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Externalities influence the career trajectories of self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) and their respective career crafting. This study aims to explore the international career crafting of SIEs (encompassing their proactive career reflection and construction), taking the combined external influences of complexity, chance and change into consideration.

The authors employ a qualitative (interpretative) approach, combining career crafting and the chaos theory of careers (CTC) to further understand, from an individual standpoint, the impact of externalities on the career crafting strategies of 24 SIEs who have relocated within the European Union.

The authors show that SIEs' proactively craft their careers to varying degrees and with varying frequency. The CTC – incorporating complexity, chance and change – allows for a more nuanced understanding of SIEs' career crafting.

This paper applies the concept of career crafting to an international context, exploring the impact of externalities on SIEs' careers. In this way, the authors combine two previously separate theories, extend the application of career crafting to an international career context and emphasise the role of temporality and the whole-life view of career in SIEs’ career crafting approach.

The global biofuels sector has expanded rapidly in the past decade, with feedstock expansion penetrating many tropical areas. While the emerging demand for biofuels represents an opportunity for developing countries, it also poses a host of social and environmental risks. Large investments are needed to finance expansion of biofuel and feedstock production, suggesting that the financial sector may have a crucial role to play in mitigating these risks. This paper seeks to explore the role of financiers in expanding biofuel feedstock production and refining in tropical forest‐rich countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America to better understand the role and future potential of responsible finance in the biofuel sector.

The analysis draws on published data and reports from academia, industry, governments, civil society and the press, to quantify the magnitude and source of investments made from 2000‐2010 in 16 countries sampled from “ecoregions” subject to high rates of forest conversion, weak land tenure institutions, and vulnerable communities.

It is found that the case study countries received USD 5.3‐7.3 billion for feedstock production and USD 5.7‐6.7 billion for biofuel refining between 2000 and 2009. This was financed by a mix of entrepreneurs, private banks, investors, governments and multilateral banks. While no clear patterns emerge, foreign banks and institutional investors rank as “important” for most feedstocks and regions. Multilateral banks and domestic institutional investors seem to be the least important. Few financiers have criteria in place in order to ensure sustainable investing practices, and those who do tend to have policies of limited quality.

While much has been written on biofuel sustainability and governance, there is little research that delineates the nature of investment and finance in the sector.

The goal of the paper is to investigate how reservation wages of older unemployed welfare recipients change once they are no longer subject to standard job search requirements.

The authors apply a regression discontinuity design.

Consistent with theoretical predictions, the authors’ findings indicate that eliminating job search requirements will tend to increase reservation wages.

The results correspond to previous findings in the literature that monitoring leads to lower accepted wages and increased exits rates from unemployment, and that it may be a successful policy measure to keep older workers in the labor market.

Monitoring of job search effort has been shown to be an effective method of activating unemployed people, but little evidence has been found on the effect of activation measures on older workers.

This study proposes an extension of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) model to understand international travellers' intentions to visit Spain. This study aims to compare whether the predictive variables of the intention to travel differ depending on nationality. The extension includes: perceived risk, loyalty to the destination, past travel experience, public opinion climate and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).

A multiple-indicator, multiple-cause (MIMIC) model was developed as a structural equational model to predict the 1,978 participants' intention to travel. The structural model was used to determine the theoretical model for the total sample and by nationality (Germans, Britons and those from other European countries).

The extended models fitted the data well, explaining 64%–68% of the total variance, while differences depending on tourist nationality were also found. The MIMIC model indicated that German people's intention to travel to a holiday destination was influenced by their perception of risk, eWOM and loyalty to the country. In the British group, only the TPB variables were relevant. For those of other European nationalities, loyalty and eWOM were also significant. Travel experience, used as a variable in previous studies, was shown not to be significant. Overall, these results offer insights into how people from diverse countries and cultures embrace the aforementioned constructs when making travel decisions.

This study also has practical implications for policymakers in holiday tourism destinations, such as Spain. In particular, this study provides a better understanding of Britons' and Germans' travel intentions and could be beneficial for guiding policies for the recovery of the tourism industry in major tourism destinations.

