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The purpose of this paper is to explore how framing of conflict in different phases is constructed and how the specific framing affects the development of the conflict and its management in the farmer–herder conflict in the Asante Akyem North District of Ghana.

The study area is Agogo which falls within the Asante Akyem North District in Ghana. The study used a qualitative approach whose philosophical ontology and epistemology believe that meaning is constructed (interpretivism). It further used a case study design using in-depth interviews, focus group discussion and observation guide. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to select the respondents. The data were analysed using the thematic analysis approach. Ethical considerations such as informed consent, willingness and anonymity of respondents were duly respected.

The findings highlighted that the conflict actors formed frames such as identity-relational, affective-intellectual and negotiation-win frames as the drivers of the conflict. In this conflict, the farmers who are indigenes and custodians of the land feel more potent over the transnational migrants who are pastoralists and argue that the herdsmen be flushed out without negotiation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the papers that bring to light the psychological dimension of the causes of the farmer–herder conflict in Ghana.

The study aims to investigate how pregnant and nursing mothers’ stories have been neglected in writing about gender, security and spaces.

The study chronicles Agogo Traditional Area’s pregnant and nursing mothers’ resistance and survival in this conflicted environment. The author used photo voices in a participatory photography design to give conflict-area women a voice. Interviews and observations supported this. Pregnant and nursing mothers were sampled using the purposive and snowball sampling techniques. The data analysis considered narrative analysis, photographic and inductive approaches.

The findings highlighted how these mothers in vicious settings experienced healthcare access and problems, societal issues including gender dynamics, food insecurity, and emotional and psychological well-being.

The findings in this study expand the socio-cultural narratives of pregnant and nursing mothers in violent spaces.

Sellers view facial recognition mobile payment services (FRMPS) as a convenient and cost-saving way to receive immediate payments from customers. For consumers, however, these biometric identification technologies raise issues of usability as well as privacy, so FRMPS are not always preferable. This study uses the stressor–strain–outcome (S–S–O) framework to illuminate the underlying mechanism of FRMPS resistance, thereby addressing the paucity of research on users' negative attitudes toward FRMPS.

Drawing from the stressor–strain–outcome (S–S–O) framework, the purpose of this study is to illuminate the underlying mechanism of FRMPS resistance. To this end, they invited 566 password authentication users who had refused to use FRMPS to complete online survey questionnaires.

The findings enrich the understanding of FRMPS resistance and show that stressors (i.e. system feature overload, information overload, technological uncertainty, privacy concern and perceived risk) aggravate the strain (i.e. technostress), which then leads to users’ resistance behaviors and negative word of mouth.

Advances in payment methods have profoundly changed consumers’ consumption and payment habits. Understanding FRMPS resistance can provide marketers with strategies for dealing with this negative impact. This study theoretically confirms the S–S–O paradigm in the FRMPS setting and advances it by proposing thorough explanations of the major stressors that consumers face. Building on their findings, the authors suggest ways service providers can eliminate the stressors, thereby reducing consumers’ fear and preventing resistance or negative word-of-mouth behaviors. This study has valuable implications for both scholars and practitioners.

The advent of extreme automation from new technologies such as artificial intelligence portends a massive increase in unemployment. The psychological impact of this threat on the workforce is critically important. This paper aims to examine the functioning of individuals' anxiety buffers in response to this threat.

A two-stage mixed-methods design is used. In stage 1, qualitative data are gathered through semi-structured interviews. In stage 2, quantitative data are collected through two experiments to assess the psychological impact of exposure to the threat.

Exposure to the threat of extreme automation reduces self-esteem, faith in the worldview and attachment security. When self-esteem and attachment security are under attack, they are ineffective as anxiety buffers, and anxiety levels increase. Additionally, there is a distal effect such that during a period of distraction, the threatened anxiety buffers are reinforced and return to their normal levels.

This study is limited to a homogenous culture in which work is highly salient. Future research should include other cultures, other methods of exposure and further examine the distal effects.

The study examines the previously underexplored issue of individuals' psychological response to the impending changes in the workforce because of technological advancements.

The ongoing dispute as to whether using technology extensively at work may cause harm continues to gain momentum. Thus, the need for more research on the harmful effect of using technology at work and on the indirect effects on work performance is needed. The call for additional moderators in technostress research is still ongoing. The research contributes to the abovementioned gaps in the literature by analyzing a model with two moderators.

The sample population was chosen randomly from the lists provided by civil-servant unions and the chamber of commerce subsidiaries in the northwest region of Turkey. The employees received letters that explained the purpose of the study; the questionnaires sent to them. Out of 500 forms, 328 were returned. PLS-SEM technique was selected for hypothesis testing.

The results revealed support for all the hypotheses, and proposed moderators can be used to mitigate the harms of technostress and burnout. The findings have implications for both theory and practice.

The limitation of this research is its sample characteristics. Due to the cross-sectional nature of the data set, it is difficult to claim causality. Therefore, readers should use caution when extending generalizations to a broader population. As for the theoretical implications, the interest in the challenges posed by various technologies in the workplace on human psychology and health over the long term is quite new. And there is still room for other mediating and moderating mechanism for the interplay between technostress and related outcomes.

