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This study (1) assessed restaurant consumers' perceived importance of better food quality versus larger portion sizes, (2) classified restaurant consumers into different segments based on their perceived importance of seven food quality attributes (taste, texture, aroma, appearance and the use of natural, local and organic ingredients) relative to portion size and (3) compared the identified market segments.

An online survey assessed 613 USA adult participants' perceived importance of seven food quality attributes relative to portion size. A K-means cluster analysis classified participants into different segments based on their perceptions.

Five restaurant consumer segments were identified: sensory-oriented consumers, taste-oriented organic food consumers, local and natural food consumers, quantity-oriented consumers and quality-oriented consumers. In general, quality-oriented consumers were the least likely to visit fast-food restaurants, had the highest average per-meal spending and were the least likely to eat out alone. Local and natural food consumers and taste-oriented organic food consumers had higher total restaurant spending than other groups. Quantity-oriented and sensory-oriented consumers visited fast-food restaurants more often and had lower total restaurant spending and per-meal spending than other groups. Age, sex and income were significantly associated with the segmentation outcomes.

Findings suggest promising opportunities for restaurants to enhance consumer perceptions of value by prioritizing the factors that hold the greatest significance to their target customers.

This study is the first attempt to segment restaurant consumers based on their perceived importance of food quality attributes relative to portion size, effectively identifying five distinct consumer segments.

With the increasing number of Web services, correct and efficient classification of Web services is crucial to improve the efficiency of service discovery. However, existing Web service classification approaches ignore the class overlap in Web services, resulting in poor accuracy of classification in practice. This paper aims to provide an approach to address this issue.

This paper proposes a label confusion and priori correction-based Web service classification approach. First, functional semantic representations of Web services descriptions are obtained based on BERT. Then, the ability of the model is enhanced to recognize and classify overlapping instances by using label confusion learning techniques; Finally, the predictive results are corrected based on the label prior distribution to further improve service classification effectiveness.

Experiments based on the ProgrammableWeb data set show that the proposed model demonstrates 4.3%, 3.2% and 1% improvement in Macro-F1 value compared to the ServeNet-BERT, BERT-DPCNN and CARL-NET, respectively.

This paper proposes a Web service classification approach for the overlapping categories of Web services and improve the accuracy of Web services classification.

Recent international business research finds that state-owned multinational enterprises (SOMNEs) invest relatively more in politically risky host countries than do privately-owned multinational enterprises (MNEs). This study aims to investigate theoretically and empirically whether state ownership mitigates the impact of host-country political risk on subsidiary economic risk.

The authors link theoretical arguments on state ownership to arguments from non-market strategy literature to outline mechanisms whereby state ownership can buffer subsidiaries from political risk, weakening the link between host-country political risk and earnings volatility in subsidiaries. Using a data set on Norwegian MNEs’ foreign subsidiaries across almost two decades, the authors test this prediction using both matching methods and panel regressions.

While standard panel regressions provide empirical support only for the infrastructure sector and for the highest political risk contexts, nearest-neighbour matching models – comparing only otherwise similar private- and SOMNE subsidiaries using the full sample – reveal more general support for the political risk mitigation hypothesis.

The study presents the first comprehensive analysis of whether state ownership can mitigate the effect of political risk on subsidiary economic risk.

This paper aims to present a theoretical model for restructuring Colombia’s educational initiatives in response to current socioeconomic needs. More equitable and decolonized education could help learners decouple their capacities to imagine the future from colonialized paradigms, thereby opening spaces for more active engagement in their own futures.

The authors take a critical, postmodern approach focused on empowering people to transcend constraints from a colonial past and recognizing that the purpose of knowledge, although reflecting power and social relationships, is to help people improve society. Notions of situated and futures literacies nourish an approach toward a decolonized and glocalized educational model.

The current Colombian educational system tends to favor a single focus – local, national or international – at the expense of the others. The authors argue that educational policy and planning should account for three realms of knowledge: locally situated literacies, nationally situated literacies and globally situated literacies.

