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In 2022, the International Network for Quality Assurance (QA) Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) published the new guidelines by adding three QA modules in response to the changing higher education landscape. The paper aims to investigate the transformative focus of quality assurance in higher education globally as well as Asian response to three new QA modules according to the INQAAHE ISGs.

The research conducted a quantitative approach for data collection. An on-line survey was conducted to perceive QA practices, perceptions toward new emerging QA modules and challenges encountered. In total, there were 26 responses from 18 territories with 22 QA agencies. A total of 13 out of them have a national qualifications framework in place.

Three are three major findings in the study. First, national policy and criteria and standards in distance education have been developed in the majority of Asian nations. Second, non-signatories of the Tokyo Convention had a higher proportion of having related policies, regulations and criteria in CBHE and distance education. Third, national policies and regulations; and lack of professional staff are two common challenges implementing QA in new types of providers.

The findings are of value for policymakers, QA agencies and universities to advocate the new QA model as a systematic approach in response to changing higher education landscape in the post pandemic era.

The 2020 pandemic disrupted traditional student mobility and forced a larger majority of transnational programmes to switch to a virtual or hybrid mode, including joint and double degree programmes. Therefore, this study aims to perceive the linkage between quality assurance (QA) and delivery modes of cross-border higher education (CBHE) in Asia before and during the pandemic.

Through an online survey and semi-structured interviews, the process by which top 200 ranked universities in the 2022 QS global ranking responded to QA and qualification issues of joint/dual degree programs in conjunction with delivery modes was explored.

The study has discovered that most respondents from universities, to some extent, tended to be positive about the effectiveness of hybrid delivery of the joint/dual degree programs, even if they still preferred the physical mode to alternatives. Either “divergence” or “responsiveness” QA modes were not applied appropriately in most joint/dual degree programs of the selected universities during the pandemic. Moreover, a fair, transparent and convergent quality and qualification system should be established to facilitate agility and responsiveness of CBHE.

The findings are of value for policymakers, QA agencies and universities to advocate the new QA model for CBHE as a systematic approach in response to changing higher education landscape in the post-pandemic era.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how firms can influence customer loyalty through customer commitment by leveraging two constructs of service quality: service assurance and service reliability.

The analyses are based on 138 responses retrieved from experienced users of mobile phone services in one of the big cities in the South-eastern part of Nigeria through a survey questionnaire. The validity and reliability of the measurement model as well as the proposed hypotheses were examined through the partial least squares structural equation modelling procedure.

Service reliability is a direct predictor of customer loyalty while service assurance is not. Affective commitment has a direct positive effect on customer loyalty and partially mediates the relationship between service reliability and customer loyalty. In contrast, the mediating effects of affective and continuance commitment on the relationship between service assurance and customer loyalty were positive but insignificant. Finally, affective commitment mediates the effect of continuance commitment on customer loyalty.

The mediating role of the individual components of commitment in the links between the individual dimensions of service quality and customer loyalty is largely untested in the literature. This line of inquiry can form the basis for future research proposals. Additionally, the outcomes that emerged from this research must be interpreted with caution due to the size of the sample on which analyses were based. Future research should employ larger samples.

Services organisations especially telecommunication firms may benefit from customer loyalty by pursuing a combined strategy of increasing service assurance, service reliability, affective commitment and continuance commitment both independently and in tandem.

As far as could be established, this paper is the first to explore the mediating effects of affective and continuance commitment on the links between service quality dimensions and customer loyalty.

Business ethics has become a controversial topic as China integrates more closely into the world economy and there are signs of convergence within global professions. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to study guanxi and business ethics in China within the context of social capital development, with a view to creating a more balanced interpretation that provides insights for Westerners wishing to conduct business in China.

In terms of methodology, the work is based on the results of a recent survey conducted among Chinese executives in southern China.

The major findings suggest that the processes of developing social capital and the nurturing of company‐to‐company relationships need to be planned carefully. Thus, no one individual should be responsible for the China connection, although the appointment of a team leader is essential, otherwise the Chinese side would become confused. Negotiations always are to be conducted on a team basis and always approved at the highest levels in the corporate structure.

The limitations of this paper include the difficulties of obtaining any research sample in China. Thus, we refer to the work of Weiss, (Learning From Strangers, Free Press, New York.) and use a snowball sample.

