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Thyssen Umformtechnik Turbinenkomponenten (TUT) in Remscheid is a supplier of turbine components for landbase turbines and for aero‐engines. Customers in the aerospace and landbase turbine business strive for reductions in costs and weight as well as for the improvement of operating temperatures in order to increase the efficiency of their engines. Next to short‐term activities like continuous improvement for cost reduction, TUT carries out research work as a long‐term investment. The research activities at TUT are numerous and range from the simulation of forging operations to the qualification of advanced materials. Various examples are presented.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

Characteristics of substance use disorders (SUDs) comorbid with mental health disorders (MHDs) are not completely clear in early population based studies. The objective of this paper is to examine the association of SUDs comorbid with MHDs and vice‐versa using a large inpatient dataset.

The data (1 July 2001 to 30 June 2007) were extracted from the New South Wales Inpatient Statistic Data Collection. Statistical analysis was performed using SAS.

There was a total of 10,211,596 (4,671,243 males (45.75 per cent) and 5,540,353 females (54.25 per cent)) admissions. Over the six years, between 9.4 per cent and 12.6 per cent of the patients with MHDs were diagnosed as having SUDs. Of the patients diagnosed with SUDs, between 42.5 per cent and 57.4 per cent also had a diagnosis of MHDs. Overall, the comorbidity for both MHDs and SUDs was between 8.4 per cent and 11.3 per cent. The odds ratio for either SUDs or MHDs compared to the general population was between 13.0 to 20.8.

Patients with SUDs are highly likely to have a mental health problem. This is the first largest study and the findings imply that different efforts towards the prevention, care and management of comorbidity may be warranted.

This study aims to examine the impact of customer experience of cannabis-infused food and beverage perception (sensory experience, novelty experience, health concerns and restaurant experience) on favouring these products and subsequent customer citizenship behaviour.

Using a purposive sampling approach, an onsite survey was administered to Thai Gen Z customers in consuming cannabis-infused foods and/or beverages. Subsequently, the sample consisted of 330 respondents. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used for the analyses.

The results indicated that sensory experience, health concerns and restaurant experience had significant positive effects on favouring cannabis-infused foods and beverages. This favourability, in turn, positively affected customer citizenship behaviour. In addition, favouring cannabis-infused foods and beverages partially mediated the relationships between customer citizenship behaviour and sensory experience, health concerns and restaurant experience.

This study provides a new contribution to the literature with a first empirical examination showing positive favouring of cannabis-infused foods and beverages among young consumers in Thailand. It provides practical insights for managers in emerging markets to leverage cannabis-infused products as part of the enhancement of the global food and beverage industry. The study also offers an example of how to move forward through an unknown territory regarding perceptions of consumer experiences.

The first part of the bibliography lists the collections of private papers from which cited material comes. The second part contains relevant works in English relating to Henry George and the single tax, and includes graduate papers. The third part presents a selected list of books about Irish history, the Irish-American experience, Roman Catholic history, and related subjects. The fourth part contains a list of consulted newspapers. All cited works are included in their respective categories, except for newspaper articles, details of which are included in the notes.

My analysis is structured as a comparative study between two countries – New Zealand and Italy – and focuses on the relationship between national audiences and the trans-media structure of the popular television series Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011– present). Game of Thrones’ narrative is characterized by elements that emphasize its fictitious world, since these elements belong to the fantasy genre, which, by definition, deals with the supernatural. From this standpoint, the fantastic universe of the series functions as an escape route from everyday life. However, instead of following the genre rules, “Game of Thrones articulates a striking refusal of the hopeful mythologies of high epic fantasy” (Tasker & Steenberg, 2016, p. 189) by focusing on the brutal, the extreme, and the overall injustice and chaos that permeate a society in which war and death appear to be inescapable. In this chapter, the textual schematic of Game of Thrones is examined through the emotional reactions, during focus group sessions, of national fan groups to themes and events of the show. In particular, the analysis of Italian and New Zealand followers’ comments on Game of Thrones will be instrumental to illustrating the reasons for their passion for the series as well as the main concerns that arise during the viewing. This ambivalent attitude in fans’ responses and engagement will emerge as significantly dependent on the media text’s capacity to transcend the boundaries of a simple categorization, to stand as a notable example of a program that manages to appeal to diverse audiences beyond the country of origin.

