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This article follows the overhaul in the teaching profession in Singapore which grants schools with more autonomy to decide their own manpower policies. It argues the need for more systemic, high‐commitment, mutually‐reinforcing human resource policies to reinforce the learning trajectory in schools. This encompasses heightening the strategic value of teachers by appointing a human resource manager; reforming the hiring and selection practices to include selection panels involving incumbent teachers, novel selection criteria and job previews; and replacing the compensation structure with one that is transparent, skill‐based, team‐oriented, and which pays premium wages and affords non‐monetary benefits like work/family programs. It is believed that such an environment would ultimately effect the transformation of all schools to become ardent learning organisations.

While Singapore's outstanding educational achievements are well known worldwide, there is a disproportionate paucity of literature on school leadership practices that contribute to and support pedagogical initiatives that – along with socio‐cultural factors – are normally considered responsible for its educational success. The aim of this paper is to explicate system‐wide school leadership factors that contribute to Singapore's educational success.

The paper includes critical discussion, review of literature and conceptualization.

It is argued that three unique features of Singapore school leadership, namely – logistics of a small tightly‐coupled school system, human resource policies that reinforce alignment, and a distinctive “leader‐teacher compact” reflecting the predominant Chinese culture – account for the extraordinary level of tight coupling and alignment of leadership across the school system. In turn, these unique features bring synergies of sustainability, scalability, succession, and high performance across the entire Singapore school system.

Unique features of Singapore school leadership must be examined in conjunction with pedagogical initiatives and socio‐cultural factors for a more complete and nuanced understanding of educational success in Singapore.

Tightly coupled mechanisms of leadership underlie the success of Singapore education. Government needs to consider whether such tightly‐ coupled leadership will continue to serve it well in future, given the demand for twenty‐first century knowledge based skills.

The influence of socio‐cultural factors (e.g. leader‐teacher compact) on educational success merits inclusion in any explanation.

This paper addresses an important gap in the literature by promulgating crucial features of school leadership that contribute to Singapore's educational success.

This qualitative study aimed to explore school principals' perceptions of social justice in a centralized school setting in Kuwait, as well as the challenges they face when promoting equity and equality for students' learning in schools.

Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 18 public school principals from Kuwait's six educational districts.

The results revealed that principals' experiences and unique perspectives shape their definitions of social justice within their schools. Some school principals see social justice as ensuring fairness and equal opportunities for every student regardless of their backgrounds. Others focus on creating an inclusive and supportive environment. The results also showed that limited resources, institutional barriers, limited autonomy, lack of training, and some ministerial laws are among the challenges that school principals face in promoting equity and equality.

The findings are informative to policymakers and other educational stakeholders. Practical suggestions are provided to improve school principals' social justice leadership practices.

This study adds to the empirical knowledge of school principals' role in promoting equity and equality for student learning in a centralized school setting and attempts to reduce the social justice leadership gap in schools.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the safety and efficiency of, and acceptance by, patients for an express refill service (ERS).

A pilot uncontrolled, cross-sectional, single-centred study was conducted at the outpatient pharmacy of a tertiary acute care hospital. Under ERS, prescriptions were dispensed without clinical review and counselling for patients refilling prescription medications. Efficiency was assessed by comparing processing times of ERS prescriptions with regular prescriptions. Safety was assessed by independent review of prescriptions by two pharmacists. Patient acceptance was assessed by a survey.

ERS reduced processing time of prescriptions by more than 30 per cent compared to the regular fill process. ERS was generally safe for patients, with drug-related problems identified in only one prescription which may have warranted closer monitoring. It was accepted by patients who opted for the service, as 91.4 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that they were satisfied with the service.

The study was conducted on a small convenience sample of patients in a single centre, with no control group.

Results showed that ERS was efficient, safe and well-accepted for select patients refilling their prescriptions. This leads to shorter waiting times and greater patient satisfaction.

This is the first published study that has explored the feasibility of an express prescription refill service. Despite some limitations, this study showed that omitting prospective clinical review and patient counselling for a defined population segment is safe, and can reduce processing time and improve patient satisfaction.

Numerous academic institutions have embarked on the pursuit of hybrid learning as an alternative approach, catering to students who opt for replacing a fraction of their conventional in-person meeting schedule with remote teaching. However, these new remote learning patterns have brought forth new stands against students' expectations. The universities have come across immense challenges in devising efficacious strategies that encompass the delivery, effectiveness and acceptability of hybrid courses. Consequently, identifying pivotal determinants related to user acceptance of technology persists as a crucial matter. This study aims to shed light on the adoption of hybrid learning from students' perspectives.

Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to scrutinise the proposed research model and hypotheses. A total sample of 444 students responded and partook in the survey. The data were analysed using AMOS software, a powerful tool for statistical analysis in the field of social sciences.

