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This paper aims to investigate the relationship between information technology (IT) capabilities, information integration and supply chain resilience within the context of a developing country.

Employing a structured questionnaire survey, the study collected cross-sectional data from 205 agro-food processing firms in Uganda, drawn from a sample of 248. The data were subsequently analyzed using SPSS version 27 to validate the hypothesized relationships.

The study findings revealed that IT capabilities and information integration are positively and significantly associated with supply chain resilience. Moreover, it established a positive and significant link between IT capabilities and information integration. The results further revealed both IT capabilities and information integration account for 62.2% of the variance in supply chain resilience (SCRES) in agro-food processing firms in Uganda. Notably, the findings revealed the partial mediating role of information integration, addressing the need to understanding the mechanisms through which IT capabilities influence SCRES.

First, the study used a cross-sectional design which makes it difficult to test causality. Some of the study variables need to be studied over time due to their inherent behavioral elements such as collaboration and information sharing. Hence, future research that could, where possible, collect longitudinal data on the study variables would add value to the findings. Second, the study was limited to agro-food processing firms in Uganda in selected districts of Kampala, Wakiso, Mukono and Jinja. Further research needs to be done in other sectors such as service industry and other geographical locations in Uganda and other developing economies to provide more generality of the findings. Third, the study was based on IT capabilities, information integration and supply chain resilience. There are other variables that affect supply chain resilience such as business continuity planning strategy, interactions between teams within an organization in building resilience, supply chain velocity, system orientation and flexibility among others which can be interesting for further research.

Managers are advised to motivate their IT-related personnel. Efficient use of IT systems by staff, especially who are skillful at self-study, enhances their ability to respond to disruptions accordingly. This enhances SCRES. Additionally, to get feedback from supply chain stakeholders, agro-food processing firms should assess the quality of their supply chain services through using IT capabilities as well as integrating their information.

This study contributes to existing literature by adopting information processing perspective to provide an empirical understanding of IT capabilities and information integration as key resources and capabilities essential for information processing in building SCRES. Furthermore, the study introduces the novel insight of the mediating role of information integration as a pathway in which IT capabilities enhance SCRES in agro-food processing firms in Uganda.

This paper aims to investigate the process by which performative technologies (PTs), in this case accreditation work in a business school, take form and how humans engage in making up such practices. It studies how academics come to accept and even identify with the quantitative representations of themselves in a translation process.

The research involved a longitudinal, self-ethnographic case study that followed the accreditation process of one Nordic business school from 2015 to 2021.

The findings show how the PT pushed for different engagements in various phases of the translation process. Early in the translation process, the PT promoted engagement because of self-realization and the ability for academics to proactively influence the prospective competitive milieu. However, as academic qualities became fabricated into numbers, the PT was able to request compliance, but also to induce self-reflection and self-discipline by forcing academics to compare themselves to set qualities and measures.

The paper advances the field by linking five phases of the translation process, problematization, fabrication, materialization, commensuration and stabilization, to a discussion of why academics come to accept and identify with the quantitative representations of themselves. The results highlight that the materialization phase appears to be the critical point at which calculative practices become persuasive and start influencing academics’ thoughts and actions.

This case replaces UVA-M-0837. It can be used in a variety of marketing and strategy classes to understand how (1) at a macro level, a shift in consumer and environmental factors can impact firm strategy and (2) at a micro level, an e-mail-based marketing campaign designed to address these changes can impact firm-level performance.

The case puts the students in the position of CEO Robert Huth as he is preparing for a board meeting. He had taken David's Bridal from a loss in 1996 to sales of over $1 billion by 2011, but he was concerned about future growth. People were waiting longer and longer to get married and, once they decided to, were spending much less than in the past, so the industry had seen year-over-year declines since 2007. How would David's Bridal establish its brand in the minds of a new generation of brides who shopped, purchased, and decided differently than had brides in past generations?

The aim of the research is to reveal information with regard to being a digital nomad as a family. Within this brief, the aim is to provide information regarding the reasons for choosing the digital nomad lifestyle of families, the female and male thoughts regarding the experience, destination selection factors and the difficulties and conveniences of digital nomadism for family aspects.

