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The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of parents who have full professorial positions (in faculties of engineering and nursing) in universities in Ontario, Canada, with a particular focus on the ways in which gender shapes professors' parenting experiences.

We employ a case study methodology involving quantitative and qualitative data collected from a survey emailed to full professors in Ontario.

Data from the study reveal that numerous strategies, resources (e.g. informal social support networks, supportive partners) and institutional supports (i.e. pausing the tenure clock after child birth) are required to assist academics to meet the extensive demands of their positions, while they perform caregiving responsibilities for their children.

The protected ground of family status is inconsistently applied in Canadian human rights policy, considerably reducing its transformative potential. Yet, while family status gains greater recognition in rights-based practice, we argue that it be added to forthcoming institutional equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) action plans across post-secondary institutions to better ensure equity for mothers who shoulder significant paid and unpaid work responsibilities.

While there is literature on parenting in academia, family status is rarely featured as an intersection of interest in EDI research. This article aims to fill this gap.

Crises precipitate strong fiscal responses by government – sometimes toward austerity, other times toward renewed social spending. This variation in approaches to crisis handling has the potential to highlight factors that drive public opinion toward government interventions that may be quite different from those in non-crisis times. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned issues.

This article brings together theories of government policymaking in crises, policy responsiveness and economic voting to assess how personal financial (egocentric) concerns and/or national financial (sociotropic) concerns may influence opinions toward government handling of direct financial supports in a crisis and, more generally, opinions toward social policy interventions. The authors assess this dynamic in the Canadian context using original national survey data collected in the initial stage of the pandemic-based crisis in June and July of 2020 (N = 1290).

The authors find strong evidence in support of sociotropic concerns shaping government approval and support for greater social policy interventions, but limited evidence to support egocentric concerns, suggesting that social policy attitudes may be more insulated from personal factors than anticipated.

The authors’ findings suggest that crises may prompt enhanced support for interventionist social policy measures that may lack broad-based support in non-crisis times.

The authors’ findings speak to the ongoing discussion around the possibility for crises to function as policy windows for enhanced social spending and for entrenching targeted financial supports for vulnerable individuals.

The aim of this article is to explore children's understanding of television advertising intent.

A different perspective on advertising intent is offered in this paper, as evidenced in an interpretive study of Irish children, aged between seven and nine years. A qualitative approach was employed, involving a series of focus group discussions and in‐depth interviews with 52 children.

The findings indicate that the participating children view advertising as serving interests including, but not limited to, the advertiser. The existence of other interested parties is suggested by the children, namely the agendas of viewers and television channels. The authors assert that these children view advertising as being larger and more complex than the advertiser's perspective, which has been the traditional focus in the extant research.

Adopting an advertising literacy perspective, the authors seek to explore children's “reading” and understanding of advertising. Advertising literacy is an approach to understanding advertising that has not received substantial attention in the child‐advertising literature. The literature to date has tended to focus on the following question – do children understand the persuasive intent of advertising? This question is suggestive of a “yes/no” answer. In contrast, the authors view the concept of understanding as being more complex and multi‐faceted, and accordingly, seek to develop this concept by way of a classification that suggests four different levels of understanding that children may exhibit towards advertising

Productivity is a multidimensional and context-dependent concept. Therefore, many different definitions and consequently, many different approaches to productivity measurement (PM) exist in the literature. As a result, the understanding of productivity and the appropriate use of PM approaches are at a low level. The literature provides some overviews, but these overviews consider only a few selected individual aspects. Therefore, the overviews do not allow a comprehensive comparison and evaluation of existing approaches. This paper aims to give an overview of existing approaches to PM and to classify them according to elaborated criteria based on the main characteristics of productivity.

Literature review for existing approaches to PM using the following keywords: productivity, PM, productivity measure, labour productivity and labor productivity.

A total of 38 approaches are identified and listed between 1955 and 2020. The main result is a systematic overview and classification of existing approaches to PM.

Researchers can use the overview to determine the development over time, the current state of research in the field of PM and identify research gaps. The classification can also be used to classify new approaches.

Companies can use the classification as a guide to identifying appropriate approaches to measuring productivity in corporate practice.

This paper enables a comprehensive comparison and evaluation of existing approaches to PM. Also, the understanding of the multidimensional character of the productivity concept is enhanced.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on the major conceptual and practical considerations of the use of robots, artificial intelligence and service automation (RAISA) in travel, tourism, and hospitality companies (TTH).

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter develops a conceptual framework of the major issues related to the use of RAISA in the travel, tourism and hospitality context.

Findings: The findings indicate that while there is a creeping incursion of RAISA into TTH, there are major concerns that the TTH industry has to consider in regard to automating TTH services.

Practical implications: In a practical sense, the chapter identifies the decisions that TTH industry professionals need to take when dealing with RAISA technologies. Furthermore, the chapter elaborates on the impacts RAISA have on business operations, marketing management, human resources and financial management of TTH companies. The TTH industry has to adjust its practices and communicate with its workforce in ways as not to increase Luddite tendencies and resistance among employees.

