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In a fast evolving labour market, higher education graduates need to develop employability competences. Key in becoming employable is the ability to reflect on learning experiences, both within a curriculum as well as extra-curricular and work placements. This paper wants to conceptualise how an online learning platform might entail a reflective practice that systematically supports students in reflecting on their learning experiences.

When studying online learning platforms for developing students' employability competences, it became clear that the effectiveness of the platform depends on how the platform guides students' reflective practice. In turn, the authors studied which features (tools, services and resources) of the online learning platform are guiding the reflective practice.

This resulted in the introduction of an online learning platform, containing a comprehensive set of online learning tools and services, which supports students' reflective practice and, in turn, their employability competences. The online platform facilitates both feedback from curricular and work-related learning experiences and can be used as a start by students for showcasing their employability competences. The reflective practice consists of a recurrent, systematic process of reflection, containing various phases: become aware, analyse current state, draft and plan a solution, take action and, finally, reflect in and on action.

Future research revolves around studying the features of online learning platforms and their role in fostering students' reflection and employability competences.

The conceptual model provides concrete indicators on how to implement online learning platforms for supporting students' reflection and employability competences.

This is the first article that analyses an online learning platform that guides students' reflective practice and fosters their employability competences. The authors provide concrete suggestions on how to model the online platform, building further on reflective practice theory.

Although it is transforming the meaning of employment for many people, little is known about the implications of the gig economy for human resource management (HRM) theory and practice. The purpose of this paper is to conceptually explore the notion of HRM in the gig economy, where intermediary platform firms design and implement HRM activities while simultaneously trying to avoid the establishment of employment relationships with gig workers.

To conceptualize HRM in the gig economy, the authors offer a novel ecosystem perspective to develop propositions on the role and implementation of HRM activities in the gig economy.

The authors show that HRM activities in the gig economy are designed to govern platform ecosystems by aligning the multilateral exchanges of three key gig economy actors: gig workers, requesters and intermediary platform firms, for ensuring value co-creation. The authors argue that the implementation of HRM activities in the gig economy is contingent on the involvement and activities of these gig economy actors. This means that they are not mere recipients of HRM but also actively engaged in, and needed for, the execution of HRM activities.

The study contributes to research by proposing a theoretical framework for studying the design of HRM activities, and their implementation, in the gig economy. From this framework, the authors derive directions for future research on HRM in the gig economy.

We investigate the impact of Absorptive Capacity (ACAP) for SMEs embedded in Collaborative Networks (CNs) on innovation performance, considering the network stages and the influence of partnership quality.

We use a mixed methodology consisting of a qualitative than a quantitative phase. The first stage relies on an in-depth literature review and 22 interviews with 17 manufacturing SMEs having operated in collaborative innovation projects to characterize the potential and realized ACAP of such SMEs in the creation and operation stages of a CN. The second phase aims at testing four hypotheses through a hierarchical regression based on 74 responses to a survey involving SMEs with prior CN experience.

Our results explain how an SME’s ACAP in the creation stage affects its ACAP in the operation stage. We also demonstrate that this latter capability contributes positively to innovation performance in the CN. Furthermore, partnership quality was found to have counterproductive effects regarding potential ACAP.

We provide manufacturing SMEs with guidance to deploy ACAP throughout their collaborative experience and overcome the potential pitfalls of good partnership quality.

We operationalize ACAP of manufacturing SMEs to contribute to mutual innovation goals in CNs and uncover its properties. We explain how this dynamic capability accumulates over the CN stages to result in higher innovation performance and show how it helps in striking a balance between the “dark” and “virtuous” sides of partnership quality.

Imagine you are working at the reference desk of a major university library on a busy weekday afternoon. As you say, “How may I help you?” to your next client, you notice that he is wearing a high school letterman's jacket and is sporting fuzz on his upper lip that he would proudly call a mustache.

This article aims to close some research gaps by differentiating between brand types and price tiers. Many consumers perceive high prices as signals of high quality, yet researchers tend to find only low average correlations between price and objective quality. Previous studies do not account for market shares and paid prices though.

A German consumer panel with more than 30,000 households reveals market shares and paid prices. Combining these data with product test ratings, the authors evaluate price-quality relationships with Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients and distinguish food from non-food products, national brands and private labels and three price tiers.

High price-quality correlations for national brands and non-food private labels indicate that a higher price signals greater product quality. For food private labels, negative correlation coefficients inhibit the use of price as a quality indicator. The price-quality relationship for food private labels implies strong competition among brand owners, based on the price and quality of their products.

