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The European Union (EU) has recently adopted gender quotas for corporate boards (CBQ), anticipating ripple effects on women’s careers in the companies concerned, as well as throughout the economy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether CBQ has spurred ripple effects and discuss mechanisms hindering or facilitating women’s occupancy of top executive positions.

Norway was the first country in the world to introduce CBQ in 2003, with full effect from 2008. The policy requires company boards to be composed of 40% of each gender. Drawing on original data mapping boards and executive committees in Norway’s 200 largest companies, the authors analyze the association between CBQ and the gender composition of executive management almost 15 years after the full implementation. The data include both companies covered by the CBQ and large companies not covered.

The investigation does not find a positive association between CBQ and more women in executive positions. Thus, the ripple effect hypothesis of CBQ is not supported. CBQ may have contributed to an increased awareness of gender imbalances, yet these findings indicate that to achieve more gender balance in executive positions, scholars and practitioners may need to focus more on gendered conditions and processes in organizations and society throughout executive careers than on the gender composition of boards.

This paper provides empirical analyses of original data 15 years after the implementation of CBQ. The authors further contribute to scholarly debate by identifying and discussing possible mechanisms that explain how requiring more women on corporate boards may – or may not – have ripple effects on executive management.

This study aims to evaluate the participation and satisfaction of learners with the brief “Mental health promotion in school health care” e-learning course, and to describe factors related to their participation and satisfaction.

A convergent mixed-method study with a descriptive, posttest-only design was conducted in Finland. Quantitative data was collected from the learning portal data and via an electronic feedback questionnaire and qualitative data in four focus group discussions.

The three modules of the course were opened altogether 12,922 times during the 21 months period. The identified factors influencing participation within the course were: favorite methods attracting attention, the relevance of additional information and postprocessing boosting diligence. The learners’ satisfaction with the course was high. The factors identified for improving satisfaction were: filling gaps in earlier education, clear and concise structure and content, inspiring and interesting design and suitability for clinical use. In addition to the primary target group (school nurses), the course was well-participated and evaluated as satisfying among other health and social care professionals as well as undergraduate students.

This study demonstrates demand for brief, fully online mental health trainings among school nurses, but also among other health and social care professionals and students. The results indicate that learners perceive such training as beneficial. This paper also presents a novel training intervention and its pedagogical base.

Deficiencies or imbalances in dietary fat intake may influence on mental and neurological functions of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This study aims to compare body mass index (BMI) and the amount of fatty acids intake in the autistic patients with the comparison group.

This case-control was carried out on 200 randomly selected children from 5 to 15 years old (100 autistic patients as the case group and 100 healthy children as the comparison group) in Tehran, Iran. The food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) was used to assess the intake of calorie, macronutrients and different types of dietary fatty acids including saturated fatty acids (SFA), monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs), poly unsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), linoleic acid (LA), α-Linolenic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and trans fatty acids.

The autistic patients had higher BMI, birth weight and mother’s BMI compared to the comparison group (All p < 0.01). No significant difference was found in the amount of dietary calorie, protein, carbohydrate and total fat intake between two groups. The risk of ASD was associated with higher intake of MUFAs (OR: 3.18, CI%:1.13–4.56, p = 0.04), PUFAs (OR: 4.12, CI95%: 2.01–6.25, p < 0.01) and LA (OR: 4.76, CI95%: 1.34–14.32, p < 0.01).

The autistic children had higher BMI and higher intake of unsaturated fatty acids except for omega-3 fatty acids. Further longitudinal studies are warranted.

The administration of a contract by the architect is necessary to ensure the contract is performed according to the conditions of the contract, compliance with related laws and the practices of the construction industry. With the increasing number of housing projects and the limited number of registered architects in the nation, the architect is unable to be hands-on with every project. Hence, the involvement of graduate architects to reduce the workload in building contract administration (BCA) is required. The purpose of this paper is to develop a BCA framework for graduate architects to enhance their work performance in BCA work and to assist them in moving a step closer to acquiring their professional qualifications.

