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Trust in disaster communication is significant because a lack of trust will prevent the transformation of information into usable knowledge for an effective disaster response. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how the culture and network ties of an affected community can encourage trust and participation in disaster communication.

A qualitative case study of Jalin Merapi (JM) was conducted by interviewing 33 research participants in the Mt Merapi surroundings.

The findings indicate that culture-embedded disaster communication plays important roles in increasing the effectiveness of disaster information and encouraging trust in the authenticity of locally based disaster information at the individual level. The findings also identify that strong ties and weak ties play different roles in disaster communication. The strong ties are more effective in facilitating information diffusion and encourage trust and community participation within the affected community. Furthermore, the weak ties are more effective in disseminating information to wider audiences, and have an indirect influence in encouraging trust by extending the offline social network owned by the affected community.

Most literature on disaster communication focusses on the construction of disaster messages to encourage effective disaster response. Less attention has been paid to the information receivers regarding how disaster information is considered to be trustworthy by the affected community and how it can increase collective participation in community-based disaster communication.

As the shortage in the information technology (IT) workforce continues, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the cultural dimensions of IT occupations that attract or drive away potential IT professionals. In the present study, the authors take an occupational culture approach to study the cultural fit of newcomers to IT occupations and to understand how young people perceive the culture embedded in this occupational community as they become part of it.

The authors take a sequential mixed methodology approach composed of two phases, one qualitative and the other quantitative. In the first phase of the study, nine focus groups and 27 interviews with college students were conducted to learn about the challenges and barriers that they personally experienced while becoming part of the IT occupational community. The second phase used results from the first qualitative phase to design a survey instrument that was administered to 215 IT college students who were currently or had recently been involved in IT work experience to evaluate their cultural fit to the IT occupational culture (ITOC) and its influence on their occupational commitment.

The results suggest that women, ethnic minorities and those with less work experience encountered greater difficulty fitting into different dimensions of ITOC. The results also showed that cultural fit is a good predictor of occupational commitment and affective commitment in particular.

An initial survey instrument was developed to measure cultural fit to ITOC. This instrument can be further modified and adapted to be used in the hiring process by HR departments to measure cultural fit to organizational subcultures, such as the one in the IT occupational group.

This paper constitutes an important contribution to the rigor and development of the theory and research of human resources in information technologies.

The European Standards and Guidelines (ESG) for quality assurance (QA) adopted at the Bergen Ministerial Meeting in 2005 in the scope of the Bologna process call upon higher education institutions to take up a systematic approach to internal QA. Standard 1.1 of the ESG establishes that institutions should have a policy and associated procedures for the assurance of the quality and standards of their programmes and awards. University of Minho (UMinho) has a longstanding experience on innovative methods for the coordination and management of the teaching and learning processes, including, since 1991, systematic mechanisms for the evaluation of teaching. However, to fulfil the new demands raised by the ESG UMinho felt the need to define a formal institutional quality policy, building upon the existing procedures and mechanisms in order to set up a comprehensive internal QA system (SIGAQ-UM) fully compatible with the ESG. The purpose of this paper is to present the distinctive features of SIGAQ-UM, the procedures involved in its certification by Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (A3ES), as well as on the perceived impact on the university’s activities, including some comments on the difficulties to develop and consolidate a quality culture embedded in all the academic community.

Case study approach.

SIGAQ-UM is a fully operational comprehensive internal QA system certified by the Portuguese Agency A3ES in January 2013, with considerable impact on the university’s operation.

Disclosure of best practices on QA in higher education.

Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario, Canada, working in partnership with leading health science centers in Toronto, Ontario, has developed a unique second-degree entry Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BScN) program called the Scholar Practitioner Program. This program is a response to the increasing demand for nursing programs which builds on prior university learning.

The program uses an educational model based on narrative inquiry and cognitive apprentice pedagogies. Narrative inquiry pedagogy is the overarching philosophical framework of the program, which embraces values that connect teachers and learners. A spirit of inquiry is cultivated in every student and a research culture embedded in the student’s practice.

The six-semester two-year full-time program occurs in a learner-driven environment which shapes how specific semester program objectives are met. A strong emphasis is placed on experiential learning within the Toronto-based academic health sciences centers.