The practical implications of the paper are that guanxi (a type of social capital), can be managed and that corruption does not have to result from the use of guanxi‐based relationships. Thus, the originality arises out of the practical implications, in that for the first time, Western concepts of social capital and Asian concepts of guanxi have been compared, leading to practical recommendations for Western managers.

Although the benefits of customer loyalty are well researched and understood, a clear explication of how customer attitudinal loyalty evolves is lacking. Cultural discrepancies across contexts are also argued as restraining the search for universal and dominant antecedents of loyalty. As a result of the high collectivistic ranking of the Nigerian culture, the purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents of attitudinal loyalty within the Nigerian telecom market.

This study is based on survey data obtained from 138 informants who are experienced users of telecommunication services in Nigeria. The cross-sectional data were examined for internal consistency using Cronbach α internal consistency measure whereas the proposed hypotheses were tested using a multiple regression technique after conducting series of validation tests to ensure that none of the assumptions of regression was violated.

The results indicate that service reliability and customer commitment explains 65 per cent of the total variance in attitudinal loyalty. Additionally, customer commitment was established as a stronger predictor of attitudinal loyalty than service reliability.

This study is limited to the extent that it used a convenience sampling approach which may not have allowed for a fully matched profile of the respondents. But the satisfactory fit of the regression model allows for the research to be a basis of a reliable comparison for future studies. Additionally, due to the limited evidence on how attitudinal loyalty evolves in the telecommunication sector, the results that emerged from this research should only be compared cautiously to the findings of previous studies.

For users of telecommunication services to become attitudinally loyal, telecom firms must get customers to become committed to their brands and also deliver reliable services. Consequently, capacity building investments that enable reliable services to be delivered and creative pricing structure and information sharing as well as promise fulfilment which attract customers’ commitment are therefore at the core of developing attitudinally loyal customers’ pool.

Although studies on customer loyalty are not new, the fact that this paper examined how attitudinal loyalty evolves in a saturated telecommunication context with a high collectivistic cultural ranking makes it a significant contribution to customer loyalty research because of the concentration of most studies in the western markets, the likelihood of disparities across markets influencing the antecedents of the construct and the absence of such research in the Nigerian telecom setting.

The persistent growth of ‘nativists’ in Hong Kong not only highlighted people's consideration over mainlandization, it also stimulates Beijing's nerve on national security. This paper adopts a critical perspective to explore the development of ‘Hong Kong Nationalism’ that emerged in 2015. It will show the development of ‘Hong Kong nationalism’ is a phenomenon compounded by the creation of critical academics, government exaggeration, and pro-Beijing media labeling. In fact, this phenomenon leads to the suppression of political space for critical opposition.

The interaction between Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government, central government, critical academics, and pro-Beijing media will be used to adopt a conceptual framework to show how their interrelationship would derive tremendous impacts to the development of ‘Hong Kong Nationalism.’ It will further investigate some implications for the further political development in Hong Kong.

The development of ‘Hong Kong Nationalism’ illustrates the triangular relations between critical academic, HKSAR and the Beijing government, and pro-Beijing media. The critical academics create and imagine such ‘Hong Kong Nationalism’ with Hong Kong's political destiny that stimulates the nerve of Beijing and HKSAR on territorial integrity. The ‘imagined nationalism’ advocated by critical and opposition academics and advanced by the activists not only opened the Pandora's box that derives a Trojan horse scenario for the development of pan-democratic camp which affects the democracy movement tremendously.

This paper is the first academic paper to explore ‘Hong Kong Nationalism’ through analyzing the discourse advocated by critical academics. This paper can also fill in the gap from existing literature about social movement in Hong Kong as most of them ignored the influence of radical nativist movement.

Purpose: This chapter presents the topics related to environmental, social and governanace (ESG) scoring, with particular emphasis on ESG ratings as a tool for benchmarking the company. The banking sector was selected for the study and comparisons were made against the banking sector in the European Union (EU).

Methodology: Firstly, a literature review and a bibliometric analysis of publications related to ESG scoring were conducted for this chapter. Secondly, the LSEG database were employed and further studied in environmental, social, and governance. The time scope of the research is 2017–2022. Using descriptive statistic tools and comparative studies of scoring, we perform an analysis for all three ESG areas and the value of the total scoring for banks from EU countries.

