools. Furthermore, it offers actionable recommendations for integrating AI-powered avatars into professional development, enhancing understanding of the roles advanced technologies play in educational and training programs.

This paper examines how rank-and-file practitioners react to and negotiate uniformized professional standards imposed by the elites of their profession in order to embody their professional ideal.

We explore this topic through the specific case of the Canadian independence rule. We mobilize Freidson’s and Becker’s conceptual tools to make sense of our data, generated through 55 interviews with rank-and-file practitioners.

We found that most rank-and-file practitioners override the (spirit of the) independence rule and engage in a process of secret deviance to pursue their professional ideal of accompanying their client in their business. Specifically, our analysis underlines how they find pleasure in fulfilling their professional ideal, seek to protect the secrecy that allows them to pursue this ideal while avoiding sanctions, and convince themselves of the morality of breaking the (spirit of the) rule in order to embody their conception of professionalism.

Our analysis expands fieldwork on rank-and-file practitioners by offering an analysis of struggles they experienced in their daily practice and by bringing to light their path to secret “professional” deviance.

Our study points to the necessity for better consideration of the realities of professional segments when developing rules or standards.

Our study develops a distinctive conceptual construct – the professionalism conception gap – to explain how secret “professional” deviance can unfold within a profession. This construct could be mobilized to further understand the divergences that can exist within broader professional spheres.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of perceived usefulness of online reviews and crowd cues on restaurant selection. In addition, the authors also examine the moderating role of perceived crowding and gender in this process.

The proposed hypotheses were tested with survey data (N = 200) collected from customers visiting full-service restaurants in Malaysia. The data were analyzed using SEM through Smart PLS.

The findings supported that the perceived usefulness of online reviews and perceived crowding have a positive effect on a consumer's purchase intentions, i.e. their decision of restaurant selection. Besides, a higher level of perceived crowding strengthens the relationship between the perceived usefulness of online reviews and their purchase intentions. This finding delineates that consumers prefer to dine in a crowded place with useful online reviews in an unfamiliar place. Finally, the results show that the effect of the usefulness of online reviews on purchase intentions does not vary with respect to gender (no significant contingent effect). However, the effect of perceived crowding varies with respect to gender – male customers have higher intentions to join crowded restaurants as compared to females.

Limitation of this study is its cross-sectional research design; data were collected in a single time frame. Longitudinal research design can be used to get in-depth knowledge of this phenomenon. Secondly, a non-probability sampling technique was used in this study, future research can used probability sampling technique to enhance generalizability of the study. Moreover, this study focused on the human crowding aspect, future studies can cover both aspects of crowding (human crowding and spatial crowding) in retailing or other service sectors (Blut and Iyer, 2020).

This study has multiple practical implications.

This study extends the current research on usefulness of online reviews and perceived crowding by investigating its direct and conditional effects. Specifically, the authors contribute in extant research by explaining its differential effects for male and female customers, when they select which restaurants to dine.

This study aims to investigate the impact of viewing different types of digital environment images on college students’ positive emotions, nature relatedness and environmental preference. This aimed to address the gap in empirical studies regarding the effects of digital environment images on these psychological constructs.

This study used a three-group experimental between-subjects design. Participants (48 undergraduate students) were divided into three groups, each viewing a different set of digital images (nature, city or object). Pre- and posttest measures assessed positive emotions and nature relatedness, whereas environmental preference was measured after image viewing. One-way analysis of variance and post hoc Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) tests were used to analyze the data.

Viewing digital nature images elicited significantly higher positive emotions, nature relatedness and environmental preference compared to viewing city or object images. In addition, environmental preference for the digital object group was marginally higher than the city group.

This study was limited by its relatively small sample size. Although further research is needed to investigate the underlying mechanisms behind the observed effects, this study provides valuable implications for education, economic dimensions and public policy initiatives, encouraging the development of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.

The findings suggest that incorporating digital nature images into learning activities can promote positive emotions, nature relatedness and environmental preference among college students. This has implications for the design of digital learning environments, especially for those with limited access to natural environments.

