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The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a concurrent outbreak of false information online. Debunking false information about a health crisis is critical as misinformation can trigger protests or panic, which necessitates a better understanding of it. This exploratory study examined the effects of debunking messages on a COVID-19-related public chat on WhatsApp in Singapore.

To understand the effects of debunking messages about COVID-19 on WhatsApp conversations, the following was studied. The relationship between source credibility (i.e. characteristics of a communicator that affect the receiver's acceptance of the message) of different debunking message types and their effects on the length of the conversation, sentiments towards various aspects of a crisis, and the information distortions in a message thread were studied. Deep learning techniques, knowledge graphs (KG), and content analyses were used to perform aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) of the messages and measure information distortion.

Debunking messages with higher source credibility (e.g. providing evidence from authoritative sources like health authorities) help close a discussion thread earlier. Shifts in sentiments towards some aspects of the crisis highlight the value of ABSA in monitoring the effectiveness of debunking messages. Finally, debunking messages with lower source credibility (e.g. stating that the information is false without any substantiation) are likely to increase information distortion in conversation threads.

The study supports the importance of source credibility in debunking and an ABSA approach in analysing the effect of debunking messages during a health crisis, which have practical value for public agencies during a health crisis. Studying differences in the source credibility of debunking messages on WhatsApp is a novel shift from the existing approaches. Additionally, a novel approach to measuring information distortion using KGs was used to shed insights on how debunking can reduce information distortions.

This study focuses on the Portuguese tourist decision process in terms of traveling to exotic places. Based on the push‐pull motive model defined by Crompton in 1979, this paper seeks to propose an integrated approach to understand tourist motivations and how these contribute to the perception of a destination.

A structural model and a categorical principal component analysis are used to assess to what degree motivational factors may influence perceptions about a destination. The empirical study is supported through data from a sample of 1,097 individuals who travelled by plane to exotic places, during 2004.

The findings show that push and pull motivations influence the way tourists perceive the destination but the resulting image does not determined the intrinsic motivations.

The study has the restriction of being limited to the Portuguese case. However, these findings open paths for further investigation, namely extending to other destinations and to tourists with different incentives and nationality.

This study contributes to the overall understanding of why tourists adopt specific behaviors. In specific, motivations and perceptions were combined in order to understand why people could be pushed to travel to exotic destinations and how they form their perceptions.

The current natural language processing algorithms are still lacking in judgment criteria, and these approaches often require deep knowledge of political or social contexts. Seeing the damage done by the spreading of fake news in various sectors have attracted the attention of several low-level regional communities. However, such methods are widely developed for English language and low-resource languages remain unfocused. This study aims to provide analysis of Hindi fake news and develop a referral system with advanced techniques to identify fake news in Hindi.

The technique deployed in this model uses bidirectional long short-term memory (B-LSTM) as compared with other models like naïve bayes, logistic regression, random forest, support vector machine, decision tree classifier, kth nearest neighbor, gated recurrent unit and long short-term models.

The deep learning model such as B-LSTM yields an accuracy of 95.01%.

This study anticipates that this model will be a beneficial resource for building technologies to prevent the spreading of fake news and contribute to research with low resource languages.

Teaching notes are available upon request.

The purpose of this paper is to enable tourism management and strategic management students to evaluate and analyze tourism activities in the United Arab Emirates by TCA. Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of developing tourism in rural areas in the United Arab Emirates and to build up proper strategies. They will be able to perform the organization’s competitive standing using Porter’s Five competitive forces and analyze its business strategies as well. They will be able to analyze the current status of the organization using SWOT analysis and to design alternative strategies for the company using TOWS analysis.

The Department of Tourism and Culture – Abu Dhabi, also known as the TCA, is a governmental tourism authority in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi established 14 years ago as part of an economy-diversifying strategy for the non-oil era. The TCA is responsible of creating tourism activities to generate new tourists in Abu Dhabi, which will increase the revenue of the authority and as well increase the gross domestic product of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) economy. Tourism activities have been focused on Abu Dhabi City as is it considered the capital city of the UAE. However, other cities are also part of this strategy, e.g. Al Ain City, which is located in the eastern region of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, and Al Dhafra City, which is located in the western region of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, both of which lack the required infrastructure, population, and tourism activity, due in part at least to the fact that the TCA’s strategy plans have been focused on Abu Dhabi City. Sultan Al Mutawa Al Dhaheri (Al Dhaheri), the TCA’s Executive Director of Tourism, has been responsible for developing tourism in Al Ain City and Al Dhafra, but due to the current situation of the two cities regarding the low revenue growth (and the consequent lack of investors willing to invest) and no critical mass (i.e. a sufficient number of hotel rooms available), Al Dhaheri is facing a dilemma regarding achieving TCA strategy in Al Ain City and Al Dhafra City.

