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The purpose of this paper is to compare the influence of relative density (RD) and strain rates on failure mechanism and specific energy absorption (SEA) of polyamide lattices ranging from bending to stretch-dominated structures using selective laser sintering (SLS).

Three bending and two stretch-dominated unit cells were selected based on the Maxwell stability criterion. Lattices were designed with three RD and fabricated by SLS technique using PA12 material. Quasi-static compression tests with three strain rates were carried out using Taguchi's L9 experiments. The lattice compressive behaviour was verified with the Gibson–Ashby analytical model.

It has been observed that RD and strain rates played a vital role in lattice compressive properties by controlling failure mechanisms, resulting in distinct post-yielding responses as fluctuating and stable hardening in the plateau region. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) displayed the significant impact of RD and emphasised dissimilar influences of strain rate that vary to cell topology. Bending-dominated lattices showed better compressive properties than stretch-dominated lattices. The interesting observation is that stretch-dominated lattices with over-stiff topology exhibited less compressive properties contrary to the Maxwell stability criterion, whereas strain rate has less influence on the SEA of face-centered and body-centered cubic unit cells with vertical and horizontal struts (FBCCXYZ).

This comparative study is expected to provide new prospects for designing end-user parts that undergo various impact conditions like automotive bumpers and evolving techniques like hybrid and functionally graded lattices.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first work that relates the strain rate with compressive properties and also highlights the lattice behaviour transformation from ductile to brittle while the increase of RD and strain rate analytically using the Gibson–Ashby analytical model.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of customer-focus on small medium enterprise (SME) performance from the perspective of a resource-based view (RBV).

This research study implemented a survey strategy to gather data from 255 respondents on the registered list of Ghana Enterprise Agency (GEA) in the eastern region of Ghana. Scales used to gather data were operationalized from previous research studies. A structural equation modeling (SEM) path analysis was used to estimate the impact of customer-focus on the performance of SMEs.

The outcomes of this study indicate that customer-focus has a significant positive impact on SME performance, hence backing the current demand for investigating the distinct influence of customer-focus on SME performance. The results show that customer-focus has a positive and significant relationship with financial performance, customer performance, internal business process performance and learning and growth performance, thus supporting the literature on the positive impact of customer-focus on SME performance. Therefore, customer-focus determinants used in this study, including co-creation, networking ties, customer insight and artificial intelligence marketing (AIM), are critical to the optimization of SME performance.

Notwithstanding the importance of this research study mentioned earlier, the study has limitations. Notably, the sample size of this study can be increased to capture SME respondents in other geographical zones that were not included in this study. Future research studies may address how business environment conditions moderate the relationship between customer focus and performance, and also the cause-effect of the relationship between customer focus and business environment conditions on SME performance.

The practical implications consist of two main items. First, this study empowers SME owners and managers to develop a customer focus technique as a central strategic goal in their quest for SME performance optimization. Second, SME owners and managers should progressively exploit the four determinants of customer focus which include co-creation, networking ties, customer insight and (AIM in order to accrue important resources for effective utilization of their customer focus competences as a way to enhance their performance.

This study is targeted at the sound development of SMEs to bring about poverty alleviation and employment. Poverty, unemployment and poor living standards are recognized as vital social challenges in most emerging economies. The establishment of customer focus as an important strategic capability provides opportunities for SME survival, profitability and growth.

Generally, the findings of this research study provide a strong backing to RBV perspective and the proposition that customer-focus and its determinants (i.e. co-creation, networking ties, customer insight and AIM) should be acknowledged as a vital strategic resource for optimizing the performance of SMEs. This research study also provides new knowledge contribution to the present body of knowledge on customer-focus orientation and management literature, particularly in the context of an emerging economy.

This study aims to explore factors that affect gendered consumption (male and female), willingness to pay (economic attributes) and the socio-cultural context of Gen-Z consumers towards specialty coffee as compared to other types in Taiwan.

Samoggia and Riedel’s (2018) theoretical framework is adopted to examine the concepts of interest. A mixed method approach comprising interviews and experimental taste tests was used to collect data from Gen-Z specialty coffee consumers in a purposive sampling manner.

The findings suggested the effect of price elasticity of demand where specialty coffee was perceived as an expensive commodity by young consumers, and hence, not a regularly purchased item. Nevertheless, specialty coffee was linked to health benefits, and a signal for conspicuous consumption – where café experiences facilitated self-promotion on sites like Instagram and Facebook. Finally, the findings alluded to a potential gender effect, with more female young consumers likely to consume specialty coffee as compared to their male counterparts.

