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Perspective-taking is an overlooked relational competence that matters to interaction, problem-solving and cooperation in inter-organizational buyer–seller relationships. This paper aims to distinguish perspective-taking from empathy with which it has often been associated. It uses aptitude theory to propose a conceptualization of perspective-taking consisting of perspective-taking ability and motivation components that are used to explore the scope of perspective-taking in customer–supplier relationships.

An experiment and survey, are conducted among customer managers to apply and test measures to capture the ability and motivation components of the perspective-taking aptitude. The two perspective-taking components are used to propose a 2 × 2 matrix that provides a four-type typology, labelled: “talented”, “ineffectual”, “fervent” and “indifferent”. Data are collected from a sample of senior managers of manufacturing firms responsible for the dyadic relationship with a business support agency.

The data supports the presence and distribution of the four typologies among customers in business relationships and regression analysis confirms the impact of the proposed perspective-taking typology types on customer–supplier cooperation. The different combinations of the perspective-taking dimensions of ability and motivation that make up the perspective-taking aptitude type result in different dispositions to cooperate. “Talented” and “ineffectual” members with high and low perspective-taking ability and motivation scores, respectively, provide the highest and lowest cooperation dispositions. “Fervent” and “indifferent” members occupy an intermediate perspective-taking aptitude on the typology, with the former impacting cooperation moderately and the latter not found to be significant.

Understanding counterparts, inferring their motives and anticipating reactions, is a critical capacity for mutual dyadic adjustments in customer–supplier relationships in business markets. Such an understanding of perspective-taking can prove useful to effective interaction, solution development and relationship building, as interacting managers belonging to different typology types exhibit different levels of cooperation. In addition, an understanding of perspective-taking can prove useful to identify the right talent that can foster effective interaction and solution development in customer–supplier relationships. It also raises the issue as to how best sellers can interact to influence the perspective-taking of buyers in their quest to achieve better solutions and cooperation.

Provides a useful supplement to theory by bringing perspective-taking, grounded in aptitude theory, as an essential relational competence in business marketing that can provide an additional explanation to cooperation and joint problem-solving in inter-organizational business relationships. The paper develops and proposes a typology of perspective-taking that brings together ability and motivation dimensions, operationalizes and assessed their measures and tests the impact of the proposed perspective-taking typology types on cooperation in customer–supplier interaction.

The true measure of the ability of Scholastic Aptitude Tests, high‐school grades, and other variables (and combinations of variables) to predict college performance would be this: a college would select its students at random, ail selected students would attend the college, and the correlations of the variables with performance at the college would be determined.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a support system to the selection of enrichment activities in educational environment called RunayaySoft, where Runayay comes from the word Quechua that means develop and Soft as it is an informatics tool that supports the educational institutions and their students, in the selection of activities that allow foster some of their skills based on their interests, learning styles, aptitudes, multiple intelligences, preferences and so on. Moreover, it suggests institutions about the activities that they should make in their building considering student´s characteristics and the agreements that they have.

It does a diagnostic for identifying which characteristics are going to be considered to students and institutions. Then, it generates adaptive profiles with the aim of generating suggestions of enrichment activities that allow to boost some of their skills. For the students were considered their preferences, learning style, aptitude, multiple intelligences and interests. In the case of institutions were the agreements, resources and activities that they develop. Based on this information, it defines the relations for the generation of suggestions of activities toward students, where it does the prioritization of which activities should be considered.

For validating the system, it was done as a functional prototype that generates suggestions to students, as well as educative institutions, through a satisfaction test student assess if they agree or disagree with the suggestions given. With that assessment, it is validated the relationship between student’s characteristics, activity and institution are related for generating activities suggestions.

RunayaySoft generates adaptive profiles for the students, activity and institution. Each profile has information that allows adapt an advice toward students and institutions.

RunayaySoft considers student’s characteristics, activities and educational institutions for generating suggestions for enrichment activities that allow to boost some of their skills. Many times, when activities are generated in educative institutions, they are not considered a learner’s needs and characteristics. For that reason, the system helps institutions to identify activities that should be done in their facilities or with those institutions which they have agreements when the institutions that students come from do not have the required resources.