This article investigates price-quality correlations by accounting for paid prices and product market shares; it also reveals differences across food and non-food products, national brands and private labels and different price tiers against the background of competition strategies. By addressing when consumers use price as a quality indicator, it outlines important managerial implications for manufacturers, retailers and consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to explain in detail the strategic asset‐seeking OFDIs of Chinese firms in Denmark through a theoretical lens that combines the updated OLI (Ownership, Location, Internalization) paradigm and the internalization theory. Meanwhile, the authors hope to unveil the unique characteristics of firm specific advantages (FSAs, including O and I advantages) and country specific advantages (CSAs, including L advantages).

The authors chose two case firms that just started investing and a third one that was in the process of preparing investment in Denmark. Primary data were collected by semi‐structured interviews in English at various locations in late 2009 and early 2010. The three Chinese firms in this study share a common primary objective in their strategic orientation of OFDIs. That is to seek strategic assets that are complementary and critical to augment their existing FSAs.

Rugman stated that strategic asset‐seeking OFDIs are supposed to have high levels of FSAs and CSAs. This study presents a more detailed analysis regarding the O, L and I advantages that Chinese investing firms in Denmark are perceived to possess. It was found that these Chinese investing firms had high levels of O_a and O_i but O_t was largely absent; furthermore, although L_r was obviously appreciated in Denmark, L_i presented a mixed picture. The paper also found that internalization advantages were only able to be realized when investing firms were good at utilizing networking and guanxi, which were largely derived from their prior O_i advantages.

Few have analyzed strategic asset‐seeking OFDIs made by emerging markets based on the FSA/CSA matrix that combines the OLI paradigm and the internalization theory. This study pursued this research endeavor by enriching a refined framework that connects the OLI paradigm, which recognizes multiple dimensions of O advantages and an institutional perspective, to the internalization theory, which converts O and I advantages into FSAs and associates L advantages with CSAs.

This chapter is an examination of the contribution of female musicianship to the Perth metal scene, particularly in relation to the positioning of women in frontier mythology and the ways in which we might read the gothic sublime in terms of women’s experiences. While it has been recognised that Australian metal music, in general, is tied to the colonial frontier narrative, Perth’s isolation produces a particular kind of frontier narrative which can be read in relation to the gothic sublime. In this chapter, the author examines three Perth metal bands which comprise female members: Claim the Throne (featuring Jess Millea on keys and vocals), Sanzu (featuring Fatima Curley on bass) and Deadspace (featuring Shelby Jansen on bass and vocals). The author will argue that there is a motif running through Perth bands that comprise female musicians that is tied to their positioning in the Western frontier narrative and its production in relation to the gothic sublime. To do so presents one kind of way to conceptualise a metal scene on the ‘Western Front’. The author emphasises that this is not a totalising conceptualisation, rather, it is one way to suggest how context might shape women’s experiences and, perhaps more importantly for this argument, the way in which women women’s experiences and historicity in relation to the legacy of ‘frontierswomen’ inflect metal music in this scene.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) aims to transform the lives of people with disabilities around the globe. Many challenges to achieving that goal still remain. The area of disability research ethics is one of those challenges and is the subject of this chapter. Systemic reform of disability research ethics is needed in order to ensure that the work of the UNCRPD rests on a bedrock of quality research and data collection. In that way, progress can be supported and any regression of disabled people’s human rights and equality can be recognised and reversed (Good, 2020). While much work has already been done, inconsistencies remain with regard to the fundamental challenge of removing all ableism from the UNCRPD knowledge base. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2023 starkly revealed the level of remaining ableism across the world, and how this ableism meant that Covid negatively impacted the lives of disabled people more extremely than others. This was revealed, for example, in a recent study of Covid era policies in 14 countries (Shikako et al., 2023) and also in a study of disabled people’s experiences of the Covid pandemic in South Africa (Wickenden et al., 2023). Reformed ethics in research and data collection are needed to expose and understand the problems in policy and practice, during the pandemic, which in some cases reverted to eugenics, and to investigate how to address these. This chapter maps out some possible ways forward in the work to improve human rights and equality-based research as an ethical issue.

Based on extensive empirical fieldworks conducted in Belgian and French family justice courtrooms in order to explain how culture and ethnicity are processed and understood in the daily reasoning and assumptions of legal professionals, this chapter analyzes different forms in which culture and ethnicity are framed in family law cases. Understanding how and along which dimensions these elements do vary in judicial reasoning constitutes the preliminary but necessary step before assessing the need of cultural expertise as such. In this attempt, we shed light on a scope of variations between complex and non-deterministic models of culture – consistent with contemporary anthropology literature – and more simplistic ones, in which culture and identity are conceived as fixed realities. Throughout this path between norms, facts, and stereotypes, we illustrate not only the multiplicity and complexity of forms which cultural elements can take in the exercise of family justice, but also the risks that some significances may carry with them and the urgent need to improve more fluid and dispassionate conceptions of cultural diversity before developing “cultural expertise” as such, an expertise that could otherwise reinforce stereotypical and fixed views of “cultures.”