The data were obtained through a semi-structured interview questionnaire with a British digital nomad family, individually from the wife and husband, using a qualitative research design in the scope of the phenomenological research.

It was determined that having a better lifestyle, being willing to spend more time with family and traveling with them were the reasons for becoming a digital nomad. The opinions of the woman and man are in parallel. While the main features of being a digital nomad are freedom and flexibility, having time to spend with family is also important. Factors for choosing a destination as a nomad were access to nature, quality of life, cost of living, quality of the food, climate, proximity to other families who are nomads and interest in nonschool education. As a family, they meet their needs and wants, such as going to a local shop or staying in a rented house, but prefer to use restaurants and other facilities if their stay is short. Although having children motivates digital nomadism, it has been determined that families prefer to stay in a fixed place as nomads since it is not appropriate for children over a certain age to travel frequently.

The study provides detailed information regarding a family experience with digital nomadism through a case study.

This paper aims to investigate how congruent keywords are used in information security policies (ISPs) to pinpoint and guide clear actionable advice and suggest a metric for measuring the quality of keyword use in ISPs.

A qualitative content analysis of 15 ISPs from public agencies in Sweden was conducted with the aid of Orange Data Mining Software. The authors extracted 890 sentences from these ISPs that included one or more of the analyzed keywords. These sentences were analyzed using the new metric – keyword loss of specificity – to assess to what extent the selected keywords were used for pinpointing and guiding actionable advice. Thus, the authors classified the extracted sentences as either actionable advice or other information, depending on the type of information conveyed.

The results show a significant keyword loss of specificity in relation to pieces of actionable advice in ISPs provided by Swedish public agencies. About two-thirds of the sentences in which the analyzed keywords were used focused on information other than actionable advice. Such dual use of keywords reduces the possibility of pinpointing and communicating clear, actionable advice.

The suggested metric provides a means to assess the quality of how keywords are used in ISPs for different purposes. The results show that more research is needed on how keywords are used in ISPs.

The authors recommended that ISP designers exercise caution when using keywords in ISPs and maintain coherency in their use of keywords. ISP designers can use the suggested metrics to assess the quality of actionable advice in their ISPs.

The keyword loss of specificity metric adds to the few quantitative metrics available to assess ISP quality. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, applying this metric is a first attempt to measure the quality of actionable advice in ISPs.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of educational service quality (ESQ) on student academic performance via the mediating role of student satisfaction.

To serve the study’s purpose, the study adopted a quantitative research approach. Three public universities representing 30% of the ten public universities located in the Southern part of Ethiopia participated in the study. Questionnaires were the main tools for gathering data. The adapted questionnaire, consisting of 116 items was administered to 400 randomly selected regular undergraduate graduating class students. The quantitative data collected via questionnaire were analyzed using descriptive and advanced inferential statistics.

The quantitative findings revealed that there is a statistically positive association between overall education service quality and students’ satisfaction (r = 0.712). The findings proved that the facets of education service quality accounted for 71.2% of the variations in students’ satisfaction in the universities. The quantitative findings further showed that the education service quality has a statistically indirect effect on students’ academic performance via the mediating role of students’ satisfaction (test statistic = 31.5311573, std. error = 0.00122536 and p-value = 0). The findings further confirmed that the overall education service quality accounted for 12.7% of the variations in students’ academic performance via student satisfaction in the universities.

The present study was conducted in public universities located in the Southern part of Ethiopia. The findings and conclusions of the study may not be generalizable to all Ethiopian public universities. Future researchers and scholars should conduct their study in all Ethiopian public universities by taking a representative sample from the Ethiopian public universities.

The present finding suggests that an improvement in ESQ leads to students’ satisfaction and that could contribute to boosting their academic performance. The findings of the present may help the practitioners who measure higher education service quality by providing how the provision of ESQ indirectly influences the student’s academic performance in the universities.