RunayaySoft suggests enrichment activities to students as well as educative institutions. For students, it suggests disciplinary areas where they can boost their skills; for each disciplinary area are recommended activities based on their preferences. Once students select the disciplinary area and activities, the system suggests educative institutions activities that they can do. If the institutions do not have the necessary facilities, the system shows with which other institutions they can set agreements. Moreover, it supports educative institutions to identify enrichment clusters, where it clusters students based on similar interest, allowing institutions to identify the activities that they should focus on.

Purpose: Preserving a country’s culture is crucial for its sustainability. Handicraft is a key draw for tourism destinations; it protects any civilisation’s indigenous knowledge and culture by managing the historical, economic, and ecological ecosystems and perfectly aligns with sustainable development. It has a significant role in creating employment, especially in rural regions and is an essential contributor to the export economy, mainly in developing nations. The study focuses on the skills required and existing gaps in the handicraft industry, its development and prospects by considering women and their role in preserving and embodying the traditional art of making handicrafts.

Approach: A framework has been developed for mapping and analysing the skills required in the handicraft sector using econometric modelling; an enormous number of skills have been crowdsourced from the respondents, and machine learning techniques have been used.

Findings: The findings of the study revealed that employment in this area is dependent not only on general or specialised skills but also on complex matrix skills ranging from punctuality to working in unclean and unsafe environments, along with a set of personal qualities, such as taking initiatives and specific skills, for example polishing and colour coding.

Implications: The skills mapping technique utilised in this study is applicable globally, particularly for women indulged in casual work in developing nations’ handicrafts industry. The sustainable development goals, tourism, and handicrafts are all interconnected. The research includes understanding skills mapping, which provides insights into efficient job matching by incorporating preferences and studying the demand side of casual working by women in the handicraft sector from a skills perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of five determinates of performance in students (N = 677) who completed three years of financial accounting to obtain a Bachelor of Accounting Science (BCompt) degree by distance education through the University of South Africa.

Regression analysis is used on three yearly measures of performance with five independent variables (age, gender, prior accounting knowledge, mathematics background and academic aptitude).

Results show that mathematics background and academic aptitude are both significantly associated with student performance, throughout the financial accounting subjects. Prior accounting knowledge is also important in the first year of study but not thereafter.

Prior research has found that other factors may influence student performance, and future studies which include these variables will add to these findings.

The results of this study have important implications for instructors, students and career advisers, particularly as research linking various factors with performance in accounting subjects over the length of a degree is limited.

The current study considers the determinants of student performance over three financial accounting years (rather than one year or one subject) and from a distance education perspective. As distance education becomes a more important delivery method of study in the future, these results have important implications.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate elements of socio-academic-related sustainability in educational institutes and propose a structure of an advising system that can aid the most critical stakeholders in such educational institutes, i.e the student. Hence, after reviewing the contemporary University Social Responsibility (USR) Venn diagram, the paper focuses on the need to develop a social and academic responsibility advisor (SARA) system as a catalyst toward fulfilling social responsibility to the most important stakeholder and alternatively leads to enhanced sustainability of such educational institutes.

A combination of research methods used in this paper, defined as by identifying the need for SARA from a literature survey. By distributing a questionnaire to students investigating their desire of an academic advisor system and by establishing a focus group to study the academic and social aspects and its implications to students’ “quality of life” as an essential aspect toward the educational institutes' sustainability. Various issues related to the features of the SARA discussed.

Literature review shows only a few articles combine both aspects of advising activities (social and academic), most of which are not interrelated to the sustainability of educational institutes. This paper highlights the need and connectivity of SARA to contemporary USR sustainability. The descriptive statistics of the questionnaire showed about 86 per cent of student participants interested in applying the proposed features. The outcome of the focus group resulted in more detailed features of academic and social aspects of the expected SARA system.

The proposed features of SARA described where the inter-related social and academic activities could be managed, logged and used by students. The proposed “heterogeneous study group” was investigated by observation implemented in four different courses in two different semesters. The result was not conclusive, and further study recommended. Even though this experimentation was not conclusive, the lesson learned from this study highlighted different issues associated with “study groups” within a course.