This case study will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate level students majoring in Tourism and Hospitality Management, Business Administration and Strategic Management.

CSS 12: Tourism and Hospitality.

Sustainable development may best be achieved by enhancing the commitment of local communities. Stewart and Hams (1991) argue that the requirements of sustainable development cannot merely be imposed but that active participation by local communities is needed. However, the terms ‘community’, ‘host community’ and ‘participation’ can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Before entering a full discussion of host community participation in tourism planning, it is first necessary to explore the various potential interpretations of these terms and to define their meaning and function. This chapter therefore clarifies some of the issues surrounding the terms community, host, host community and participation. The major typologies and available models in relation to host communities’ participation in sustainable planning for tourism are also reviewed.

This chapter discusses the use of an extended stage model for the evaluation of the adoption of e-business in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Empirical studies of e-business adoption are rare in Middle Eastern and developing countries and the chapter provides valuable insight into this region, by presenting an account of the use of the extended stage model to explore the level of e-business adoption among Yemeni SMEs.

In making this examination, the challenges and opportunities that accompany e-business adoption are revealed. The internal drivers and barriers, such as finance and skills, are recognised along with the external factors that include infrastructure and legislation. It also provides valuable insight into the macro-level sociopolitical determinants of e-business adoption that have not previously been appreciated; the study was undertaken during the Yemen Civil War in 2016.

Current adoption models imply that organisations adopt technologies in a linear fashion, gradually increasing complexity and capability. This study makes an important contribution by recognising that there are multiple points at which SMEs may ‘enter’ the technology-adoption ladder.

This chapter highlights the close relationship between the wellbeing of faculty and students in higher education and the quality of teaching and learning. Improving teaching and learning is crucial for promoting the wellbeing of both faculty and students. As such, instructional leadership, an approach that focuses on enhancing teaching and learning, should be a priority for higher education leaders. However, the involvement of higher education leaders in instructional leadership is often limited. Therefore, a customized version of instructional leadership that considers the unique priorities, characteristics, and norms of this specific educational context should be implemented in higher education to prioritize the improvement of teaching and learning and, consequently, enhance the wellbeing of faculty and students.

Given that a relatively large percentage of college students entering historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are first-generation students and considering the low completion rate among this group in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) discipline, the purpose of this preliminary meta-synthesis study is intended to facilitate a greater understanding of the academic and social adjustment among college students, particularly first-generation college students enrolled in STEM disciplines at HBCUs. Therefore, this meta-synthesis will shed light and offer important recommendations for university administrators and faculty members in supporting the academic and social adjustment of these students in STEM fields at HBCUs.

This review of literature was conducted using a meta-synthesis approach (also referred to as integrative review). A meta-synthesis is based on a process by which findings across multiple studies are organized and presented (Turner, Gonzalez and Wood, 2008; Wood, 2010). This approach is used to provide insight to academicians and practitioners alike on the status of research on a given phenomenon (Bland, Meurer and Maldonado, 1995; Patterson, Thorne, Canam and Jillings, 2001; Wood, 2010). We engaged in a cyclical process of collecting, annotating, and synthesizing research over a 45-year time-frame (1970 to 2015). This produced over 50 cited resources with more than 100 scholars including peer-reviewed articles, reports, books, book chapters, and conference papers.

Factors present in the literature that affected students enrolled in a STEM program at a HBCU are grouped into three contexts: (a) first-generation academic and social characteristics, (b) first-generation college dropout and transition, and (c) first-generation STEM retention. Tables 2 to 4 provide these contexts by author and year of publication. Within these general groupings, four interrelated themes emerged from the literature: (a) prior academic performance and STEM discipline, (b) college adjustment and STEM discipline, (c) social integration and STEM discipline, and (d) academic integration and STEM discipline.

This information may help professors and university professionals in the STEM fields to be more aware of the challenges faced by incoming college students. More empirical work is needed in this area in a way that is useful for understanding and enhancing professors’ and university professionals’ knowledge. To this end, research that carefully describes what HBCU professors and university professionals know or their ideas about teaching college students, especially first-generation students enrolled in the STEM discipline, is needed.

This qualitative research articulates the perspective that educational institution directors have on the meaning of management action and the need for training in this area. Significant research findings include the importance of training in three specific aspects: technical knowledge, virtues, and managerial competencies. Study participants emphasized that experience alone is insufficient to run a school, which is an important job not only for educating students, but also for the impact it has on the entire educational community (i.e., managers, administrative and service staff, teachers, and parents).

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.