Search results

This comparative case study looks towards the diverse approaches of higher education to support peacebuilding, from policy and philosophy to pedagogical practices, in conflict-affected and post-conflict settings. The achievement of global development goals is dependent on addressing access to quality education in conflict-affected contexts, including higher education. However, in settings affected by conflict, higher education is often perceived to be a luxury, not a necessity. This study, then, explores whether and how higher education might support peace and development through the unique perspective of the “three faces” of higher education in conflict contexts.

The paper is designed as a qualitative comparative case study. The research examines the work of university educators in two institutions in Afghanistan and Somaliland, highlighting the challenges and opportunities they face working in conflict-affected societies and their pedagogical responses to conflict. Data for the research were collected through in-depth interviews, documents, and digital artifacts with 12 university educators across the two institutions. The faculty teach a wide variety of subjects in the social sciences and humanities, subjects including and in addition to those specific to peace and development studies. To strengthen the interpretation of data, multiple coders were involved and intercoder reliability was conducted.

Findings indicate a number of challenges and opportunities that university lecturers and their institutions face in teaching for peace in conflict-affected contexts, particularly as it relates to the “three faces” of higher education to support, impede, or reveal the complicated nuances of peacebuilding in conflict settings. Member-checking was employed with participants to enhance the reliability of the analysis.

In the end, the paper contributes new empirical insights into higher education in conflict-affected contexts, particularly from the standpoint of faculty. Critical perspectives and implications for curriculum, pedagogy and research are offered.

This research aims to determine the influence that work flexibility (WF) has on the happiness of workers through the work and personal life balance, work-life balance (WLB), as a mediating variable, as well as the moderating role of gender between WLB and job happiness (JH). A structural model that describes the interactions between these study variables is proposed.

A quantitative approach was used. The data were collected by non-probabilistic sampling, surveying 200 mid-level employees in small and medium industrial enterprises (industrial SMEs). The proposed hypotheses were analyzed and tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results confirmed the hypotheses presented. In the relation of WLB and JH, positive work-family and family-work interactions would result in a greater increase in JH in the women group compared to men, and special characteristics were found in the variables in the Mexican context.

This study will provide information to those responsible for the human resources departments of companies to design and implement good practices in which importance can be given to labor agreements involving WF and the implementation of WLB policies differentiated by gender to generate happiness at work.

The JH construct proposed by Fisher (2010) was applied, and its relationship with WF and WLB in a post-pandemic context was studied. The research applied to supervisors and area managers of industrial SMEs reflects the importance of considering the balance between their life and work to achieve JH, understanding it as job satisfaction and more commitment to work, in addition to considering the differences by gender.

The aim of this paper is to focus on discovering whether high‐tech professionals as a user community search for information from Wikipedia to fulfill their job duties and, if they do, how they share information with co‐workers and clients.

An online questionnaire was used, administered by a commercial provider. The questionnaire consisted of 15 Likert‐scaled questions to assess participants' agreement with each question along with an optional open‐ended explanation. A total of 68 participants successfully answered the questionnaire. Participants' Likert rating scores were analyzed by two‐way ANOVA, one‐way ANOVA and correlational analyses using SPSS.

The analyses examined relationships among participants' characteristics, their use of information resources for research and teaching, information‐sharing behaviors, and use/non‐use of Wikipedia. Findings indicated that the participants treated Wikipedia as a ready reference for general information. Their concern is that Wikipedia only has a limited number of entries available at this point. They suggested that Wikipedia needed to improve the contribution and editorial process and to make it more rigorous.

Personal information infrastructure affects how the high‐tech professionals surveyed use‐and‐share information from Wikipedia for work. In the current situation, the participants consider Wikipedia to be a developing information resource and show less interest in contributing to it. The project is an exploratory study and more considerations are needed for this research area.

This study aims to assess the performance of Canadian higher educational institutions (HEIs) on the sustainable development goals (SDGs) from 2019 to 2023, determine where they have focused on, whether they have improved or not their performance and assess if having larger research income affects their sustainability performance.

Data were collected from the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings from 2019 to 2023 on 27 Canadian HEIs, and statistical tests were used to assess performance, trends and significant differences.

Results show that while overall Canadian HEIs are performing better on the SDGs, their minimum and maximum scores have improved and the variance across universities has declined; their performance on social and economic SDGs is significantly positive on some but not all these SDGs. More importantly, their environmental performance is poor, with a constant decline in their score on SDG#13 – climate action, which peaked in 2019 and was significantly higher than that of 2023. Results also show smaller research universities perform better than top institutions.

There is a lot of research on the impact of universities on the SDGs; however, this study makes a deeper and statistical assessment of a quarter of Canadian universities on all the SDGs, with important findings for decision makers to consider as they accept and act according to the role that educational institutions should play in sustainable development.