The findings of this study show that perceived service quality positively and significantly impacts the ease of use and usefulness of a hybrid learning system among students. In addition, the results demonstrate that ease of use and usefulness of the system positively and significantly influence students' favourable attitudes toward hybrid learning. Remarkably, the statistical analysis unveils the significant mediating effect of ease of use and usefulness in the relationship between perceived service quality and students' attitudes toward hybrid learning.

The findings suggest that the pervasive dependence on information systems and the quality of service from novel technologies continues to be a vital influence in the learning environment. The study has provided valuable insights into student perseverance learning strategies for higher education institutions.

This study's novelty lies in illuminating the crucial role of ease of use and usefulness as mediators, highlighting their criticality in enhancing students' attitudes towards hybrid learning. Notably, the study underscores that perceived service quality exerts a positive influence on ease of use and usefulness.

This paper aims to investigate efficiency in the UK hotel industry and further evaluate the impacts of hotel characteristics and industry environment on efficiency.

The network data envelopment (DEA) weak link approach is used for the efficiency analysis, while the determinants of efficiency are evaluated by bootstrapped truncated regression.

The findings show that the UK hotel industry is very inefficient. The results of overall efficiency deconstruction show that the second-stage production process experiences an even lower level of efficiency than that of the first stage. The second-phase analysis shows that both the hotel-specific characteristics and the industry-specific characteristics are significantly related to UK hotel efficiency.

The robustness of the results is affected because a single set of input-intermediate product-outputs and a single DEA method were used. Therefore, further studies can use alternate inputs, intermediate measures and outputs in the efficiency analysis. In addition, the robustness of the efficiency score can be checked using alternate parametric or non-parametric methods.

Hotels in the UK should focus on cost reduction, business diversification, improvement in the capital level and labor productivity, while at industry and macroeconomic level, discounts are recommended to be provided to international tourism and the tourism industry should be further opened.

The weak-link approach has been applied to estimate the efficiency level, as this provides more robust and accurate results compared to other non-parametric methods in the existing empirical studies and unique hotel-specific and industry-specific determinants of efficiency are considered in the second-stage analysis.

Distribution of long-haul goods could be managed via multimodal transportation networks where decision-maker has to consider these factors including the uncertainty of transportation time and cost, the timetable limitation of selected modes and the storage cost incurred in advance or delay arriving of the goods. Considering the above factors comprehensively, this paper establishes a multimodal multi-objective route optimization model which aims to minimize total transportation duration and cost. This study could be used as a reference for decision-maker to transportation plans.

Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is introduced to deal with transportation uncertainty and the NSGA-II algorithm with an external archival elite retention strategy is designed. An efficient transformation method based on data-drive to overcome the high time-consuming problem brought by MC simulation. Other contribution of this study is developed a scheme risk assessment method for the non-absolutely optimal Pareto frontier solution set obtained by the NSGA-II algorithm.

Numerical examples verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm as it is able to find a high-quality solution and the risk assessment method proposed in this paper can provide support for the route decision.

The impact of timetable on transportation duration is analyzed and making a detailed description in the mathematical model. The uncertain transportation duration and cost are represented by random number that obeys a certain distribution and designed NSGA-II with MC simulation to solve the proposed problem. The data-driven strategy is adopted to reduce the computational time caused by the combination of evolutionary algorithm and MC simulation. The elite retention strategy with external archiving is created to improve the quality of solutions. A risk assessment approach is proposed for the solution scheme and in the numerical simulation experiment.

This paper aims to investigate how institutional entrepreneurs in a mature field acquire different forms of legitimacy through various narrative strategies, as revealed by a historical analysis of the Late Qing Dynasty of China. Specifically, the study seeks to illuminate the narrative techniques employed by these entrepreneurs to build multi-level legitimacies for their new systems during the national crises of the late 19th century.

This study employs a qualitative approach based on three historical case studies of Westernization, namely advocates, reformists and revolutionaries during the Late Qing Dynasty of China. It delves into the institutional entrepreneurial activities of these groups, investigating how they navigated and influenced their sociopolitical context through narrative strategies.

The findings reveal that institutional entrepreneurs utilize various narrative techniques to build legitimacy. These include (1) modifying and disseminating narratives at the proper time, (2) ascribing their proposed system to cultural tradition by reinterpreting classical works and (3) offering understandable and concrete promises to stakeholders. The study also identifies an evolving pattern of narratives underpinned by mutual learning and continuous iteration among different factions of institutional entrepreneurs.

This paper adds new insights to the literature on institutional entrepreneurs and, more broadly, to institutional research literature by advancing our understanding of the discursive dynamics underlying institutional changes. It unveils the complex interplay of narrative techniques and legitimacy building in the context of societal and institutional upheaval, providing a nuanced understanding of the role of narratives in institutional entrepreneurship.