Applicability of SARA would enhance the quality of life of students in general and provide a mechanism to motivate low aptitude students to get engaged with study and projects with high-aptitude students.

Avoiding the “feel” of isolation by some students due to the inability to find study partner who can also act as mentor to a study group. The proposed “Heterogeneous study group” would provide a mechanism for “Practiced student-to-student Social responsibility”.

The paper highlights and proves the need for SARA in contemporary USR where SARA can act as a catalyst for enhancing the socio-academic zone of the reviewed USR Venn diagram. Features of SARA identified as an outcome of the study in this paper. Proposal of “Heterogeneous Study Group” was proposed as mechanism of “social learning”. “Group health” testing was proposed as a criteria resulted from a balance between collaboration, social affinity and project effort.

Various types of short training programmes exist in Germany. This article aims to evaluate short training courses for welfare recipients and to detect which programme type works best with respect to different outcome indicators.

The author measures the impact of six short training programmes on the participants. She uses propensity score matching and large‐scale administrative data to find suitable comparison groups. She compares treatment to non‐participation as well as participation in different training types directly.

The results demonstrate that in‐firm training has large positive effects on individual employment prospects and stability. Furthermore, classroom skill training is more effective than other classroom types while application training is rather ineffective. Treating some of the application training participants with an alternative sub‐programme would improve the effectiveness.

The results show which training types work best. However, the results do not imply macro or cost‐benefit effects.

Several of the short training courses, mostly occupation‐specific sub‐programmes, are short and relatively inexpensive options to activate welfare recipients.

The paper analyses the effects of six short training programmes for welfare recipients that have not been analysed before. The sensitivity of the results is examined using a wide range of estimators and different outcomes.

Just as materials undergo acceptance sampling to improve quality, so should the human resources undergo acceptance sampling to improve the quality they contribute to a product. The importance of high quality human resources in computer‐integrated manufacturing (CIM) production environments is particularly important because of the technology that is at risk to operator control. Suggests that the development of a quality assurance programme for screening human resources that work in CIM environments improves product quality and reduces technology risk. Outlines a quality assurance programme for human resources, along with an illustrative application of how acceptance sample methods can be used in the programme.

This study examines the test's predictive validity of English language performance and compares test constructs to identify the most effective predictors of English language performance.

Data were collected and analysed from test scores of students enrolled in the foundation year (N = 84) and level 2 (N = 127) in the faculty of English at a Saudi university using correlation and regression tests.

The findings revealed that the General Aptitude Test (GAT) is effective in predicting English performance for students in level 2 and that the error detection task is the most effective predictor of performance in English reading.

The study provides support for the validity of the GAT as a university admission requirement for English language courses in the Arabic-speaking world.

This study examines the GAT's power using a fine-grained approach by deriving scores from its breakdown constructs to predict the performance of English skills at the university level.

The authors investigate the role of people-related Total Quality Management (TQM) practices, specifically metaperceptions, in hearing care students' vocational decision-making. In Italy, audiologists are health professionals and must hold a degree in hearing care. They operate according to clinical principles but must also develop marketing and commercial skills. While employers take these aspects for granted, the expectations of hearing care students often differ from reality. Thus, the authors aim to investigate the vocational expectations of hearing care students.

A survey was distributed to 600 hearing care students. Multiple regression analysis with bootstrapped confidence intervals was employed to test the hypotheses.

Students who perceived audiology as their calling were more interested in the clinical aspects than the marketing and commercial aspects of audiology. Moreover, those desiring a meaningful career path in audiology were more interested in becoming a store owner or franchisee.

Universities and recruiters should consider the influence of relevant others' metaperceptions on students' self-perceptions of their aptitudes for different careers. Universities should assist students to identify aptitudes that are relevant to career-related decision-making. In this context, people-related TQM can help students avoid incorrect aspirations and expectations.

This study is the first to investigate the role of metaperceptions from a people-related TQM perspective. Metaperceptions play a crucial role in determining the correct course of study as well as job satisfaction and expectations.