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This study aims to examine Victorian primary school parents’ perspectives about a potential school-provided lunch program (LP).

An online cross-sectional survey was conducted in Victoria, Australia, in 2022 to explore parents’ perceptions regarding the lunch menu, funding source, amount willing to pay, frequency of meals and special dietary needs of a school-provided LP.

Over half of parents (57% out of 359) said they would allow their child to participate in a school LP, 34% were unsure and only 9% said they would not. The opportunity for hot cooked lunches at school and the perceived convenience for parents were the top two reasons for favouring such a program. Fifty-eight percent were in favour of hybrid-type funding from both the government and parents. The most preferred amount to pay per meal was AUD5-6 (43%), followed by AUD3-4 (25%). Parents expected meals to be healthy and made from whole food and cater to the special dietary and cultural needs of their children. They also expected enough time to be allocated so children could eat and enjoy the meals.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore Victorian parents’ perceptions regarding the above aspects of a school-provided LP. The findings suggest that parents are receptive to a school-provided LP; they, however, did have several expectations regarding the menu and time for eating. These findings provide important directions for designing future school-provided LPs at primary schools in Australia.

This study aims to explore the role of social media visual posts (known as foodstagramming) on restaurant visit intention. Drawing on the heuristic–systematic model and normative focus theory, this research introduces a framework that assesses the effects of key foodstagramming attributes – vicarious expression, aesthetic appeal and post popularity – and the mediating roles of goal relevance and mimicking desire, in the process.

Structural equation modelling was performed to test the proposed model using a sample of tourists (n = 377) and residents (n = 341). Multi-group analysis was performed to compare the differences between these groups.

Results reveal that mimicking desire and goal relevance influence restaurant visit intention; however, mimicking desire has a stronger influence than goal relevance. Little difference was found between the tourist and the resident groups in the proposed relationships, except that vicarious expression positively influences mimicking desire in the tourist group but not in the resident group.

This study guides restauranteurs and social media influencers (foodstagrammers). It shows that consumers value the textual content and aesthetic appeal of photos over the popularity of a post. It also indicates that vicarious expression is more important for tourists than for residents.

This research advances social media marketing literature by proposing a new information processing framework. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first studies to explore the impact of visual post attributes on individual decision-making behaviours through socially acceptable norms.

Extant studies propose music sentiment as a novel measure of individuals’ sentiment. These studies argue that individuals’ choice of music reflects their emotional condition in real time and influences their cognitive ability, making it a powerful tool for assessing their mood. This study aims to use music sentiment as a proxy for auditors’ mood and explore its impact on audit quality.

A sample of the US firms from 2017 to 2020 is used in the study. The authors apply the ordinary least squares regressions and the logit regressions to the audit quality models. The authors use absolute discretionary accruals and the propensity to meet or beat earnings forecasts as proxies for audit quality and calculate a stream-weighted average sentiment measure for Spotify’s Top-200 songs of each day during the audit period of a client firm to capture the sentiment of auditors.

The authors find that music sentiment is positively associated with audit quality. The result is consistent with the mood maintenance hypothesis, which suggests that a positive mood can induce auditors to be more careful in risky situations. Furthermore, the result is robust to various sensitivity analyses.

The study contributes to the scarce literature that focuses on auditors’ emotional state and highlights the importance of monitoring auditor mindset during the audit period.

This paper aims to identify the effect of environmental management systems (EMSs), commitment to stakeholders and gender diversity on corporate environmental performance (CEP) and the extent to which an economic crisis moderates these relationships.

A regression analysis was conducted on a sample of 14,217 observations from 1,933 firms from 26 countries from 2002 to 2010. The estimator used is ordinary least squares with heteroscedastic panel-corrected standard errors (PCSEs), which allows us to obtain consistent results in the presence of heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation.

The results show that EMSs and stakeholder engagement are mechanisms that drive CEP but lose their effectiveness in times of crisis. However, the presence of women on boards has a positive effect on CEP that is not affected by an economic crisis.

The study has some limitations that could be addressed in the future. We present board gender diversity as a governance mechanism because its role is strongly related to non-financial performance. Future studies could focus on other corporate governance mechanisms, such as the presence of institutional or long-term investors. In addition, other mechanisms could be found that can counteract poor environmental performance in times of crisis. Finally, it might be useful to contrast these results with the crisis generated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The results obtained have important practical implications at the corporate and institutional levels. At the corporate level, they highlight, as essential contributions, that environmental management systems and stakeholder orientation are not effective in times of economic crisis, except for with the presence of women on the board.

Following the crisis, the European Commission has promoted gender diversity on boards as a mechanism to improve the governance of entities – improving, among other aspects, sustainability. In this sense, another one of the practical implications of the study is support for the policies that the European Union has implemented over the last two decades.

