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The aim of this research is to identify users' perceived affordances and explore how they influence the acceptance of an e‐reader device collaborative learning system.

The paper reports on two studies conducted to identify and explore perceived affordances. The first study enabled four users to experience a collaborative problem‐solving task to elicit perceived affordances. The second study developed and used a survey instrument based on a modified technology acceptance model with 54 participants to investigate the influences of the affordances on users' acceptance using the partial least square technique.

Five major affordance factors were found to be significantly influencing users' acceptance of the proposed system. These affordance factors are: mobility affordance, support affordance, connectivity affordance, immediacy affordance, and collaborative affordance. Surprisingly, sustainability affordance was found to have limited influence on the acceptance of the proposed system.

The findings can be applied to other e‐reader devices with features similar to iLiad such as Sony PRS, Kobo, Nook, PocketBook and Viewsonic. Prototyping is a critical design process which aims to elicit user experiences. The research implies that the prototype system is capable of generating perceived affordances that are useful for e‐reader device development in order to enhance acceptance. The convenience sample used in the survey is biased towards male participants. As male and female users perceive information and communications technologies (ICT) differently, caution should be taken when applying the findings to the general population.

Practitioners should focus on utilising the support affordance of the system and identifying clear learning goals with the help of collaborative affordance as the learning pedagogy. System designers should focus on creating a good range of visible support affordances that are intuitive, while enhancing or complementing the collaborative learning affordances. The design of an integrated chat application is important as it lays the foundation for ensuring that collaborative learning with e‐reader devices is possible.

E‐reader devices have not been studied extensively as collaborative learning systems. This research is believed to be the first to integrate and explore the use of an e‐reader device in a collaborative learning environment. This study introduces the concept of composite affordance with a modified technology acceptance model for investigating users' acceptance of an e‐reader device as a collaborative learning system.

Social networking sites have in recent years become an increasingly popular avenue for young people to express and to share their thoughts, views, and emotions. When young people are emotionally distressed for instance, instead of the traditional channel of consulting friends, parents or specialists, social networking blogs may provide a channel to share and release their emotions and intentions. The objective of the paper is to explore the use of text mining and data warehousing technologies to identify and monitor bloggers who are depressed and may be at risk of suicide, self harm or harming others.

The paper first provides a literature review on relevant work in affective and emotional content text mining and relevant suicide research. An algorithm based on a weighted dictionary text search algorithm was developed to identify at risk bloggers to illustrate the viability of the system. An example that compares the percentage of at‐risk bloggers of three different countries – Australia, the UK and New Zealand‐– from a sample blog population is provided.

The results show that it is possible to use text mining technologies to identify depressed bloggers. However, there is a need for future research to improve identification and remove false alarms.

The ability to identify at‐risk bloggers and to provide appropriate interventions could be critical in avoiding tragic consequences. Such a system could provide an e‐monitoring service for various social agencies to engage with potentially at‐risk bloggers.

The current research represents pioneer work in monitoring depression risk in weblogs – research on monitoring at‐risk bloggers is rather limited.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate potential users' cognitive beliefs and intention to use (IU) a proposed short message service (SMS)‐based library catalogue system. The motivation for this research is the growing popularity of mobile information systems and the need to explore if SMS is a technology that libraries could tap into to enhance their services to users.

A review of literature on SMS‐based services and applications within the library sector is followed by a prototyping of an SMS‐based library catalogue system and the development of a number of hypotheses using the technology acceptance model (TAM) as the base framework. The study investigates potential users' cognitive beliefs and IU the systems as well as the effect of self‐efficacy (SE) on these. A survey questionnaire is distributed to a purposeful and convenient sample of university students who are also users of the university library online public access catalogue.

The results of the data analysis show that SE has a positive impact on the perceived ease of use (PEOU) and a negative impact on perceived usefulness (PU). The findings also show that SE does not have direct impact on IU. The overall model explains 55.2 per cent of behaviour intention in using the proposed system. This is comparable with other TAM models in the context of SMS usage.

There is scant research available in the literature on user acceptance of SMS‐based systems. This study and its findings provide new insights for understanding user motivation for using SMS‐based systems, specifically for SMS‐based library catalogue systems. This understanding can aid the efforts when designing and promoting the use of such systems. The study also examines SE alongside the user technology acceptance constructs of PEOU, PU and IU.

The purpose of this study is to explore a consumption values model for Islamic mobile banking acceptance and to identify any differences in perceived consumption values between Muslims and non-Muslims towards the use of Islamic mobile banking services.

Using an online survey method, a sample of 183 was collected and the partial least squares (PLS) method was used to evaluate the model and validate hypothesis, as it is ideal for assessing both the psychometric properties of all scales and, subsequently, to test the structural relationships proposed in the model.

Empirical results via the PLS method demonstrates that the result satisfactorily explains the adoption of Islamic mobile banking and further demonstrates the use of the consumption values model as an alternate approach for technology adoption. The consumption values model approach appears to have a stronger fit for Muslims than non-Muslims with 66.6 per cent of the variance explained and a goodness-of-fit index of 0.724. The conditional factors are important in the non-Muslims compared to Muslims. Muslims seem to value emotional factors more than non-Muslims.