The findings of this study confirmed that the facets of ESQ are associated with students’ satisfaction and this, in turn, indirectly influences their academic performance. Student academic performance is one of the key indicators of quality education, and it has its influences on the social, political and economic development of a country. The findings of the present research provide valuable insights to higher education management bodies, higher quality assurance agencies and the Federal Ministry of Education to learn the indirect effect of ESQ on students’ academic performance and take necessary measures to improve the Ethiopian higher education quality.

The contributions of ESQ in the higher education sector are enormous. However, the existing service quality literature in higher education mainly focuses on the interrelation among service quality, student satisfaction, loyalty and behavioral intentions. Little is known about the indirect influence of ESQ on student academic performance (one of the key indicators of quality education), principally in Ethiopian higher education, the place of current research. The present study showed the indirect impact of ESQ on student academic performance in Ethiopian public universities. The study, therefore, suggests that university management bodies should actively monitor the quality of their services and commit themselves to boosting students’ learning outcomes.

This paper focuses on the use of e-resources by research scholars and post-graduate students at Kashmir University. The main aim is to determine the use of e-resources, users skills in handling e-resources and the purpose of their use. Further, this paper aims to highlight the problems faced by research scholars and post-graduate students in accessing e-resources.

The survey was conducted through a structured questionnaire circulated among 250 research scholars, both (M.Phil./Ph.D.) and post-graduate students, from different departments of Kashmir University, and the response rate was 80%. Random sample method was used for the selection of respondents and interacting with them. The responses received from the research scholars to 14 questions are presented in the form of tables.

Major findings of the study reveal that the majority of the students reported using electronic journal resources for various purposes including working on assignments, research proposal writing, literature review writing, research report writing, current awareness and leisurely exploration of ongoing scientific debates through peer-reviewed papers. The challenges encountered in the use of electronic journal resources include a power outage, inadequate bandwidth, slow download speed, inability to access the resources from home, lack of training, lack of awareness, limited access to computers and difficulty in searching. The paper concludes that electronic resources have become an integral part of the information needs of research scholars’ post-graduate students at Kashmir University. Further, it finds that e-resources can be good substitutes for conventional resources, if the access is fast, and more computer terminals are installed to provide fast access to e-resources. Finally, recommendations for improving the use of electronic journal resources are provided.

The paper restrains the study exclusively to use of e-resources by the research scholars and post-graduate students of Kashmir University.

The paper highlights the use of e-resources by research scholars and post-graduate students of Kashmir University and makes some constructive suggestions for the improvement of electronic resources and services. This is the first time an effort has been made to assess the use of electronic resources by post-graduate students at Kashmir University. The study could be used to assess the post-graduate students’ needs for electronic resources at the Kashmir University and other users in higher learning institutions.

Cyberloafing is an organization-directed counterproductive work behavior (CWB). One stream of literature deems cyberloafing to be bad for organizations and their employees, while another suggests cyberloafing is a coping response to stressful work events. Our work contributes to the latter stream of literature. The key objective of our study is to examine whether cyberloafing could be a means to cope with a stressful work event-abusive supervision, and if yes, what mediating and boundary conditions are involved. For this investigation, the authors leveraged the Stressor-Emotion-CWB theory which posits that individuals engage in CWB to cope with the negative affect generated by the stressors and that this relationship is moderated at the first stage by personality traits.

Using a multi-wave survey design, the authors collected data from 357 employees working in an Indian IT firm. Results revealed support for three out of the four hypotheses.

Based on the Stressor-Emotion-CWB theory, the authors found that work-related negative affect fully mediated the positive relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing, and work locus of control (WLOC) moderated the positive relationship between abusive supervision and work-related negative affect. The authors did not find any evidence of a direct relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing. Also, the positive indirect relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing through work-related negative affect was moderated at the first stage by the WLOC such that the indirect effect was stronger (weaker) at high (low) levels of WLOC.

This work demonstrates that cyberloafing could be a way for employees to cope with their abusive supervisors.

This study aims to evaluate and summarize the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and internet-based CBT (ICBT) interventions on relapse prevention and severity of symptoms among individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD). CBT is one of the most used and suggested interventions to manage MDD, whereas ICBT is a novel effective proposed approach.

