Search results

This study aims to identify the changes in different selling situations/styles during and post-COVID scenarios.

To attain the above-mentioned objective, a qualitative study drawn upon the principles of the theories-in-use approach is conducted. The data were collected through 23 in-depth semistructured interviews, conducted with professional salespeople working at various levels in different industries. The data thus generated was analyzed through open, axial and selective coding, which resulted in three broad categories of changes in professional selling.

The findings of the study suggest that though sales jobs are perceived to be similar in nature, but there are differences in how various selling jobs are being performed. The same is the case with the effect of the pandemic on sales jobs. The authors found that every selling style faced a different challenge due to the pandemic and so is the case for the salespeople engaged in the respective selling practice.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research of its kind that has focused on the differences in various selling styles. Though the recent academic literature on personal selling does manifest the effect of the pandemic. But, in doing so, these studies have presented “personal selling” as an overarching concept encompassing all types of selling and have failed to differentiate between the various nuances of personal selling which include trade selling, technical selling, new-business selling and missionary selling.

Between 2006 and 2012, Mexico implemented a “frontal war against organized crime”. This strategy increased criminal violence and triggered negative consequences across the country’s economic, political and social spheres. This study aims to analyse how the magnitude and visibility of criminal violence impact the housing market of Mexico City.

The authors used different violent proxies to measure the effect of the magnitude and visibility of violence in housing prices. The structure of the data set is an unbalanced panel with no conditions of strict exogeneity. To address endogeneity, the authors calculate the first differences to estimate an Arellano–Bond estimator and use the lags of the dependent variable to instrumentalise the endogenous variable.

Results suggest that the magnitude of violence negatively impacts housing prices. Similarly, housing prices are negatively affected the closer the property is to visible violence, measured through narcomessages placed next to the bodies of executed victims. Lastly, housing prices are not always affected when a violent event occurs nearby, specifically, when neighbours or potential buyers consider this event as sporadic violence.

There are only a few studies of violence in housing prices using data from developing countries, and most of these studies are conducted with aggregated data at the municipality or state level. The authors are using geocoded information, both violence events and housing prices, to estimate more disaggregated effects. Moreover, the authors used different proxies to measure different characteristics of violence (magnitude and visibility) to estimate the heterogeneous effects of violence on housing prices.

The research aimed to explore the perceptions of aspiring future police officers studying at a university in relation to the actions to be taken with regards to typical posts on social media by a fictitious off and on-duty police officer. This in turn would inform future police workforce requirements.

Policing students who expressed their aspirations as future police officers were recruited. A total of 99 students studying the College of Policing licensed Professional Policing Degree at the University of South Wales, took part in Hydra Immersive Simulations to ascertain their perception of social media posts by a fictitious serving police officer. The students were asked to rate the appropriateness of the social media posts as groups, and as individuals.

The findings suggest that, whilst the majority of students identified misconduct issues in the social media posts, the response to how the fictitious police officer should be dealt with varied. In addition, it would appear that there may be a need for those involved in policing education to reinforce, in an ongoing basis, knowledge of the College of Policing Code of Ethics, misconduct rules, regulations and increase awareness of unacceptable social media posts.

The research was conducted with professional policing degree (PPD) students from one university.

It is important to reinforce The College of Policing Code of Ethics, expected professional standards and an understanding of what constitutes unacceptable social media posts throughout the education of aspiring police officers. As this has the potential, if recruited, to impact on the service.

Limited research has been conducted in relation to the College of Policing licensed higher education programme, the PPD, equipping aspiring police officers to successfully join the service and influence the cultural change.

Drug use in prisons remains a public health concern because it is often the place of drug initiation. The purpose of this study was to analyze the drug use in prison in Burkina Faso.

We conducted cross-sectional study in the prison of Ouagadougou. The adult prisoners (male and female) incarcerated for more than one month at the largest prison of Burkina Faso were included in the study. Participants were selected using a systematic random sampling. Data were collected from October 28 to November 26, 2018. The face-to-face interviews were conducted in the prison grounds. Logistic multivariate regression was used to identify factors associated with in prison drug use. All analysis was done using Stata.