This study adopted a qualitative method where seven housing projects in Malaysia were selected as case studies to conduct documentation reviews and semistructured interviews. The data collected was analyzed using content analysis to develop the BCA framework. Focus groups were used to validate the framework.

This study summarized there are 5 themes (claims and legal matters management, project management, communication and relationship management, quality assessment and management, and design management) and 11 sub-themes (authority matters, building certification, meetings, coordination checklist, letter-writing, contract documentation, building material, design brief, building sustainability and workmanship quality standard, contractor’s submission and building details) that need to be improved by graduate architects in BCA work.

The contribution of this study to the existing knowledge is the development of a BCA framework that enables graduate architects to get a glimpse of architectural professional practice in reality and better prepare them to confront and resolve problems. Besides, the proposed framework could be incorporated into a pedagogy focusing on methods to support construction contract administrators.

This paper aims to analyse the role of a network in the development of female business experiences through the study of the Industrie Femminili Italiane (I.F.I.) (Italian Women’s Cooperative Enterprise), founded in 1903 in Rome to promote women’s work and their economic conditions.

This study applies the embeddedness theory for women’s empowerment that provides a valuable lens to explore the interactions between female entrepreneurs and their social, cultural and economic contexts.

With this study, the authors found that the network structure was used at the beginning of the past century in Italy as a useful instrument for female emancipation and empowerment, extending to common/not exceptional women entrepreneurial opportunities otherwise reserved for rich and noble women. In the interplay among the different “contexts” (political, social, cultural and cognitive), it seems to emerge the incidence of female social relationships in facing an unfavourable political and cultural context, breaking out the norms and allowing the business to exist and influencing, with the activity of the high social standing women, the cognitive structure of the other female workers, make them active participants in this entrepreneurial activity.

This is a single case study that has shed light on a specific female network, and the authors’ findings and considerations are influenced by the shortage of data and sources available. Demonstrating that I.F.I. is the result of the collaboration of women from different social classes involved at different organisational levels, this work shows, from a historical perspective, the importance of female mutual support for their emancipation and the role played by the network structure as an amplifier of possibilities otherwise limited to rich women, the emancipation of women and minorities in countries characterised by important barriers to entrepreneurship.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper analysing a female entrepreneurial network from a historical point of view and its role in overcoming gender barriers within the analysis of the interplaying contexts.

This paper aims to nuance the understanding of hazing’s negative impact on newcomers.

Data were collected through a qualitative interview study of recently employed nurses’ (n = 19) and nursing students’ (n = 42) hazing experiences and analysed through reflexive thematic coding.

The analysis uncovered two themes relating to hazing’s normative harm on newcomers’ professional self-image: “Being denied a voice” and “Being infantilised.”

This paper challenges the two-dimensional challenge-hindrance framework for elucidating the individual consequences of hazing and suggests adding threat stressors.

This paper aims to explore the cybersecurity challenges the electric power industry faces due to its increased reliance on digital supply chains (DSCs), focusing on the procurement phase.

This study uses qualitative methods, with 17 semi-structured interviews conducted among industry participants to delve deep into the challenges and potential solutions. The Gioia methodology was applied to analyse the interview data. The ecosystem and procurement theory is used to understand the interconnectedness and vulnerabilities within the electric power industry’s DSC.

Three aggregated dimensions were identified: cybersecurity, risk management and supplier tensions. Key findings suggest the importance of precise cybersecurity requirements, continuous monitoring, engagement with all supply chain actors and adaptability to emerging threats.

This paper presents a framework to systematically address and mitigate cybersecurity risks in the DSC. Combining theoretical foundations with reasonable measures can significantly enhance cybersecurity resilience. By implementing these guidelines, organisations can foster collaboration across the supply chain, maintain regulatory compliance and continually adapt to the evolving threat landscape.