Social implications: The analysis shows that there is an upcoming era in which automation of services will be so advanced that wealthy countries may not need to import labour to make up with its own aging workforce, suggesting that RAISA and its further development has the potential for disrupting society and international relations.

Originality/value: This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the issues related to the use of RAISA in the TTH industry, including the drivers of RAISA adoption in tourism, advantages and disadvantages of RAISA technologies compared to human employees, decisions that managers need to take, and the impacts of RAISA on business processes. It shows how macroenvironmental pressures shape the microeconomic decisions to use RAISA in a TTH context.

Studies on personal characteristics that influence managers' performance in their jobs and their ability to innovate focus mainly on for-profit organizations. We argue that non-profit organizations (NPOs) differ substantially from for-profit organizations in their organizational set-up and processes, so the skills they demand from their managers and employees also differ. We undertake this research to explore the personal factors that could be particularly relevant to managers' performance and innovativeness in the non-profit sector.

We conduct a qualitative, model-building study to derive the personal factors that influence managers' intention to perform and to innovate and their behavior in that regard. The base of our analysis is 15 interviews with knowledgeable informants who either work in NPOs, provide services to them or perform research about them.

We derive 14 personal factors that can be aggregated into four categories—experience, virtues and vices, interpersonal skills and management skills—each of which affect NPO managers' individual performance and/or individual innovativeness.

This study adds to existing research on Ajzen's (1985) Theory of Planned Behavior by extending it to the nonprofit context, so it contributes to the literature on individuals' behavioral intentions.

Research shows that there are mechanisms of information simplification that lead to the danger that first, laypeople rely on their own epistemological skills when assessing scientific claims. Second, laypeople underestimate their dependence on experts when they receive simplified information. This underestimation can be problematic because scientific knowledge, due to its complexity, usually cannot be fully understood without further advice from experts. Compared to laypersons, adult education practitioners can be expected to have a higher level of scientific literacy in relation to knowledge in their professional field because they are familiar with the structure of knowledge through their formal education. The present study examines whether the “easiness effect” also occurs in adult education practitioners when they read simplified and highly simplified texts about research findings.

The sample consisted of 1.267 continuing education institutions. For the survey experiment, particioants were randomly assigned to tree text types at the end of the survey: easy, less scientific and scientific text. We used the difference-in-difference method to analyze the data.

The study examined whether easily presented research findings influenced self-assessment and reliance on experts. The results of our study support the hypothesis that the easiness effect is also present among professional practitioners.

The use of clear and nontechnical language is essential for ensuring that scientific knowledge is accessible and utilizable outside of academic circles. This aspect gains particular significance in educational research, as it enables professional practitioners to comprehend and ideally implement, research findings in their daily routines to address and resolve real-world challenges in their educational environments. Previous studies have demonstrated that the way text is presented influences laypeople's perceived reliance on experts. Building upon the conceptual framework of the easiness effect, this survey experiment took an additional step by focusing specifically on a targeted audience: professional practitioners in adult education.

This paper explores the experience of “Shari’a” as non-state law in the English courts through a historical analysis of past Islamic finance dispute resolutions (IFDRs). This paper aims to propose a conceivable scenario relating to the law applicable in international commercial contracts in the English courts with the emergence of the Hague Principles 2015.

This paper addresses several issues that have been raised in English case law: doubts about the legal nature of “Shari’a” as non-state law; the limits placed on freedom of choice of “Shari’a” law by the application of a single legal system; and the distinction between application of law and incorporation by reference of “Shari’a” in IFDRs. The paper then analyses the conformity of “Shari’a” with the provisions now used to resolve Islamic finance disputes (trade and investment) in the English courts, using an empirical analysis of The Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions standards.

The paper provides that, in theory, “Shari’a” standards could play a significant role in IFDRs after Brexit, even though a gap persists in practice because the Hague Principles 2015 have not yet been adopted by the English legal system.

The study focuses on the English courts and shows how the IFDRs could be resolved with the emergence of Hague Principles 2015 in the post-Brexit era.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper appears to be the first paper to provide a conceivable scenario relating to the future of the IFDRs in the English courts.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a profound overview of recent research trends and structures in European waste-related research based on the 7th Framework Programme (FP7), the most important RTD programme in Europe.

In order to analyse Europe-wide research efforts on waste technologies, the authors conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 50 FP7-funded research projects to assess which approaches they take, which technologies they develop and which types of organisations play a leading role.

FP7 waste-related projects care for a multiplicity of environmental technologies concerning waste. The most prominent research fields comprise: first, the recovery of by-products and waste into biomass and other valuable products; second, the development of technologies to rework manufacturing discarded products and, therefore, reduce the total use of raw materials; third, the improvement of manufacturing technologies in order to cut down on industrial waste; and finally, the support of the development of recycling management processes. In total, 52 per cent of all the participants are from the industry sector, which therefore plays an essential role.

The analysis show that FP7 supports the shift to a cradle-to-cradle society and is partly in line with the aims of the new Flagship Initiative “A resource-efficient Europe”.

This analysis gives the possibility to benchmark the trend of waste-related research carried out at European level against priorities set within European directives.