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The world of work is changing and creating challenges and opportunities for the employment inclusion of young people with disabilities. In this article, the perceptions held by young adults with disabilities regarding participation in the future of work are examined.

One-on-one interviews were conducted with Canadian young adults (ages 18–36 years) living with a disability. Participants were asked about their thoughts regarding the impact of the changing nature of work on their labor market involvement and career aspirations. A thematic analysis was performed to identify and examine emergent salient themes.

In total, 22 young adults were interviewed; over half held secure employment. Career aspirations and work-related decisions were primarily shaped by a participant's health needs. The future of work was seen as a more proximal determinant to employment. Digital technologies were expected to impact working conditions and create barriers and facilitators to employment. Participants who indicated being securely employed held positive expectations regarding the impact of digital technology on their work. Participants working precariously held negative appraisals regarding the impact of digital technologies on employment opportunities. The role of technological and soft skills was critical to participating in a labor market reliant on advanced technology. Participants reported barriers to developing job skills related to their disability and their work arrangements.

This research highlights the importance of considering changes in the future of work, especially the digital transformation of the economy, in the design of initiatives which promote the employment inclusion of young adults with disabilities. Despite the significance of the changing nature of work, supporting health needs and encouraging access to secure work arrangements also remain paramount.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model elaborating on the type of conditions that can inhibit (or at least temporarily hold back) “reactive conformance” in the wake of an increasing reliance on quantitative performance evaluations of academic research and researchers.

A qualitative study of a research group at a Swedish university who was recurrently exposed to quantitative performance evaluations of their research activities.

The empirical findings show how the research group under study exhibited a surprisingly high level of non-compliance and non-conformity in relation to what was deemed important and legitimate by the prevailing performance evaluations. Based on this, we identify four important qualities of pre-existing research/er ideals that seem to make them particularly resilient to an infiltration of an “academic performer ideal,” namely that they are (1) central and since-long established, (2) orthogonal to (i.e. very different from) the academic performer ideal as materialized by the performance measurement system, (3) largely shared within the research group and (4) externally legitimate. The premise is that these qualities form an important basis and motivation for not only criticizing, but also contesting, the academic performer ideal.

Extant research generally finds that the proliferation of quantitatively oriented performance evaluations within academia makes researchers adopt a new type of academic performer ideal which promotes research conformity and superficiality. This study draws upon, and adds to, an emerging literature that has begun to problematize this “reactive conformance-thesis” through identifying four qualities of pre-existing research/er ideals that can inhibit (or at least temporarily hold back) such “reactive research conformance.”

This chapter focusses on the ethical issues raised by different types of surveillance and the varied ways in which surveillance can be covert. Three case studies are presented which highlight different types of surveillance and different ethical concerns. The first case concerns the use of undercover police to infiltrate political activist groups over a 40-year period in the UK. The second case study examines a joint operation by US and Australian law enforcement agencies: the FBI’s operation Trojan Shield and the AFP’s Operation Ironside. This involved distributing encrypted phone handsets to serious criminal organisations which included a ‘backdoor’ secretly sending encrypted copies of all messages to law enforcement. The third case study analyses the use of emotional artificial intelligence systems in educational digital learning platforms for children where technology companies collect, store and use intrusive personal data in an opaque manner. The authors discuss similarities and differences in the ethical questions raised by these cases, for example, the involvement of the state versus private corporations, the kinds of information gathered and how it is used.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what impacts university students perceived from their short-term intensive international courses as part of undergraduate multidisciplinary education.

The study design was informed by interpretative phenomenological analysis. Semi-structured interviews explored informants’ views of their experience to elicit key themes of their experience.

The analysis resulted in four major themes: personal development, generic skills, global perspectives and subject-specific matter. Some text segments were coded with multiple themes, which suggests that the impacts of short-term international courses are multifaceted.