The review was conducted following the preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis protocol. A comprehensive and extensive search was performed to identify and evaluate the relevant studies about the effectiveness of CBT and ICBT on relapse prevention and severity of symptoms among patients with MDD.

A total of eight research studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in this systematic review. RCT studies were conducted to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of CBT and ICBT on relapse prevention and severity of symptoms among patients with MDD. It has been found that CBT is a well-supported and evidently based effective psychotherapy for managing depressive symptoms and reducing the relapse and readmission rate among patients diagnosed with MDD. The ICBT demonstrated greater improvements in depressive symptoms during major depressive episodes among patients with MDDS. The ICBT program had good acceptability and satisfaction among participants in different countries.

Despite the significant findings from this systematic review, certain limitations should be acknowledged. First, it is important to note that all the studies included in this review were exclusively conducted in the English language, potentially limiting the generalizability of the findings to non-English speaking populations. Second, the number of research studies incorporated in this systematic review was relatively limited, which may have resulted in a narrower scope of analysis. Finally, a few studies within the selected research had small sample sizes, which could potentially impact the precision and reliability of the overall conclusions drawn from this review. The authors recommend that nurses working in psychiatric units should use CBT interventions with patients with MDD.

This paper, a review of the literature gives an overview of CBT and ICBT interventions to reduce the severity of depressive symptoms and prevent patients’ relapse and rehospitalization and shows that CBT interventions are effective on relapse prevention among patients with MDD. In addition, there is still no standardized protocol to apply the CBT intervention in the scope of reducing the severity of depressive symptoms and preventing depression relapse among patients with major depressive disorder. Further research is needed to confirm the findings of this review. Future research is also needed to find out the most effective form and contents of CBT and ICBT interventions for MDD.

CBT is a psychological intervention that has been recommended by the literature for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). It is a widely recognized and accepted approach that combines cognitive and behavioral techniques to assist individuals overcome their depressive symptoms and improve their overall mental well-being. This would speculate that effectiveness associated with several aspects and combinations of different approaches in CBT interventions and the impact of different delivery models are essential for clinical practice and appropriate selection of the interventional combinations.

This systematic review focuses on the various studies that explore the effectiveness of face-to-face CBT and ICBT in reducing depressive symptoms among patients with major depressive disorder. These studies were conducted in different countries such as Iran, Australia, Pennsylvania and the USA.

This study aims to capture how the association between a multichannel relational communication strategy (MRCS) and customer performance is contingent upon such customer performance (low- versus high-performance customers) and to reconcile past contradictory results in this marketing-related topic. To this end, the authors propose and validate the method of quantile regression as an unconventional, yet effective, means to proceed to that reconciliation.

This study collected data from 4,934 customers of a private pension fund firm and accounted for both firm- and customer-initiated relational communication channels (RCCs) and for customer lifetime value (CLV). This study estimated a generalized linear model and then a quantile regression model was used to account for customer performance heterogeneity.

This study finds that specific RCCs present different levels of association with performance for low- versus high-performance customers, where outcome customer performance is the dependent variable. For example, the relation between firm-initiated communication (FIC) and performance is stronger for low-CLV customers, whereas the relation between customer-initiated communication (CIC) and performance is increasingly stronger for high-CLV customers but not for low-CLV ones. This study also finds that combining different forms of FIC can result in a negative association with customer performance, especially for low-CLV customers.

The authors tested the conceptual model in one single firm in the specific context of financial services and with cross-sectional data, so there should be caution when extrapolating this study’s findings.

This study offers nuanced and precise managerial insights on recommended resource allocation along with relational communication efforts, showing how managers can benefit from adopting a differentiated-customer performance approach when designing their MRCS.

This study provides an overview of the state of the art of MRCS, proposes a contingency analysis of the relationship between MRCS and performance based on customer performance heterogeneity and suggests the quantile method to perform such analysis and help reconcile past contradictory findings. This study shows how the association between RCCs and CLV varies across the conditional quantiles of the distribution of customer performance. This study also addresses a recent call for a more holistic perspective on the relationships between independent and dependent variables.