This study is located within the context of Taiwan, which has been a tea-dominated consumption landscape for numerous decades. The use of an experimental design also presents a unique angle to elucidate sensory elements surrounding specialty coffee as a research design for Gen-Z research projects. The study points to the relevance of social context in the consumers’ behavioural patterns, which has been largely implicit within consumer behaviour scholarship.

COVID-19 has had various effects on women’s labour supply worldwide. This study investigates how women’s labour market outcomes in the MENA region have been affected by the stringency of governments’ COVID-19 responses and school closures. We examine whether women, particularly those with children at young age, reduced their labour supply to take care of their families during the pandemic.

To investigate whether having a family results in an extra penalty to women’s labour market outcomes, we compare single women to married women and mothers. Using the ERF COVID-19 MENA Monitor Household Surveys, we analyse the key conditions underlying women’s labour market outcomes: (1) wage earnings and labour market status including remaining formally employed, informally, unpaid or self-employed, unemployed or out of the labour force and (2) becoming permanently terminated, being suspended, seeing a reduction in the hours worked or wages, or seeing a delay in one’s wage payments because of COVID-19. Ordered probit and multinomial logit are employed in the case of categorical outcomes, and linear models for wage earnings.

Women, regardless of whether they have children or not, appear to join the labour market out of necessity to help their families in the times of crisis. Child-caring women who are economically inactive are also more likely to enter the labour market. There is little difference between the negative experiences of women with children and child-free women in regard to their monthly pay reduction or delay, or contract termination, but women with children were more likely to experience reduction in hours worked throughout the pandemic.

These findings may not have causal interpretation facilitating accurate inference. This is because of potential omitted variables such as endogenous motivation of women in different circumstances, latent changes in the division of domestic work between care-giving and other household members, or selective sample attrition.

Our analysis explores the multiple channels in which the pandemic has affected the labour outcomes of MENA-region women. Our findings highlight the challenges that hamper the labour market participation of women, and suggest that public policy should strive to balance the share of unpaid care work between men and women and increase men’s involvement, through measures that support child-bearing age women’s engagement in the private sector during crises, invest in childcare services and support decent job creation for all.

This paper aims to explore how Indonesian males who are entrepreneurs in make-up artists navigate their businesses in a society that relies on hegemonic masculinity. This goal is reached by concentrating on male make-up artist entrepreneurs in five Indonesian provinces and investigating how they actively rewrite their gender and inherent vocations by societal norms.

This paper adopts a qualitative phenomenological approach with methods. In-depth interviews and observations were conducted with 28 informants in five provinces of Indonesia.

These findings show that, aside from self-concept, family support is the most crucial determining factor that pushes men make-up artists to become businesses in the face of so many rejections. Persistence in battling for their fate is also critical in efforts to erase themselves, who are constantly subjected to hegemonic masculinity. Aside from that, it appears that the government's role in attempts to promote gender equality in all fields of business in Indonesia remains limited.

This paper contributes to the gender and entrepreneurship literature by providing a broader exploration of male entrepreneurs working in the field of female make-up artists in a society that still adheres to hegemonic masculinity.

This study examines the effect of social media marketing on voting intention applying a combination of fuzzy logic methodology and a multidimensional panel data model.

The study adopts a multidimensional panel data method that includes several fixed effects. The dependent variable is a multifaceted construct that measures the participants’ intention to vote. The independent variables are electronic word of mouth (eWOM), customisation (CUS), entertainment (ENT), interaction (INT), trendiness (TRD), candidate’s perceived image (CPI), religious beliefs (RB), gender and age. The grouping variables that signify fixed effects are employment status, level of education, mostly used social media and religion. First, the significance of said fixed effects was tested through an ANOVA process. Then, the main model was estimated, including the significant grouping variables as fixed effects.

Employment status and level of education were significant fixed effects. Also, eWOM, ENT, INT, CPI, RB and gender significantly affected participants’ voting intention.

Being based on a questionnaire that asked participants about how they perceive different aspects of social media, the present study is limited to their perceptions. Therefore, further studies covering the voters’ behaviour in action could be efficient complements to the present study.

The findings could guide the political parties into prioritizing the aspects of social media in forming an effective campaign resulting in being elected.