Findings: ESG scoring for all dimensions in the banking sector in EU countries shows good relative ESG performance and above average degree of transparency in reporting material ESG data publicly. The highest rank for total ESG score has banks from France, Portugal, and Spain (score A). Banks from Sweden, Slovenia, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Greece, Germany, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Austria assessed the scoring, which was situated above the median values, in the third quartile (score B). The last group with satisfactory relative ESG performance (score C) are banks from Slovakia, Denmark, Cyprus, and Belgium. The studies also allow us to formulate the following conclusions: the average and the median values for all ESG disclosure areas are higher in the old EU countries in all ESG dimensions. Moreover, other statistical measures (Q1, Q3) are also higher in banks from the old EU countries.

Implications: Important both for banks’ insiders and stakeholders as it provides a measurement and benchmarking tool. The data can be used as well for further analysis of the banking sector.

Limitations: Comparable ESG scoring among EU countries. Nevertheless, not all banks and countries were included in further analysis because of a lack of data. Unfortunately, the comparative analysis covers only 19 out of 27 counties. The time scope of the research is limited to six years due to regulatory limitations.

Future Research: The relationship between ESG scores and the performance of banks (e.g., return on assets, return on equity, market value).

The purpose of this paper is to trace the changing pattern of identity politics in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). It shows that in response to the massive urban renewal projects in the 2000s, “civic localism” in the form of cultural preservation movement emerged to protect local community culture against the government-business hegemony. However, due to the deepening of social integration between Hong Kong and the mainland, a new “anti-mainland localism” emerged in the 2010s against the influx of mainlanders. In 2015–2016, as a result of Beijing’s active interference in Hong Kong affairs, localism is further transformed to Hong Kong “independence.”

This paper uses a historical methodology to trace the changing pattern of identity politics in Hong Kong after it becomes a special administrative region of China in 1997.

It shows how the interaction among the following three factors has shaped the pattern of localism in Hong Kong: macro historical-structural context, social movement dynamics and the response of Hong Kong and mainland government.

This paper argues that Beijing’s hardline policy toward Hong Kong localism may work in the short run to all push the pro-independence activities underground. However, unless the structural contradiction of the HKSAR is resolved, it seems likely that anti-mainland localism and Hong Kong independence sentiment and movement will come back with a vengeance at a later stage.

The literature tends to discuss Hong Kong localism in very general terms and fails to reveal its changing nature. This paper contributes by distinguishing three different forms of localism: civic localism in the mid-2000s, anti-mainland in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and independence after 2016. It shows how the macro historical-structural transformation, social movement dynamics and the responses of the Hong Kong SAR government and Beijing government have led to the changes of civic localism to anti-mainland localism, and finally to independence.

Embracing a large set of innovation objectives and collaborating with diverse partners have been promoted as a means to improve innovation performance. However, empirical evidence on the relationships between breadth of objectives, breadth of cooperation and innovation performance is limited, particularly in the context of emerging economies. A larger number of objectives and cooperation partners inevitably increases the complexity in organizational alignment, and cooperation eventually leads to diminishing returns. This study adds to the debate on the costs and benefits of cooperation for innovation. Understanding the optimal levels of the breadth of objectives and cooperation supports managerial decision-making and productivity in the practice of cooperation for innovation.

Operationalizing breadth of innovation objectives and cooperation via the Turkish Community Innovation Survey data, self-reports reflecting 5,863 firm-level responses between 2006 and 2008 are analysed using tobit and probit models. The maximum likelihood estimator is used to find the optimal levels for breadth of objectives and cooperation.

Firms with greater breadth of innovation objectives experience higher innovation performance; those with greater breadth of cooperation also experience higher innovation performance, but our results indicate the existence of optimal levels of breadth for both innovation objectives and cooperation.

The authors extend the logic that there is no safety in numbers in cooperation for innovation. If the aim is to enhance innovation performance, managers and policymakers need to pay attention to the number of innovation objectives and the amount of cooperation pursued by firms. However, innovation success may be closely associated with a firm's dynamic capabilities and ability to mobilize its resources. Drawing on organizational learning theories, future research could explore why a lower than maximum level of cooperation may be more conducive to reaching levels of enhanced innovation performance and whether this level is influenced by cognitive processes.

The authors draw attention to the ideal number of innovation objectives and number of cooperating partners required to enhance innovation performance, thus contributing to the debate on the complex relationships between innovation, performance and cooperation in the unique setting of a large developing economy.