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Uncontrollable movement of people across international borders is one of most pressing contemporary challenge encountered by nation-states. Their response to this challenge is often rooted on a reconceptualisation of (in)security from a state-centric to a non-state-centric one. This has been the case with Australia where insecurity from asylum seekers, or what is referred to as the ‘boat people’, dominating the country's discourse on protecting its borders. Such conceptions are rooted on historical anxieties from ‘foreigners’, resulting in exclusionary policies of ‘White Australia’ to recent assertions of exclusive sovereignty over the refugee intake. In this context, while reviewing government documents, reports and other secondary sources, the chapter examines Australia's policy towards asylum seekers domestically as well as at the regional level, while placing them within the broader debate between deterrence and human rights. The chapter is significant as it provides an important case study of the inherent contradictions that come into light in a nation-state's response towards refugees on the one hand and undocumented arrivals, in this case, the ‘boat people’ on the other. This chapter provides analytical support to the primary assertion that while Australia has been an active international player regarding refugee issues, there is bipartisan exclusivity and hard-handedness towards asylum seekers.

Fitness games, as a medium that combines playfulness and usefulness for exercise, face challenges in sustaining long-term user engagement. Currently, there is limited research exploring factors influencing users' continued intention to use from the perspective of user experience. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the priority of various user experience attributes of fitness games in promoting users' sustained engagement and to construct a user behavior model, offering theoretical guidance for designers and businesses.

This study distributed 441 survey questionnaires and, based on the fundamental characteristics of external games, established a model for users' continued intention to use external games. It explores the impact of various gaming elements on users' continued intention to use fitness games and the relationships between these elements.

The study indicates that usefulness, functional quality, and ease of use directly influence players' intention to continue playing external games. Social interactions, technical quality, and playfulness do not have an impact on the continued intention to use.

This research breaks away from the bias of previous studies overly focusing on playfulness in games. It fills the research gap regarding the continued intention to use fitness games and provides insights into the design and operation of fitness games.

The study sets out to demonstrate how a lifecycle perspective on complex, public-sector procurement projects can be used for making qualitative assessments of procurement policy and practice and reveal those procurement capabilities that are most impactful for operating effectively.

Agency theory, institutional theory and the lifecycle analysis technique are combined to abductively develop a framework to identify, analyse and compare complex procurement policies and practices in public sector organisations. Defence is the focal case and is compared with cases in the Nuclear, Local Government and Health sectors.

The study provides a framework for undertaking a lifecycle analysis to understand the challenges and capabilities of complex, public-sector buyers. Eighteen hierarchically-arranged themes are identified and used in conjunction with agency theory and institutional theory to explain complex procurement policy and practice variation in some of the UK’s highest-profile public buyers. The study findings provide a classification of complex buyers and offer valuable guidance for practitioners and researchers navigating complex procurement contexts.

The lifecycle approach proposed is a new research tool providing a bespoke application of theory by considering each lifecycle phase as an individual but related element that is governed by unique institutional pressures and principal-agent relationships.

The development of electronic monitoring policy over the last decade in Scotland has contributed towards its expansion and the intensification of what McNeill (2019) refers to as mass supervision. Often posited as a solution to relieve problems in the criminal justice system such as prison overcrowding and high remand populations, electronic monitoring can be punitive and problematic, exposing more people to diffused forms of social control and functioning more as a supplementary feature of prisons as opposed to a substitution for prisons. In this chapter, I explore the existing and emerging policy landscape of penal electronic monitoring Scotland, drawing upon qualitative, experiential data about being subject to and enforcing penal electronic monitoring in Scotland (see Casey, 2021) to highlight how policy is enacted in practice. Ultimately, I argue that there are fundamental issues with how electronic monitoring is currently enacted in terms of what it promises, in terms of fairness and in relation to the potential harms of integration. I call for a fundamental and holistic reframing of policy and regulation of penal electronic monitoring in Scotland that avoids siloed approaches towards policymaking, attending to both the social and digital impacts of electronic monitoring in people’s lives, thus contributing to arguments about how ‘mass supervision’ should be moderated and resisted.

The purpose of this paper is to set forth a conceptual model describing the actors and roles in ecosystems created to enable productive black entrepreneurship in the USA.

This paper provides a systematic literature review of entrepreneurship ecosystems. It further leverages such literature review by using an autoethnographic approach recommended by Guyotte and Kochacka (2016), drawing on the authors’ practical experience in studying, owning, educating or consulting employer businesses owned by persons of color in the USA and abroad.

Each actor in the ecosystem has practical wisdom and assets that can be shared and leveraged through interacting with the other actors either as role model institutions or capacity development institutions, thus mitigating social inequalities and boosting economic progress by extending entrepreneurial opportunities beyond those that are greatly resourced.

Our literature review is based on selected samples of relevant articles on entrepreneurship ecosystem research and ethnic minority entrepreneurship, and thus, is not exhaustive. The selection was partly influenced by the authors’ opinion of whether a given study was relevant or not to a black entrepreneurship ecosystem. There is the possibility that some relevant studies were excluded. Thus, other actors are encouraged to revise or adapt this model to inform their distinct roles and goals.

The proposed model can help actors involved in the operation or support of a black-owned business make optimal business decisions, enabling each actor to be instrumental in another’s understanding of how to facilitate the success of black American entrepreneurs and business owners and thus, deploy marketing campaigns to boost the visibility and role of each actor. These campaigns play a role in their entrepreneurial marketing efforts.

Responding to Gines and Sampson’s (2020) call, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to explicitly provide a comprehensive black entrepreneurship ecosystem model that identifies the actors, roles and activities that can help black Americans address social inequalities that limit their ability to become a successful employer business. The proposed model may aid in deepening the theoretical discussion on entrepreneurial ecosystems and be of inspiration for the future works of scholars and practitioners interested in the entrepreneurship and marketing interface.

