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This instant study explores the relationship between weight-based teasing and depressive symptoms in Indian college students. It further investigates the moderating effect of gratitude on depressive symptoms occurring due to weight-based teasing.

The study is theoretically based on Fredrickson's broaden-and-built theory (2001). PROCESS macro in IBM SPSS v21 was used to analyze the effect of gratitude in moderation of weight-based teasing and depressive symptoms. The study used correlation and regression analysis to assess the relationship between weight-based teasing and depressive symptoms.

The study has confirmed that weight-based teasing results in the development of depressive symptoms in Indian college students. The study has also revealed that gratitude casts a significant moderating effect on depression due to weight-based teasing, i.e. a reduction in regression weight of weight-based teasing.

This study is the first of its kind in India and will significantly add to the national literature on teasing and depression. Further, the study will help stakeholders like educators and policymakers to formulate psychological programs based on positive psychology 2.0 and gratitude to combat the rising issue of body shaming in India.

This paper aims to provide a historical overview of AA, its purpose and benefits, the legal rationale for the SCOTUS ruling and what it means for colleges and the workplace regarding equitable opportunities for minority groups (which include women, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other low-income populations), as they aim for the “American dream”.

SCOTUS decision and rationale, along with literature.

The race-based affirmative action (AA) precedent was recently overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in the case of Students for Fair Admission (SFFA), Inc. vs President and Fellows of Harvard College/University of North Carolina. SCOTUS ruled that race cannot be a specific basis for college admission. In other words, public and private colleges and universities will no longer be able to consider “race” as a factor in deciding which qualified applicants should be admitted to enhance the diversity of their student body.

This is an original analysis.

This paper aims to shed light on the spatial constraints of sex work in Greece. The objective is twofold: to illustrate the intertemporal stance of the Greek state to push sex work at the edge of both the city and the law produces sex workers as always already marginal subjects and to identify how a spatial-based understanding of sex work could help in acknowledging sex workers’ full community citizenship.

This article examines the legal geographies of sex work in modern and contemporary Greece. The author is a doctoral student in critical jurisprudence with a professional background in urban planning law, who also works voluntarily with Athens-based sex worker’s organizations. Law’s materialization within space (Bennet and Layard, 2015, p. 406), namely, the implication of law in the discursive and material production of place, is examined through archival research with primary and secondary sources, including legislations and LGBT publications such as Amfi and Kráximo from the 1980s and 1990s found in the Archives of Contemporary Social History (ASKI) in Athens. Additionally, as the author is currently conducting fieldwork with people who are working or have worked in the past in sex in Greece as a part of her PhD dissertation, the paper contains data provided by ten interlocutors to highlight their own personal experience. The researcher has used the critical oral history method, as it is committed to recording first-hand knowledge of experiences of marginalized community members who are often unheard or untold, with the additional goals of contextualizing these stories to reveal power differences and inequities (Lemley, 2017, Rickard, 2003).

The paper provides insight into how regulationism establishes the brothel – a metonymy of prostitution – as a heterotopia within the urban space. Contemporary approaches, such as LULUs and broken window policies, are used to indicate the historically marginal placement of sex work.

The interviews presented here were conducted in the summer of 2022, in the context of the author’s PhD research. Despite her six years of activist-level involvement with sex workers’ rights organizations, due to ethical constraints, only the findings of interviews conducted up to the writing of this paper are presented here, while details of private discussions with members of these organizations are omitted.

The paper examines a significant and timely matter of place making and spatial justice. Unlike earlier research on prostitution in Greece that focused on the brothel either as a heterotopia or as an undesirable land use, the novelty of this paper is that it highlights the intersections between policing, planning, public hygiene, anti-immigration policies around the regulation of the sex market. By critically discussing the implications of the de facto illegality of sex work in Greece, the study highlights the importance of including the voices of sex workers in decision-making and contributes to the debate around the decriminalization of sex work in Greece.

Cyber-attacks that generate technical disruptions in organisational operations and damage the reputation of organisations have become all too common in the contemporary organisation. This paper explores the reputation repair strategies undertaken by organisations in the event of becoming victims of cyber-attacks.

For developing the authors’ contribution in the context of the Internet service providers' industry, the authors draw on a qualitative case study of TalkTalk, a British telecommunications company providing business to business (B2B) and business to customer (B2C) Internet services, which was a victim of a “significant and sustained” cyber-attack in October 2015. Data for the enquiry is sourced from publicly available archival documents such as newspaper articles, press releases, podcasts and parliamentary hearings on the TalkTalk cyber-attack.

The findings suggest a dynamic interplay of technical and rhetorical responses in dealing with cyber-attacks. This plays out in the form of marshalling communication and mortification techniques, bolstering image and riding on leader reputation, which serially combine to strategically orchestrate reputational repair and stigma erasure in the event of a cyber-attack.

Analysing a prototypical case of an organisation in dire straits following a cyber-attack, the paper provides a systematic characterisation of the setting-in-motion of strategic responses to manage, revamp and ameliorate damaged reputation during cyber-attacks, which tend to negatively shape the evaluative perceptions of the organisation's salient audience.

This study aims to explore the role of frontline service employees’ (FSEs) awareness that their job can be substituted by smart technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and algorithms (STARA) in their job autonomy and proactive service performance and when these relationships can be buffered. Drawing on the cognitive appraisal theory of stress, the study examined the mediating relationship between FSEs’ STARA awareness, job autonomy and proactive service performance and the moderating effects of self-efficacy and resilience on this relationship.

The authors administered two-wave online surveys to 301 South Korean FSEs working in various service sectors (e.g. retailing, food/beverage, hospitality/tourism and banking). The Time 1 survey measured respondents’ STARA awareness, self-efficacy, resilience and job autonomy, and the Time 2 survey assessed their proactive service performance.

FSEs’ STARA awareness negatively affected their subsequent proactive service performance through decreased job autonomy. The negative association between STARA awareness and job autonomy was weaker when FSEs’ self-efficacy was high than when it was low. While the authors observed no significant moderation of resilience, the author found a marginally significant three-way interaction between STARA awareness, self-efficacy and resilience. Specifically, STARA awareness was negatively related to job autonomy only when both self-efficacy and resilience were low. When either self-efficacy or resilience was high, the association between STARA awareness and job autonomy became nonsignificant, suggesting the buffering roles of the two personal resources.

Given that the measurement of variables relied on self-reported data, rater biases might have affected the findings of the study. Moreover, the simultaneous measurement of STARA awareness, self-efficacy, resilience and job autonomy could preclude causal inferences between these variables. The authors encourage future studies to use a more rigorous methodology to reduce rater biases and establish stronger causality between the variables.

Service firms can decrease FSEs’ STARA awareness through training in the knowledge and skills necessary to work with these technologies. To promote FSEs’ proactive service performance in this context, service firms need to involve them in decisions related to STARA adoption and allow them to craft their jobs. Service managers should provide FSEs with social support and exercise empowering and supportive leadership to help them view STARA as a challenge rather than a threat.

Distinct from prior research on STARA awareness and employee outcomes, the study identified proactive service performance as a key outcome in the STARA context. By presenting self-efficacy and resilience as crucial personal resources that buffer FSEs from the deleterious impact of STARA awareness, the study provides practitioners with insights that can help FSEs maintain their job autonomy and proactive service performance in times of digitalization and automation.