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The purpose of this paper is to examine US public relations professionals' perceptions of the benefits and challenges associated with the concept of moral entrepreneurship, defined as the purposeful process of changing or creating new institutionalized ethical norms. This study argues that the concept of moral entrepreneurship provides organizations with a potentially valuable framework to actively recognize societal pressures and problems and act accordingly to better the environment in which the organization resides and operates.

This exploratory study uses purposive in-depth interviews with 25 diverse public relations professionals, who represented communication firms, in-house public relations departments, higher education, nonprofits and government.

Respondents assigned a high value to the concept of moral entrepreneurship: In addition to its being viewed as the right thing to do, they recognized its practice as a way to help organizations recruit and retain employee talent and improve stakeholder trust. However, based on the interviews, organizational leadership is the primary initiator of ethical changes; therefore, without a seat at the management table, practitioners lack the influence to initiate such new organizational directions and take on the role of moral entrepreneurs only when directed to do so by their superiors. Barriers to adopting a moral entrepreneurship approach included a limited budget and shortage of staff, employees' resistance to change, fear of failure, poor leadership and a politically polarized workplace.

Practice implications include considerations for furthering moral entrepreneurship in organizations.

This study is the first to explore the applicability of the concept of moral entrepreneurship in public relations. The paper underscores the need for further discussion around novel approaches to ethics in public relations that go beyond simple compliance with professional codes and industry standards and that help organizations lead societal change.

Lean management tools are becoming increasingly applied in different types of organizations around the world. These tools have shown their significant contribution to improving business performance. In this vein, the purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of lean management on both occupational safety and operational excellence in Tunisian companies.

A survey was conducted among Tunisian companies, and it resulted in the collection of 62 responses that were analyzed using the software SPSS. In addition, a conceptual model linking the practices of the three basic concepts was designed to highlight the hypotheses of the research. Subsequently, factor analysis and structural equation method analysis were conducted to assess the validation of the assumptions.

The results obtained have shown that lean management has a significant impact on occupational safety. Similarly, occupational safety has a significant impact on operational excellence. However, lean management does not have a significant impact on operational excellence.

This work highlighted the involvement of small and medium-sized enterprise’s managers from emerging economies in the studied concepts’ practices. Likewise, it testified to the impacts of lean management on occupational safety and operational excellence in the Tunisian context.

Senior executives and leaders of public sector institutions (PSIs) are responsible for the development, preservation or restoration of employee integrity (EI). This conceptual paper aims to address the direct impact of EI on work performance (WP). It also explores the interceding effects of job satisfaction (JS) and employee organisational identification (OI) and the context-conditional impact of purposeful leadership (PL).

This research builds a research framework coupled with suppositions by integrating literature from both theoretical and empirical works in the fields of integrity management, human resource management, performance management and leadership using a systematic literature review approach. Firstly, the authors explicitly express the authors’ list of goals through replicable design. Secondly, the authors find all research papers that would satisfy the requirements for inclusion. Thirdly, the authors evaluate the truthfulness of the results from the incorporated research, and, finally, the authors offer a summary and synthesis of the features and outcomes of the incorporated research.

This study finds that EI will be favourably linked to WP, and this encouraging connection will be favourably interceded by JS and OI, both independently and together. Also, PL will favourably moderate the EI–JS connection as well as the EI–OI linkage.

This study provides a novel framework for specialists and academics in four multidisciplinary fields for improving the EI and WP of employees using JS and OI as strategic devices. It also considers the conditional influence of PL, which has been underexploited in the academic sphere. Thus, this research sets the stage for forthcoming academics to investigate this research framework empirically in diverse PSIs worldwide.

To guarantee that PSIs draw, grow and preserve workers who symbolise the beliefs of the institution, their leadership must uphold a “values-grounded approach” to all facets of its human resource practises – comprising recruitment, performance appraisals, training, leadership development platforms and promotions.

This study reveals the importance of improving integrity in PSIs and the diverse mechanisms through which EI translates into WP. It also highlights the possible benefits that purposeful leaders can offer as well as the problems that they can potentially help mitigate.

