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UNESCO’s ESD for 2030 Agenda places interdisciplinarity at the top of the three interrelated strategies for higher education contributions. However, more needs to be known about interdisciplinarity from a learning perspective, especially its measured relationship with learning outcomes. Does interdisciplinarity improve or hinder learning outcomes? What specific learning outcomes are more sensitive to interdisciplinarity? If a university prides itself on interdisciplinary teaching and learning, how is it fulfilled based on its curriculum? This study aims to focus on an intentionally interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum at a Chinese university to answer these questions.

This study adopts a concept of interdisciplinary mobility to observe the extent to which undergraduate students would intentionally navigate across academic divisions at key curricular checkpoints. It then adopts student self-reporting on a set of institutional learning outcomes, aligned with AAC&U’s VALUE framework, to examine the correlations between the mobility patterns and the self-reported outcomes. Finally, it uses the qualitative self-reported data to deepen alignment between the institutional learning outcomes and the VALUE framework.

The study finds that students demonstrate distinctive patterns of interdisciplinary mobility when they intentionally navigate across academic divisions at key curricular checkpoints. Students make these decisions, which allow them to become interdisciplinarily wider, narrower or as is. Some of these mobility patterns show significantly positive or negative correlations with the self-reported outcomes, e.g. research capabilities. One mobility pattern demonstrates particularly higher self-reported outcomes.

This study introduces a concept of interdisciplinary mobility, which could inspire creative use of curricular checkpoints and therefore allow examining interdisciplinarity vertically vis-à-vis horizontally.

In this chapter, the authors provide a historical overview of the development of comparative and international education societies throughout the earth. In most cases, these societies have gradually grown and continue to thrive; in other cases, some comparative education societies have become dormant and a few no longer exist. A historical analysis that outlines the rise and fall of comparative education societies is provided. An overview of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies is also discussed, including its lead organizational role in serving as a historical hub to help comparative education societies preserve and disseminate their respective histories. The chapter concludes with suggestions on how anyone can get involved to help contribute to the history preservation of comparative education at the individual, national, regional, and global levels.

In this chapter, the authors provide a historical overview of the development of comparative and international education in North America from 1920s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The authors document the significant role some of the most influential leaders played to help lay the foundation for comparative education societies in Canada, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, and the United States. Using historical comparative research technique, the authors examine the many interconnections of current and past leaders. The authors conclude with recommendations on how knowing the history can help strengthen comparative and international education development well into the future.

Online medical teams (OMTs) are gaining popularity as a new form of online health service to provide patients with prompt and guaranteed treatment. While the effective development of an OMT depends on physicians’ active participation, there is insufficient research on how a doctor gains from the OMT, especially from the multilevel and cross-level perspectives. In attempting to narrow this knowledge gap, the authors hypothesize multilevel and cross-level professional capital determinants of physicians’ performance in online health-care communities (OHCs) through the lens of social exchange theory.

This study develops a cross-level model to explain the effects of individual and team professional capital on physicians’ performance. To test the research model and hypotheses, the authors leverage data of 10,398 physicians engaged in 2,611 popular OMTs in China in conjunction with the hierarchical linear model approach.

The results indicated that physicians’ status capital (SC) and decisional capital (DC) are positively related to their performance. The SC and DC of an OMT not only increase physicians’ performance but also indirectly strengthen the positive effect of physicians’ SC on their performance. In contrast, OMTs’ SC and DC lessen the importance of physicians’ DC in promoting their performance.

By studying the mechanism between professional capital and physicians’ performance, this study provides several contributions to theory and practice. Specifically, this study contributes to the extant professional capital research by uncovering the influencing pathways of professional capital on physicians’ performance from a cross-level perspective. These findings suggest physicians pay close attention to the strength and mechanism of OMTs’ professional capital in improving their online performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of a physician’s prosocial behavior on a patient's choices in the online health community (OHC) context. Moreover, the authors explore how such effects differ across different online word-of-mouth (WOM) and professional titles.

Guided by the motivation, opportunity and ability (MOA) framework, this paper develops hypotheses and an econometric model. Then this paper used spline regression to test hypotheses on 6,204 physicians at The Good Doctor (www.Haodf.com), which is one of the largest Chinese OHCs. The authors conducted the propensity score matching and difference-in-difference method (PSM-DID) to address the concern about the bias caused by possible endogeneity concerns.

The authors’ results show that a physician’s prosocial behavior improves a patient's choice only when the strength of a physician’s prosocial behavior is below the tipping point. In addition, the influence of a physician’s prosocial behavior is heterogeneous for physicians with different online WOM and professional titles. For physicians with higher online WOM, the effect of a physician's prosocial behaviors on a patient's choice is positive, while for physicians with lower online WOM, a physician’s prosocial behavior has no impact on a patient’s choice. For physicians with higher professional titles, the quantity of a physician’s prosocial behavior has a positive impact on a patient’s choice, while for physicians with lower professional titles the quality of a physician’s prosocial behavior has a positive impact on a patient’s choice.