The findings have the potential to help the public in making better informed decisions when voting. Furthermore, the results of this study indicate applications for social media which are beyond leisure time fillers.

Fuzzy logic and multidimensional panel data estimates are this study’s novelty and originality. Structural equation modelling and crisp linguistic values have been used in previous studies on social media’s effect on voting intent. The former refines the data gathered from a questionnaire, and the latter considers the possibility of including different grouping factors to achieve a more efficient and less biased estimation.

The occupational health risk associated with the production of prefabricated concrete components is often overlooked. This paper will use a damage assessment and cyclic mitigation (DACM) model to provide individualized exposure risk assessment and corresponding mitigation management measures for workers who are being exposed.

The DACM model is proposed based on the concept of life cycle assessment (LCA). The model uses Monte-Carlo simulation for uncertainty risk assessment, followed by quantitative damage assessment using disability-adjusted life year (DALY). Lastly, sensitivity analysis is used to identify the parameters with the greatest impact on health risks.

The results show that the dust concentration is centered around the mean, and the fitting results are close to normal distribution, so the mean value can be used to carry out the calculation of risk. However, calculations using the DACM model revealed that there are still some work areas at risk. DALY damage is most severe in concrete production area. Meanwhile, the inhalation rate (IR), exposure duration (ED), exposure frequency (EF) and average exposure time (AT) showed greater impacts based on the sensitivity analysis.

Based on the comparison, the DACM model can determine that the potential occupational health risk of prefabricated concrete component (PC) factory and the risk is less than that of on-site construction. It synthesizes field research and simulation to form the entire assessment process into a case-base system with the depth of the cycle, which allows the model to be continuously adjusted to reduce the occupational health damage caused by production pollution exposure.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether and in what ways library workers in the United States encountered patrons espousing beliefs in conspiracy theories and, if so, to explore the effectiveness of the strategies they used to address information disorder during the interactions.

The study was designed with an exploratory qualitative approach. Data were collected via an online survey posted to national and state library association listservs, utilizing a self-selected sampling method. Researchers inductively and deductively analyzed results, developing predetermined themes based on the research questions, then iteratively integrating unexpected data during coding.

A total of 334 responses were received over two weeks. Data represent library workers from 43 states and Washington, D.C., including various types of libraries. Library workers interacted with patrons with conspiratorial thinking, and both library workers and patrons evidenced a range of emotions and motivations.

This is the first national study to survey library workers and whether they encountered patrons espousing conspiracy theories. While the sample size is small, themes elucidate various strategies that library workers use for interacting with patrons who express some level of conspiracy ideation.

The authors' study aims to examine to what extent managerial religiosity does influence human resource (HR) managers' attitudes towards women as managers (ATWM), and whether such posi(nega)tive attitudes can facilitate or impede the adoption of supportive HR practices (SHRP).

This study empirically examines a theoretical model by employing partial least squares-based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) using quantitative survey data from 182 HR managers in Bangladesh.

The authors' findings reveal that individual religiosity may adversely affect HR managers' attitudes towards recognising women as managers, and such stereotyped attitudes, in turn, may attenuate the adoption of supportive HR practices in organisations operating particularly in highly religious socio-culture environments.

The findings of the authors based on self-report, cross-sectional survey data collected from HR managers/equivalent working in the Bangladeshi organisations may unlikely to predict the ATWM held by the top leaders in organisations and other employees in similar socio-cultural settings.

The authors' findings suggest that religiosity cannot be ignored in management development and recruitment processes for HR managers, particularly in a society characterised by relatively weaker formal institutions and people with a higher degree of religiosity.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first attempt explicating how top management's religiosity interacts with the attitudes towards the acceptance of women as managers and how such attitudes can influence the adoption of supportive HR practices.

Transnational migration is a key challenge in migrant-sending and host-receiving countries. However, relatively little is known about how migrants use network capital to foster small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore how network capital fosters Laotian migrant workers in Thai family SMEs.

This research was conducted using qualitative network analysis (QNA). Referral snowball sampling was used to draw 20 participants from December 2021 to March 2022. Data analysis was performed using Gephi, a software package developed for QNA (coding, network features, measure nodes and network metrics).

The main findings are the following four emerging themes: chain networks, social networks, human networks and financial networks are associated with network capital for fostering Laotian migrant workers in Thai family SMEs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first QNA to explore how Laotian migrant workers use network capital in Thai family SMEs.