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This study aims to estimate the synergy effect of agricultural dual-scale management (ADM) on farmers' total household income, its heterogeneous effects and its mechanisms.

This study constructs a theoretical analysis framework based on the division of labor and synergy theory, empirically assesses the impact of ADM on farmers' income, and further discusses the heterogeneity and mechanisms using the propensity score matching (PSM) and quantile treatment effect (QTE) models. Data is collected from 1,076 households across 4 cities in Liaoning Province of China in 2021.

ADM can improve the total household income of farmers, and the impact force is greater than that of the single-scale management mode. ADM is more conducive to improving the income of farmers with low income and low labor endowment. Moreover, ADM can improve agriculture production efficiency, increase net grain production income. Nevertheless, it has no significant effect on farmers' off-farm employment income.

Previous studies have mainly focused on the income effect of land scale management or service scale management. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to identify the synergy effect of ADM on farmers' income in China. It provides new insights into the process of agricultural production and management mode transitions in rural China.

Public health measures implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic brought the idea of essential work into the public discourse, as the public reflected upon what types of work are essential for society to function, who performs that work, and how the labour of essential workers is rewarded. This chapter focusses on the rewards associated with essential work. The authors develop an intersectional lens on work that was officially deemed essential in 2020 to highlight longstanding patterns of devaluation among essential workers, including those undergirded by systemic racism in employment and labour law. The authors use quantitative data from the CPS-MORG to examine earnings differences between essential and non-essential workers and investigate whether the essential worker wage gap changed from month to month in 2020. The authors find that patterns of valuation among essential workers cannot be explained by human capital or other standard labour market characteristics. Rather, intersectional wage inequalities in 2020 reflect historical patterns that are highly durable and did not abate in the first year of the global pandemic.

Can regional economic complexity improve the employment effect, and is the employment structure also affected by heterogeneity? In order to solve these doubts, this paper plans to carry out systematic theoretical analysis and quantitative tests on these problems.

Based on the macroeconomic data of 129 countries from 1995 to 2022, this paper empirically studies the impact of economic complexity on the employment effect and its mechanism channel by building relevant models.

The results show that regional economic complexity can significantly improve the employment effect of society. At the same time, regional economic complexity has an indirect positive role in promoting employment from two aspects: accumulating fiscal surplus and increasing the working-age population. The former can stimulate employment policies by increasing the government’s tax sources, while the latter can increase production specialization and complexity by stimulating demand and increasing employment. In addition, regional economic complexity will lead to job market differentiation, making the boundary between the service sector and the labor market between industry and agriculture and between the informal employment market and the formal employment more obvious, thus triggering the substitution effect of employment.

The possible innovations and marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: First, there are many studies on the influencing factors of employment or unemployment, and this paper provides a new research direction for the literature on the influencing factors of employment effect by using the concept of regional economic complexity for the first time. Second, this paper broadens the research perspective of the employment effect of regional economic complexity, divides the employment substitution effect of various sectors from the perspective of industrial structure and further analyzes the employment promotion effect of regional economic complexity.

This study examines the construction of essential labour during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Research questions include: (1) How have government policies shaped designations of essential versus non-essential labour? (2) What are the consequences of these designations for essential workers? To address these questions, the author employs a case study of custodial services employees at Prairie University, a large public university in a major Texas city (Prairietown). The author begins with an examination of federal, state, and municipal guidelines about COVID-19 safety and critical infrastructure in order to understand the policy landscape within which custodial employees at Prairie University were formally deemed essential. Drawing on theories of non-nurturant care work, the author shows how government guidelines for essential work released during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic discursively invisibilized cleaning labourers. The author then demonstrates how this invisibilization contributed to Prairie University custodial services staff members’ exposure to COVID-19. The author concludes by considering the implications of the findings for future research on care work and the construction of essential labour.

The study aims to explore the utilisation of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) tools in Tanzanian healthcare facilities by identifying the tools used, the challenges encountered and the adaptive strategies employed by healthcare practitioners. It utilises an Activity Theory (AT) approach to understand the dynamic interactions between healthcare providers, CDS tools and the broader healthcare system.

The research adopts a qualitative approach in two prominent regions of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam and Dodoma. It involves semi-structured interviews with 26 healthcare professionals and key stakeholders across ten healthcare facilities, supplemented by document reviews. The study employs AT to analyse the interactions between healthcare professionals, CDS tools and the broader healthcare system, identifying best practices and providing recommendations for optimising the use of CDS tools.

The study reveals that Tanzanian healthcare practitioners predominantly rely on non-computerised CDS tools, such as clinical guidelines prepared by the Ministry of Health. Despite the availability of Health Information Systems (HIS), these systems often lack comprehensive decision-support functionalities, leading practitioners to depend on traditional methods and their professional judgement. Significant challenges include limited accessibility to updated clinical guidelines, unreliable infrastructure and inadequate training. Adaptive strategies identified include using non-standardised tools like Medscape, professional judgement and reliance on past experiences and colleagues’ opinions.

The investigation was constrained by access limitations because it was challenging to get some respondents to share information. However, a sufficient number of individuals participated in the interviews, and their knowledge was very beneficial in understanding the procedures and tools for clinical decision support.

This study contributes to AT by extending its application to a low-resource healthcare setting, uncovering new dimensions of the theory related to socio-cultural and technological constraints in healthcare facilities in Tanzania. It provides valuable insights into the practical barriers and facilitators of HIS and CDS tool implementation in developing countries, emphasising the need for context-specific adaptations, robust training programs and user-centred designs. The findings highlight the resilience and imagination of healthcare practitioners in adapting to systemic limitations, offering recommendations to enhance clinical decision-making and improve patient care outcomes in Tanzania.

South Africa lags significantly in mathematics achievement on international benchmarking tests, which has led to several interventions aimed at improving mathematics attainment in the country. Drawing on the theoretical work of Vygotsky, Leontiev and Engeström, this chapter reports on one such initiative that implemented computer technology into disadvantaged schools in the apple growing district of the Western Cape. Contrary to expectations, the object of the lesson became control over students' actions, rather than a mathematical object aimed at developing students' understanding of the subject. The teacher adopted what I call a defensive position in relation to the novel technology, tightening pace and sequencing in these lessons. I draw on Ratnam's work into ‘excessive entitlement’ to illustrate that this teacher's defensive posture regarding technology emanates from a need to exert complete power over the content taught in a lesson and leads her to reject the novel technology in favour of traditional methods. While interviews with the teacher in this study indicated that she felt she promoted student dialogue and more symmetrical power relations in her classes through group work, this is not seen in the data. This is explained in relation to teachers' excessive entitlement to ‘owning’ the knowledge in their classrooms through maintaining control over the rules of the system. I pull on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to illuminate how the activity of teaching in a classroom affords and constrains what the teacher is able to achieve, often making them feel excessively entitled to push back reform.

Our work adds to the debate regarding higher education graduates’ skills required in the labour market in Germany and beyond.

Using Q-methodology and the accompanying narrations, we explore German employers’ and employees’ views (N = 26) on characteristics required at the entry level.

Our findings show three areas of the labour market with different skill requirements. Whereas the first area, “The world of rules”, applies more likely to the professions and academia, the two other areas, “The middle field” and “The people-oriented and critical market”, can be found throughout the labour market. The disciplinary affiliation does not play a role. In all three areas, soft skills are crucial and specialised knowledge is only highly valued in the area of “The world of rules”.

In contrast to previous findings, we do not focus on singular skills. Instead, we focus on skill sets and discuss their relevance from the background of their usability.