This research adds to the sparse literature on the construct of PL within PSIs’ settings and offers a new conceptual model for boosting employee WP through the facilitating roles of JS and OI, both separately and together.

With the launch of mobile applications to reduce food waste, this study reviews scholarly articles to answer the questions: (1) What research topics are extensively discussed in relation to food waste mobile applications (FWMA)? (2) How do these applications impact food waste and food poverty? (3) At which stage of the supply chain are digital applications employed?

This paper conducts a systematic literature review of scholarly articles on the topic of mobile applications and food waste to answer three research questions.

The article provides a definition of mobile applications to reduce food waste. Most published studies on mobile applications are from developed countries. Over half of the applications address procurement and consumption along the supply chain. The applications are categorized by food saving method and used in studies on innovation management, platform relations and performance, the supply chain activities impacted and platform acceptance.

The articles and applications analyzed suggest more quantitative studies. A wider range of cases in diverse cultural settings is needed, as well as analyses of the factors influencing the development, performance and market acceptance of platforms.

This study is the first study to systematically review the relevant scholarly contributions related to mobile applications, an innovative practice that helps reduce food waste. It allows making an initial progress report on the research carried out.

This study aims to examine the influence of training and development (TAD), including performance appraisal (PFA), on the performance of microfinance institutions in a developing economy.

A random sampling drew 100 microfinance institutions in Ghana's Greater Accra Region. Then, a purposive sampling approach selected a cross-section of employees in these institutions. Finally, the data were collected from a sample of 367 respondents, such as managers, utilizing a survey questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test hypothesized relationships.

The study results indicate that PFA has a statistically significant positive relationship with organizational performance, and this relationship is partially mediated by job satisfaction (JBS). Interestingly, the TAD process does not have a statistically significant positive relationship with organizational performance when JBS is present in the model. In fact, JBS fully mediates the relationship between TAD and organizational performance.

The study is limited to microfinance in tiers two and three in Greater Accra city of Ghana and did not include the entire country. Although the city of Accra provides a generalized representation of the research, which can be replicated, some variables and results may be impacted if other tiers of microfinance organizations are incorporated.

TAD, as well as PFA, enhance the performance of microfinance and can be utilized as tools for competitive advantage in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (e.g. microfinance institutions). The study accentuates the value of TAD, PFA and JBS in microfinance in a developing country like Ghana.

This is an original study investigating the effect of TAD and PFA practices on the performance of SMEs in a developing country like Ghana. Also, the study analyses JBS as a mediation variable to performance using SEM, which advances the research methodology in this research field.

The purpose of this study is to investigate consumers' emotional responses to artificial intelligence (AI) defeating people. Meanwhile, the authors investigate the negative spillover effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes toward AI companies. The authors also try to alleviate this spillover effect.

Using four studies to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, the authors use the fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from the Transformers algorithm to run a sentiment analysis to investigate how AI defeating people influences consumers' emotions. In Studies 2 to 4, the authors test the effect of AI defeating people on consumers' attitudes, the mediating effect of negative emotions and the moderating effect of different intentions.

The authors find that AI defeating people increases consumers' negative emotions. In terms of downstream consequences, AI defeating people induces a spillover effect on consumers' unfavorable attitudes toward AI companies. Emphasizing the intention of helping people can effectively mitigate this negative spillover effect.

The authors' findings remind governments, policymakers and AI companies to pay attention to the negative effect of AI defeating people and take reasonable steps to alleviate this negative effect. The authors help consumers rationally understand this phenomenon and correctly control and reduce unnecessary negative emotions in the AI era.

This paper is the first study to examine the adverse effects of AI defeating humans. The authors contribute to research on the dark side of AI, the outcomes of competition matches and the method to analyze emotions in user-generated content (UGC).

Blockchain technology has encouraged more transparent transactions process through decentralized protocols and has identified multi-dimensional benefits. However, value innovation–based blockchain for the particular industry requires further elaboration since there appears to be a vague understanding. Therefore, this study aims to provide a profound perspective of value innovation based blockchain, which has the potential to be applied in the halal industry.

