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The size of the population classified as people with disabilities or older adults is increasing globally. The World Health Organization estimates that the average prevalence of disability is around 18% among adults age 18 and older. People with disabilities and older adults have lower levels of physical activity and experience significant barriers to walking in local neighbourhoods. A new perspective is needed that views disability in the context of the built environment and across the lifespan. The purpose of this chapter is to examine walking as an activity that is inclusive of any age, ability or assistive device used for mobility. Through a literature review, we illustrate the complex relationship that exists between individuals with disabilities/older adults and the built environment. We describe environmental and social factors, which have been found to be associated with walking among people with disabilities and older adults as well as factors perceived to be barriers to walking. Factors cited in the literature include aspects that fall into the environmental domains of the International Classification of Functioning. We conclude by highlighting key factors needed for planning supportive walking environments for people with disabilities and older adults. Recommendations include the use of walking audits to gain information on detailed aspects of the built environment, developing inclusive walking initiatives, including people with disabilities and older adults in the planning process and planning for maintenance.

By adopting a cultural lens, this study aims to conceptualize destination-community hospitality to capture societal hospitality at the destination as an intangible asset. Destination-community hospitality comprises a set of attitudes and traits that are organically conveyed by community members and directly experienced by tourists. The paper contributes to efforts aimed at freeing hospitality from the confines of commercial lodging and food and beverage establishments.

This study proposes an affection–attention–awareness (AAA) framework by drawing on the pertinent literature and leveraging the affective–behavioral–cognitive model of attitudinal change. It focuses on the effects of cognition in conceptualizing destination-community hospitality as the core of the framework. Methodologically, the framework is illustrated with qualitative data including observational fieldwork and interviews conducted in Iran.

Illustration of the AAA framework in the context of Iran highlights how welcoming attitudes are leveraged at a destination as an ingrained community mindset even in the absence of formal initiatives or professional training. It underscores the hospitality advocacy role of local-community members irrespective of public-sector policy and capacity deficiencies.

Destinations that strive to attract tourists should tap into the significant wealth of intuitive hospitality within communities as an intangible resource. The ingenuity should be preserved to sustainably enhance the overall tourist experiences. The framework can serve as a guide to strategically facilitate destination-community hospitality.

Research on community-wide hospitality at destinations, as a major cultural asset in the context of strategic hospitality management, remains underdeveloped. With illustrative evidence, the findings elevate the critical role of community members as innate advocates of hospitality in developing destinations. The proposed framework of destination-community hospitality provides a new perspective and impetus for investigating hospitality beyond commercial domains.

To add new empirical knowledge to debates about social practices of peer production communities, and to conversations about bias and its implications for democracy. To help identify Wikipedia (WP) articles that are affected by systematic bias and hopefully help alleviate the impact of such bias on the general public, thus helping enhance both traditional (e.g. libraries) and online information services (e.g. Google) in ways that contribute to democracy. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives.

Quantitatively, the authors identify edit-warring camps across many conflict zones of the English language WP, and profile and compare success rates and typologies of camp edits in the corresponding topic areas. Qualitatively, the authors analyze the edit war between two senior WP editors that resulted in imbalanced and biased articles throughout a topic area for such editorial characteristics through a close critical reading.

Through a large-scale quantitative study, the authors find that winner-take-all camps exhibit biasing editing behaviors to a much larger extent than the camps they successfully edit-war against, confirming findings of prior small-scale qualitative studies. The authors also confirm the employment of these behaviors and identify other behaviors in the successful silencing of traditional medicinal knowledge on WP by a scientism-biased senior WP editor through close reading.

WP sadly does, as previously claimed, appear to be a platform that represents the biased viewpoints of its most stridently opinionated Western white male editors, and routinely misrepresents scholarly work and scientific consensus, the authors find. WP is therefore in dire need of scholarly oversight and decolonization.

The authors independently verify findings from prior personal accounts of highly power-imbalanced fights of scholars against senior editors on WP through a third-party close reading of a much more power balanced edit war between senior WP editors. The authors confirm that these findings generalize well to edit wars across WP, through a large scale quantitative analysis of unbalanced edit wars across a wide range of zones of contention on WP.

Although higher education institutions have invested substantial resources in distance education (DE) courses, major problems are associated with cultural and organizational changes. The purpose of this article is to identify and portray the organizational and cultural changes occurring while DE is initiated at a higher education institute in Israel. This article discusses the assimilation stages of educational change, the barriers and challenges, and also ways to overcome them and lessons learned.

In order to examine the shift from traditional lecturing in large lecture halls, to DE – anytime anyplace, informal discussions were conducted with 15 lecturers and faculty, indicating a range of opinions. The five‐stage model of ACOT (Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow) were used to indicate lecturers' stages of change.

