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Mediation is defined as a process, whether referred and agreed to by the expression mediation, pre-litigation mediation, online mediation, community mediation, conciliation or any other expression of such similar import, whereby party or parties, request an independent third person referred to as mediator or mediation service provider to assist them in their attempt to reach a peaceful settlement of a dispute. The peaceful settlement of any dispute to be initiated, processed, guided and moderated in the process of successful mediation before parties, needs mediator to have four major new skills such as witness-awareness, stillness-concentration, empathy-motivation and a pragmatic-sensibility for fulfilling the aims and outcomes of mediation. These four skills are deeply inward and psychological, which can be accessed and empowered by an exercise of deepening experience called spiritual in content and application. However, a crucial interchange of meaning and value that very often come into this situation between spirituality and psychology is an important one to be mentioned here. The two seemingly distant disciplines of experience, one of psychology and another of spirituality lies in the orientation that an individual and a collective give to life and world as a whole. When life and world are accepted in totality, spirituality can be life-affirmative and world-embracing giving us a direction to the individual psychological states of though-emotion-sensation-behaviour complex to embrace and enhance values of inclusion, harmony and development at the collective and universal level. These psychological states, both individual and collective, gradually open the vision and mission of values to live within and outside, to be and to become, and finally manifest a future world of stability, order, richness and growing perfection by solving challenges that come to our existence. It makes life both spiritual and earthly. This chapter demonstrates that this kind of spiritual meaning, value and experience entering into and operating through psychological capacities give mediator four major new skills for easing the process and purpose of mediation exercise. One, an objective awareness to witness the proceedings of the mediation calmly within the conscious cognition and without having any bias and fixed beliefs towards any issues of the parties. Two, a stillness with sensory concentration to avoid unnecessary reactions or agitations that human nature is prone to in taking sides on issues or become lop-sided in approach and consequently affecting mediation's outcome of peaceful settlement. Three, an empathy that animates and motivates parties to look for win-win situation for both as against the adversarial method currently present in the legal system where one party loses and another party gains grounds, which results in bitterness in parties' relationships, rights and obligations. Four, a pragmatic sensibility or practical responsibility by which costs or damages or injuries of all kinds such as social, economic, profit-loss ratio, psychological or organizational stress etc., can be pre-calculated, meaningfully distributed and harmonized between parties by the mediator. With millions of pending legal cases in the existing system of the courts of law that are supposedly designed to provide access to justice and, unfortunately have become fragile as a result of severe shortage of resources of all kinds to deal with sheer quantity and intricate complexity of issues in the disputes, applied spirituality in mediation can pave way for easy, flexible, quick, cost-effective and satisfactory justice to both sides of the parties when these four major new skills are developed through application of spiritual experience and experiments in the whole process of mediation. The author explains in this article the method of acquiring these four major new skills in experiential form in any mediation scenario and the rationale for infusing applied spirituality in mediation. Author also discusses the Indian situation of mediation in the light of new developments sought for enhancing the alternative dispute resolution. At the end, this chapter demonstrates the bigger picture that represent the need of spirituality using these four major new skills while mediating challenges of sustainable development. It will be shown in the end how spirituality, sustainability and mediation for settlements of disputes of sustainable development have something common, core and collective. This is the premise based on which the relationship between applied spirituality and mediation in overcoming the challenges of sustainability are expressed with the help of intuitive, inspirational, integrative and intelligent actions for a sustaining our future age, new humanity and harmonious space.

This study aims to evaluate the loyalty formation model on e-grocery service incorporating food quality, e-grocery quality and relationship quality as determinants of loyalty.

The quantitative approach was used by using 353 data from young Indonesian customers with purchasing experience of local food through e-grocery service. The hypothesized relationships between variables were tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results confirm that local food quality, e-grocery service quality and the relationship quality elements of a sense of community and attitudinal attachment, are all loyalty drivers. Next, mediation tests reveal that local food quality and e-grocery service quality influence customer loyalty through customers’ attitudinal attachment and a sense of community.