This study developed a typology model that describes a profound understanding of blockchain adoption for value innovation. Empirical research was conducted using multiple case studies to justify the model. The case selection in this study was based on the halal industry in Indonesia. This study employed few sources to derive sufficient data through in-depth interviews, direct observations, and archival records. In particular, this study drew upon specific theories to elaborate on the blockchain-enable value innovation.

A blockchain is identified as having the opportunity to promote value innovation in the halal industry through its features. This study defines a typology model of value innovation-based blockchain for the halal industry that takes place on a particular spectrum. The model built in this study classifies blockchain adoption for the halal industry from specific dimensions: the degree of blockchain-based system complexity and the intensity of value innovation. Then, this study finds that these cases have different classifications and are evenly distributed in the quadrants of the model.

The typology model in this study can be a reference for decision-making when considering blockchain to leverage a value innovation in particular systems. Although blockchain technology can potentially be applied in vast areas, the decision-makers should understand that technology adoption should provide distinct values to its stakeholders, notably in multi-dimensional areas such as the halal industry. Thus, this study contributes significantly to blockchain technology usage for the halal industry.

This paper aims to examine the effect of carbon emissions on audit fees. The authors hypothesize that firms in cities with higher carbon emission levels have lower reporting transparency, higher return volatility or are subject to higher reputation risk, causing them to be charged higher audit fees for auditing services.

The authors use panel data of 25,960 firm-year observations from a sample of Chinese firms. The carbon emission data for each Chinese city are obtained from the China Emission Accounts and Datasets for Emerging Economies. This paper adopts a multiple regression model to study the impact of carbon emissions on audit fees.

The authors find that firms located in cities with higher carbon emission levels and firms with more carbon emissions are charged, on average, a higher audit fee. This audit fee effect of carbon risk is transmitted by lessened information transparency and elevated financial risk within these firms. This paper shows that auditors consider carbon risk in their audit fee decisions and other factors that could influence audit risk and effort.

This study draws a connection between carbon emissions and audit fees. It is especially relevant due to the increasing importance of environmental factors in the audit risk assessment. In addition, the findings suggest that a firm implementing a proactive environmental strategy benefits the economy and decreases the costs to the firm for services such as auditing.

This article aims to present a direct solution to handle linear constraints in finite element (FE) analysis without penalties or the Lagrange multipliers introduced.

First, the system of linear equations corresponding to the linear constraints is solved for the leading variables in terms of the free variables and the constants. Then, the reduced system of equilibrium equations with respect to the free variables is derived from the finite-dimensional virtual work equation. Finally, the algorithm is designed.

The proposed procedure is promising in three typical cases: (1) to enforce displacement constraints in any direction; (2) to implement local refinements by allowing hanging nodes from element subdivision and (3) to treat non-matching grids of distinct parts of the problem domain. The procedure is general and suitable for 3D non-linear analyses.

The algorithm is fitted only to the Galerkin-based numerical methods.

The proposed procedure does not need Lagrange multipliers or penalties. The tangential stiffness matrix of the reduced system of equilibrium equations reserves positive definiteness and symmetry. Besides, many contemporary Galerkin-based numerical methods need to tackle the enforcement of the essential conditions, whose weak forms reduce to linear constraints. As a result, the proposed procedure is quite promising.

The current research aimed to investigate the external enablement role of Digital Infrastructures (DI) in the interplay of entrepreneurial cognitions and innovation.

Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) were used for analyses. This yielded a sample of 8,601 Generation Z entrepreneurs operating in 25 European countries.

Applying hierarchical moderated regressions showed that socio-cognitive components of an entrepreneurial mindset (self-efficacy, risk propensity, opportunity identification) affect innovation among Generation Z entrepreneurs. More importantly, DI plays an external enablement role in the interplay of cognitions and innovation among Generation Z entrepreneurs.

This study contributes to the socio-cognitive theory of entrepreneurship by integrating an external enablement perspective into the study of cognitions and entrepreneurial outcomes (here, innovation). It contributes to the digital technology perspective of entrepreneurship by connecting the conversation about the socio-cognitive perspective of entrepreneurship regarding the role of cognitions in innovation to the conversation in information systems (IS) regarding technology affordances and constraints. This study extends the application of the external enabler framework to the post-entry stage of entrepreneurial activity and integrates a generational perspective into it.