The current research findings represent mainly university students with some exposure to Islamic mobile banking experience and familiarity with mobile technology. Indeed, the samples were taken from Malaysia, an Islamic country that has a diverse ethnic and cultural background. Hence, the result may not apply to other Islamic countries, e.g. Arabic countries due to the cultural background differences. Future researchers could overcome the limits of generalisability by increasing sample coverage.

This research finding is useful as the comparison is made between Muslim and non-Muslim consumers which help practitioners and researchers to better understand the different adoption characteristics and advance insights on how to promote such a technological service for everyday banking needs especially to different segments of the community. In developing Islamic mobile banking interactions, designers should look beyond the system’s ease of use and take advantage of the different consumption values to include personalisation in the service design through automatically recognising Muslim customers and non-Muslim customers during system use.

The study contributed to the theory of consumption values model in technology adoption and demonstrated the model is capable of explaining the functional, emotional, epistemic, conditional and social values on consumers in their adoption intention. This research provides empirical findings not reported in previous studies due to the overly represented technology acceptance model approach.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects religious affiliation and commitment have on Southeast Asian young adults' intention to adopt Islamic mobile phone banking.

An online self‐administered survey was distributed to Southeast Asian young adults through convenience and snowball sampling and a total of 135 responses obtained.

The study found Islamic mobile phone banking to be a novelty service, with little consumer awareness and experience, especially among non‐Muslims. Religious affiliation and commitment were both effective segmentation strategies, as differences in adoption intention were found between Muslims and non‐Muslims, as well as devout and casually religious Muslims. Overall, devout Muslims were socially‐oriented with their adoption criteria whereas casually religious and non‐Muslims relied upon the utilitarian attributes.

The paper contributes to the existing mobile banking adoption literature by providing evidence of consumers' adoption intentions toward Islamic mobile phone banking. It also uses religious commitment in addition to affiliation as segmentation tools, an approach which has not been used in previous Islamic mobile banking research.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the factors (trust, formalization, knowledge technology, empowering leadership, effective reward systems and motivation) that influence knowledge sharing among the small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia, in order to meet the challenges of today's dynamic business environment.

Systematic sampling was used to select 680 manufacturing sector participants from the SME Corporation Malaysia business directory to participate in the survey, out of which 250 valid responses were returned, yielding a response rate of 36.75 percent. Factor analysis and reliability analysis were conducted before testing the seven hypotheses formulated for this study using regression analysis.

The results indicate that knowledge technology, motivation, effective reward systems, trust and empowering leadership explain up to 60.2 percent of the variance observed in attitude towards knowledge sharing. It was also found that attitude towards knowledge sharing influences intention to share knowledge with an R² of 0.387.

The sample for this study is based on manufacturing sector SMEs only and it is suggested that future studies enlarge the scope to include the SMEs in the service sector.

In order to encourage knowledge sharing within SMEs, firms need to ensure that both the technical (knowledge technology) and social (motivation, effective reward systems, trust and empowering leadership) elements are addressed. Hence, a socio‐technical approach needs to be adopted to ensure the effectiveness of the knowledge management strategies formulated by SMEs.

This study highlights the importance of six factors in encouraging knowledge sharing intentions in SMEs operating within the manufacturing sector and confirms that knowledge technology, which encompasses a range of information and communication technologies does play a pivotal role vis‐à‐vis ensuring that SMEs have favorable attitudes towards knowledge sharing for their sustained competitive advantage.

There are ten universal principles of United Nations Global Compact in four areas namely human rights, labour, environmental and anti-corruption, and this chapter will explore the sixth principle of labour standard on elimination of discrimination in employment and occupation, in particular the doctrine of constructive dismissal in Malaysian labour relations. Constructive dismissal is creating a new challenge in labour relation in Malaysia.

This chapter specifically analyses some of the constructive dismissal awards and its implication to labour relations in Malaysia. The methodology employed in this chapter is the analysis of case laws using criterion-based sampling from the Industrial and Superior Court awards on constructive dismissal.

There has been an increasing number of awards on constructive dismissal made by the Malaysian Industrial Court over the last nine years. From the year 2009–2013, the Industrial Court has made 663 awards on constructive dismissal, mostly against employers. With compensation awarded to each employee amounted to as much as 24 months of back-pay salary plus a month’s pay for every year of service, employers can no longer neglect this pressing issue.

The concept of constructive dismissal falls within the purview of section 20 of the Industrial Relations Act 1967 in Malaysia. Constructive dismissal is a ‘deemed dismissal’ if an employer is guilty of a breach of the employment contract which goes to the root of the contract. It arises when a workman terminates his/her contract of employment and considers himself/herself discharged from further obligations because of the employer’s conduct.

With a good understanding of the constructive dismissal awards, it is expected that organizations will manage and treat their human resources as their greatest assets and prevent constructive dismissal claims from taking place. This will eventually help to improve and maintain harmonious labour relations. This chapter is likely to provide insights into the Malaysian labour relations environment for international business operations.

In the context of Malaysian labour relations, studies on constructive dismissal are limited as it is considered as a new area and a specific area of study. This chapter therefore hopes to fill the existing gap in the literature, to highlight some of the recent awards and lessons to prevent constructive dismissal claims from taking place and generally to contribute to the constructive dismissal literature.