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Introduction: Skill development is crucial in developing economies by enhancing productivity and creating employment opportunities. At the macro level, it also leads to industrial development and economic growth.

Purpose: The research is to identify the types of skills required for increasing the probability of employability of labour. It also aims to define the challenges and opportunities in skill development to drive change.

Need of the Study: Studying opportunities and challenges for skill development in developing economies is essential for achieving sustainable economic growth, reducing poverty, increasing employment opportunities, and promoting global competitiveness.

Research Methodology: Some skills are recognised through research that has been published to determine the skill set needed to increase labour productivity. To draw lessons, some skill development initiatives by various companies are also identified and presented in case studies. Additionally, several government programs are available to assess the possibilities and prospects for skill development in the Indian market.

Practical Implications: The research will be valuable in micro and macro decision making. At the micro level, research is advantageous for a business person to initiate the skill development of its employees by using government schemes. Nations other than India can understand the policy framework for skill development.

Findings: The term ‘skilling’ has become fashionable. Due to the need for skill-based earnings data, only some studies examine the return on skill (ROS) of the labour market. Skill development plays a significant role in bringing change at the micro and macro levels. Hence it is necessary to exploit all opportunities for skill development.

The shift toward a circular economy (CE) represents a collaborative endeavor necessitating the presence of efficient frameworks, conducive contexts and a common comprehension. This research serves as a pivotal stride towards this goal, presenting an exclusive prospect for the investigation and fusion of these frameworks, with particular emphasis on the Quintuple Helix Model (5HM), into a unified theoretical framework that underscores the core principles of the CE. This study is centered on three pivotal questions aimed at decoding the CE transition in specific regional settings.

Adopting an abductive approach firmly anchored in a two-stage qualitative process, this study specifically merges the foundational principles from institutional theory, entrepreneurship literature and CE frameworks to provide insights into the dynamics of circular ecosystems, with a specific focus on the Huelva region in Spain.

The findings demonstrate significant potential in the CE, ranging from the integration of product and service systems to innovations in eco-industrial practices. Yet, a notable deficiency exists: the absence of institutional entrepreneurs, highlighting the essential role that universities can play. As recognized centers of innovation, universities are suggested to be key contributors to the transformation toward a CE, aligning with their societal and economic responsibilities.

This study highlights the importance of managing relationships with entities like SMEs and policymakers or academia for effective CE adoption. Policymakers can refine strategies based on the research’s insights, while the impact of university-driven circular ecosystems on sustainable societies is another crucial area for research.

The sustainability models cited in CE literature may not be comprehensive enough to prevent problem shifting, and it can be argued that they lack a sound theoretical and conceptual basis. Furthermore, the connections between sustainability objectives and the three levels of the CE operating system remain vague. Additionally, there is insufficient information on how regions foster the involvement of the environment in fivefold helix cooperation and how this impacts the CE.

This study aims to develop the alleviating bullwhip effects framework (ABEF) replenishment rules, and bullwhip, inventory fluctuations and customer service fulfilment rates were examined. In addition, automated smoothing and replenishment rules can alleviate supply chain bullwhip effects. This study aims to understand the current artificial intelligence (AI) implementation practice in alleviating bullwhip effects in supply chain management. This study aimed to develop a system for writing reviews using a systematic approach.

The methodology for the present study consists of three parts: Part 1 deals with the systematic review process. In Part 2, the study applies social network analysis (SNA) to the fourth phase of the systematic review process. In Part 3, the author discusses developing research clusters to analyse the research state more granularly. Systematic literature reviews synthesize scientific evidence through repeatable, transparent and rigorous procedures. By using this approach, you can better interpret and understand the data. The author used two databases (EBSCO and World of Science) for unbiased analysis. In addition, systematic reviews follow preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

The study uses UCINET6 software to analyse the data. The study found that specific topics received high centrality (more attention) from scholars when it came to the study topic. Contrary to this, others experienced low centrality scores when using NETDRAW visualization graphs and dynamic capability clusters. Comprehensive analyses are used for the study’s comparison of clusters.

This study used a journal publication as the only source of information. Peer-reviewed journal papers were eliminated for their lack of rigorousness in evaluating the state of practice. This paper discusses the bullwhip effect of digital technology on supply chain management. Considering the increasing use of “AI” in their publications, other publications dealing with sensor integration could also have been excluded. To discuss the top five and bottom five topics, the author used magazines and tables.

The study explores the practical implications of smoothing the bullwhip effect through AI systems, collaboration, leadership and digital skills. Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a preferred tool in the supply chain, so management must understand the opportunities and challenges associated with its implementation. Furthermore, managers should consider how AI can influence supply chain collaboration concerning trust and forecasting to smooth the bullwhip effect.