A total of 379 prisoners were included in this study. Approximately one-third inmates (32.71%; n = 124) experienced illicit drug in lifetime. Nearly one-third (28.76%; n = 109) of the prisoners were drug users before incarceration and 11.87% (n = 45) used drug inside the prison, of which 33.33% (n = 15) initiated drug use in the prison. Cannabis was the first drug used by the prisoners (71.11%) followed by tramadol (62.22%), diazepam (13.33%) and cocaine (2.22%). Four prisoners (3.63%) had reported Heroin use before incarceration. Cannabis was mainly smoked. Tramadol, diazepam and amphetamines were swallowed or mixed with food. Cocaine is smoked and snorted. Case of injection of cocaine and heroin was reported before incarceration. Main factors independently associated with drug use in prison is drug use before prison and young age of inmates. Indeed, inmates who had reported drug use before prison had 4.01 time {adjusted odd ratio (AOR: 4.01 [95% CI: 1.91–8.41])} higher odds to use drug in prison.

To conduct the interviews in the prison grounds could be a limitation due to social desirability bias. Indeed, the prisoners may understate drug use in prison for the fear of likely additional sentence. Availability of biological tests for drug markers might help addressed this bias. Nevertheless, the findings of this study should help to plan effective drug use prevention and care programs for prisoners.

The actions must include the implementation of a medical and psychological care in continuum of healthcare system in Burkina Faso. This system should include screening at entry and adequate health and psychological care in prison for drug users for an effective control of drugs use in prison.

Most of these drug users in prison have a low level of education and are unemployed. Education activities and training on occupational activities to prepare drug users for a successful social reintegration less dependent on drugs is essential. This study can be a basis to explore more possibilities and find out what is available to help those with substance use disorder, manage these cases in prison and prevent relapse on release.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first study on drug use in prison in Burkina Faso. It indicates that the repressive strategy against drug use seems ineffective because former users continue their consumption inside and also new users are initiated to use drugs in prison.

Due to their particular nature, virtual assets (VA) are vulnerable to financial crimes such as money laundering and if the appropriate legal mechanisms are not established, this may result in the financial collapse of various economies. To this effect, best practices and standards have been published by some international organisations such as the Financial Action Task Force and IMF which are now domesticated in the national laws of several countries. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyse the anti-money laundering (AML) legislative framework in the context of VA in three countries, namely, Mauritius, Japan and South Africa.

To achieve the research objective, the Mauritian AML laws in the context of VA were compared with the corresponding laws of some other countries, namely, Japan and South Africa. As such, a qualitative research method was adopted. In particular, the black letter approach was used to examine the relevant laws of these countries. A comparative analysis was conducted concerning the relevance of AML laws for each country when dealing with VA with the view of suggesting recommendations for Mauritian stakeholders to adopt to enhance the existing AML legal and regulatory framework.

The comparative study conducted has revealed that there are both similarities and divergences among the AML framework of the three countries further to which this research recommends that the Mauritian laws must be amended concerning the duration of information storage on VA, the definition of VA, advertisement by VA service providers and the electronic submission of annual reports. The Mauritian regulatory bodies also need to play a more active role in their joint collaboration to monitor suspicious VA transactions to combat money laundering.

At present, this study will be among the first academic writings on the efficiency of AML laws in the context of VA in Mauritius and also, because existing literature is quite scarce on assessing the adequacy of AML legislation in developing countries, this research aims at filling in the gap in literature. This study is carried out with the aim of combining a large amount of empirical, theoretical and factual information that can be of use to various stakeholders and not only to academics.

Globally, hepatitis C treatment uptake is lower among people who are homeless or unstably housed compared to those who are housed. Understanding and addressing this is essential to ensure no one is left behind in hepatitis C elimination efforts. This study aims to explore peoples’ experiences of unstable housing and health care, and how these experiences influenced engagement in hepatitis C treatment.

Purposive sampling was used to recruit people with lived experience of injection drug use, hepatitis C and unstable housing in Melbourne, Australia. In-depth semistructured interviews were conducted and a case study approach with interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to identify personal experiential themes and group experiential themes.

Four people were interviewed. The precarious nature of housing for women who inject drugs was a group experiential theme, however, this did not appear to be a direct barrier to hepatitis C treatment. Rather, competing priorities, including caregiving, were personal experiential themes and these created barriers to treatment. Another group experiential theme was “right place, right time, right people” with these three elements required to facilitate hepatitis C treatment.