The paper is based on unique interview data from actors in the electric power industry. It presents a new framework for managing cybersecurity in DSCs, underpinned by the theoretical lenses of ecosystems and procurement.

This article aims to develop a measurement scale for assessing agripreneurial competencies relevant to emerging economies in alignment with the SDG2 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2030.

The scale development procedure includes item development and refinement, data collection, reliability and validity tests and scale purification with exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

The validated scale carries eight dimensions of competencies: Agreeableness (AG), Technological Competency (TC), Competitive Spirit (CS), Innovativeness (IN), Self-Confidence (SC), Social Responsibility (SR), Conscientiousness (CO) and Leadership (LS). The analysis puts forth a good and fit model, and the new scale reports sufficient convergent and discriminant validity.

This study is focused on the agripreneurial competencies of individual agripreneurs; institutional agripreneurs are excluded from the study.

Identifying prominent agripreneurs using the scale developed from this study will aid in allocating various government and non-governmental organisations' assistance to agripreneurs. Since developing economies rely heavily on agriculture, any positive contribution can help alleviate poor economic growth, end hunger, and promote sustainable agriculture (SDG 2 of 2030).

Though several scales for measuring entrepreneurial competencies are available, there is no standard scale to measure agripreneurial competencies. This article presents the development and validation of a measurement scale to assess the major competencies of agripreneurs that influence agripreneurship performance.

This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is supporting analyses, so security authorities can make appropriate decisions about their actions.

The corpora were obtained through web scraping from a newspaper's website and tweets from a Brazilian metropolitan region. Natural language processing was applied considering: text cleaning, lemmatization, summarization, part-of-speech and dependencies parsing, named entities recognition, and topic modeling.

Several results were obtained based on the methodology used, highlighting some: an example of a summarization using an automated process; dependency parsing; the most common topics in each corpus; the forty named entities and the most common slogans were extracted, highlighting those linked to public security.

Some critical tasks were identified for the research perspective, related to the applied methodology: the treatment of noise from obtaining news on their source websites, passing through textual elements quite present in social network posts such as abbreviations, emojis/emoticons, and even writing errors; the treatment of subjectivity, to eliminate noise from irony and sarcasm; the search for authentic news of issues within the target domain. All these tasks aim to improve the process to enable interested authorities to perform accurate analyses.

The corpora dedicated to the public security domain enable several analyses, such as mining public opinion on security actions in a given location; understanding criminals' behaviors reported in the news or even on social networks and drawing their attitudes timeline; detecting movements that may cause damage to public property and people welfare through texts from social networks; extracting the history and repercussions of police actions, crossing news with records on social networks; among many other possibilities.

The work on behalf of the corpora reported in this text represents one of the first initiatives to create textual bases in Portuguese, dedicated to Brazil's specific public security domain.

This study aims to identify and explore different risk typologies associated with consumer acceptance of purchase recommendations from voice assistants (VAs).

Drawing on components of perceived risk, consumer trust theory, and consumption value theory, a research model was proposed and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) with data from 482 voice shoppers.

The results reveal that, unlike risks associated with physical harm, privacy breaches, and security threats, a variety of other concerns—including financial, psychological, social, performance-related risks, time loss, and the overall perceived risks—significantly influence consumers' willingness to accept VAs purchase recommendations. The effect is mediated by trust in VA purchase recommendations and their perceived value. Different types of risk affect various consumption values, with functional value being the most influential. The model explains 58.6% of the variance in purchase recommendation acceptance and significantly elucidates the variance in all consumption values.

This study contributes crucial knowledge to understanding consumer decision-making processes as they increasingly leverage AI-powered voice-based dialogue platforms for online purchasing. It emphasizes recognizing diverse risk typologies associated with VA purchase recommendations and their impact on consumer purchase behavior. The findings offer insights for marketing managers seeking to navigate the challenges posed by consumers' perceived risks while leveraging VAs as an integral component of modern shopping environments.