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The purpose of this paper is to explore control and resistance in the UK further education (FE) sector by examining senior college managers’ attempts to engineer culture change and analysing lecturers’ resistance to such measures.

Data were derived from interviews with managers and lecturers in two English FE colleges and the analysis of college documents. Interview data were analysed thematically using NVIVO software.

It was found that college managers sought to build consent to change among lecturers based on values derived from “business‐like” views. Culture change initiatives were framed within the language of empowerment but lecturers’ experiences of change led them to feel disempowered and cynical as managers imposed their view of what lecturers should be doing and how they should behave. This attempt to gain control of the lecturers’ labour process invoked the “Stepford” lecturer metaphor used in the paper. Paradoxically, as managers sought to create lecturers who were less resistant to change, individualised resistance intensified as managers’ attempts to win hearts and minds conspicuously failed.

The paper draws on data from two case study colleges and this limits the generalisability of its findings.

The paper provides a critical perspective on the received wisdom of investing in stylised change programmes that promise to win staff over to change but which may alienate those they purport to empower and ultimately lead to degenerative workplace relations.

The paper offers new insights into culture change from the juxtaposed, polarised views of senior managers and lecturers, while highlighting the negative consequences of imposing change initiatives from above.

The purpose of this article is to examine how the labour process of further education lecturers has changed as a result of legislative reforms introduced in the early 1990s.

The paper draws on labour process theory and emergent perspectives on “the new public management” to provide theoretical frameworks. Evidence is derived from research carried out at three FE colleges in the English West Midlands involving interviews with managers and lecturing staff, documentary material and a survey of lecturing staff employed in the colleges.

Market‐based reforms in this sector have resulted in the intensification and extensification of work effort for lecturers. This paper argues that these changes have been driven by the ideological underpinning of the reform process. Individual and collective acts of lecturer resistance have been insufficiently strong to prevent change from occurring and worker alienation has increased.

The case study method renders generalisability of findings difficult. Comparative studies in other localities and sectors are needed.

The research indicates that the “new managerialism” – which has developed in the public sector – has created an increasingly alienated workforce and that the processes of change in many institutions have had negative outcomes.

The research demonstrates and application of labour process theory, supported by empirical evidence, as a means for examining the changing experiences of a group of public sector workers and assessing the effect of the “new managerialism” on workers' experiences.

The purpose of the paper is to discuss how the so‐called “modernisation” agenda has triggered changes in the structure and management of the UK public sector. The concern of the paper is with how such changes have impacted on the labour process of lecturers in the English further education sector.

A Bravermanian approach is adopted to examine aspects of change in the FE lecturer labour process. Empirical evidence is derived from three FE colleges and draws on data from semi‐structured interviews, a survey of lecturers and documentary evidence.

Power relations have been radically reinvented in these colleges, with senior managers now able to redefine the parameters of lecturers' contractual obligations. These colleges were characterised by standardisation, routinisation and rules driven by senior managers who saw themselves as “change agents” and “modernisers”. Lecturers, on the other hand, felt that they had less power, job autonomy and task discretion. The labour process provides a valid explanatory framework for linking these observed changes in workplace relations to broader matters of political economy.

The research provides detailed insights into changes in FE lecturers' working experiences. However, the reliance on three colleges may place some limitations on the generalisability of these findings.

FE lecturers are central to delivering on ministerial priorities around skills for work. The paper reveals that lecturers feel under‐valued, over‐worked and over‐managed. This raises questions as to the sustainability of current approaches to the management of FE lecturer labour.

The FE sector continues to be under‐researched and the paper therefore provides a valuable contribution.

In the context of nursing in higher education, digital competencies are increasingly recognised as a necessary skillset, within a continuously evolving healthcare professional landscape. This study sought to explore nursing students’ digital competencies and to further understand the digital literacy gaps and barriers they encounter for both learning and future work.

The research involved a cross-sectional, discipline-based empirical study of nursing students’ self-assessed digital competencies via a questionnaire survey, which collected quantitative and qualitative data from a total of five hundred and fifty-three students. The study explored the role of demographics (age, urban/rural geographical location of growing up, study year, learning disabilities (neurodiversity)) and experiences of digital divides (e.g., access, contextual and behavioural barriers) play on students’ digital competencies and outcomes.

Students’ digital competencies were found at an intermediate level, with younger and first-year students self-assessing higher. Significant differences were identified between students who had encountered digital barriers/divides and those who had not, with the former, self-reporting lower digital competencies. Students with learning disabilities reported complex support needs for processing and organizing digital information and for productivity. Almost all the individual digital competencies items assessed had strong statistical correlations between them.

The research offers key recommendations for academic libraries for the ongoing, evolving exploration of students’ digital competencies and for the need to follow tailored, discipline-related, holistic, practice-based and curriculum-embedded approaches to students’ digital skills development and support. It provides novel insights into digital competencies development for nursing students, particularly those who experience digital divides.

This study investigates the influence of corporate culture on financial reporting transparency within Iranian firms.

Leveraging a dataset of 1,480 firm-year observations from the Tehran Stock Exchange spanning from 2013 to 2022, the study employs text mining to quantify linguistic features of corporate culture and transparency, specifically readability and tone, within annual financial statements and Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) reports.

Our results confirm a positive and significant relationship between corporate culture and financial reporting transparency. The distinct dimensions of corporate culture — Creativity, Competition, Control, and Collaboration — each uniquely enhance financial transparency. Robustness tests including firm fixed-effects, entropy balancing, Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) validate the profound influence of corporate culture on transparency. Additionally, our analysis shows that corporate culture significantly affects the disclosure of business, operational, and financial risks, with varying impacts across risk categories. Cross-sectional analysis further reveals how the impact of corporate culture on transparency varies significantly across different industries and firm sizes.

