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This study aims to investigate the effect of sandwich-generation caregiving (caregiving for elders and children simultaneously) on employed caregivers’ job satisfaction when compared with non-sandwich caregiving patterns of no caregiving, children-only caregiving and elders-only caregiving. This study also aims to explore whether depression mediates this effect and whether three types of caregivers-friendly work time (less work-time length, less nonstandard work-time schedule and more work-time autonomy) buffer these direct and indirect effects.

A sample of 7,571 Chinese employees is chosen from the 2020 China Family Panel Studies through a multistage stratified sampling design.

After controlling for employees’ sociodemographic, work and other caregiving characteristics, this study finds that sandwich-generation caregiving is indeed more likely to negatively affect employees’ job satisfaction when compared with no caregiving and elders-only caregiving, but to the same extent as children-only caregiving. This study also suggests that the effect of sandwich-generation caregiving on job satisfaction is mediated by employees’ depression and that three types of caregiver-friendly work time help to weaken the negative effects on employees’ depression and job satisfaction.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the negative spillover effect and its mechanisms of caregiving on employees’ job satisfaction through focusing on a special caregivers group: employed sandwich-generation caregivers. These results shed light on the importance of extending caregiver studies to the workplace and provide implications for organization managers and human resources practitioners to design caregiver-friendly workplace policies to maintain employed caregivers’ work-family balance.

In experiments utilising sweat solution and distilled water, seamed ensembles performed less thermally efficiently than unseamed fabrics.

Water may not accurately reflect perspiration when testing multi-layered clothes for thermal comfort in wet state. Most researchers used water or sodium chloride (NaCl) to measure wet state thermal comfort. However, human perspiration is an extremely complex mixture of aqueous chemicals, including minerals, salts, lipids, urea and lactic acid. This study compares the effects of simulated sweat solution to distilled water on the thermal behaviour of a multi-layered fabric assembly with different seam patterns.

Experiment results show that stitching decreases thermal resistance and thermal conductivity. Seam pattern of 10 cm diagonal spacing is more thermally resistant than 2.5 cm diagonal spacing. In comparison to that of simulated sweat, fabric that has been moistened with distilled water exhibits increased thermal conductivity. Hollow polyester wadding or micro polyester wadding as the intermediate layer exhibits greater thermal resistance than multi-layered construction with spacer fabric as middle layer.

This study considers human perspiration while designing protective clothing for wet thermal comfort.

India liberalized its economy in 1991, which resulted in intense global competition, quality-conscious and demanding customers. Additionally, significant technological advancements lead to enhancements in products and processes. These forced Indian organizations to adopt innovative business strategies in the past 30 years. Meanwhile, the Lean Six Sigma methodology has significantly grown with vast applicability during the past 30 years. Thus, the purpose of this study is to develop the learning on Lean Six Sigma methodology in the Indian context through investigation of literature.

A three-stage systematic literature review approach was adopted to investigate the literature during the present study. In total, 187 articles published in 62 journals/conference proceedings from 2005 to 2022 (18 years) were shortlisted. The first part of the article summarizes the significant milestones towards the quality journey in the Indian context, along with the evolution of the Lean Six Sigma methodology. The second part examines the shortlisted papers on Lean Six Sigma frameworks, their applicability in industrial sectors, performance metrics, outcomes realized, publication trends, authorship patterns and leading researchers from the Indian perspective.

Lean Six Sigma has emerged as a highly acclaimed and structured business improvement strategy worldwide. The Indian economy has seen remarkable growth in the past decade and is one of the fastest-growing economies in the 21st century. Lean Six Sigma implementation in India has significantly increased from 2014 onward. The study revealed that researchers have proposed several different frameworks for Lean Six Sigma implementation, the majority of which are conceptual. Furthermore, the balanced applicability of Lean Six Sigma in manufacturing and service sectors was observed with the highest implementation in the health-care sector. Additionally, the widely adopted tools, techniques along with performance metrics exploring case studies were reported along with a summary of eminent and leading researchers in the Indian context.

This study is confined to reviewed papers as per the research criteria with a significant focus on the Indian context and might have missed some papers due to the adopted papers selection strategy.