Academic topics of the courses substantially centred around humanities and social sciences at a particular university. This paper furthermore primarily depended on students’ self-reported answers, and it is possible that the participants who chose to enrol in the elective international courses may be principally willing to acquire global competence. Therefore, this study did not set out to present the generalised impacts of any short-term international courses.

The findings could be used as a conceptual tool for the design and evaluation of new and existing courses. In addition, the four major themes that this study elicited are useful as a cue for students’ self-reflection about their own learning experiences.

There have been significant efforts devoted to increasing the quantity of short-term international programs, but there has been less focus on the quality of these programs. This study supports the findings of existing literature but also identified one of the potential unfavourable impacts that short-term international courses may have on students’ development.

Social relationships play an important role in organizational entrepreneurship. They are crucial to entrepreneurs’ decisions because, despite the bleeding-edge technological advancements observed nowadays, entrepreneurs as human beings will always strive to be social. During the COVID-19 pandemic many companies moved activities into the virtual world and as a result offline Social relationships became rarer, but as it turns out, even more valuable, likewise, the inter-organizational cooperation enabling many companies to survive.

This chapter aims to develop knowledge about entrepreneurs’ SR and their links with inter-organizational cooperation. The results of an integrative systematic literature review show that the concept of Social relationships, although often investigated, lacks a clear definition, conceptualization, and operationalization. This chapter revealed a great diversity of definitions for Social relationships, including different scopes of meaning and levels of analysis. The authors identify 10 building blocks and nine sources of entrepreneurs’ Social relationships. The authors offer an original typology of Social relationships using 12 criteria. Interestingly, with regard to building blocks, besides those frequently considered such as trust, reciprocity and commitment, the authors also point to others more rarely and narrowly discussed, such as gratitude, satisfaction and affection. Similarly, the authors discuss the varied scope of sources, including workplace, family/friendship, past relationships, and ethnic or religious bonds. The findings of this study point to a variety of links between Social relationships and inter-organizational cooperation, including their positive and negative influences on one another. These links appear to be extremely dynamic, bi-directional and highly complex.

The purpose of this paper is to facilitate a deeper understanding of the uses and users of performance measurement (PM) in the university context.

Empirical data were gathered from four universities. This approach allows for a multilevel and comparative analysis based on the neo-institutional theory. The results are discussed alongside interdisciplinary literature on the use of PM in the public sector.

PM practices at universities have become increasingly popular on institutional, organisational and individual levels. The results indicate that different types of PM are used in universities and that the extent, and scope of PM used by various actors differ. Universities often use PM in a ceremonial and symbolic manner, with the aim of legitimising themselves externally as research-oriented institutions. The use of PM depends on both, exogenous factors (such as isomorphic pressures) and endogenous factors related to the different responses of organisations and individual actors (university managers, and academics). However, the analysis at the internal level reveals different attitudes and some resistance to the use of such kinds of PM. In universities with a local focus, the use of PM for rational decision-making is generally loosely coupled with the reporting performance for external accountability purposes. Moreover, the internal use of PM can be also symbolic.

This paper focusses on four case studies that are currently undergoing changes. The comparative analysis is supported by the use of different data collection methods and several in-depth interviews with key university actors.

The authors assume that the use of PM depends on a number of exogenous and endogenous factors. PM uses and users are discussed in the specific context of the higher education system in Poland. The four business school cases facilitate a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences in terms of the uses and users of PM in the context of internationally and locally oriented universities.

Organizations across industries are increasingly using Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to support their innovation processes, supply chains, marketing and sales and other business functions. Implementing AI, firms report efficiency gains from automation and enhanced decision-making thanks to more relevant, accurate and timely predictions. By exposing the benefits of digitizing everything, COVID-19 has only accelerated these processes. Recognizing the growing importance of AI and its pervasive impact, this chapter defines the “social value of AI” as the combined value derived from AI adoption by multiple stakeholders of an organization. To this end, we discuss the benefits and costs of AI for a business-to-business (B2B) firm and its internal, external and societal stakeholders. Being mindful of legal and ethical concerns, we expect the social value of AI to increase over time as the barriers for adoption go down, technology costs decrease, and more stakeholders capture the value from AI. We identify the contributions to the social value of AI, by highlighting the benefits of AI for different actors in the organization, business consumers, supply chain partners and society at large. This chapter also offers future research opportunities, as well as practical implications of the AI adoption by a variety of stakeholders.