The study’s scope, while focused on Iran, opens avenues for comparative research in different cultural and regulatory environments. Its reliance on text mining could be complemented by qualitative methods to capture more nuanced linguistic subtleties.

Findings underscore the strategic importance of cultivating a transparent corporate culture for enhancing financial reporting practices and stakeholder trust, particularly in emerging economies with similar dynamics to Iran.

This research is pioneering in its quantitative analysis of the textual features of corporate culture and its impact on transparency within Iranian corporate reports, integrating foundational theoretical perspectives with empirical evidence.

Built on the socioemotional selectivity theory, the purpose of this paper is to analyze elderly female consumers’ consumption of environmentally sustainable apparel (ESA) according to their time perspective (TP) (expansive vs limited) and different types of advertising appeals (emotional vs rational and positive vs negative emotional appeals).

The study conducted a survey and experiments with 154 US female consumers who were 65 years of age or older. Data were analyzed through regression and ANCOVA.

The results showed that older female adults with an expansive TP tended to consume ESA, with their fashion consciousness moderating the results. Rational and either positive or negative emotional advertisements with environmental messages were found to encourage the higher purchase intentions of elderly consumers more effectively than advertisements with no environmental messages.

Apparel retailers are recommended to consider the factor of TP when encouraging environmental consumption. Environmental messages containing rational information and eliciting positive and negative emotions are suggested to promote purchase intention toward ESA among elderly consumers.

This study addressed an under-studied segment in ESA consumption – elderly female consumers – built on the socioemotional selective theory, and confirmed that this group’s ESA consumption can be explained by their perspective on time. In addition, this study confirmed which advertising appeals would effectively encourage their ESA consumption, and provided theoretical explanations for these findings.

This study aims to compare graduate student perspectives of online versus face-to-face (FTF) education during the pandemic at two different universities. One university, the “International University”, was physically located in Korea but served an international base of students, and the other was a Jesuit, Catholic University in the USA.

An online Qualtrics survey was used to gather student perceptions on a five-point Likert scale on individual and program factors. Chi-square analysis using the contingency coefficient as the nominal value was performed to uncover significant differences.

Significant differences between the two groups existed on motivation, discipline, self-directed, independence, cost investment, preference, happiness, difficulty, student-to-student interaction and student-to-instructor interaction. This research has implications for instructors and administrators in identifying shortcomings and highlighting the uniqueness of different practices around the world.

Previous studies on student perceptions have been performed. However, this study is original in the fact that it directly compares two different graduate student populations perspectives of online versus FTF during the pandemic.

The concept of responsiveness has been widely discussed, yet so far most of this discussion has remained qualitative in nature. The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model identifying the key factors that determine the responsiveness of a supply chain system, which – once quantified – provide a unique profile of each supply chain setting towards the appropriate supply chain strategy.

The paper reviews existing contributions and synthesises these into a conceptual model of responsiveness. The model is applied using three case studies from the automotive and electronics industry. The case research is based on value stream mapping, semi‐structured interviews, and site visits.

Three key findings could be established: first, the concept of responsiveness has a simple logic that aligns itself to a wide range of manufacturing strategies. However, underlying this remit is a complex interaction of an array of key variables, and it was found that previous contributions largely have only addressed a subset of these. Second, these key variables can be grouped into three categories or dimensions of responsiveness – product, process and volume – to provide a holistic understanding of responsiveness and its key determinants. Third, due to the large involved, there cannot be one single “holy grail” concept of how responsiveness can be achieved, neither does one single approach apply to entire sectors.

A great variety of variables needs to be considered in order to provide a balanced view of all three dimensions of responsiveness, thus the case analyses remain at a necessarily high level.

The paper provides guidelines for management on how to align their supply chain strategy to volume, product and process contingency factors in order to balance responsiveness to customer demand and supply chain efficiency.

The paper aims to elevate a discussion that previously has been held mostly at a conceptual level beyond the qualitative description, and thus addresses a key shortcoming in the current debate.

This article aims to present a systematic and up-to-date account of carbon-based reinforcements, including carbon nanotube (CNT), carbon nanofibre (CNF), carbon black (CB), carbon fibre (CF) and grapheme, in shape-memory polymer (SMP) for electrical actuation.

Studies exploring carbon-based reinforcement in SMP composites for electrically conductive performance and Joule heating triggered shape recovery have been included, especially for the principle design, characterisation and shape recovery behaviour, making the article a comprehensive account of the systemic progress in SMP composite incorporating conductive carbon reinforcement.

SMPs are fascinating materials and have attracted great academic and industrial attention owing to their significant macroscopic shape deformation in the presence of an appropriate stimulus. The working mechanisms, the physico requirements and the theoretical origins of the different types of carbon-based reinforcement SMP composites have been discussed. Current research and development on the fabrication strategies of carbon-based reinforcement SMP composites have been summarised.

A systematic review is to evaluate carbon-based reinforcements in SMPs for electrical actuation and discuss recent developments and future applications.

Carbon-based reinforcements in SMPs can be used as smart deployable space structure in the broad field of aerospace technologies.

To reveal the research and development of utilising CNT, CNF, CB, CF and grapheme to achieve shape recovery of SMP composites through electrically resistive heating, which will significantly benefit the research and development of smart materials and systems.