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When and why do organizations prefer high-status exchange partners? While past work has focused on status as a signal to the marketplace, this study shows that actors use the selected organization's status as a signal to legitimate their own selection decision.

The context of the study is the selection of investment banks by local governments in the United States for the purpose of selling municipal bonds to investors. Hypotheses were developed through interviews with participants in the public and private sectors and were then tested using generalized estimating equations (GEEs). The models include 6,720 selection decisions nested within 1,032 local governments.

Interview data reveal that governmental decision-makers struggle with interdepartmental conflict and are concerned about the perceived legitimacy of decisions in the “political arena”. The quantitative results confirm that with respect to selection decisions, the social context of the local government matters. Specifically, racial/ethnic heterogeneity, political competition and functional complexity—contexts where actors must signal independence and objectivity in decision-making—are each associated with an increased likelihood of retaining a high-status investment bank.

The study shows that a preference for a high-status partner is not just market driven. Rather, it emerges also from the legitimacy demands of the organization's own participants. More broadly, the study reveals how organizational decision-making—even that pertaining to the external market environment—is embedded in an organization-specific social reality.

This paper aims to propose a data mining approach to evaluate a conceptual model in tourism, encompassing a large data set characterized by dimensions grounded on existing literature.

The approach is tested using a guest satisfaction model encompassing nine dimensions. A large data set of 84 k online reviews and 31 features was collected from TripAdvisor. The review score granted was considered a proxy of guest satisfaction and was defined as the target feature to model. A sequence of data understanding and preparation tasks led to a tuned set of 60k reviews and 29 input features which were used for training the data mining model. Finally, the data-based sensitivity analysis was adopted to understand which dimensions most influence guest satisfaction.

Previous user’s experience with the online platform, individual preferences, and hotel prestige were the most relevant dimensions concerning guests’ satisfaction. On the opposite, homogeneous characteristics among the Las Vegas hotels such as the hotel size were found of little relevance to satisfaction.

This study intends to set a baseline for an easier adoption of data mining to evaluate conceptual models through a scalable approach, helping to bridge between theory and practice, especially relevant when dealing with Big Data sources such as the social media. Thus, the steps undertaken during the study are detailed to facilitate replication to other models.

This paper aims to explore the characteristics of playful literacies in case study research examining digital games in secondary English classrooms. It analyzes how educators use play as a resource for meaning-making and the impacts of play on student learning.

The authors used a keyword search in relevant academic databases to identify articles within specified search parameters. This was followed by bibliographic branching to identify additional articles. Following the identification of 30 articles, two rounds of open coding were used to identify themes for analysis.

The literature revealed five types of playful pedagogical practices: single-player gameplay, turn-taking gameplay, multiplayer play, play-as-design and little or no gameplay. Discussion of these findings suggests that classroom play was a highly social activity across case studies. Furthermore, boundaries between types of play and their contributions to learning were blurred and often disrupted normative approaches to curriculum and teaching.

Given the novelty of replacing traditional texts with digital games in English classrooms, this study represents an important moment to pause and review the literature to date on a particular, understudied aspect of digital games in English curricula: their playfulness. This is especially important given the innovative ways in which digital play can shift thinking about meaning-making and narrative, two historically dominant concerns within the discipline of English.

Videogames are complex, meaningful and multimodal texts. This study aims to explore how students could learn about narratives from, and be engaged by, playing a videogame and how a teacher adapted their pedagogy to incorporate the young adult videogame (YA game) What Remains of Edith Finch into an English Language Arts curriculum.

This case study examined the experiences of a classroom teacher and students in a Year 10 English class in Australia. Thematic analysis included a wide range of data, including interviews, surveys, observations and artefacts.

First, students demonstrated a strong understanding of the game as a narrative text, including essential components of narrative such as plot, characterisation, themes, settings and literary techniques. Second, students experienced a consistently high level of engagement and embodiment throughout the study as a consequence of the interactive, collaborative and multimodal nature of YA games. Third, the teacher discovered that he was able to achieve key curriculum outcomes with the videogame through re-imagining pedagogy.

A playful approach allows teachers and students to be curious about the diverse narrative pathways possible within YA games and offers new opportunities to experience embodiment within and through digital texts.

