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In Burkina Faso, maize is a key component in farm households’ food security and welfare. However, maize productivity in the country is low and productivity improvements do not necessarily result in better living conditions. This paper aims to establish linkages between maize productivity and welfare by considering the context of digital finance adoption for farmers in Burkina Faso.

For this purpose, we use an endogenous switching regression approach on the Burkina Faso’s Living Standard Measurement Survey of 2018.

Our estimates show that digital finance adoption enhances the transmission of productivity gains to farm households’ welfare, with the welfare elasticity of maize productivity almost twice higher for digital finance adopters.

Our findings highlight the importance of increasing the access to digital finance to improve farm household welfare.

This manuscript makes the valuable contribution of analysing the heterogeneity of the transmission of agricultural productivity to welfare, with a focus on the identification of the role of digital finance.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-01-2024-0077

Education is foundational for creating caring sustainable leaders and organizations. This paper aims to investigate whether historically eminent Lebanese universities are integrating sustainability courses and practices in their curriculum, and to discern whether these universities’ administrators are currently providing, or plan to provide, positive educational experience through addressing sustainability concepts and tools in their respective universities.

The authors based their qualitative study on a multimodal design for explorative and recommendation purposes. The review of literature and online search facilitated setting standards and benchmarking. Face-to-face interviews and observation corroborated the findings and provided insight. The information was systematically ordered to tackle sustainability as a product and as a process on different campuses. All research was subject to ethical clearance from the studied subjects.

Compiling the input from all participants revealed that there is an urgent need to reform universities’ products and processes, in addition to a necessary call for support from governmental entities. The seeds of environmental sustainability are present in varying degrees in universities that have been continuously functional in the service of higher education in Lebanon for a period of 50 years or more.

The lack of contextual, comprehensive models, toward which change can be geared, presents a limitation to this work. Another limitation is that this study was restricted to historically prominent universities with the valid assumption that they play a leadership role in higher education. More universities should be investigated to further validate the findings, to complement this project and to allow for generalizability and comparison with initial findings.

More focus is needed to prepare present students and the future community to rely on available resources. The paper outlines the need to change the educational approach in Lebanese universities. It addresses a call to the administrators of all universities to provide the right policies, tools, materials and other resources to help sustainability.

Universities are called to play a major role especially in inspiring and teaching sustainability concepts. It is worth noting that education can be seen as a social good. If education is well served, it can create jobs, generate high revenues and raise standards of living. But serving the education “well” may require disruption of the status quo, which, if done creatively, will lead to novel approaches and solutions that outweigh the disruption itself.

This paper has exposed the status quo of universities vis-à-vis sustainability, but it has also challenged “what is”, and opened up possibilities of what “could be”. Educational projects should be adapted with the participation of the private sector to stimulate innovation, and experience the lived dimension of sustainability. Implementing such a change represents the bridge between current and needed ways of thinking required by the new environment.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the effects of service quality (SQ) on outcome variables may shift over time. However, scant attention has been paid to capturing that shift. The current study uses the theory of relationship dynamics to capture the rate and direction of change in the effects of SQ attributes on customer satisfaction (CS) and emotional attachment (EA). For this purpose, the study takes CS-velocity and EA-velocity as dynamic outcomes of SQ.

A sample of 306 restaurant consumers responded to a structured questionnaire at three points in time. Confirmatory factor analysis was carried out, followed by analysis of the data through latent growth curve modeling using MPlus (Version 8.1).

SQ attributes positively affect CS and EA, but these effects diminish over time, as SQ attributes negatively influence CS-velocity and EA-velocity. In addition, the study demonstrates that dynamic elements strongly impact behavioral intentions (BI).

The study enables service and relationship marketing managers to better understand the role of SQ attributes in maintaining longitudinal satisfaction, attachment and BI. The insights from this longitudinal investigation help managers to formulate long-term service management and relationship management strategies.

This study is the first attempt to examine SQ’s dynamic outcomes using longitudinal panel data. It is the first study to introduce EA-velocity as a dynamic construct of EA and the first to examine the relationships of CS-velocity and EA-velocity with BI.

Leadership is basically about influence and ability to cultivate followership. This chapter examined the nature of indigenous socio-political leadership in Africa using Zimbabwe, Sudan and Nigeria as caselets and compared this with the post-colonial or modern-day leadership realities. A survey was conducted among senior executives at Lagos Business School, Nigeria, with a sample size of 200 persons, to find out their perception of the African indigenous leadership system. An overwhelming 90% believe that culture plays a big role in shaping African leadership style. However, two-thirds of the respondents agreed that Africa lacks proper institutional structures to support good leadership, thus encouraging corruption (97% of the respondents) and non-accountability among the leaders. Also, only 5% thought cultural orientation was the reason why the African followers do not hold their leaders accountable. In other words, it is not in the African culture not to hold leaders accountable for their actions. So, what went wrong? We attempted a deeper look at the effect of colonial rule and the attendant militarisation of the African continent. Our conclusion is that the colonisation of the continent by Europe brought significant distortion to the traditional African indigenous leadership institutions and the psyche of the African leader and the followers alike. Post-colonial Africa has witnessed 133 recorded coups d’etat between 1952 and 2016. This chapter is recommended to all those who seek a deeper understanding of the nature of the African indigenous leadership practices and the factors that have shaped these over the years.

The aim of this paper is to critically review the most significant writings on “two” constructs that have quickly acquired the status of “important marketing topics”; that is, brand attachment (BA) and brand love (BL).

A profound and parallel inspection of highly influential articles along with ensuing essays by the same single authors is performed.