Deconstructing obsolete and colonized methodologies could not only help prepare Colombian learners for active engagement both within and beyond their modern-day borders but could also help transform other educational systems originally designed to support societies and economies that no longer exist, including those of the Global North.

A prime objective of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA; Clean India Mission) is to motivate people to segregate their household waste. The purpose of this study is to assess the ground reality of waste management behaviour of Delhi residents with the help of a modified Value–Belief–Norm (VBN) model. Past researches point the need to include cost as a variable in the VBN model. This study fulfils this need and tests cost as one of the variables on the gathered data.

The research data were gathered by interacting with the people and the civic staff in the jurisdiction of the three Delhi municipalities through a stratified sampling technique (N = 250). The structural equation modelling was used to analyse the collected data.

The modified VBN model explains the waste management behaviour, but the variables do not follow the exact causal chain. Values, awareness of consequences, ascription of responsibility and personal norms all explain the resident's waste management behaviour. However, cost limits the resident's waste management behaviour.

The study could only achieve a moderate model fit; its sample size was small; and data were collected through self-reported questionnaire.

Three main practical implications of the study are: (1) While designing waste management solutions, due importance must be given to the cost to be borne by people for adopting these solutions. (2) Design such interventions that target residents' values to convince them to make the desired behavioural change. (3) People need be educated about the ways to sort waste and made aware of the importance of waste segregation in eradicating the urban waste mess.

The paper is an original contribution to testing a modified VBN model in predicting waste management behaviour. The modified model includes cost as a variable missing in the previous research. This research is useful in the backdrop of the SBA and provides suggestions for policymakers and pro-environment researchers.

It is documented that companies and government agencies in the USA invest more in the fourth fiscal quarter without having higher investment opportunities. While previous studies focus on the agency conflicts and information asymmetry within organizations, this study is motivated by Scharfstein and Stein's (2000) two-tiered agency model and aims to examine how firms' external business environment affects the “fourth quarter effect.”

The authors implement this study in a sample of 41 countries and observe similar seasonality in firm investment as documented in the US market.

More importantly, using country characteristics, this study finds that firms from countries with better investor rights and protection, and more developed financial markets show less severe over-investment in the fourth fiscal quarter.

This paper contributes to the literature of law and finance, and the internal capital market, by investigating the quarterly investment patterns of firms from 41 countries. The authors find that similar to the results in earlier studies on the US market, firms in the global market increase their capital expenditure in the fourth fiscal quarter, indicating that the internal agency conflicts between the headquarters and divisional managers are widespread across the world. The authors also find that firms that operate in countries with higher investor rights and protection, and more developed financial markets, tend to show less severe “fourth quarter effect”.

The purpose of this study is to describe peer support work in a men’s mental health unit from a lived experience and service user’s perspective. The intertwining of process (a lived experience perspective) and subject (the therapeutic value of peer support) leads to greater knowledge and insight into peer support for people with mental health problems.

This service user narrative draws on the extracts from a reflective journal of interactions and conversations with people with mental health problems as well as feedback from service users and staff about the value of peer support. These methods allow a first-person, service user’s, reflective and narrative account of peer support work.

Peer support work, particularly hearing voices sessions, are found to be highly therapeutic and worthwhile. They promote insight and create feelings of safety and hope in what can sometimes be a frightening and hostile ward environment. Peer support provides emotional and practical support. Sharing stories and experiences of mental illness with people leads to trust, feelings of being valued, heard and accepted as well as better experiences of care and being seen as a person first. Due to their shared experiences, peer support workers are able to befriend people with mental health problems on the ward. Peer support work bridges the gap and vacuum of care between people with mental health problems and staff. It compensates for understaffing to provide more holistic and person-centred care and support.

Lived experience/ service user perspectives and narratives on peer support are rare, particularly in a hospital setting. This article provides a rich, perhaps overlooked and hidden narrative on the nature of peer support work. People with mental health problems, like Ben, are often excluded from society, health and social care, education, employment and research. This narrative opens up a pathway to understanding peer support from a service user perspective.