This chapter contains a case study analysis on a song by the Spanish heavy metal group Desafío or ‘Challenge’. The lyrics of the song are treated as a poem, and I will thus progress toward a linguistic and poetic analysis (Leech, 2013). Songs include many poetic devices, such as personification, metonymy, paradox, tautology, antithesis, and hyperbole (cf. Hewitt, 2000, p. 189). During the aforementioned linguistic and poetical analysis, it will be seen that the song Muerte en Mostar ‘Death in Mostar’ abounds with poetic features. The song begins with personification, for example: ‘The moon reflects in her face the shadows of evil’. Liturgical lexis and bellicose vocabulary also proliferate. Especially active in the song is the notion of an almost religious crusade. For example, one liturgical aspect found in the chorus is where an unnamed protagonist is described within the context of an almost holy war: ‘To his squadron's flag he promised his loyalty / His heart of love would be called by God’. The song goes on to recount the subsequent events and, therefore, this song in fact seems to be a mini-narrative. Finally, I will show how so much literary allusion reveals, in the end, that the song is not about Spain at all but about events that took place during the war of Bosnia–Herzegovina.

This study explores the role of proactive decision-making in enhancing academic motivation and career calling among university students in Central Asia. It aims to investigate how proactive traits and cognitive skills influence career calling and academic persistence while examining the moderating effects of demographic factors.

A convenience sample of 380 undergraduate business students from Kazakhstan was surveyed using validated scales for proactive decision-making, career calling and academic motivation. Data analysis involved correlation, regression and mediation tests using SPSS to evaluate relationships between variables and test the mediating role of career calling in the proactive decision-making-academic motivation link.

Proactive decision-making was found to significantly enhance career calling and academic motivation, with career calling partially mediating the relationship between proactive decision-making and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation. In addition, demographic variables, such as gender and GPA, moderated the effects of proactive decision-making on academic motivation.

This research contributes to the understanding of proactive decision-making in the educational context, particularly within international business education, by highlighting its role in shaping career aspirations and academic engagement. It provides new insights into the interplay between personality, decision-making and academic motivation in a Central Asian setting.

The purpose of this paper is to establish and evaluate the concrete loss and labor productivity (LP) indicators in the concreting step of aluminum formwork system (AFS) in construction in Brazil. The loss and productivity indicators are directed to a regional database (Pernambuco, Brazil).

Case study was selected as the most appropriate approach. The methodology included data collection in the construction project with 10 residential towers of 320 apartments, in the city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, Brazil, throughout 82 concrete pouring days using 415 concrete mixer trucks, with a total of 2,582.50 m³ of concrete.

The findings identified an average concrete loss of 2.6 percent and the LP indicator varying between 0.15 and 0.97 WH/m³. It could be verified that the loss indicators were influenced mainly by the learning effect associated to the qualification of the labor. In addition, the productivity indicators were strongly influenced by delays at the beginning of the concrete pouring and by problems coming from the sequence of concrete supply.

LP indicators are still literature restricted, especially considering only the concreting step. The direct observations of this study allow the identification of factors that inhibit productivity. The comparison of indicators for the concreting service between the ASF and the conventional system attests to the speed, low cost and efficiency of the system studied in this paper.

The paper aims to identify the emergent themes of hotel guests’ satisfaction, to compare the distribution of the attributes of the themes between Chinese and North American guests and to compare the importance of the themes for different satisfaction levels between Chinese and North American guests from a cross-cultural perspective.

By adopting Python (a computer language), the word-frequency method was used to identify emergent themes of hotel guests’ satisfaction. Topic modeling was adopted to compare the attributes distribution of each theme and the features of satisfaction between Chinese and North American guests.

First, three themes were identified including functionality, staff and price. Functionality can be further categorized into five subthemes, namely, room, travel, food, environment and hotel facility. Second, the distribution of the attributes of the themes between Chinese and North American guests was compared from a cross-cultural perspective. Chinese guests tend to mention both lifestyles- and social norms–related attributes and expect personalized service, while North American guests mainly prefer to describe lifestyle-related attributes and prefer standardized service. Third, the study compared the changing importance of the themes (functionality, staff and price) for different satisfaction levels between Chinese and North American guests. As the satisfaction level decreases, the importance of functionality decreases, that of staff increases and that of price remain stable for Chinese guests. In contrast, the importance of each theme has fluctuated mildly from the high to the low satisfaction level for North American guests.

Proposed managerial implications are to highlight lifestyle- and social norms-related attributes, as well as personalized service for Chinese guests. However, lifestyle-related attributes and standardized service should be facilitated for North American guests. Specific suggestions were made to help improve hotel performance such as the good performance of functional-related attributes, which could enhance satisfaction and better staff performance, which would reduce dissatisfaction.

By mining big data, this study investigated hotel guests’ satisfaction from a dynamic instead of a static perspective. This study provides some rare insights into differences in key attributes influencing satisfaction levels of Chinese versus North American guests staying in luxury hotels in China. This study also takes a novel approach to examine the dynamics of the importance of the various themes at different satisfaction levels, and contrast these dynamics between Chinese and North American guests. The findings offer valuable insight into market segmentation and management in the hospitality industry.