Access to clean drinking water is a major encumbrance in developing countries. In Ghana, urban water supply is below internationally recognised standards, especially among the urban poor, sub-urban and rural communities. Stakeholders and institutional inefficiencies may be hindrances facing the Ghanaian water supply process. Therefore, this study aims to appraise the motivational factors and outcome of stakeholders’ engagement and identify the factors that influence effective institutional management of urban water supply in Ghana.

Sequential exploratory mixed methods were adopted and analysed to proffer answers to the research questions. Nineteen participants and 521 respondents were sampled for the qualitative and quantitative phases.

Findings reveal that the institutional processes and stakeholder engagement significantly influence the effectiveness of the management of urban water supply in Ghana. Findings identified 35 motivational factors and categorised them into the health of the population, socio-economic, technological and innovation trends, policy reform and adaptive governance. Also, the 22 institutional factors identified were categorised into three groups: regulatory framework, ethics for managing water supply and the culture of managing water supply.

Besides the study addressing the theoretical gap regarding which variables are germane in influencing the effective management of urban water supply, the study may be among the top studies that have appraised the role of stakeholders in the institutional management of urban water supply in Ghana.

I examine patterns of making or deferring strategic repatriations that firms can use to either meet analysts' forecasts or defer to maintain future reported earnings flexibility. First, I examine the extent to which firms repatriate earnings from high foreign tax subsidiaries to decrease US tax expense, resulting in increased net income and lower cash taxes. Using federal tax return information, I find evidence that firms strategically repatriate these earnings to meet or beat current analysts' forecasts. Next, I find evidence that firms that are able to obtain current year tax reductions defer these repatriations in an attempt to build cookie-jar reserves. Lastly, I find that firms do not disclose high foreign tax repatriations (HTRs), even when required by SEC rules. This study contributes to the earnings management, tax avoidance, and disclosure literature by examining a discretionary tax planning strategy.

Humanity and all life depend on the natural environment of Planet Earth, and that environment is in acute crisis across land, sea and air. One of a set of commentaries on how service can address the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), the authors focus on environmental goals SDG 13 (climate action), SDG 14 (life below water) and SDG 15 (life on land). This paper aims to propose a conceptual framework that incorporates the natural environment into transformative services.

The authors trace the evolution of service thinking about the natural environment, from a stewardship perspective of the environment as a set of resources to be managed, through an acknowledgement of nonhuman organisms as actors that can participate in service exchange, towards an emergent concept of ecosystems as integrating human social actors and other biological actors who engage fully in value co-creation.

The authors derive a framework integrating human and other life forms as co-creating actors, drawing on shared natural resources to achieve mutualism, where each actor can have a net benefit from the relationship. Future research questions are posited that may help services research address SDGs 13–15.

The framework integrates ideas from environmental ecosystem literature to inform the nature of ecosystems. By integrating environmental actors and ecological insights into the understanding of service ecosystems, service scholars are well placed to make unique contributions to the global challenge of creating a sustainable future.

The aim of this research is to determine the extent to which the human resource (HR) function can screen and potentially predict suicidal employees and offer preventative mental health assistance.

Drawing from the 2019 National Survey of Drug Use and Health (N = 56,136), this paper employs multivariate binary logistic regression to model the work-related predictors of suicidal ideation, planning and attempts.

The results indicate that known periods of joblessness, the total number of sick days and absenteeism over the last 12 months are significantly associated with various suicidal outcomes while controlling for key psychosocial correlates. The results also indicate that employee assistance programs are associated with a significantly reduced likelihood of suicidal ideation. These findings are consistent with conservation of resources theory.

This research demonstrates preliminarily that the HR function can unobtrusively detect employee mental health crises by collecting data on key predictors.

In the era of COVID-19, employers have a duty of care to safeguard employee mental health. To this end, the authors offer an innovative way through which the HR function can employ predictive analytics to address mental health crises before they result in tragedy.

Studies showed that digital technology applications in the construction industry are low, especially in many developing nations. Construction incentivisation (CI) is one of the long-standing principles adopted to enhance project performance. There is a paucity of studies concerning CI to improve digital technology applications. Thus, this research investigated the relevance and perceived hindrances that may hinder the implementation of CI from promoting digital technologies and proffer ways to improve digital technology applications in the construction sector.

In Nigeria’s context, this research is exploratory. Twenty-four semi-structured virtual interviews were conducted in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria, with knowledgeable participants that indicated interest and were interviewed. The engaged interviewees were drawn from government agencies, academicians in construction consultancy, Internet and communication technology experts, construction contracting firms and construction consulting firms. The collected data were coded and analysed through a thematic method.

Digitalisation of the industry via CI may face some hindrances. The perceived issues that may hinder CI implementation were classified into most severe, severe and fairly severe in Nigeria’s construction industry context. Findings proffer feasible policy solutions that can mitigate these issues and improve digital technology applications in the industry via the CI.

This study covered the relevance and perceived issues that may hinder the implementation of the CI to improve digital technology applications in the industry. Also, the study proffers policy solutions to enhance digital technology applications in the industry via the CI concept.

Findings from this research will support and offer a valuable understanding of the relevance of the “incentivisation concept” to improve digital technology applications in the Nigerian-built environment. Other developing countries with low applications of digital technology in construction may consider the suggested policy solutions from this research. Also, this study will stir policymakers and construction practitioners to support policies tailored towards improving digital technology applications in construction.

This research contributes by exploring the effectiveness of the CI concept and informing construction practitioners and policymakers on how to improve digital technology applications in the Nigerian construction industry.