There is limited research providing in-depth insight into how personal experiences with unstable housing and health care shape engagement with hepatitis C treatment. The analyses indicate there is a need to move beyond a “one size fits-all” approach to hepatitis C care. Instead, care should be tailored to the needs of individuals and their personal circumstances and regularly facilitated. This includes giving greater attention to gender in intervention design and evaluation, and research more broadly.

Crises, such as COVID-19 pandemic, are critical events that provoke important changes in organizational practices, regulations and actors' roles. The pharmaceutical sector has been strongly affected because of the urgency to produce drugs that are effective and safe. However, the validation process and regulations are historically restrictive in this sector. This study aims to study how biotechnology firms, small companies lacking resources, have undertaken strategic actions during crisis time to induce important changes to their advantage within such a highly regulated environment.

Interviews were conducted with 21 managers in four mRNA-based biotechnology firms.

Results showed that rhetorical strategies and institutional actions are used in order to manage change opportunities. Media attention, greater openness of state agencies and public willingness to accept new ways of treatment illustrated this opportunity of change in favor of biotechnology firms.

Highly regulated environments tend to be unfavorable to smaller firms with limited resources to overcome these constraints. The authors show that times of crisis can reverse this assumption through the provision of new opportunities as long as the smaller firms skillfully use strategic actions to exploit the institutional changes at play.

Drug cryptomarkets increase information available to market actors, which should reduce information asymmetry and increase market efficiency. This study aims to determine whether cryptomarket listings accurately represent the advertised substance, weight or number and purity, and whether there are differences in products purchased from the same listing multiple times.

Law enforcement drug purchases – predominantly cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA and heroin – from Australian cryptomarket vendors (n = 38 in 2016/2017) were chemically analysed and matched with cryptomarket listings (n = 23). Descriptive and comparative analyses were conducted.

Almost all samples contained the advertised substance. In most of these cases, drugs were either supplied as-advertised-weight or number, or overweight or number. All listings that quantified purity overestimated the actual purity. There was no consistent relationship between advertised purity terms and actual purity. Across the six listings purchased from multiple times, repeat purchases from the same listing varied in purity, sometimes drastically, with wide variation detected on listings purchased from only one month apart.

In this data set, cryptomarket listings were mostly accurate, but the system was far from perfect, with purity overestimated. A newer, larger, globally representative sample should be obtained to test the applicability of these findings to currently operating cryptomarkets.

This paper reports on the largest data set of forensic analysis of drug samples obtained from cryptomarkets, where data about advertised drug strength/dose were obtained.

This paper aims to examine the impact of announcements related to 77 interventions by 46 listed Indian pharmaceutical firms during COVID-19 on the abnormal returns of the firms. The study also finds the variables which explain cumulative abnormal returns (CARs).

This study uses standard event methodology to compute the abnormal returns of firms announcing pharmaceutical interventions in 2020 and 2021. Besides this, the multilayer perceptron technique is applied to identify the variables that influence the CARs of the sample firms.

The results show the presence of abnormal returns of 0.64% one day before the announcement, indicating information leakage. The multilayer perceptron approach identifies five variables that explain the CARs of the sample companies, which are licensing_age, licensing_size, size, commercialization_age and approval_age.

The study contributes to the efficient market literature by revealing how firm-specific nonfinancial disclosures affect stock prices, especially in times of crisis like pandemics. Prior research focused on determining the effect of COVID-19 variables on abnormal returns. This is the first research to use artificial neural networks to determine which firm-specific variables and pharmaceutical interventions can influence CARs.

Several countries, such as South Africa and India, believe that intellectual property rights (IPRs), including patents, impede the efficient increase in vaccine production to inoculate the global population as they scramble to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Their proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive these pharmaceutical patents has been met with resistance from a few developed countries, who believe that the abrogation of IPRs is unnecessary, even during a pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of a potential waiver of medical patents at the WTO versus the status quo of IPR laws in the global economy.

This study examines key arguments from economic and moral standpoints regarding the provisions of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement and other related international agreements and their validity based on the premise of the internalisation of positive externalities posed by vaccines.

The effectiveness of the TRIPS agreement in securing medical access is weak on account of the ability of profit-making multinationals to secure IP rights and on account of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral agreement that supports patent evergreening and a period of protection on test data which challenges the access to medicines and the fundamental human right to health.

This study examines international IPRs through the lens of human rights and proposes a new system that balances the two.