A continuous interactive process involving teachers and learners encourages self-directed learning and participant accountability. Application of knowledge and skills in a professional, caring, and holistic manner is expected. This type of undergraduate learning environment which includes immersion in the employment milieu enables the future scholar practitioner to be relevant in the evolving profession of nursing.

Focussing on the links among people, places and traditions, this study aims to present the reflections derived from five in-depth personal interviews on traditions regarding wine, fish, cheese making and rural hospitality, collected in a journey across the province of Reggio Calabria in southern Italy. It provides an original view of the “stories” behind the places and the products, useful to inform local development strategies centred on traditional food products.

The article presents a novel approach in conducting research that involves collecting information via empathetic interviews and presenting the findings in a reflexive, narrative storytelling style.

Empathetic personal interviewing is key to elicit information useful to frame the links among people, places and traditions. The economic motivation is not the main one for people to remain engaged in the production of traditional food products in the province of Reggio Calabria. Pride in linking their activities and the products they make to the territory, its traditions and the culture embedded therein, clearly contribute to define a sense of place that might be further drawn upon in participatory, rural development initiatives.

Due to the way in which the interviewees have been selected, not all findings can be generalized as applicable to the entire Province or beyond.

Recognizing the people and the stories behind a product may offer insights on how to design effective, socially sustainable policies that would preserve important traditions. Personal food narratives might contribute, in a unique way, to an effective branding of the products and the territory.

Doing more empathetically participatory research, rather than taking a “neutral” stance in data collection and data crunching, which has traditionally characterized the work of agricultural economists, may help in making the institutions being perceived as less distant by the ultimate beneficiary of development policies and make participatory planning much more effective.

The article contributes to an emerging area of research at the intersection between agricultural economics and rural development policy. How to highlight and protect the people and their stories as fundamental aspects of the “places”, “products” and “traditions”, remains an area of research that has not yet been fully explored, at least in the rhetoric and discourse on integrated rural development in Italy.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of developmental opportunities and perceived pay equity-and paternalistic leadership on affective organizational commitment and the moderating role of paternalistic leadership at the team level in a Korean context.

Hierarchical linear modeling with a two-level design was used to analyze data collected from 844 employees and 59 work teams.

The study identified that developmental opportunities and perceived pay equity were significantly associated with affective organizational commitment. However, paternalistic leadership was not significantly related to affective organizational commitment. The results also showed that the moderation effect of paternalistic leadership on the relationship between pay equity and organizational commitment was non-significant, and paternalistic leadership moderated the relationship between developmental opportunities and organizational commitment. In particular, the relationship of developmental opportunities with organizational commitment became weaker when the supervisor’s paternalistic leadership was stronger.

The results of this study supported the applicability of organizational support theory and previous empirical studies supporting the relationships between human resource (HR) practices and commitment, particularly in the Korean cultural context. The results have several practical implications for employers, mangers and HR practitioners in an East Asian cultural context.

This study extends the body of knowledge in leadership research by investigating the influences of two key factors of HR practices and a Confucianism-based indigenous leadership theory on organizational commitment. More importantly, the results can guide future cross-national or cross-organizational studies exploring the relationships among leadership, organizational culture and organizational effectiveness. This study also offers clearer empirical evidence for why and how developmental opportunities and perceived pay equity need to be enhanced in an East Asian cultural context.

Conducting research with children and youth has become increasingly challenging in recent years. At times these difficulties come in the form of restrictions by Institutional Review Boards, funding agencies, and parents. Additionally, changes in youth culture and behavior, specifically regarding online activities and digitally mediated communications, impact the access that researchers have to children and youth communities in significant ways. In this chapter, I propose that the use of an emerging methodological technique, digital ethnography, may provide researchers with new data sources on children and youth culture. Digital ethnography combines ethnographic techniques of observation, participation, and interview with content analysis to collect rich data about online behavior, norms, expectations, and interactions. This technique not only provides researchers with sources of data that allow insight into youth culture by acknowledging the increasing importance of online and digital interactions in youth culture but may also address some of the concerns raised by IRBs and other interested parties about conducting research with children and teens. This chapter provides practical and ethical considerations of this method, as well as a discussion of limitations of data collection and access as it highlights new ways of studying youth culture, using emerging data collection techniques in innovative research projects.

The purpose of this article is to share this study’s efforts to foster belonging in special collections public service spaces, as Black and Latina practitioners of color, while navigating known systemic professional barriers to inclusivity in the library information profession.

