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This study aims to examine brand personality and its application to political branding. This study focuses on the brand personality of a political leader from the BJP Party brand (Bharatiya Janta Party). The development of a strong political brand personality is crucial for success at the polls. Little research has been dedicated to this phenomenon particularly beyond Western political and post-election contexts.

The scope and development of the study required a qualitative approach. The theoretical frameworks of the study acted as the deductive base of the study. The insights of the respondents were the inductive base of the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with external stakeholders [voters]. In addition, semi-structured interviews were also adopted to capture the branding activities used by internal stakeholders [BJP].

The brand personality dimensions such as sincerity; agreeableness, competence, energy, openness, conscientiousness and emotional stability were clearly associated with a political leader. Negative qualities such as dictatorial attitudes and arrogance affected the political leader’s brand personality. Religious partisanship was another strong negative trait affecting the brand personality of the political leader.

The study has an actionable framework for political brand personality in the post-election context. It offers negative qualities to be avoided in the development of the political brand personality of the leader. It offers insights about the political brand personality of the leader in terms of young digitally savvy voters.

Este trabajo examina la aplicación de la personalidad de marca al ámbito del marketing político y de la marca personal política. Concretamente se centra en la personalidad de marca de un líder político del partido Bharantiya Janta Party (BJP). El desarrollo de una fuerte marca personal política es crucial para el éxito en las elecciones. Pocos trabajos se han centrado hasta el momento en este fenómeno más allá del contexto político occidental.

El alcance y desarrollo del estudio requirió la adopción de un enfoque cualitativo. El marco teórico sirvió de base deductiva al tiempo que las entrevistas realizadas sirvieron de base inductiva. Estas entrevistas fueron semi-estructuradas y dirigidas a grupos de interés externos del BJP (los votantes). Además, se realizaron entrevistas también semi-estructuradas para capturar las actividades de marca desarrolladas por los grupos de interés internos (candidatos, políticos, trabajadores y gerentes del partido).

Las dimensiones de personalidad de marca sinceridad, competencia, energía, estabilidad emocional, franqueza y escrupulosidad están claramente asociadas con un líder político. Por el contrario, rasgos negativos como las actitudes arrogantes y dictatoriales dañan la personalidad de marca de dicho líder, pero sobretodo el partidismo religioso.

El trabajo proporciona un marco de acción para la marca personal política en un contexto post-electoral. Proporciona indicaciones de los rasgos y cualidades negativas que deben de evitarse en el desarrollo de una marca personal para un líder político. Ofrece también evidencias sobre la personalidad de marca que tiene que desarrollar un líder de cara a los votantes más dinámicos y digitales.

South Africa attained democracy over 24 years ago. The changes in South Africa's Constitution allowed for protection for all citizens. Despite these freedoms and the promise of change, the country is plagued by violence, corruption and crime. These crimes affect the LGBTQ+ people of the South African population. These citizens have been protected by the Constitution; however, they continue to live their lives in a paradox, between protection and prejudice. LGBTQ+ people experience high levels of hate crimes which extend to violence, assault, bullying and cyberbullying. This chapter focuses on the legal protection and challenges experienced by South African LGBTQ+ people.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of critical, journalistic documentaries on viewers. More precisely, it investigates the effects of responsibility attribution and surprise on stakeholder attitude, trust and identification.

In a quasi-experimental pre-post setting, 127 participants viewed a documentary about Austrian beverage and marketing company Red Bull. The film inquired into the deaths of six extreme athletes sponsored by the company. As a critical, investigative piece, the documentary was designed to give viewers the impression that Red Bull was, at least partially, responsible for the athletes’ deaths.

Results show that responsibility attribution, the feeling of being surprised and being in a state of negative affect, had a significant impact on viewers’ attitude and trust toward, and identification with Red Bull.

The study adds insights on surprise as a factor in viewers’ assessment of responsibility. The study is original in terms of methodology by using real-time rating to ascertain which sequences trigger changes in responsibility attribution among viewers. Furthermore, implications of the study’s findings with regard to inoculation theory are discussed.

