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Purpose: Nowadays, many terms like computer vision, deep learning, and machine learning have all been made possible by recent artificial intelligence (AI) advances. As new types of employment have risen significantly, there has been significant growth in adopting AI technology in enterprises. Despite the anticipated benefits of AI adoption, many businesses are still struggling to make progress. This research article focuses on the influence of elements affecting the acceptance procedure of AI in organisations.

Design/Methodology/Approach: To achieve this objective, propose a hierarchical paradigm for the same by developing an Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM). This paper reveals the barriers obstructing AI adoption in organisations and reflects the contextual association and interaction amongst those barriers by emerging a categorised model using the ISM approach. In the next step, cross-impact matrix multiplication is applied for classification analysis to find dependent, independent and linkages.

Findings: As India is now focusing on the implementation of AI adoption, therefore, it is essential to identify these barriers to AI to conceptualise it systematically. These findings can play a significant role in identifying essential points that affect AI adoption in organisations. Results show that low regulations are the most critical factor and functional as the root cause and further lack of IT infrastructure is the barrier. These two factors require the most attention by the government of India to improve AI adoption.

Implications: This study may be utilised by organisations, academic institutions, Universities, and research scholars to fill the academic gap and faster implementation of AI.

Recently, ethical leadership has become a widely studied research topic. Simultaneously, many studies have begun to emphasise the role of interpersonal communication competence (ICC) in successful leadership. However, there has been little discussion on the links between ethical leadership and leaders’ ICC. To address this research gap, this study aims to compare and combine the research traditions of ethical leadership and leaders’ ICC. The study is based on two literature reviews examining (a) ethical leadership (substudy 1; N = 27) and (b) leaders’ ICC (substudy 2; N = 18). The research questions are as follows: (a) How are the requirements of leaders’ ICC noticed in the literature of ethical leadership? (substudy 1) (b) How are the requirements of ethical leadership noticed in the literature of leaders’ ICC? (substudy 2) The findings reveal that (a) studies in ethical leadership rarely pay attention to leaders’ ICC and (b) studies in leaders’ ICC do not often discuss ethical aspects of ICC, at least explicitly. While a larger sample would have been preferred, the study contributes to previous research by addressing a research gap between ethical leadership and leaders’ ICC and suggests integrating these research traditions to better understand the nature of ethics and ICC in leadership. By promoting novel interdisciplinary research perspectives, the study provides a foundation for further research and development of (a) a competence-based approach to ethical leadership and (b) an ethics-focused approach to competent leadership communication.

In this chapter I characterize the relationship between macroeconomic variables and the terms structure of interest rates using the recent macro-finance approach adapted to the case of an emerging economy and applying it to Brazil. I find that macro variables help to explain the dynamics of the yield curve in emerging markets, specially in periods of high volatility. Moreover, the notion of great external vulnerability of emerging economies is confirmed by the strong role of the nominal exchange rate change, which explains up to 37% of the variation in yields in Brazil. However, the model does a poor job in forecasting yields during the financial crisis of 2008. This fact seems to be related to the strong fall in international commodity and industrial goods prices (in dollar terms), which limited the passthrough from the strong depreciation of the exchange rate to inflation.

This chapter reports on a course that is designed to facilitate the students’ transition out of college and into life after graduation. It describes how the course foregrounds the problems students face, both the technical aspects of the transition and the emotional experience, unthought out ideas about what the students want, their goals, and how they might go about achieving their goals. The authors report on the course culture, assignments, observations from teaching the course, student feedback from focus groups, surveys, behavior, as well as summaries of data on the student’s experience.

The need for this course is supported by the research literature on emerging adulthood. In addition, the authors report on focus group and survey data gathered. The modern discourse on the post-college transition commonly emphasizes economic and practical hurdles, such as educational loan debt, student employability, skill transferability, career networking, and job interviewing. Receiving far less attention are the psychosocial and developmental dimensions that color the student experience of the graduation transition.

Yet very few colleges and universities have paid attention to this glaring need, especially public institutions with many first-generation college students. This chapter describes a college course dealing with the problem of transitioning to life after college taught in an intellectual, communal, and personal atmosphere.

This chapter provides in-depth case studies of two large urban public libraries in the United States and how communities and libraries respond to reductions mandated by their funding agencies. Boston Public Library (BPL) and Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) are both in communities that faced, and are still facing, recessionary budget pressures that began in 2007. Each community and library system has responded in different ways. In the recent past, in both Boston and Los Angeles, the Mayors and City Councils have supported libraries that have come to define the great cultural heritage and heart of these cities in the past. In 2010, however, both cities faced unheard of budget pressures. In Boston, there was a budget shortfall of $3.6 million. In Los Angeles, the budget shortfall began in 2007 due to huge increases in pension payments to city workers, particularly in the police and fire departments (City of Los Angeles Web site, 2011). In Boston, the community was told there could be branch closures. In Los Angeles, the budget shortfall created severe personnel, material, and service cuts. How each library and their leaders responded to those challenges differed. The level of support that their communities provided and the manner in which it was provided also differed. The two cases describe what can happen when budget crises occur and how libraries and their communities deal, or do not deal with them. The cases also reflect how the two library systems serve metropolitan areas with very distinct characteristics.