Misinformation on social media has become a great threat across the globe. Therefore, the authors aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of social media users' misinformation combating behavior, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the authors merged the uses and gratifications theory, social cognitive theory and theory of prosocial behavior into one theoretical framework (e.g. information seeking, status seeking, entertainment and norms of reciprocity) to understand their effect on users' prosocial media sharing experience and misinformation self-efficacy to combat misinformation.

The authors collected data from 356 social media users through “Google Forms” during the third wave of coronavirus in Pakistan. Further, the authors applied structural equation modeling for hypotheses testing.

The authors noted that entertainment and perceived norms of reciprocity positively affect social media users' prior experience and misinformation self-efficacy to enhance their misinformation combating intention. However, information seeking positively affects social media users' prior experience and insignificantly affects their misinformation self-efficacy. Similarly, status seeking was noted to be insignificantly associated with social media users' prior experience and misinformation self-efficacy.

The authors tested this model of misinformation combating intention in a developing country during the COVID-19 pandemic and noted that entertainment and status seeking motives are context-specific. Therefore, this study may likely benefit researchers, academicians and policymakers to understand the causal relationship between motivations and the behavior of combating misinformation on social media within a developing country.

In this study the authors merged three theories (e.g. uses and gratifications theory, social cognitive theory and theory of prosocial behavior) to understand information seeking, status seeking, entertainment and norms of reciprocity as the main motives for social media users' misinformation combating intention.

Much scholarship has looked at how radical politics and its symbolism are framed and distorted by the mass media, while less attention has been devoted to how the symbolic imagery of violence and death is used in activists’ self-representations. This chapter provides one such alternative angle by probing how “visual protest materials” are creatively used in activists’ own videos to pass on stories of communion and contestation.It interrogates how activist video practices mirror the continuum between physical places and mediated spaces in political activism by analyzing a thread of videos circulating on YouTube that commemorate people who have died in connection with three protest events across Europe, putting on display the “spectacles of death” punctuating each of these events. The analysis draws on social semiotics, in particular the work of Barthes (1981) and Zelizer (2010), to examine how death is used as a visual trope to signify the ultimate prize of taking to the streets. This chapter suggests how agency and meaning travel back and forth between offline and online spaces of activism. Engaging with some implications of this interplay, the chapter argues that, in the quest to document truth and induce realism and immediacy, tensions between fact and fiction emerge in the creative appropriation and remixing of images. Finally, it demonstrates how the cityscape is recruited to document and dramatize the spectacle of death as part of a larger struggle for semiotic resources within the protest space and over media representations of social movements more generally.

This study aims to examine the impact of the transformation of an assessment on students’ performance and perspectives in an English for Academic Purposes course in Hong Kong. The assessment was changed from the traditional pen-and-paper mode to an unproctored online mode.

Using mixed methods, the research team analysed the differences between the assessment performances of those who took the course before the pandemic (n = 664) and those who took it during the pandemic (n = 702). Furthermore, focus group interviews were conducted with seven students regarding their perspectives on the unproctored assessment.

The results revealed that, although there were no major differences in the overall grades of the two groups, students who were assessed online during the pandemic performed significantly better in terms of their English use. Nevertheless, the shift to online assessment had several negative effects on the students.

Previous studies on unproctored online assessments (UOA) were concerned with potential learning quality issues, such as plagiarism and grade inflation. This study, however, provided empirical evidence that high-quality assessment delivery can be provided via UOA if the question types and assessment arrangements are carefully decided.

While there is no question that women on movie screens are frequently eroticised, with countless shots of heaving bosoms or curvaceous rear ends, action stars do occasionally get a reprieve. Pam Grier, the first female action star, was not so lucky. While Grier's Amazonian status should be celebrated, the dark side of her career should also be noted as a cautionary tale of just how much misogyny and racism lurks behind Hollywood doors and intertwined into American cinema history. This chapter examines how Grier's career forces us to rethink both femininity and racism, as well as action films themselves.