Some faculty expressed positive attitudes, approving the innovative project; but some expressed negative attitudes, claiming it is a waste of resources (i.e. time, manpower, and money). The authors found that DE opponents base their opinions on traditional beliefs more than on data and evidence. Findings indicated misconceptions about DE and the challenges higher education face while implementing teaching and learning from distance.

In the global economy of the twenty‐first century, organizations and companies are under increasing pressure to enhance lifelong learning among their employees, contributing to their professional development and productivity. At a time when employees are often scattered around the world, and keeping them away from their jobs is no longer an option, universities should reach out to them by launching DE programs. To cater to the increasing need for DE programs, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, has founded TIDES (Technion International Distance Education and Studies) center. In the past year and a half, the Technion has made a substantial capital investment in human resources and technology to support the development of DE courses. However, similar to other universities, the initiation of DE programs challenges the Technion's organizational structure and educational culture. These changes and challenges are highlighted and reflected in this paper.

At the beginning of the 21st century, multiple and diverse social entities, including the public (consumers), private and nonprofit healthcare institutions, government (public health) and other industry sectors, began to recognize the limitations of the current fragmented healthcare system paradigm. Primary stakeholders, including employers, insurance companies, and healthcare professional organizations, also voiced dissatisfaction with unacceptable health outcomes and rising costs. Grand challenges and wicked problems threatened the viability of the health sector. American health systems responded with innovations and advances in healthcare delivery frameworks that encouraged shifts from intra- and inter-sector arrangements to multi-sector, lasting relationships that emphasized patient centrality along with long-term commitments to sustainability and accountability. This pathway, leading to a population health approach, also generated the need for transformative business models. The coproduction of health framework, with its emphasis on cross-sector alignments, nontraditional partner relationships, sustainable missions, and accountability capable of yielding return on investments, has emerged as a unique strategy for facing disruptive threats and challenges from nonhealth sector corporations. This chapter presents a coproduction of health framework, goals and criteria, examples of boundary spanning network alliance models, and operational (integrator, convener, aggregator) strategies. A comparison of important organizational science theories, including institutional theory, network/network analysis theory, and resource dependency theory, provides suggestions for future research directions necessary to validate the utility of the coproduction of health framework as a precursor for paradigm change.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and assess a government support programme for business innovation in a very peripherical European region: the Spanish region of Andalucía.

Endogenous development approach is used to categorize the main public and private actions included in the government ICT support programme. Cross-time analysis has been carried out by using three territorial indicators of diffusion and effective use of ICT: the physical aspect, refereed to the infrastructures used as a base for the information society development (infrastructures, technology and equipment); the actors and their degree of organization (firms present on the internet and support organizations and institutions); and knowledge, refereed to the technological sprawl and the entrepreneurship capacity (fostering innovation and training among the general population and businesses).

The study confirms that the public policies implemented are coherent with the endogenous development approach, where investment in physical and human capital have been accompanied by enabling measures of interaction between firms and other economical agents (universities, business associations, business centres and technology institutes, etc.), with a view to favouring the dissemination of innovations and knowledge among firms. Secondly, the research assess the impact of this ICT programme, both in terms of economic growth and per capita income, as well as on the main variables that reflect the degree of business participation in the Information Society. Results show that, during the period 1996-2010, this region has made important progress in terms of convergence with more advanced European regions.

The study has methodological implications in terms of designs of further ICT programmes in less developed European regions to broke the digital divide.

Recent outlooks of the OECD call for more assessment research on ICT national and regional policies around the world, especially those that prove that it is possible to broke the international digital divide. The present study suggests that public policies following the directives laid down by the endogenous development approach can reach this economic and social target. The Andalucía Information Society Programme constitutes a real commitment and private-public partnership towards a structural change in the technological culture amongst businesses. Investment in physical capital and human capital has been accompanied by measures that enable the interaction of firms with other economic agents (university, business associations, technology centres, etc.), with a view to favouring the dissemination of innovation and knowledge among firms.

The study uses for the first time the endogenous development approach applied to a less advanced region for evaluation of ICT policy and it improves a methodology based on this approach to assess its effectiveness.

The purpose of the study is to understand the team communication skill among students with engineering background.

Labour market offers more employment to those who have better social skills than those who fair less on these skills. It is pertinent to integrate these skills among engineers. In the study, a Qual-quant-Qual platform was created to develop social skill andragogy for engineers from India. Involving 132 engineers, the authors gathered qualitative and quantitative data to understand their perspective on communication and the emergent factors of team communication skill.

The qualitative study supports the view that despite theoretical awareness, the actions may differ. The factor analysis of the data revealed five important factors of interpersonal communication. The study offers six utilities in support of andragogy.

The study offers a platform to engineers to internalize and reflect differences in order for the real learning to take place, and it also offers space to faculty members to simulate and offer relevant interventions.