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This article examines the role of BLDSC's Translations Section as a focal point in the national and international availability of translations. BLDSC's collection of translations into English is amongst the largest in the world (the Translations Index has over half a million entries) and the Centre is the principal source both of translations and of information about them in the UK. Translations are acquired from all over the world, covering most languages, with the main source languages emerging as Russian, German, French and Japanese. On average, 40,000 requests are received by the Translations Section each year, the majority treating BLDSC as the first and only resort. 11% of these requests are from overseas. The Centre also publishes several major bibliographical tools in this field, and has close links with other national and international translations centres. It acts not only as a document supplier but also as an information provider in this specialized area.

The goal of this project is to link the analysis of gender construction to reproductive health, sexuality, and development within the postdisaster context of Nepal and thereby, inform our understandings of these linkages more broadly, as well as provide new opportunities for promoting gender equity, reproductive health, and development in areas of conflict or disaster.

Using life history narratives, I examine the intersections among reproductive health, gender, and sexuality before, during, and postdisaster.

These life history interviews shed light on how socialization processes shape and determine adolescent girls' future actions and women's life opportunities. At both the individual and state levels, issues related to gender, sexuality, and reproductive health are exacerbated in times of crisis.

Life histories provide rich, thick descriptions of social life. However, they are limited in terms of reliability and making generalizations about larger populations. This chapter engages the reader, scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers in contemplating policy reform and initiation of context-based programs in times of natural disaster, political conflict, and other catastrophic events that disenfranchise those without agency and power.

This paper is unique in that it is the first to examine reproductive health and sexuality from the perspective of women living within a society bound by rigid gender and sexuality norms, but torn apart by natural disasters and the political and economic instability that follow in countries like Nepal.

While there has been a growing interest in the field of Metaverse-related research, its impact on vulnerable segments of the population, particularly those with special needs, is yet to be fully examined. This research develops the underlying scant theoretical knowledge related to the attachment of people with disabilities to the Metaverse and its effects on their need for uniqueness and acceptance of disability, and hence their sense of inclusivity and overall well-being.

The study adopted a quantitative approach using an Internet-based survey. The sample size consisted of 530 Metaverse users with a physical disability in the USA. The proposed model integrates virtual place attachment alongside disabled consumers' need for uniqueness, and acceptance of their physical disability. SPSS and LISREL were utilized for data analysis and SEM.

The study underscores the complexity of the interplay between virtual place attachment, disability acceptance and the need for uniqueness among physically disabled users in the Metaverse. It investigates how the attachment to virtual spaces by people with disability influence their psychological well-being.

This research adds to the interactive marketing and disabled consumer psychology literature exploring the theoretical and practical implications from an attachment and need for uniqueness theory perspectives.

Many theories have been proposed to understand and improve the process of leadership development. One useful way to structure the literature is around three complementary perspectives, briefly summarized as the “knowing, doing and being” dimensions of leadership. While the complementarities between these perspectives have been discussed, the mechanisms by which they are linked are less clear. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of experimentation as one such mechanism.

Building on interviews and prior literature, the authors argue that experimentation consists of two processes: task-prototyping focused on the work overseen by the leader and self-prototyping focused on how the leader relates to others. This study proposes a theoretical framework linking experimentation to action-taking (e.g. being entrepreneurial and taking on challenging assignments), which in turn links to leader effectiveness. The authors test the hypotheses on two groups of leaders (481 business school alumni and 310 financial services leaders).

The authors find evidence that both forms of experimentation provide significant explanatory power in understanding why some individuals engage in higher levels of action-taking than others. Additionally, their study confirms the central role of action-taking in leadership development.

Conceptually, this study distinguishes two dimensions of experimentation and their connection to action-taking, knowledge development and identity development. Empirically, the authors show that these two experimentation activities were significant predictors of action-taking, even after controlling for all other factors, and that action-taking (along with self-prototyping) was an important predictor of leader effectiveness. The results offer a practical framework for leadership and development professionals to use in designing and evaluating leadership development activities.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the social significance of digital technologies for researching and understanding active women's bodies, identities, practices, and politics. In critically surveying the rapidly expanding body of literature on women's social media use for sport and physical activity, the chapter highlights the multidisciplinary nature of much of this work and its feminist and social justice orientation toward understanding the uneven impacts of platformed engagement for women, particularly those who are socially marginalized.

The chapter synthesizes the current literature to identify feminist and sociological approaches to analyzing sporting women's social media use. It draws on the authors' own research as case study illustrations of key developments.

Findings identify opportunities and challenges for women navigating the complexities of social media encounters in their sporting and physical cultural lives, focusing on self-presentation, branding and digital labor, community-building, and activism. It proposes theoretical, methodological, and ethical directions for sociological interventions in this area of study.

Future research should investigate the rapidly evolving digital landscape, issues of social justice and marginalized voices, and the social conditions that sustain gender inequalities in sport and social media spaces.

The chapter contributes original insights on emerging directions in the study of women, sport, and social media. Furthermore, it addresses the challenges for social researchers responding to the uptake of new social media platforms by female athletes and physically active women.

Anchoring on expectancy disconfirmation theory, this study aims to investigate the influence of product quality, customer satisfaction and word-of-mouth (WOM) on improved cook stoves (ICSs). The study also examines customer satisfaction as a mediator and explores a case-specific analysis of the interrelationships.

Data were elicited using a structured survey conducted during February 2024 across rural, semirural and urban areas in Nepal. A purposive sampling method was used, distributing 300 questionnaires and obtaining 222 valid responses, reflecting a response rate of 74%. Respondents included 70 females and 152 males, with an average age of 32.42 years, and 48.2% of the population from rural areas. Hypotheses tested included product quality affecting WOM, product quality impacting customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction mediating the relationship between product quality and WOM. PLS-SEM was used for hypothesis testing.

The results reveal that product quality significantly enhances WOM and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, customer satisfaction mediates the relationship between product quality and WOM, emphasizing the importance of satisfaction as a driver of positive WOM.

The study focuses on ICS adoption in a specific region. Future research should explore these dynamics across different cultural and geographic contexts to validate and generalize the findings.

This research provides a novel perspective on the role of product quality and customer satisfaction in driving WOM for ICSs. It highlights how consumer satisfaction mediates these relationships, offering actionable insights for improving ICS adoption strategies.

Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

Research efforts aiming to improve understanding of how various organisational relationships contribute to better food quality (FQ) in a constantly changing business environment are limited. This study examines the effects of supply chain (SC) organisations on the quality of food products across multi-tiered segments with dynamic business situations.

Guided by a conceptual research framework based on contingency theory and netchain analysis, moderation-based partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse multi-tiered data from 405 shrimpers and 238 women processors in Akwa-Ibom, Lagos and Ondo states in Nigeria.

The authors' findings show that unpredictable business environments such as market turbulence (MT), power asymmetry (PA) and distrust (DT) not only directly influence SC organisations but also moderate how organisational networks contribute to improved FQ. Further results reveal that closer vertical ties such as relational contracts are prerequisites for small-scale actors to guarantee improved FQ along multiple nodes of the food system.

This is the first study to examine, from a contingency and multi-tiered perspective, how small-scale actors can maintain FQ across interdependent nodes of a food chain in a developing country context and to explore the complex interplay between SC networks and the quality of highly perishable food products in unpredictable business environments. Relevant theoretical and policy implications are discussed.