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The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of information technology (IT) on supply chain performance in the automotive industry. Prior studies that analyzed the impact of IT on supply chain performance report results representing the situation of the “average industry.” This research focuses on the automotive industry because of its major importance in many national economies and due to the fact that automotive supply chains do not represent the supply chain of the average industry.

A research model is proposed to examine the relationships between IT capabilities, supply chain capabilities, and supplier performance. The model divides IT capabilities into functional and data capabilities, and supply chain capabilities into internal process excellence and information sharing. Data have been collected from 343 automotive first-tier suppliers. Structural equation modeling with partial least squares is used to analyze the data.

The results suggest that functional capabilities have the greatest impact on internal process excellence, which in turn enhances supplier performance. However, frequent and adequate information sharing also contributes significantly to supplier performance. Data capabilities enable supply chain capabilities through their positive impact on functional capabilities.

The findings will help managers to understand the effect of IT implementation on company performance and to decide whether to invest in the expansion of IT capacities.

This research reports the impact of IT on supply chain performance in one of the most important industries in many industrialized countries, and it provides a new perspective on evaluating the contribution of IT on firm performance.

Matching foods available at food pantries to client preferences provides a variety of benefits and should be viewed as a best practice.

Data on food pantry client demographics and choices were collected throughout 2019, resulting in 467,384 recorded food choices. Households were segmented using a cluster analysis based on observed choices. Next, a variety of demographics-based statistical models were built to predict food choice segment membership.

Six different segments of clients emerge from the choice data. Some segments choose mostly fruits and vegetables; other segments prefer different options such as grains, animal protein, plant protein or easier-to-prepare but more processed combination foods. Further, these choice-based segments can be predicted with varying levels of accuracy using demographic information. This highlights that the food people choose is related to their identities. For example, as household size grows, clients are less likely to belong to the segment preferring combination foods and more likely to belong to the segment preferring fresh fruits and vegetables. However, other demographics are more predictive of different segments; for example, Asian households are more likely to belong to segments that show preference for plant proteins or for grains.

Large-scale data on pantry client choice is exceedingly rare. The authors use this unique data set to propose food pantries understand their clients better through traditional marketing methods, specifically segmentation.

Our fifth annual survey of the business leaders to keep an eye on the next year.

Increasingly, universities are involved in providing leadership development opportunities that support students’ academic endeavours and their personal and professional development, including employability and citizenship skills. Leadership experiences are beneficial not only for students, but also for universities, the wider community, and future employers. To develop a greater understanding of students’ perceived benefits of their involvement in peer leadership activities, a group of Australasian universities participated in a pilot survey based on the United States National Survey of Peer Leadership. Overall, the results suggest students believe they benefit from peer leadership experiences across a range of key outcomes areas, most prominently creative problem solving, appreciation of diversity, and a sense of belonging and contributing to the university community.

The issue of “predatory” publishing and the scholarly value of journals that claim to operate within an academic framework, namely, by using peer review and editorial quality control, but do not, while attempting to extract open access (OA) or other publication-related fees, is an extremely important topic that affects academics around the globe. Until 2017, global academia relied on two now-defunct Jeffrey Beall “predatory” OA publishing blacklists to select their choice of publishing venue. This paper aims to explore how media has played a role in spinning public impressions about this issue.

The authors focus on a 2017 New York Times article by Gina Kolata, on a selected number of peer reviewed published papers on the topic of “predatory” publications and on an editorial by the Editor-in-Chief of REM, a SciELO- and Scopus-indexed OA journal.

The Kolata article offers biased, inaccurate and potentially misleading information about the state of “predatory” publishing: it relies heavily on the assumption that the now-defunct Beall blacklists were accurate when in fact they are not; it relies on a paper published in a non-predatory (i.e., non-Beall-listed) non-OA journal that claimed incorrectly the existence of financial rewards by faculty members of a Canadian business school from “predatory” publications; it praised a sting operation that used methods of deception and falsification to achieve its conclusions. The authors show how misleading information by the New York Times was transposed downstream via the REM editorial.

Education of academics.

Thousands of preprints related to Covid-19 have effused into the academic literature. Even though these are not peer-reviewed documents and have not been vetted by medical or other experts, several have been cited, while others have been widely promoted by the media. While many preprints eventually find their way into the published literature, usually through integrated publishing streams, there is a small body of preprints that have been opaquely withdrawn/retracted, without suitable reasons, leaving only a vestigial or skeletal record online. Others have, quite literally, vanished. This paper aims to examine some of those cases.

For peer-reviewed literature, a retracted academic paper is usually water-marked with “RETRACTED” across each page of the document, as recommended by ethical bodies such as the Committee on Publication Ethics, which represents thousands of journals and publishers. Curiously, even though pro-preprint groups claim that preprints are an integral part of the publication process and a scholarly instrument, there are no strict, detailed or established ethical guidelines for preprints on most preprint servers. This paper identifies select withdrawn/retracted preprints and emphasizes that the opaque removal of preprints from the scholarly record may constitute unscholarly, possibly even predatory or unethical, behavior.

Strict ethical guidelines are urgently needed for preprints, and preprint authors, in the case of misconduct, should face the same procedure and consequences as standard peer-reviewed academic literature.

Journals and publishers that have silently retracted or withdrawn preprints should reinstate them, as for regular retracted literature, except for highly exceptional cases.

Our point of departure is a reservation concerning the validity of cosmopolitan ideas in response to 9/11. Cosmopolitanism in the social and political sciences plays an important role in the reconstruction of conceptual tools, the diagnosis of the current epoch and the creation of new normative standards. Its key motif, however, that of epochal change from a nationally-based to a cosmopolitan world order, is prematurely dismissive of traditional categories and assimilative of a normative vision. The separation of the present from the past is as overstated as is its conflation with the future.

The field of cognitive-behavioural therapy contains many different theoretical models of psychopathology, with each discipline ascribing greater emphasis to a particular cognitive process or organisation of beliefs. This paper seeks to propose a method of integrating the two most widely practiced and researched schools of CBT; Beck ' s cognitive therapy (CT) and Ellis ' s rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT).

Although there exist a large degree of similarity between the two therapeutic approaches, the two models do differ in relation to their respective hypothesises regarding the core psychological variable in psychopathology. Cognitive theory hypothesises that negative representational beliefs are of central importance whereas rational emotive behaviour theory hypothesises that negative evaluative demands lie at the core of psychological disturbance. This paper evaluates these competing predictions on the basis of the available empirical literature.

The empirical literature provides greater support for the organisation and interrelations of the irrational beliefs proposed by REBT theory over CT theory, however the research data clearly indicate the importance of the cognitive variables stressed by CT theory in the pathogenesis of psychological distress. Based on the available evidence an integrated CBT model which incorporates elements of both CT and REBT theory is presented. It is proposed that this integrated model can serve as the stepping-stone toward a larger, single, coherent CBT model of psychopathology.

Few empirical studies have directly compared the competing predictions of CT and REBT theory. If future research supports the findings presented in this paper, the proposed model can serve as a template for the development of a unified, general-CBT theory of psychopathology.

The integrated model presented in this paper can serve as a guiding theoretical model for therapeutic practice which takes into account therapeutic methods from both CT and REBT.

This paper proposes the first theoretical model which incorporates the competing theoretical conceptualizations of psychological distress from the two main schools of CBT.