Digital leadership and addressing the digital skills gap are also essential for the success of AI systems. According to the framework, it is necessary to balance AI performance and accountability. As a result of the framework and structured management approach, the author can examine the implications of AI along the supply chain.

The study uses a systematic literature review based on SNA to analyse how AI can alleviate the bullwhip effects of supply chain disruption and identify the focused and the most important AI topics related to the bullwhip phenomena. SNA uses qualitative and quantitative methodologies to identify research trends, strengths, gaps and future directions for research. Salient topics for reviewing papers were identified. Centrality metrics were used to analyse the contemporary topic’s importance, including degree, betweenness and eigenvector centrality. ABEF is presented in the study.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the potential mediating role of employee engagement in the relationship between gratitude and subjective well-being (SWB) of employees working in the information technology (IT) sector in India. The study investigated a moderated mediation model for gratitude and SWB, treating employee engagement as a mediator and gender as a moderator.

Data was collected from 162 professionals working IT sector in India. Process Macro, AMOS and IBM SPSS 22 were used to analyze the mediation and moderation effects.

The results depicted that employee engagement fully mediates the positive association between gratitude practice and the SWB of employees as well as the demographic variable; gender also demonstrated a full moderation effect between them.

This research may be one of the few studies from the Indian context that explore whether gratitude practiced by employees working in the IT sector can play a significant role in impacting their SWB. Past research models had not introduced employee engagement’s indirect impact on the examined variables.

Although numerous signal modalities are available for emotion recognition, audio and visual modalities are the most common and predominant forms for human beings to express their emotional states in daily communication. Therefore, how to achieve automatic and accurate audiovisual emotion recognition is significantly important for developing engaging and empathetic human–computer interaction environment. However, two major challenges exist in the field of audiovisual emotion recognition: (1) how to effectively capture representations of each single modality and eliminate redundant features and (2) how to efficiently integrate information from these two modalities to generate discriminative representations.

A novel key-frame extraction-based attention fusion network (KE-AFN) is proposed for audiovisual emotion recognition. KE-AFN attempts to integrate key-frame extraction with multimodal interaction and fusion to enhance audiovisual representations and reduce redundant computation, filling the research gaps of existing approaches. Specifically, the local maximum–based content analysis is designed to extract key-frames from videos for the purpose of eliminating data redundancy. Two modules, including “Multi-head Attention-based Intra-modality Interaction Module” and “Multi-head Attention-based Cross-modality Interaction Module”, are proposed to mine and capture intra- and cross-modality interactions for further reducing data redundancy and producing more powerful multimodal representations.

Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e. RAVDESS and CMU-MOSEI) demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of KE-AFN. Specifically, (1) KE-AFN is superior to state-of-the-art baselines for audiovisual emotion recognition. (2) Exploring the supplementary and complementary information of different modalities can provide more emotional clues for better emotion recognition. (3) The proposed key-frame extraction strategy can enhance the performance by more than 2.79 per cent on accuracy. (4) Both exploring intra- and cross-modality interactions and employing attention-based audiovisual fusion can lead to better prediction performance.

The proposed KE-AFN can support the development of engaging and empathetic human–computer interaction environment.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

This chapter presents the findings of an extracurricular online beta test of a competition between students of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the International University of Malaya-Wales. The competition is intended to promote the concept of harmonious entrepreneurship and the creation of student-led harmonious enterprises that address the global sustainability challenge and deliver a triple bottom line in which profit, people, and planet are in harmony. It reveals that extracurricular learning can attract students from disciplines other than business and can educate the participants, both staff and students, not just about harmonious entrepreneurship but also how to identify and launch an innovative harmonious enterprise that addresses a sustainability challenge. The test identifies how the competition may be improved prior to its global launch and makes recommendations for students, educators, mentors, providers, and universities as to how it might best be implemented. Once revised and launched the competition will be further tested to better understand how extracurricular learning can help advance the delivery of both entrepreneurship and sustainability education in universities and colleges around the globe.

Four reputed leaders for the coming years in the field of special education for individuals with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) each with a slightly different perspective on the field were asked to respond independently to a prompt asking what does special education mean for students with EBD and what is being done and how do we maintain tradition? The contributors' responses to the prompt are presented and then summarized across the essays. A remarkable consistency emerges across the independent essays. In addition to the tradition of providing a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment, the contributors identify needs to support teachers serving this population. Needs in teacher training and the expertise required to meet the needs of individuals with EBD are outlined as well as potential contributions of technology to carry out specific tasks. We conclude with a call for increased advocacy for use of the knowledge that we currently possess and that which will soon be discovered to support students with EBD as well as their teachers. We also note that the contributors' names are listed alphabetically to acknowledge the equality of each person to the final product.