By promoting positive emotions and nature relatedness, digital nature experiences can contribute to emotional well-being and potentially foster pro-environmental behaviors. This can have implications for promoting sustainable lifestyles and environmental conservation efforts.

This study provides original empirical evidence on the impact of viewing digital environment images on several psychological constructs. It highlights the potential of digital nature experiences as a complement to direct nature exposure, particularly for those with limited access to natural environments. These findings contribute to the growing body of literature on the benefits of digital nature experiences and have implications for various fields, including education, environmental psychology and human–computer interaction.

The purpose of this study is to revisit the conventional wisdom about a key contribution [i.e. strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis] in the field of strategic management. The societal context and the role of academics, consultants and executives is taken into account in the emergence of SWOT analysis during the 1960–1980 period as a pivotal development within the broader context of the satisfactory, opportunities, faults, threats (SOFT) approach. The authors report on both the content and the approach, so that other scholars seeking to invigorate indigenous theories and/or underreported strategy practices will thrive.

Applying a historiographic approach, the authors introduce an evidence-based methodology for interpreting historical sources. This methodology incorporates source criticism, triangulation and hermeneutical interpretation, drawing upon insights from robust evidence through three iterative stages.

The underreporting of the SOFT approach/SWOT analysis can be attributed to several factors, including strategy tools being integrated into planning frameworks rather than being published as standalone materials; restricted circulation of crucial long-range planning service/theory and practice of planning reports due to copyright limitations; restricted access to the Stanford Research Institute Planning Library in California; and the enduring popularity of SOFT and SWOT variations, driven in part by their memorable acronyms.

In the spirit of a renaissance in strategic planning research, the authors unveil novel theoretical and social connections in the emergence of SWOT analysis by combining evidence from both theory and practice and delving into previously unexplored areas.

Caution is advised for scholars who examine the discrete time frame of 1960–1980 through mere bibliometric techniques. This study underscores the risks associated with gathering incomplete and/or inaccurate data, emphasizing the importance of triangulating evidence beyond scholarly databases. The paradigm shift of strategic management research due to the advent of large language models poses new challenges and the risk of conserving and perpetuating academic urban legends, myths and lies if training data is not adequately curated.

Drawing on psychological development and mixed embeddedness theories, the authors of the present paper seek to identify why some senior individuals in the Egyptian context actively engage in self-employment while others avoid it.

The empirical sample comprised semi-structured interviews with 30 senior entrepreneurs who have pursued entrepreneurial activities for at least one year. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the interview transcripts.

The authors identified the following three categories of motives: cultural (religious considerations, successful global and local role models, networking and social recognition), economic (minimal required business skills and capital, zero tax and no business registration, expectations of profits and guaranteed market and insufficient pension for life needs) and ageing and individual motivations (reviving their civilisational heritage, abundance of time and escaping from loneliness). We consider these as explaining why senior individuals engage in entrepreneurial activities. Moreover, the authors found that the health status of senior individuals, negative influence on pension and limited capital available are the main reasons why some seniors avoid self-employment.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in the literature on senior entrepreneurship, about which empirical studies, particularly in the context of North African economically uncertain countries, such as Egypt, have been limited so far.

This paper investigates the evolving landscape of architectural criticism in the digital era, leveraging the enduring interplay between architecture and media. It specifically examines the role of social media and public awards in improving user engagement with architectural discourse.

A mixed-method approach, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative analyses, is used to discuss three architecture awards. These are chosen for their different evaluation processes and their capacity to offer diverse opportunities for public interaction and engagement.

The study emphasises the potential of social media to democratise architectural criticism, while also addressing challenges such as the prominence of non-critical visual material and the presence of algorithmic biases. The findings underline the importance of providing adequate materials for public evaluation and integrating expert juries to support the assessment process. These elements are essential to fostering informed public participation, bridging the gap between professional expertise and popular engagement, and enabling meaningful architectural discourse on social media.

This paper fills a gap in the academic literature by connecting public architectural awards – a relatively unexplored aspect of architectural culture – with the potential of social media as a platform for architectural criticism.