The present study is one of the initial attempts to investigate the literature published on Lean Six Sigma in the Indian context, including perspective on the Indian quality movement. Therefore, the present study will provide an understanding of Lean Six Sigma methodology in the Indian context to graduating students in engineering and management and entry-level executives. The analysis and findings on Lean Six Sigma frameworks, research approach, publications details, etc., will be helpful to potential research scholars and academia. Additionally, analysis of case studies on Lean Six Sigma implementation by Indian industries will assist the managers and professionals in decision making.

This paper aims to overcome the limitations of studies on work-life balance, which have focused on Western countries without considering “mental” dimensions of gendered childcare. By concentrating on South Korea as a case study, this paper also aims to examine how the gendered division of childcare changed when Korea's work-life/family policy followed European work-family conciliation policy.

The Korean Time Use Survey (KTUS) in 2009 and 2019 are used for multiple regression analyses. Based on discussions about theories on unpaid work distribution within households and its stratification effects, this study examines the relationship between wife's and husband's behaviors and the stratification effects in the gendered division of childcare alongside the work-life/family policy change.

Substantial findings indicate the necessity of strengthening various legal and institutional structures that might increase husbands' characteristics of caring masculinities. Additionally, while policies developed to support flexible working arrangements, low-income women at risk of being trapped in dual poverty of time and income should be carefully considered.

This study focuses especially on South Korea, thereby contributing to understanding how national policy and gendered distribution of childcare are related. Notably, this link has not been widely discussed in the literature on work-life balance. It also suggests viable directions for future policies depending on gender and socioeconomic status.

The purpose of this study was conducted at an enterprise that produces fasteners and is one of the leading companies in the sector in terms of market share. Possible defects in the coating of bolts and nuts either lead to products being scrapped or all of the coating process being repeated from beginning to end. In both cases, the enterprise faces a waste of time and excessive costs. Through this project, the six sigma theory and its means were effectively used to improve the efficiency and quality management of the company. The selection of the six sigma project has also contributed to the creation of various documents to be used for project screening and evaluation of financial results.

Six sigma is an optimization strategy that is used to improve the profitability of businesses, avoid waste, scrap and losses, reduce costs and improve the effectiveness of all activities to meet or exceed customers’ needs and expectations. Six sigma’s process improvement model, known as Definition-Measurement-Analysis-Improvement-Control, contributes to the economic and technical achievements of businesses. The normal distribution of a process should be within ±3 sigma of the mean. This represents a scale of 99.7% certainty. However, improving the process through the utilization of the six sigma rule, which accepts normal variabilities of processes twice as strict, will result in an error rate of 3.4 per million instead of 2,700 per million for each product or service.

Using six sigma practices to reduce the costs associated with low quality and to increase economic added value became a cultural practice. With this, the continuation of six sigma practices throughout the Company was intended. The annual cost reduction achieved with the utilization of six sigma practices can be up to $21,780. When time savings are also considered, a loss reduction of about $30,000 each year can be achieved. The coating thickness efficiency increased from 85% to 95% after the improvements made through the six sigma project. There is a significant increase in the efficiency of coating thickness. In addition, the coating thickness efficiency is also close to the target value of 95%–97%.

The results of the study were optimized with the help of deep learning. The performance of the model created in deep learning was quite close to the actual performance. This result implicates the validity of the improvement work. The results may act as a guide for the use of deep learning in new projects.

This paper aims to present a comprehensive overview of open-access publications by Indian non-profit organizations over the past two decades. The study explores the growth, licensing patterns, citations, authorship patterns and other parameters to understand the scholarly output.

The study involves data collection from OpenAlex scholarly catalog. Data analysis uses OpenRefine, a data carpentry tool, to examine and extract various aspects of scholarly output. A total of 89,149 scholarly outputs from 2004 to 2023 were analyzed using statistical and bibliometric methods.

The findings revealed a positive publication growth trend, with 57.74% open access. Gold OA dominates, with 69.61% of papers in 2023. Licensing patterns reveal that 63.75% of OA papers have licenses. Most papers have multiple authors, with 24.83% of over ten authors receiving 60.12% of citations. “Medknow” is the leading publisher, and “The Indian Journal of Ophthalmology” tops journals. Contributions from repositories like SSRN and PubMed are significant. The study also examines citation patterns across different OA types and identifies the top 30 research areas, emphasizing “Medicine” as the most prevalent.

The identified trends and patterns offer valuable insights for policymakers, researchers and organizations to enhance accessibility and impact. This study stresses sustained efforts for transparency and democratization of knowledge in the non-profit sector.