Transnational arrangements between different types of higher education institutions provide an interesting example of partnership working, being business arrangements with learning as a core organising principle. Successful partnerships both learn and work together and can become mutually transformative, sources of growth for the individuals and institutions involved. Individual projects early in the lifecycle of a partnership can support this development, enabling both organisations to take responsibility for relationship building and the demonstration of trust. This approach has the advantage that it takes the focus away from the home/away dichotomy often apparent in discussions of transnational partnership working and instead attention turns to the development of a new hybrid organisation, a ‘third space’ characterised by reciprocity, commitment, effective communication, competence and trust.

This chapter provides a case study analysis of a learning and teaching programme which provided the opportunity for a partnership between a London-based university and a private provider in Sri Lanka to have transformational potential. It uses multiple sources of data to identify practical characteristics associated with developing a culture of transformative partnership working which includes the experiences of the ‘boundary spanner’ responsible for its development and leadership.

The purpose of this chapter is to study the mathematisation of finance – excessive use of mathematical models in finance – which has been widely blamed for the recent financial and economic crisis. We argue that the problem might actually be the financialisation of mathematics, as evidenced by the gradual embedding of branches of mathematics into financial economics. The concept of embeddedness, originally proposed by Polanyi, is relevant to describe the sociological relationship between fields of knowledge. After exploring the relationship between mathematics, finance and economics since antiquity, we find that theoretical developments in the 1950s and 1970s lead directly to this embedding. The key implication of our findings is the realization that it has become necessary to disembed mathematics from finance and economics, and proposes a number of partial steps to facilitate this process. This chapter contributes to the debate on the mathematisation of finance by uniquely combining a historical approach, which chronicles the evolution of the relation between mathematics and finance, with a sociological approach from the perspective of Polyani’s concept of embedding.

Retailing thought and practice is premised on the assumption that consumers visit retailers to search for and acquire objects produced by manufacturers. In essence, we assume that the acts of consuming and producing are conducted by separate entities. This unspoken yet familiar premise shapes the questions retail scholars ask and the way retail practitioners think about their industry. Although this assumption accurately depicted retailing since the Industrial Revolution, its relevance is being challenged by a growing set of individuals who are equipped with new digital tools to engage in self-manufacturing. In this chapter, we examine self-manufacturing with a particular focus on the recent rise of desktop 3D printing. After discussing this new technology and reviewing the literature, we offer a conceptual classification of four distinct types of 3D printed objects and use this classification to inform a content analysis of over 400 of these objects. Based on this review and analysis, we discuss the implications of self-manufacturing for retailing thought and practice.

This study looks at board governance in Ontario hospitals.

We conducted a research of the hospitals’ websites and a survey of board directors to study the board structure and examine governance practice in Ontario hospitals.

The findings suggest that the board structure and process in Ontario hospitals are in compliance with Accreditation Canada’s Governance Standards, and such administrative controls are appropriate. Ontario hospital boards, in general, have fulfilled their key functions of governance in terms of working as an effective board; developing a clear direction; supporting the organization to achieve its mandate; maintaining positive relationships with external stakeholders; and being accountable and achieving sustainable results. Building knowledge through information is an area where improvement is needed.

Ontario hospitals have implemented appropriate administrative controls in terms of board composition and committee structure. The results of a survey of 99 board directors from over 25 hospitals suggest that directors, in general, have a good understanding of their governance role and relationship with senior management as well as the government. The findings are also supportive of good governance practice where executives manage and nonexecutive directors monitor the performance of the executives. According to the respondents, Ontario’s hospital boards are actively involved in setting the mission, strategic goals and objectives of their organizations, and they take appropriate steps to ensure that risk management, client safety, and quality improvements are incorporated in their governance and strategic planning process. In order to discharge their fiduciary duty effectively, respondents would like to have more information from different sources. This is an area where management accounting professionals can become involved such that relevant information from a variety of sources, especially external sources, are provided to board directors for decision making.

Ontario’s hospital sector has undertaken initiatives through research and publications to promote good governance practice. Such leadership is critical to ensure that directors have the competence and skills to discharge their duties and responsibilities diligently. Hospital boards should focus on renewal while ensuring that board directors are equipped for the challenging task of governing through professional development and continuing education.

Limitations related to the use of questionnaire applies to this research study. Self-selection bias and low response rate limit the generalizability of the findings. Future research can examine the behavior of directors in the boardroom and the impact of governance variables on hospital performance, such as quality of care and patient safety.