Universities are large, complex and highly hierarchical organisations with deeply engrained gendered values, norms and practices. This chapter reflects on the experiences of two universities in initiating structural change towards gender equality as supported by the TARGET project. A common aspect thereby is the lack of a national policy in higher education and research providing specific support for implementing gender equality policies. The process of audit, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the first gender equality plan (GEP) in each of these universities was conceived as a first step in a long journey, providing a framework for engaging different institutional actors and fostering reflexive, evidence-based policy making. The analysis deals with reflexivity and resistance and seeks to draw lessons from bottom-up and top-down experiences of GEP implementation. It is the result of shared reflection between the GEP ‘implementers’ in the two universities and the team who provided support and acted as ‘critical friends’.

This study empirically tests a conceptual framework that shows how integration practices are significantly associated with supply chain (SC) performance. This study also intends to achieve the following purposes: first, how the performance is influenced by the integration practices, i.e. internal and external; second, to measure the mediating effect of organizational antecedents (market orientation, learning orientation) between integration practices and firm’s SC performance.

In a noncontrived study environment, a cross-sectional study design was used with a questionnaire. The study used a stratified proportionate random sample of 205 managers from manufacturing firms in China. Six hypothesized relationships were examined using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique in AMOS software, and five were shown to be valid. The proposed model was validated through various techniques.

Results of this study indicate that both external and internal integration influence SC performance and confirms the mediating role of organizational antecedents between integration practices and SC performance. According to the findings, five out of the six hypotheses are accepted. Findings of this research also offer very expedient insights for the companies’ management which can help them to ensure optimal output by giving due importance to external as well as internal integration.

The data for the study were only obtained from one province, which was Henan Province, and one industry, which was manufacturing; this constrained the generalizability of the study. The findings may be further validated in the future by expanding the scope of the studies to include various cultural contexts and types of businesses. Second, this study used data from a cross-sectional analysis; however, future research may potentially make use of a longitudinal design in order to more thoroughly confirm the findings.

Findings of this study offer substantial managerial insights suggesting various ways to develop better internal as well as external integration to get better results. Management of the company should focus and give more importance to job rotation, trainings and management commitment as part of internal integration. Moreover, management should strive for improving the capabilities of integration in internal functions prior to external integration as internal collaboration, teamwork and interaction within the company are considered as a precondition to maintain integration with external stakeholders. It is also a social process which needs to be built up over a longer period of time.

The authors contribute to the literature by experimentally evaluating the effects of integration practices on SC performance using a conceptual model drawn from current theories. The study also offer additional empirical evidence for Han et al. (2007), who found that SCI enhances firm performance through quality management in their analyses of the relationships between SCI, quality management practices and firm performance.

Extant research mainly focused on potentially negative customer responses to service robots. In contrast, this study is one of the first to explore a service context where service robots are likely to be the preferred service delivery mechanism over human frontline employees. Specifically, the authors examine how customers respond to service robots in the context of embarrassing service encounters.

This study employs a mixed-method approach, whereby an in-depth qualitative study (study 1) is followed by two lab experiments (studies 2 and 3).

Results show that interactions with service robots attenuated customers' anticipated embarrassment. Study 1 identifies a number of factors that can reduce embarrassment. These include the perception that service robots have reduced agency (e.g. are not able to make moral or social judgements) and emotions (e.g. are not able to have feelings). Study 2 tests the base model and shows that people feel less embarrassed during a potentially embarrassing encounter when interacting with service robots compared to frontline employees. Finally, Study 3 confirms that perceived agency, but not emotion, fully mediates frontline counterparty (employee vs robot) effects on anticipated embarrassment.

Service robots can add value by reducing potential customer embarrassment because they are perceived to have less agency than service employees. This makes service robots the preferred service delivery mechanism for at least some customers in potentially embarrassing service encounters (e.g. in certain medical contexts).

This study is one of the first to examine a context where service robots are the preferred service delivery mechanism over human employees.

Legal education, like any other discipline in higher education, necessitates in use of various teaching and learning pedagogies in order to provide a sustainable teaching and learning experience. This article aims to examine the feasibility of implementing flipped learning method as a pedagogy on legal students at the Open University of Sri Lanka, as well as the perceptions of students and lecturer on the teaching and learning process in a flipped class in preparation for future implementation.