This review reveals that: hardly a year goes by without some reinventions or retouching of these constructs’ conceptual characteristics; there are several striking similarities between them; the politics of marketing theory are at work in keeping these constructs away from each other; the literature under scrutiny not only suffers from amnesia, but also from some severe schizophrenic symptoms; and that BA and BL are nothing more than the same core knowledge product offered under different brand names.

This review is limited to considering the constructs of BA and BL.

Because the literature on BA and BL has been essentially empirical, this paper has the potential to add a compulsory conceptual component to it. It also has the potential of instigating discussions, debates and, in due course, a deeper understanding of these “two” constructs.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new method for knowledge worker productivity measurement which is based on valid principles and appropriate viewpoints.

Based on an extensive and thorough literature review the elements that need to be taken into consideration, while designing a method for knowledge worker productivity measurement, are determined and divided into principles and viewpoints. These elements must be incorporated into the design of knowledge worker productivity measurement methods so that the correctness and accuracy of these methods can be verified. The proposed model, which is based on appropriate principles and viewpoints, determines the outputs of knowledge work with respect to the tasks that a worker’s job includes. Considering nine measures, these outputs are evaluated using fuzzy numbers and, then, quantified. The inputs of knowledge work are knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) required to do the job. These inputs are identified and quantified using Job Element Method. Furthermore, fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis is employed to model the productivity.

In this paper, the proposed method for knowledge worker productivity measurement follows both appropriate principles and viewpoints, simultaneously. In order to validate the obtained results and explore the applicability of the proposed method, a case study was carried out at an Iranian organization in electric power industry. Statistical analyses are employed to prove the validity of the results. Based on the obtained results, the productivity of a knowledge worker is said to be high when he/she delivers the expected amount of job outputs considering the values of his/her inputs (KSAs).

The originality of this paper is twofold. First, the extracted principles and viewpoints can serve as a guideline for the development of similar methods. Second, the proposed model offers an effective and efficient tool that can serve as the basis for the comparison among relative productivity of knowledge workers. Furthermore, the obtained results could form a basis to examine the productivity trend of each knowledge worker over different periods of time.

Photoresist imaging traditionally uses silver halide or diazo based phototools for contact exposure to an actinic UV light source. By contrast, laser direct imaging uses digital imaging data to control a laser beam scanner to write directly on to the photoresist, therefore eliminating the need for phototools. In the past, even though the benefit of a UV system was recognised, laser direct imaging was mainly limited to the use of a visible laser as early UV lasers were low in power, unreliable and expensive. So far, no visible systems have gained commercial recognition because of the inherent deficiencies of the visible system. Recent advantages in UV laser equipment and UV sensitive photoresist have now made UV laser direct imaging a viable alternative to traditional contact imaging. As new UV laser imaging systems start to emerge, interest and attention are also growing among printed circuit board manufacturers. This paper discusses various attributes of a UV laser direct imaging system and fundamental differences in photophysics between laser direct imaging and conventional UV imaging.

The purpose of this paper is to recognize that organized crime and terrorism do not always operate independently from each other but, at times, rely on each other to create synergistic outcomes and use the same tactics and methods to advance their goals such as the use of fraud.

Sources of information consisted of scholarly articles and articles retrieved from the web.

Findings suggest that over time the crime‐terror nexus has increased its collaborative nature and terrorists have adopted the use of fraud schemes that were initially believed to be methods used only by organized crime to finance their organizations and goals.

This paper serves as a useful guide to alert and educate anti‐fraud professionals, law enforcement and policy makers of the nexus between organized crime, terrorism and fraud and that fraud should not be viewed as a peripheral issue in the crime‐terror nexus.

The purpose of this article is to help librarians interested in developing a basic understanding of Sub‐Saharan African cinema and increase awareness of the resources available when building a collection of sub‐Saharan African films for their library. A general review is provided to help become familiar with the history and nature of the four regions discussed.

A collection development project to expand a mid‐sized university's collection of sub‐Saharan African films is discussed. Includes brief historical information and core titles, selected for their historical role and/or ease of purchase.

A list of core films is recommended for academic and public libraries representing four geographic regions of sub‐Saharan Africa: Nigeria, South Africa, West Africa, and East Africa.

Unfortunately, many of the titles referenced in academic literature and winners of African film awards are not available for purchase outside of Africa, making it impossible to accomplish our goal of collecting a core list as intended.

The paper increases awareness of African cinema and value inclusion in library collections.

While there are general articles on the topic of African cinema, there are no recent articles on the topic of collecting African films for libraries.

Over the past few years, the internet has expanded rapidly, and it has been considered a systematic way that consumers use to retrieve health-related information. However, the existing literature does not provide an articulated view of online health information-seeking behaviour through an in-depth understanding of users’ searching-related behaviour. The objectives of this study are to identify the factors affecting consumers’ health-related internet use and recognise the relationships between those specified and health-related internet use. Finally, the recommendations are made based on the findings.

An amalgamated model of technology acceptance model and health belief model was used to hypothesise health-related internet use behaviour, which is then tested using a cross-sectional survey of 287 Sri Lankan managerial-level employees. The covariance-based structural equation modelling with AMOS was used to check the study hypotheses.

Findings of this study depict five factors contributing to consumers’ health-related internet use as follows: perceived health risk towards chronic diseases consisting of perceived susceptibility and perceived severity; health consciousness; perceived usefulness of the internet; perceived ease of internet use; and attitude towards health-related internet use. As theorised, the internet’s perceived usefulness was positively and significantly related to consumers’ use of health-related internet and attitude towards health-related internet use. But as hypothesised, perceived ease of internet use did not directly affect consumers’ use of health-related internet. Further, findings reveal that health-related internet use is estimated by perceived health risk than health consciousness.

Findings reveal that Sri Lankan managerial-level employees have a reactive health behaviour driven by the perceived health risk and the desire to seek online health information.