In this conceptual essay, frameworks from Black and Chicana feminist theories are applied which resonate deeply with this study’s practices but are not often encountered in library spaces, namely intersectional nepantla, which is used to situate the positionality within special collections.

Fostering belonging in special collections environments is an ongoing effort, but this study offers reflections in solidarity with all who seek to increase inclusivity and equity in their spaces. It is believed that the cumulative impact of many small actions implemented from the ground up can potentially be as significant as top-down, administrative charges.

This article's originality stems from both its authors and the methodology. As BIPOC practitioners, to the authors emphasize the authentic, day-to-day interactions that are essential to developing inclusivity and equity in special collections and archival spaces. Special collections reference workers have limited time off desk to collaborate and conduct research.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of total quality management (TQM) resources on strategic product innovation. It addresses the apparent tension between quality management and innovation management and seeks empirical support for the proposition that quality management resources can be used to support strategic innovation. Based on resource-based view, it defines key resources that firms develop during implementation of TQM systems: TQM culture, product design capability, and process improvement capability – and assesses the role of these resources in the success of product innovation.

A survey of 112 manufacturing firms was conducted and the resulting data were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) to determine how TQM constructs affect strategic product innovation.

The main finding suggests that only product design capability contributes to strategic product innovation. TQM culture has a direct influence on process improvement and product design capabilities but not on product innovation. The effect of innovation capability and innovation orientation on product innovation was only supported for innovation capability. The effect of innovation orientation is mediated by the development of innovation capability.

The paper focusses on the level of maturity of capability development without taking into consideration the time since adoption. Also, the measure of product innovation is based on the degree of product newness but does not dichotomize in terms of radical vs incremental. Several arguments supporting a negative relationship between TQM and innovation often refer to radical or breakthrough innovation. It would be interesting to test the model while distinguishing between radical and incremental innovation. The use of cross-sectional data is a methodological limitation.

The results suggest that managers can leverage their quality management systems to support product innovation. In particular, the ability to design quality into products leads to higher levels of strategic production innovation. The successful deployment of TQM capabilities requires an integrative and well-structured approach, involving top leadership engagement of employees and customer orientation. While TQM culture is critical to the development of quality management capabilities, it does not directly affect the innovativeness of a firm.

The paper explores the relationship between quality management systems and strategic product innovation. Further work is needed to test whether TQM effect on strategic innovation is different for radical and incremental products, and for other innovation outcomes such as process and service innovation.

Purpose: This chapter outlines a cultural critique of the Gangsta as an exemplary figure to investigate the performance of social media identity. The main goal of the chapter is to illustrate some of the implications that social media have on the contemporary dramatization of the criminal, here framed as a collective techno-cultural process at the threshold between social stigma and branding. Despite using the term “Gangsta,” the author’s intent is not to “fix” this figure as an identity or a class of people, but rather to identify a broad cultural context that emerges from a glocalized hip-hop imaginary, stemming from gangsta rap and evolving alongside trap and drill.

Methodology/approach: The contribution is not intended as an empirical sociological study, but a critical cultural exploration of convergent media that bring together a glocalized gang culture and everyday social media interactions. In the second section, the author outlines his theoretical framework by identifying a point of convergence between recent studies of Instagram celebrities and criminological takes on the selective nature of gang identity. The author also explores the relationship between the “dissing,” a cultural form that is very relevant to the more aggressive sub-genres of rap, and the practice of tagging, a key affordance of social media platforms. In so doing, the author frames social media tagging as a form of identity labeling.

Findings: In light of the theory previously outlined, the author explains how tagging is used alternately to enforce social stigma and engage in recursive branding. The final section examines the aforementioned forms of tagging more in detail, in relation to specific media ecologies of YouTube videos that feature compilations of Instagram Stories originally posted by emerging Italian rappers.

Research limitations: Although it is aimed at offering an interdisciplinary contribution, this chapter adopts an admittedly media-focused perspective. Rather than producing more evidence about the use of social media by gangs, the author comments on existing sociological insight in relation to the affordances and esthetics of social media ecologies, re-problematizing certain forms of online interaction.

Originality/value: By focusing on the commonplace practice of tagging in relation to the figure of the Gangsta, the author emphasizes how online labeling practices can be more fraught that they appear, emphasizing the need for further critical reflections on the stereotyping potential of social media branding practices.