A mixed research method was used. A survey and a semi-structured interview were used to collect student perceptions, and observations of the lecturer were used to document the lecturer's perception.

According to the information gathered from both qualitative and quantitative data, the flipped learning pedagogy enhances the prior learning and student-centered learning of open and distance learning (ODL) and offers a new perspective on the existing pedagogies used in legal education. This article also emphasizes that an equitable implementation of designing and delivering a flipped class will ensure the effectiveness in teaching and learning law in Sri Lanka through ODL.

Despite the fact that there is substantial academic literature on flipped pedagogy, including in legal education, this article will create an original contribution by incorporating reflections from Sri Lankan legal education as well as ODL.

This study aims to assess the effect of water variation on bioethanol production from cassava peels (CP) using Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast as the ethanologenic agent.

The milled CP was divided into three treatment groups in a small-scale flask experiment where each 20 g CP was subjected to two-stage hydrolysis. Different amount of water was added to the fermentation process of CP. The fermented samples were collected every 24 h for various analyses.

The results of the fermentation revealed that the highest ethanol productivity and fermentation efficiency was obtained at 17.38 ± 0.30% and 0.139 ± 0.003 gL⁻¹ h⁻¹. The study affirmed that ethanol production was increased for the addition of water up to 35% for the CP hydrolysate process.

The finding of this study demonstrates that S. cerevisiae is the key player in industrial ethanol production among a variety of yeasts that produce ethanol through sugar fermentation. In order to design truly sustainable processes, it should be expanded to include a thorough analysis and the gradual scaling-up of this process to an industrial level.

This paper is an original research work dealing with bioethanol production from CP using S. cerevisiae microbe.

1. Hydrolysis of cassava peels using 13.1 M H₂SO₄ at 100 ^oC for 110 min gave high Glucose productivity

2. Highest ethanol production was obtained at 72 h of fermentation using Saccharomyces cerevisiae

3. Optimal bioethanol concentration and yield were obtained at a hydration level of 35% agitation

4. Highest ethanol productivity and fermentation efficiency were 17.3%, 0.139 g.L⁻¹.h⁻¹

Hydrolysis of cassava peels using 13.1 M H₂SO₄ at 100 ^oC for 110 min gave high Glucose productivity

Highest ethanol production was obtained at 72 h of fermentation using Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Optimal bioethanol concentration and yield were obtained at a hydration level of 35% agitation

Highest ethanol productivity and fermentation efficiency were 17.3%, 0.139 g.L⁻¹.h⁻¹

The purpose of this study is to analyse how academic staff cope with the new culture of performance measurement and assessment in universities. In particular, the study aims to shed light on how external pressures related to measurement of research performance are translated into organisational and individual academic responses within the university and the extent to which these responses are related specifically to the operational features of performance measurement systems (PMS).

The study is based on a case study conducted in an Italian public university and based on interviews with a cross-disciplinary sample of faculty members.

The study provides insights into how linking financial incentives and career progression to research performance metrics at the system and organisational levels may have important reorientation effects on individual behaviours and epistemic consequences for the academic work.

The study is based on interviews, so one limitation is related to the risk of researcher and interviewee personal bias. Moreover, this study is focused on one single case of a specific university setting, which cannot be fully representative of the experiences of others.

The study contributes to the literature on management accounting by exploring the factors that might explain why the unintended effects of PMS on academics’ behaviour reported by several studies might occur. From a practitioner’s point of view, it shows features of PMS that may produce unintended effects on academic activities. It also highlights the need to rethink PMS for the evaluation of university performance through the involvement of different stakeholders.

Big data analytics (BDA) capabilities can affect supply chain performance in several ways. The main purpose of this study was to understand how BDA capabilities could affect supply chain performance through supply chain resilience and supply chain innovation.

The study adopted a cross-sectional approach to collect survey-based responses to examine the hypotheses. Accordingly, 187 responses were collected and analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) in the SmartPLS3.

The results showed that BDA capabilities improve supply chain performance through resilience and innovation of the supply chain.

The present study also contributed to the existing literature by demonstrating the mediating role of supply chain resilience and supply chain innovation between BDA capabilities and supply chain performance. In this context, some theoretical and managerial implications were proposed and discussed.