This study filled a gap in existing research by focusing on Indian non-profits, highlighting their roles and impacts often overlooked in scholarly literature. This study provides insights into the growth of open-access publications and their implications in the non-profit sector.

In parallel with the rising importance of innovation and digital technologies, research on platform ecosystems is rapidly accumulating. This study aims to summarize the current research published in leading technical and innovation management (TIM) journals and provide recommendation for future research.

In this paper, the authors combine multiple quantitative literature review methods (social network analysis, citation analysis and co-citation analysis) with a systematic literature review of articles published in the 13 most influential TIM journals over a 15-year period.

The citation network of 168 selected papers is sparse, with low network density indicating the emerging nature of the field. Using network centrality values, the authors identified the 33 most influential articles. The review of methodologies in these articles found that conceptual and case study research dominate, suggesting the need for additional confirmatory and quantitative analysis. Co-citation analysis of the references identified six research clusters: foundation, network-centric innovation, complementor management, platform competition, ecosystemsand product platforms.

This analysis is among the first to examine the knowledge structure of platform ecosystem research in the TIM domain by using multiple evidence-based analysis methods. The authors also apply the theory, context, characteristics and methodology framework to suggest areas for future research.

This study aims to examine the effects on student motivation and perception of technological interventions within undergraduate mechanical engineering and product design and manufacture programs at a Sino-foreign international university. The authors use an augmented reality game application within a class on Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) that was developed using the approaches of microlearning and digital game-based learning (DGBL).

Structured as design-based research, the study reports on developing innovative educational interventions and provides an empirical investigation of their effectiveness. Data were collected using a mixed methods approach, using pre- and post-tests and questionnaires, together with researcher observations and participant interviews.

Through two rounds of playtests, the game positively affected intrinsic motivation and encouraged higher-order cognitive learning, critical thinking, communication and collaboration. Collaborative learning plays a significant role, DGBL is preferred over traditional methods and microlearning reduces information density and cognitive overload.

The study contributes to our understanding of digital game-based interventions on students’ intrinsic motivation and provides insights into effective ways to design instructional materials in similar teaching and learning settings.

Live-streaming e-commerce is becoming a new way for many consumers to shop. During the live broadcast process, the interaction between anchors and customers plays a decisive role on consumers' purchasing decisions. This study aims to explore how two types of interaction between the anchor and the customers (i.e. task-oriented interaction and relationship-oriented interaction) affect customers' purchase decisions.

The study establishes a model based on online trust theory and multi-sensor interaction theory. To validate the model, we carried out five simulated live-streaming events and collected data through a scenario-based survey of the viewers participating in the live-streaming (N = 244). Structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypotheses.

Both task-oriented interaction and relationship-oriented interaction have a positive impact on users' purchase decisions through the mediation of virtual touch, emotional trust and cognitive trust. Sense of power has opposite moderating effects on the impacts of relationship-oriented interaction on emotional trust and cognitive trust.

This study enriches the theory of live-streaming e-commerce by demonstrating the decisive roles of two types of anchor–customer interaction, the mediation roles of virtual touch, cognitive trust, and emotional trust in customer purchase decisions, as well as the moderating effect of sense of power on customer decision-making processes. The findings provide practical insights for anchors and live-streaming platforms about how they should arrange live-streaming content to enhance consumer purchasing decisions.

Ultrasonic welding is an emerging apparel manufacturing technique. However, the applications are widely explored in the field of technical textiles, with less exploration in the apparel endues. The purpose of this study is to explore the application of ultrasonic welding in apparel by analyzing the impacts of different parameters.

This study analyzed the influence of ultrasonic welding parameters, including pressure, welding speed and ultrasonic power on the seam performances (seam strength, seam bursting strength, seam thickness and seam stiffness). The parameters are optimized using Box–Behnken experimental design to achieve better seam performances.

The properties of ultrasonic seams are influenced by welding and fabric properties. Ultrasonically welded seams showed better performances in the case of comfort properties of seams, whereas the functional properties are lesser compared to conventional seams.

The findings of the research clearly outline the level of influence of different parameters on the performance of the ultrasonically welded seams in knitted fabrics, which can greatly help in applying ultrasonic welding manufacturing methods in apparel manufacturing.