This study recommends that managers of e-grocery services of local food businesses could benefit from the development of attachment and a sense of community among their young clients. Furthermore, to develop loyalty among young customers, offering high-quality local food as well as e-grocery services is suggested.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first examination of the e-grocery service loyalty in the context of local food.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how digital interventions are mediating the identity work of community health workers (CHWs) in the context of two African countries.

This paper analyzes the everyday work of CHWs in two low- and middle-income country (LMIC) contexts (Uganda and Malawi) and seeks to understand changes in collective identity and the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in mediating this “identity work”. As CHWs conduct their everyday tasks of care giving, data reporting and maintaining social interactions, they play two primary roles. One is the care giving role oriented towards the community, and two, is reporting and administrative work by virtue of them being affiliated with the Ministry of Health, either in formal or voluntary capacity. The ambivalence which they experience as they move back and forth between these two worlds of work is significantly now mediated through ICTs. The paper analyzes these dynamics and identifies three key sets of ambivalence in identity work: (1) role embracing-institutional distancing; (2) conformist-resistant and (3) dramaturgical-transformative. The paper makes unique contributions to information systems (IS) and ICT for development (ICT4D) studies in that it focuses on a nonprofessional group, which plays a fundamental role in providing care to underserved populations and also conducts data work which provides the foundation of the national health information system. This contrasts with dominant research in the field which focuses on professional groups, largely based in Western business organizations.

The paper identifies identity related tensions that emerge with the mediation of digital technologies in the work world of CHWs. These include tensions of conformist-resistant; and (3) dramaturgical-transformative. These findings are relevant and unique to the field of IS and ICT4D studies in that it focuses on a nonprofessional group, which plays a fundamental role in providing care to underserved populations and also conducts data work which provides the foundation of the national health information system.

While acknowledging identity construction and negotiation is a function of both work and social lives, in this paper we could only focus on the work lives.

As digital interventions in the health sector of low and middle income countries is becoming increasingly widespread, often the focus is more on the supply side (the supply of the technology) rather than on the demand side (users experiences and aspirations). Identity becomes a lens to understand these demand side dynamics, which helps provides practical guidance on implementation approaches to ensure that the technology adds value to user work processes and there is a seamless and not a disruptive transition.

CHWs are the most neglected cadre in the health system of low and middle income countries, even though they provide the cutting edge in care provision work to the most marginalized populations, living in rural and underserved areas. By focusing on how technologies can be more effectively implemented to support these care processes, the paper provides important social implications both for practice and research.

Analysis of identity construction and negotiation of informal groups in the unorganized sector of low and middle income countries has not received adequate attention in IS research. The paper seeks to fill this important gap.

The purpose of this paper is to consider what safeguarding responses to discriminatory abuse and hate crime might learn from existing research on restorative justice and to drive practice development based on available evidence.

This paper is based on a scoping review of literature using four academic databases and reference harvesting. This comprised a critical appraisal of 30 articles, which were thematically analysed to appreciate the benefits and challenges of restorative justice responses to hate crime and how this might inform safeguarding responses to discriminatory abuse and hate crime.

The analysis identifies four domains where learning can be drawn. These relate to theory on restorative justice; restorative justice practices; perspectives from lived experience of restorative justice and hate crime; and an appraisal of critiques about restorative justice.

This paper connects the emerging evidence on restorative criminal justice responses to hate crime to the “turn” towards strengths-based practices in adult safeguarding. Although this provides a fertile environment for embedding restorative practices, the authors argue certain precautions are required based on evidence from existing research on hate crime and restorative justice.

The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of those volunteering within a restorative justice service thus enabling an insight into their perceptions of the different methods used, their beliefs about restorative justice effectiveness, and its place within the criminal justice system. The study also sought to identify any challenges and positive experiences the participants encountered during their role as volunteers, with volunteering during the COVID-19 pandemic explored specifically.

Data was collected from the participants (n = 5) via semi-structured interviews and analysed using thematic analysis, thus enabling patterns within the experience of the volunteers to be identified.