One of the practical implications is that technology at work might have the potential to create stress, sometimes greater than its benefits. The effects that might be created by other sources of stress when combined with stress related to technology in the workplace should also be taken seriously. There are tools to reduce the harm caused by technostress that practitioners could make use of such as time-management interventions.

The dispute whether using technology extensively at work may cause harm rather than advantage continues to confuse people, and with time it is gaining momentum. Thus, there is necessity for more research on the harms of technology, and especially on the indirect effects on work performance. Second, the vast technostress literature seems to neglect to discern task performance from contextual one as the dependent variable. Lastly, the call for additional moderators in technostress research is still prevailing. The research contributes to the abovementioned gaps in the literature by analyzing a model with two moderators.

My title comes from Blanche Geer's (1964) famous paper ‘First days in the field’. When she was about to do the preliminary fieldwork for the project that became Becker, Geer, and Hughes (1968) on liberal arts undergraduates, she reflected on her own student ‘self’. That young woman had a taste for ‘milkshakes and convertibles’ (p. 379), which to Geer as an adult woman seemed incomprehensible and foreign. Being British, my life has never included any enthusiasm for milkshakes or convertibles which do not figure in UK culture, but the phrase has always enchanted me, and I have always wanted to use it as a title. This autobiographical reflection is in two main parts. The first half is a reflexive examination of my current life and scholarly work. In some ways that will seem to be the self-portrait of a somewhat uni-dimensional workaholic with an uneasy relationship with the symbolic interactionist intellectual tradition. The second part of the piece is an account of my family history, childhood and adolescence spent with my eccentric mother, and the reader is invited to understand the choices made in adulthood as largely contrastive: designed to ensure my life was as unlike my mother's as possible. Just as Geer looked back to her college years and found her youthful self strange, I look back to my childhood and see a very different person.

This study aims to predict the dark side of knowledge management risk to innovation in Portuguese small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It examines the spinner innovation model factors of knowledge creation, knowledge transfer, private knowledge, public knowledge and innovation in uncertain environments.

The authors developed a conceptual model to support the analysis. The survey data stemmed from a sample of 208 Portuguese SMEs in Portugal. The authors analyzed the primary data from the ad hoc survey using the data mining (deep learning) technique.

The research sets out and tests factors relevant to understanding how to predict innovation in uncertain business environments. This study identifies four factors fostering innovation in SMEs: knowledge creation, knowledge transfer, public knowledge management and private knowledge management. Knowledge creation showed the best return and presented the closest relationship with innovation.

Innovation models generally measure the relationships between variables and their impacts on the economy (economic and regional development). Predictive models are considered in the literature as a gap to be filled, especially in an uncertain environment in the SME context.

Information Systems research on emotions in relation to using technology largely holds essentialist assumptions about emotions, focuses on negative emotions and treats technology as a token or as a black box, which hinders an in-depth understanding of distinctions in the emotional experience of using artificial intelligence (AI) technology in context. This research focuses on understanding employees' emotional experiences of using an AI chatbot as a specific type of AI system that learns from how it is used and is conversational, displaying a social presence to users. The research questions how and why employees experience emotions when using an AI chatbot, and how these emotions impact its use.

An interpretive case study approach and an inductive analysis were adopted for this study. Data were collected through interviews, documents review and observation of use.

The study found that employee appraisals of chatbots were influenced by the form and functional design of the AI chatbot technology and its organisational and social context, resulting in a wider repertoire of appraisals and multiple emotions. In addition to positive and negative emotions, users experienced connection emotions. The findings show that the existence of multiple emotions can encourage continued use of an AI chatbot.

This research extends information systems literature on emotions by focusing on the lived experiences of employees in their actual use of an AI chatbot, while considering its characteristics and its organisational and social context. The findings inform the emerging literature on AI.

This paper aims to highlight the positive and negative effects of technostressors on employee attitudes using psychological need satisfaction as an explanatory mechanism and mindfulness as an individual resource, thereby developing an integrative conceptual model.

A narrative literature review was performed in the technostress, job demands-resources and mindfulness literature to develop the propositions of the integrative conceptual model.

This paper posits psychological need satisfaction as a mediator in the process by which technostressors impact important employee outcomes. It also proposes mindfulness as a personal resource that helps alleviate technostressor induced burnout and foster work engagement.

The proposed integrative conceptual framework provides some useful directions for future empirical research on this topic of growing importance.

Based on the findings of this paper, managers can devise and implement a technostressor-specific mitigation strategy to cope with information and communication technology–induced work demands. They can also introduce mindfulness-based programs to support positive outcomes when technostressors are present.

This paper is the first to theoretically delineate specific characteristics of technostressors as challenge and hindrance demands and makes interdisciplinary contributions by extending the role of psychological mechanisms such as psychological need satisfaction and personal resources such as mindfulness in work-related technology use research.