Previous studies have applied various extended TPBs to one specific country or made comparisons between Asian countries. This study’s proposal makes a comparison of the variables used to predict the intention to visit a holiday destination among the European countries.

本研究提出了计划行为理论 (TPB) 模型的扩展, 以了解国际旅行者访问西班牙的意图。目的是比较旅行意图的预测变量是否因国籍而异。扩展包括：感知风险、对目的地的忠诚度、过去的旅行经历、舆论氛围和电子口碑（eWOM）。

开发了一个多指标、多原因 (MIMIC) 模型作为结构方程模型来预测 1,978 名参与者的旅行意图。结构模型用于确定总样本和国籍（德国人、英国人和来自其他欧洲国家的人）的理论模型。

扩展模型很好地拟合了数据, 解释了总方差的 64%–68%, 同时还发现了取决于旅游国籍的差异。 MIMIC 模型表明, 德国人前往度假目的地的意愿受到他们对风险、eWOM 和对国家忠诚度的认知的影响。在英国组中, 只有 TPB 变量是相关的。对于其他欧洲国家的人来说, 忠诚度和 eWOM 也很重要。旅行经验, 在以前的研究中用作变量, 被证明并不重要。总体而言, 这些结果提供了有关来自不同国家和文化的人们在做出旅行决定时如何接受上述结构的见解。

以前的研究已经将各种扩展的 TPB 应用于一个特定的国家或在亚洲国家之间进行了比较。我们的建议对用于预测欧洲国家旅游目的地意图的变量进行了比较。

Este estudio propone una extensión del modelo de la teoría del comportamiento planificado (TPB) para comprender las intenciones de visitar España de los viajeros internacionales. El objetivo es comparar si las variables que predicen la intención de viajar difieren según la nacionalidad. Esta extensión del modelo incluye variables como: riesgo percibido, lealtad al destino, experiencia de viaje anterior, clima de la opinión pública y el boca a boca electrónico (eWOM).

Se desarrolló un modelo de indicadores y causas múltiples (MIMIC) como modelo de ecuaciones estructurales para predecir la intención de viajar de los 1978 participantes. El modelo estructural se utilizó para comprobar el modelo teórico para la muestra total y por nacionalidades (alemanes, británicos y otros países europeos).

Los modelos ampliados propuestos se ajustaron bien a los datos, explicando entre el 64% y el 68% de la varianza total, si bien se encontraron diferencias en función de la nacionalidad del turista. El modelo MIMIC indicó que la intención de los alemanes de viajar a un destino de vacaciones estaba influenciada por su percepción de riesgo, el eWOM y la lealtad a España. En el grupo británico, solo las variables TPB resultaron relevantes. Para el grupo de otras nacionalidades europeas, la lealtad y el eWOM también fueron significativas. Sin embargo, la experiencia de viaje, utilizada en estudios previos, se mostró no significativa en todos los grupos. En general, estos resultados ofrecen información sobre cómo las personas de diversos países y culturas adoptan los constructos antes mencionados cuando toman decisiones de viaje.

Estudios previos han aplicado varios TPB extendidos a un país específico o han comparado los resultados entre países asiáticos. Nuestra propuesta hace una comparación de las variables utilizadas para predecir la intención de visitar un destino vacacional entre países europeos.

The continued poor performance of many retailers trading internationally suggests that effectively managing international operations continues to be a source of great difficulty. This paper presents short case studies of the ways in which two leading UK retailers – Dixons and Laura Ashley – have, by very different mechanisms, expanded their businesses outside the UK. For both companies, a review of their motivations for and philosophies on trading internationally is followed by some observations on the management of their international operations. Both companies have recently restructured their management in an effort to move away from a “multi‐domestic” management style and towards a more integrated “transitional” approach.

Purpose – This chapter explores the strategies and tactics employed by researchers when dealing with emotionally challenging situations, both in the field and in academia in general.