A prior understanding and interest in restorative justice was evident within the data, with participants demonstrating a preference for direct, face-to-face mediation. The perceived lack of support from external agencies was discussed along with the role of education in their volunteering experience. Finally, it was acknowledged that although face-to-face practice was deemed the most effective overall, certain practices adopted during COVID-19 enabled aspects of the role to be carried out more efficiently and equally as effectively.

The findings from this study draw out real-world implications, producing tangible action points for restorative justice services. Some tentative suggestions for future practice are outlined.

The volunteers’ role within restorative justice is often overlooked within the literature (Paul and Borton, 2013) and time constraints can add additional barriers to a hard-to-reach population. However, volunteers play a vital role in restorative justice. By exploring and listening to the volunteers’ experience, this study expands an additional strand within the literature in terms of what makes restorative justice effective and the challenges that are faced from a volunteer perspective.

Fun at workplace is considered an important initiative to build co-working communities, and this study aims to study its role in promoting the innovative behaviour of co-workers [members of co-working spaces (CWS)] and the mechanism of its influence.

Based on the theory of social exchange and resource conservation, the authors conducted a qualitative study to explore the four dimensions of workplace fun and a quantitative study to empirically analyse the relationship between community embeddedness, organisational embeddedness, workplace fun and creativity of co-workers, taking K-space as an example.

Workplace fun is positively correlated with co-workers' creativity. Community embeddedness plays a complete mediating role between workplace fun and organisational embeddedness. Community embeddedness and organisational embeddedness play a chain-mediating role between workplace fun and creativity.

This study explores the process and impact of fun on employee creativity in a shared office environment by clarifying the composition of fun in CWS workplaces and the transmission mechanism of fun through informal community embeddedness and formal organisational embeddedness, expanding the research perspective on the factors influencing employee creativity in the new office model and enriching the research findings on the impact of fun at work on job performance.

Based on the principles of the social capital theory (SCT), this study aimed to generate hypotheses and evaluate a mediated moderated model that examined the impact of social capital on online brand community happiness (OBCH).

Using 215 online questionnaires from users of private online brand communities (OBCs) , researchers examined the hypothesized connections between variables. The SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 26.0 were applied to fulfill the purpose.

For the goodness of model fit, the authors have applied cut off criteria for fit indexes given by Hu and Bentler (1999) and model-fit measures indicators, i.e. CMIN/DF 1.397, CFI 0.958, SRMR 0.045, RMSEA 0.043 and PCLOSE 0.866, which meet the minimum acceptable criteria. Based on the results, social capital significantly affects psychological well-being (PWB), which, consequently, leads toward increased happiness among OBCs. Furthermore, membership duration moderates the relationship between PWB and OBCs.

The authors have utilized a cross-sectional research design, and it limits the researcher’s ability to generalize the findings. These findings imply how social capital leverages PWB and OBCH. Moreover, the presence of membership duration helps to understand that members who spend more time in the community are happier in the OBCs.

In this age of social media, it provides valuable guidance to the administrators of private Facebook groups dedicated to specific brands, enhancing the definition and development of OBC operations and community interactions.

This research takes a broader look at social capital’s impact on happiness among private OBCs. The current research contributes to the existing body of work by emphasizing the role of PWB in generating happiness. The study is novel in examining the mediating moderating model of PWB and membership duration to explore deep insights for social media platforms.

For decades, conflict resolution (CR) educators working cross-culturally have struggled with a fundamental dilemma – whether to offer western, evidence-based approaches through a top-down (prescriptive) training process or to use a bottom-up (elicitive) strategy that builds on local cultural knowledge of effective in situ conflict management. This study aims to explore which conditions that prompted experienced CR instructors to use more prescriptive or elicitive approaches to such training in a foreign culture and the implications for training outcomes.

There are two parts to this study. First, the authors conducted a literature review to identify basic conditions that might be conducive to conducting prescriptive or elicitive cross-cultural CR training. The authors then tested the identified conditions in a survey with experienced CR instructors to identify different conditions that afforded prescriptive or elicitive approaches. Exploratory factor analysis and regression were used to assess which conditions determined whether a prescriptive or elicitive approach produced better outcomes.