This study contributes new knowledge and provides new perspectives to study a patient's choice by addressing the importance of physician's prosocial behavior. With the effort of explicitly explaining the complex mechanisms, this study encourages physicians' engagement in a physician’s prosocial behavior and gives some implications on how to perform the behaviors strategically.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is significant in the financial market. Despite plenty of existing research on CSR, few studies have quantified the fine-grained aspects of CSR and examined how diverse CSR aspects are associated with firms' trade credit. Based on the released CSR reports, this paper strives to measure the CSR fulfillment of firms and examine the relationships between CSR and trade credit in terms of textual features presented in these reports.

This research proposes a natural language processing-based framework to extract the overall readability and the sentiment of fine-grained aspects from CSR reports, which can signal the performance of firms' CSR in diverse aspects. Furthermore, this paper explores how the textual features are associated with trade credit through partial dependence plots (PDPs), and PDPs can generate both linear and nonlinear relationships.

The study’s results reveal that the overall readability of the reports is positively associated with trade credit, while the performance of the fine-grained CSR aspects mentioned in the CSR reports matters differently. The performance of the environment has a positive impact on trade credit; the performance of creditors, suppliers and information disclosure, shows a U-shaped influence on trade credit; while the performance of the government and customers is negatively associated with trade credit.

This study expands the scope of research on CSR and trade credit by investigating fine-grained aspects covered in CSR reports. It also offers some managerial implications in the allocation of CSR resources and the presentation of CSR reports.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and financial distress and the moderating effect of firm characteristics, auditor characteristics and the Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) in China.

The research question is empirically examined on the basis of a data set of 1,257 Chinese-listed firms from 2011 to 2021. The dependent variable is financial distress risk, which is measured mainly by Z-score. CSR score is used as a proxy for CSR. Propensity score matching, two-stage least square and generalized method of moments are adopted to mitigate the potential endogeneity issue.

This study reveals that CSR can reduce financial distress. Specifically, results show an inverse relationship between CSR and financial distress, more significantly in non-state-owned enterprises, firms with non-BigN auditor and during Covid-19. The results are consistent and robust to endogeneity tests and sensitivity analyses.

This study enriches the literature on CSR and financial distress, resulting in a more attractive corporate environment, improved financial stability and more crisis-resistant economies in China.

The purpose of this paper is to combine triboelectric nanogeneration technology with ball bearing structure to achieve energy collection and fault monitoring.

In this paper, according to the rotation mode of ball bearings, the freestanding mode of triboelectric nanogeneration is selected to design and manufacture a novel triboelectric nanogeneration device Rolling Ball Triboelectric Nanogenerator (RB-TENG) which combines rotary energy collection with ball bearing fault self-sensing.

The 10,000s continuous operation experiment of the RB-TENG is carried out to verify its robustness. The accurate feedback relationship between the RB-TENG and rotation velocity can be demonstrated by the fitting comparison between the theoretical and experimental electrical signal periods at a certain time. By comparing the output electrical signals of the normal RB-TENG and the rotor spalling RB-TENG and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) balls with different degrees of wear at 500 r/min, it can be concluded that the RB-TENG has an ideal monitoring effect on the radial clearance distance of bearings. The spalling fault test of the RB-TENG stator inner ring and rotor outer ring is carried out.

Through coupling experiments of rotor spalling fault of the RB-TENG and PTFE balls fault with different degrees of wear, it can be seen that when rotor spalling fault occurs, balls wear has a greater impact on the normal operation of the RB-TENG, and it is easier to identify. The fault self-sensing ability of the RB-TENG can be obtained, which is expected to provide an effective scheme for monitoring the radial wear clearance distance of ball bearings.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-08-2024-0295/

This study aims to test the effect of individual audit quality on career advancement the audit labour market.

This paper uses data on auditors from two collapsed audit firms in China, namely, Ruihua and Zhengzhong Zhujiang, and tests the effect of individual audit quality on career advancement in the audit labour market.

The baseline results show that high-quality audits promote auditors’ career advancement. Our results hold after a battery of robustness tests. Further analyses support our hypothesis, indicating that client retention and audit fees are positively related to auditors’ prior audit quality. The effect of audit quality on career advancement does not hold for auditors from sanctioned branch offices or for auditors with prior culpable clients, as shared reputation damage can weaken the effect of high audit quality. Furthermore, this paper investigates whether the reputation enhancement effect of high audit quality can be strengthened by auditor experience, the title of “senior auditor” and IPO auditing experience. We also show that clients and audit firms place more weight on the quality of audits conducted by auditors in competitive markets and auditors with engagements matched with industries.

Together, these findings indicate the vital role of individual audit quality in auditors’ career development in the audit labour market, consistent with the reputation rationale for audit quality.