Methodology/Approach – It draws on a qualitative longitudinal project investigating how recent Polish migrants from cities that are rather homogenous in terms of ethnicity and religion make sense of, and come to terms with, the much greater diversity they encounter in German and British cities. The project adopts a mixed-methods approach that includes social network analysis, focus groups, creative methods and in-depth interviews.

Findings – Moving beyond the inside–outsider binary in qualitative research, the authors reflect on their management of conflicting feelings about what happens in research situations. The authors discuss interview situations they found particularly emotionally challenging and the different ways they supported each other during and after fieldwork, for instance, when faced with situations in which research participants say things that are racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, xenophobic, classist or misogynist. They reflect on their use of electronic media, especially email and messenger applications, as tools which not only allow them to unpack the emotions that emerge in fieldwork, but also enable them to collaboratively reflect on their own positionalities in the field.

Originality/Value – The chapter argues that face-to-face and virtual interactions with colleagues can create spaces of care, self-care and solidarity. These relational spaces can form integral support systems for researchers and help them to deal with both the emotionality of social-science research and the wider emotional labour of academic work.

Various health systems are challenged by a multifaceted crisis of increased service demand and workforce shortages. The effects are devastating and may end up in decreased access to care, poor quality of patient care and extreme demands on the workforce. The introduction of the physician assistant (PA) profession provided an avenue to address such challenges in several countries. In Germany, the integration of PAs has been proceeding slowly.

To understand the integration of the profession in Germany, we conducted 15 expert interviews to reveal how the PA profession is perceived among healthcare experts as well as the barriers and facilitators of integration in inpatient care.

Our results highlight a generally positive perception of PAs, particularly in terms of workload relief and bridging the gap between healthcare professionals. Nonetheless, barriers include resistance from healthcare workers unfamiliar with the PA role, while workforce shortages and collaborative teamwork facilitate integration.

These findings lay the groundwork for potential integration-enhancing strategies in Germany.

EUROCHEM, the first major British chemical and process engineering show for more than six years, takes place at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, next month. Will it do for British exhibitors what the world‐famous ACHEMA, held in Frankfurt's exhibition centre every three years, does for German exhibitors? What do exhibitors and organisers hope for from this and other exhibitions? Laura Pank went to a pre‐exhibition gathering to find out.

This article explores the perceptions of professionals on the implementation and impact of Dual Vocational Training (Dual VET) in the Spanish education system.

The study involves interviews with various professionals in the education and employment sectors and two discussion groups.

Results reveal positive views on Dual VET’s ability to enhance employability and reduce the education-to-employment gap. However, challenges like the involvement of small and medium enterprises and the need for continuous curriculum evaluation and adaptation are recognized. Additionally, the study highlights a lack of acknowledgment of antecedent programs to Dual VET, despite their recognition by experts as highly influential in facilitating the school-to-work transition for young individuals.

The study emphasizes the importance of promoting awareness among stakeholders and emphasizes the role of collaboration between educational institutions and the business sector to ensure Dual VET’s success in Spain.

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe in March 2020, higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide were confronted with creating online courses to complete the semester. While emphasizing positive elements such as flexibility and innovative solutions, the literature focused on numerous faculty problems such as online fatigue, emotional well-being and stress. This paper aims to explore faculty perceptions of teaching during the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two surveys, in the first week and at the end of the semester, were conducted at a business school in Switzerland via the program Lima. A total of 19 faculty members participated in the survey. Of the participants, 56.7% responded in the first survey and 70.9% responded in the second.

The findings revealed that the faculty’s impressions of their online courses remained positive. The most significant issue cited was time. According to faculty estimations, more than ten additional hours per week were spent preparing for online courses. Nonetheless, many faculty members reported interest in continuing online practices in their future courses.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed HEIs to embrace the digital revolution while teaching in a competence-oriented mode. However, moving forward, HEIs must mitigate the long-term effects by careful planning and evaluating their digital readiness as an institution and offering training for their faculty and students when necessary.

The study contributes to the existing literature by analyzing one stakeholder group, i.e. faculty members, and their perceptions of teaching during a worldwide pandemic.