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Purpose: The main aim of this study is to explore the emergence and significance of blockchain technology in the financial system. This analysis examines the early stages of the adoption of blockchain technology.

Need of the study: To ascertain the viability of blockchain systems as a viable, fair, and traceable way of storing transaction records in Indian banking and financial services organisations.

Methodology: By virtue, this study is exploratory, following access to related studies on the implementation and applications of blockchain technology in the financial sector.

Findings: This study explores blockchain technology, its adoption, types, usefulness, benefits, challenges, and security concern in the banking sector.

Implications: This study will contribute to future research on applications of blockchain technology in the financial sector. It will help the researcher understand this technology’s importance and complications in the financial system.

This study investigates the impacts of operational risks and corporate governance on bond yield spreads, examining their impacts on bond yield spreads during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results indicate that operational risks significantly raise yield spreads, especially for high-leverage firms. Moreover, a higher independent director percentage reduces debt costs. Furthermore, the results reveal more pronounced effects of operational risks on yield spreads during the COVID-19 pandemic, with these risks increasing the financing costs for large firms. When the effect of the independent director percentage on the yield spreads increases, this consequently raises the debt costs for large firms.

The functional strategy map (FSM) is a tool used to capture the organizations' supply chain strategy. Its product, the strategy map, allows the organizations to apply the Conceptual System Assessment and Reformulation methodology (CSAR) with a multi-objective perspective to rethink the business strategy. The aim of this study is to optimize a company business strategy of corrugate cardboard boxes, with its strategic and tactical relations and problems obtained with the CSAR methodology and the FSM tool, as well as its operational priorities identified by the analytical hierarchy process, which is a tool to support multicriteria decision-making. This proposal, with a mixed methodology approach, generates multiple improvements, such as the reduction of the overall cost, the optimal fill rate operations, and the articulation of the strategic and functional decisions in this organization, which are based on a cost competitive strategy. The results were validated by the financial assessments that ensure an attractive return of the investment and the articulation between the business strategies with its functional plans.

As China's educational policy and reforms continue to evolve and adjust to shifting social, economic, and political conditions, this chapter provides a template for conceptually framing education research on and in China. To do so this chapter first identifies focus areas in comparative education research related to China, which reflect researcher perspective, perceived advantage, and demonstrated resistance to these educational policy reforms. The authors develop a conceptual framework for comparatively understanding education research on and in China, which focuses on the intersection of comparative education themes, institutional change agents or methods, and Chinese educational reform topics. This conceptual framework specifically accounts for overlap, complexity, and the evolving nature of educational policy reform in China. This chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of comparative education researchers, national policymakers, and consumers of the research using new data and methods as they become available to continue to revise understandings of Chinese educational policy and reform.

Key enabling technologies (KETs) are a set of six technological components that work together to address social challenges and build advanced for sustainable economies. Industry 5.0, the next industrial development, is designed to capitalize on specialists' unique creativity while also collaborating with powerful, intelligent, and precise technologies. Industry 5.0 outsourced repetitive and monotonous activities to robots/machines requiring employees to perform activities that involve critical thinking and are based on the 6R (Recognize, Reconsider, Realize, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle), to improve production quality. With numerous supporting technical advancements, advanced and quick manufacturing concentrating on the interaction of machines and humans may be produced. Maintaining healthcare and nursing care, evaluating patients' health requirements using KETs, and giving care with manpower are all major advancements in Industry 5.0 today. Future studies may focus on providing healthcare using mainly technology and, therefore, no human workers. This chapter highlights healthcare advances in Industry 5.0, where KETs and people collaborate to create and innovate. In this framework, the purpose of this chapter is to present the deployment of KETs in the nursing patient care process.

Worldwide systems of higher education are experiencing intense and unprecedented transformation, both in its operation and in their relationship to governments. The adoption of neo-liberal, free-market economic policies in the 1980s, and the consequent deregulation of education has impacted many systems in Europe, North and South America, and Asia (including New Zealand and Australia) (Olssen, 2002). Many of these nations have restructured their systems of public education in an attempt to acquire relative autonomy and to assume responsibility as individual institutions. As a result of deregulation and liberalization, the trends of individual institutions are to become more competitive and accountable by creating an overall market mechanism within the education system (Giroux, 2002; Dale, 2001). The issuance of educational loans by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) supports these trends. In general, the IMF and WB serve as a support mechanism for neo-liberalism in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe by the promotion of market mechanisms which effect increases in private investment in education and accountability in higher education institutions (Chou, 2003).

This chapter discusses the high adoption of plastic bags/packages by food providers in Malaysia during pandemic that resulted in a long-time lockdown. Under the federal government act of ‘Movement Order Control’ (MCO), people had no choice but to order food or purchase food ingredients via online food delivery services. Such situation made the food delivery business instantly one of the top and essential economic contributors. However, this also severely impacted our environment specifically the growing usage of plastic bag, plastic food container, and parcel packaging. While the food delivery company introduces a campaign to reduce and replace the plastic bag/packages, the awareness level is still very low. This chapter highlights the introduction of food delivery business striving in the COVID-19 pandemic, the severity of plastic usage and challenges of sustainability marketing campaign in Malaysia.

Institutional actors are critical allies for grassroots movements, but few studies have examined their effects and variations within the non-democratic context. This chapter argues that while institutional allies are heavily constrained and unlikely to give open endorsement to grassroot activists, some institutional activists indirectly facilitate movement mobilization and favorable outcomes in the process of advancing their own political agendas. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted in 2008 and 2012, I illustrate this argument by examining the Anti-PX Movement – a landmark grassroots environmental movement against a chemical plant – in Xiamen, China. I find that the environmental institutional actors were constrained and divided, yet some still fostered opportunities for movement mobilization and in turn exploited the opportunity created by the protesters to pursue their policy interests, thus facilitating positive movement outcomes. As long as the claims are not politically subversive to the authoritarian rule, this type of tacit and tactical interaction between institutional activists within the state and grassroot activists on the street is conducive to promoting progressive policy changes.

The kindergarten curriculum in mainland China has evolved through four periods and the current reform began in the end of 1980s. The reform aimed to transform kindergarten practice by shaping ideologies including respect for individual child, active learning, and play-based integrated curriculum. This review of research literatures shows that compared with the practice before the reform, many kindergarten teachers organize classrooms in learning centers, provide more play materials, pay time, and freedom for free play, and pay more attention to individuals. But indoor space organized in rice-seedling-bed model, teacher-led group instruction and teacher-controlled interactions are still often observed after three decades of reform efforts; there still exist great variations among kindergartens of different sponsoring bodies and in different regions. The problems resulted from the innate deficiencies of the top-down and value-priority reform, the conflicts between the advocated value and the traditional Chinese culture with emphasis on Ming-Fen, testing, and the value of children for the whole family and nation, and the unequal distribution of public resources decided by the educational institutions. Therefore, the curriculum reform is not a separate endeavor from other social changes, but a comprehensive and systematic change. To guarantee the success of the curriculum reform, the Chinese society needs cultural transformation and institutional reconstruction.