In general, although prescriptive methods were found to be more efficient, elicitive methods produced more effective, culturally appropriate, sustainable and culturally sensitive training. Results revealed a variety of instructor, participant and contextual factors that influenced whether a prescriptive or elicitive approach was applied and found to be more suitable.

This study used empirical survey data with practicing experts to provide insight and guidance into when to use different approaches to CC-CR training effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to examine peace as a paradigm for promoting peace culture.

The paper amalgamates paradigmatic concepts, insights and analytical writing while building on existing literature.

The findings of this research suggest that the paradigm of peace can be used as a model to promote peace culture and harmony in the 21st century, which is characterized by “hyper” and “super” diversity. Diversity is everywhere, including schools, workplaces and marketplaces. Diversity is very complex and encompasses nearly every element of human life. Diversity should not only be based on the race, culture, ethnicity, religion or gender of an individual. Diversity should be based on the uniqueness of an individual. The fact that we live in a diverse world does not mean that we cannot coexist harmoniously. This paper explores the paradigm of peace research by focusing on how it enhances peace culture to thrive amidst diversity. This study also illustrates that peace and conflict studies cannot be restricted to the resolution of war, violence and conflict. It can likewise aid us in addressing cultural, racial, religious and ethnic concerns. In addition, this research demonstrates that encouraging positive peace (and discouraging negative peace) can be used as a deterrent against violence, including war and conflict. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates the significance of personal peace and some other types of peace. It demonstrates that inner peace combined with external peace yields personal peace. Therefore, an individual may not be able to enjoy the holistic values of personal peace without inner and external peace. Also, this research indicates that encouraging a daily culture of peace can assist us in becoming quotidian agents of peace.

Most publications focused on peace and conflict but made no connection between peace and culture. In addition, the majority of publications did not discuss peace as a paradigm that can aid in promoting a culture of peace and nonviolence. In addition, most papers did not link peace culture with diversity. Moreover, the majority of studies did not connect peace with the environment. This study addresses these gaps by introducing peace as a paradigm for fostering a culture of peace amidst diversity in the 21st century. This paper introduces peace as a paradigm for promoting nonviolence, peace culture and harmony. This study also emphasizes the need for environmental peace, thereby increasing awareness of the problems that affect the planet. This study also includes a discussion of positive and negative peace, as well as other definitions and viewpoints of peace. It also underlines the importance of establishing positive peace. This paper can be used as an introductory pathway to understanding the intriguing aspect of peace that fosters a peace culture if practiced adequately and why a peace culture is important in a world of diversity.

Manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are heading towards smart manufacturing despite growing challenges caused by globalisation and rapid technological advancement. These SMEs, particularly textile SMEs of Bangladesh, also face challenges in implementing sustainability and organisational ambidexterity (OA) due to resource constraints and limitations of conventional leadership styles. Adopting paradoxical leadership (PL) and entrepreneurial bricolage (EB) is important to overcome the challenges. However, these dynamics are less explored in academia, especially in the Bangladeshi textile SMEs context. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the adoption of smart technologies (ASTs), PL and OA, EB on sustainable performance (SP) of textile SMEs in Bangladesh.

A cross-sectional and primary quantitative survey was conducted. Data from 361 textile SMEs were collected using a structured self-administrated questionnaire and analysed by partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

The statistical outcome confirms that ASTs and PL significantly influence SP and OA. OA plays a significant mediating role for PL and is insignificant for ASTs, and EB significantly moderates among ASTs, PL and SP.

As this study is cross-sectional and focussed on a single city (Dhaka, Bangladesh), conducting longitudinal studies and considering other parts of the country can provide exciting findings.

This research provides valuable insights for policymakers, management and textile SMEs in developing and developed countries. By adopting unique and innovative OA, PL and EB approaches, manufacturing SMEs, especially textile companies, can be more sustainable.

This study has a novel, pioneering contribution, as it empirically validates the role of multiple constructs such as AST, PL, OA and EB towards SP in the context of textile SMEs in a developing country like Bangladesh.