The paper analyses how a crisis affects the moral and cultural institutional mechanisms that promote CEP. Gender diversity on the board of directors not only promotes environmental performance but also appears to be a governance mechanism that ensures this performance in times of crisis when the other mechanisms lose their effectiveness. The study proposes specific policies that help maintain environmental performance in an economic crisis.

The significance of business processes has fostered a close collaboration between academia and industry. Moreover, the business landscape has witnessed continuous transformation, closely intertwined with technological advancements. Our main goal is to offer researchers and process analysts insights into the latest developments concerning artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to optimize their processes in an organization and identify research gaps and future directions in the field.

In this study, we perform a systematic review of academic literature to investigate the integration of AI/ML in business process management (BPM). We categorize the literature according to the BPM life-cycle and employ bibliometric and objective-oriented methodology to analyze related papers.

In business process management and process map, AI/ML has made significant improvements using operational data on process metrics. These developments involve two distinct stages: (1) process enhancement, which emphasizes analyzing process information and adding descriptions to process models and (2) process improvement, which focuses on redesigning processes based on insights derived from analysis.

While this review paper serves to provide an overview of different approaches for addressing process-related challenges, it does not delve deeply into the intricacies of fine-grained technical details of each method. This work focuses on recent papers conducted between 2010 and 2024.

This work addresses a significant gap by employing a pioneering approach to introduce challenges in BPM alongside AI/ML techniques and integrated tools. Hence, it offers comprehensive guidelines that elucidate the alignment between ML methods and solutions to current challenges across the BPM life-cycle, including process enhancement and process improvement. Additionally, by detailing various aspects of the life-cycle phases and highlighting ML technique characteristics, this research demonstrates potential approaches for future exploration, thereby enhancing applicability for both process analysts and researchers in this context.

This paper aims to understand if buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services, a digital type of credit that targets young consumers, acts as a protective or a risk factor for food insecurity among young consumers in Australia.

The study uses survey data from a representative sample of young consumers aged 18–24 from all internal states and territories in Australia. Propensity score matching is used to test two hypotheses: BNPL drives young consumers to food insecurity, and food insecurity leads young consumers to use BNPL.

There is evidence that BNPL use is driving young Australian consumers to experience food insecurity, but there is no evidence of food insecurity driving the use of BNPL services.

The evidence of BNPL driving young consumers to experience food insecurity calls for the adoption of practices and stronger regulation to ensure that young users from being overindebted.

Although the link with more traditional forms of credit (such as personal loans) and consumer wellbeing has been explored more broadly, this project is the first attempt to have causal evidence of the link between BNPL and food insecurity in a high-income country, to the best of the authors’ knowledge. This evidence helps to fill the gap about the protective or risky nature of this type of digital financial product, as experienced by young Australians.

This chapter examines sexually violent hazing as a form of group sexual assault, which involves multiple perpetrators in a single sexually violent act, in the context of junior men's hockey in Canada. Research outside of the context of sport suggests that group sexual assaults are relatively rare. However, available evidence suggests that the prevalence of group sexual assaults perpetrated by male junior hockey players is significantly disproportionate to perpetration rates by men who do not participate in competitive sports. Drawing on examples from junior men's hockey in Canada, three main forms of group sexual assault are identified and explored in which multiple male junior hockey players have been reported for sexually assaulting: (1) new male team members through sexually violent hazing rituals, (2) female victims during team rookie nights or initiation parties and (3) a single female victim away from team activities. The data analysed include media files and written legal decisions involving group sexual assault allegations against 65 Canadian junior men's hockey players. This chapter reveals that each form is interconnected within the misogynistic culture of junior men's hockey in Canada, where group sexual assaults have long been tolerated, silenced and ignored by teams, leagues and legal officials.

This chapter addresses the hypothesis that the criminal justice reforms toward an accusatory/adversarial model produced in Latin America from the 1980s onwards have meant a mutation in its way of functioning that can be read as an “Americanization.” Specifically, this general question is addressed by analyzing the introduction, in these reform processes, of mechanisms of conviction without trial – in their majority inspired by the “plea bargaining” of the Anglo-American tradition – that have a significant impact on the way in which the power to punish is exercised in most of the countries of the region today. This discussion is elaborated from a case study on the Province of Santa Fe (Argentina). It is argued that in the “law in books” the introduction of this type of mechanism has frequently implied a “weak Americanization,” since it was a “legal translation” (Langer, 2006) that not only generated “adoptions” but also “innovations” with respect to the parameters of the Anglo-American tradition. But it also shows how this can be combined with a “strong Americanization” in the “law in action,” differentiating the dimension of the dynamics from the dimension of the effects, based on two key observations: the weakness and infrequency of judicial control of the agreements reached by the parties and the enormous preponderance of convictions without trial. In this way, it is intended to make the idea of “Americanization” of criminal justice more complex, differentiating levels (in books/in action) and dimensions (dynamics/results).