Negative disclosure tone in 10-K annual reports has economic consequences, yet relatively little is known about how it is generated. Boards of directors play an important governance role with respect to mandatory disclosures and personally sign off on Form 10-K, leading us to expect directors to influence financial reporting narratives. This study investigates whether the negative tone of firms' narrative annual report disclosures is associated with the human and social capital of its board of directors.

Multivariate regression analyses of negative disclosure tone (Loughran and McDonald, 2011) on board members' average age, gender, education, financial expertise and turnover is performed. A host of supplemental tests to corroborate our primary analysis, including using Sarbanes-Oxley's financial expert mandate as an exogenous shock to board composition, impact threshold for a confounding variable, placebo analysis, portfolio tests of more and less negative disclosing firms and portfolio tests of “loud” versus “quiet” boards are conducted.

Evidence that directors' gender, education, financial expertise and board turnover are associated with more negative disclosure tone, while directors' age is associated with less negative disclosure tone is found. The study also looked within the board to differentiate whether these findings are driven by characteristics of inside directors or outside directors serving on the audit committee, or both, as these are the specific groups of directors we would expect to play a role in disclosure. It was found that negative disclosure tone is associated with a lower bid-ask spread, so this study interpreted more negative tone as containing more descriptive information.

This study helps decode the “black box” of annual report disclosure tone, which Loughran and McDonald (2011) show has important economic implications. The results help inform stakeholders such as policymakers, executives and capital market participants as to how board member traits are associated with disclosure. The findings are particularly important as this study bears witness to the increasing prominence of gender/diversity mandates (e.g. Israel, Norway, California) and financial expertise mandates (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley).

The missing travel time data for roads is a common problem encountered by traffic management departments. Tensor decomposition, as one of the most widely used method for completing missing traffic data, plays a significant role in the intelligent transportation system (ITS). However, existing methods of tensor decomposition focus on the global data structure, resulting in relatively low accuracy in fibrosis missing scenarios. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a novel tensor decomposition model which further considers the local spatiotemporal similarity for fibrosis missing to improve travel time completion accuracy.

The proposed model can aggregate road sections with similar physical attributes by spatial clustering, and then it calculates the temporal association of road sections by the dynamic longest common subsequence. A similarity relationship matrix in the temporal dimension is constructed and incorporated into the tensor completion model, which can enhance the local spatiotemporal relationship of the missing parts of the fibrosis type.

The experiment shows that this method is superior and robust. Compared with other baseline models, this method has the smallest error and maintains good completion results despite high missing rates.

This model has higher accuracy for the fibrosis missing and performs good convergence effects in the case of the high missing rate.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, student engagement in online learning has been a critical issue for all educational institutions. The university student engagement inventory (USEI) is the most used scale for assessing the construct of student engagement. The present study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the USEI among 1504 Chinese university students who completed a survey through an online platform between December 2020 and January 2021.

In this cross-sectional study, content validity, construct validity and reliability of the scale were assessed.

The results supported the three-factor model with acceptable goodness of fit (χ² (71) = 369.717, p = 0.13, χ²/df = 5.207, comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.967, normed fit index (NFI) = 0.960, Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) = 0.958, standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) = 0.030, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) (90% CI) = 0.053 [0.049, 0.057]), good internal consistency and construct reliability (Cronbach's alpha and omega coefficient >0.70) and strong convergent validity. Also, the measurement invariance was confirmed across gender.

This study showed that the 3-factor structure of USEI with Chinese university students had good construct validity, internal consistency and reliability. It could help measure student engagement in online learning in China.