The PICCH research project contributes to opening a dialogue between cultural heritage archives and users. Hence, the users are identified and their information needs, the search strategies they apply and the search challenges they experience are uncovered.

A combination of questionnaires and interviews is used for collection of data. Questionnaire data were collected from users of three different audiovisual archives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two user groups: (1) scholars searching information for research projects and (2) archivists who perform their own scholarly work and search information on behalf of others.

The questionnaire results show that the archive users mainly have an academic background. Hence, scholars and archivists constitute the target group for in-depth interviews. The interviews reveal that their information needs are multi-faceted and match the information need typology by Ingwersen. The scholars mainly apply collection-specific search strategies but have in common primarily doing keyword searching, which they typically plan in advance. The archivists do less planning owing to their knowledge of the collections. All interviewees demonstrate domain knowledge, archival intelligence and artefactual literacy in their use and mastering of the archives. The search challenges they experience can be characterised as search system complexity challenges, material challenges and metadata challenges.

The paper provides a rare insight into the complexity of the search situation of cultural heritage archives, and the users’ multi-facetted information needs and hence contributes to the dialogue between the archives and the users.

Successful adoption of building information modelling (BIM) by early adopters is crucial for its effective diffusion. The purpose of this study is to develop a framework of understanding that supports contextualized understanding of BIM adoption decisions in a BIM infant industry. The framework bridges the gap in current knowledge in terms of the absence of such a framework, which has hindered the structured understanding of the BIM decision of an adopter, curtailing the appropriate strategizing of their BIM adoption.

The study focuses on a BIM infant industry, where early adopters begin using BIM, allowing insights into this crucial initial stage of adoption. Identifying affordances as a versatile concept that could effectively represent not only what an adopter perceives and expects from BIM implementation, but also, what the adopter, in fact, can achieve from it, an affordance-led framework of understanding (AFU) was developed to comprehensively capture varying dynamics of BIM decision process. The study took a qualitative retroductive approach to theory with semi-structured interviews to gather necessary data from a sample of BIM adopters purposively selected to maximize the breadth and depth of data.

The study concludes by identifying and defining pertinent affordances as a new concept and a compulsory state for BIM adoption. Findings further demonstrate that existing theories can be linked to the AFU to strategically direct the affordances dynamics towards the pertinent state.

The AFU enables a deeper contextualizable view of innovation adoption that was absent in existing innovation studies. It significantly enhances the precision of strategizing BIM adoption compared to previous approaches, enabling adopters to plan and implement BIM in a manner that aligns well with their expectations and specific conditions.

English as a foreign langauge (EFL) students find it difficult to apply the theoretical knowledge they acquire on translation in the practical world. Therefore, this study explored if training in pretranslation techniques (PTTs) (syntactic parsing) as suggested by Almanna (2018) could improve the translation proficiency of Yemeni EFL students. Moreover, the study also assessed which of the PTTs the intervention helped to develop.

The study adopted a primarily experimental pre- and posttests research design, and the sample comprised of an intake class with 16 students enrolled in the fourth year, Bachelor in Education (B.Ed), Hadhramout University. Six participants were also interviewed to gather the students' perceptions on using PTTs.

Results showed that students' performance in translation developed significantly (Sig. = 0.002). All the six PTTs showed development, though subject, tense and aspect developed more significantly (Sig. = 0.034, 0.002, 0.001 respectively). Finally, the study reported students' positive perceptions on the importance of using PTTs before doing any translation tasks.

One of the recurrent errors that can be noticed in Yemeni EFL students' production is their inability to transfer the grammatical elements of sentences from L1 (Arabic) into L2 (English) or the visa versa. The researchers thought though translation is more than the syntactic transmission of one language into another, analyzing the elements of sentences using syntactic and semantic parsing can help students to produce acceptable texts in the target language. These claims would be proved or refuted after analyzing the experiment result of the present study.