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Mary Kay is one of the best-known direct sellers of women's cosmetics in the world. Its channel strategy is to use independent beauty consultants, who are independent distributors, to sell directly to consumers. Its compensation plan is multilevel, providing commissions to distributors on their own sales as well as the sales of the distributors they recruit. At the time of the case, the company is grappling with a well-established change in consumer behavior—the decline of the stay-at-home mom as she returns to the workforce—combined with the opportunities offered by Internet selling. Focuses on the company's efforts to move with consumer demand and behavior, while remaining true to its core goal of “Improving Women's Lives.” Discusses ways Internet technology can be used throughout the company's channel and supply chain structure, not just as a route to market.

Nurses are a significant part of the professional workforce, but leaders may be promoted without the requisite competencies. This study aims to explore the perspectives of nurse managers about the core competencies necessary for promotion as leaders in health.

This was a mixed-methods study that targeted nurses (N = 126) who were promoted in four Caribbean countries over the past five years. A 30-item questionnaire was used for quantitative data collection and analyzed using SPSS version 25. Interviews yielded the qualitative data, which were analyzed using open coding and thematic analysis. Ethical approvals were received from ethics committees at the university and country level.

Most participants were female (n = 112), had 15 or more years’ experience (n = 71) and an associate degree/diploma in nursing (n = 62). Leadership was the most important competency required of nurse leaders in spite of their position within the organization, followed by team building and motivation. Challenges to the transitioning into leadership positions included the prevailing culture and a lack of a systematic approach to building capacity in leadership. There was also between-group statistical significance, as determined by one-way ANOVA for delegation, motivation and leadership as core competencies based on occupations roles.

Notwithstanding the importance of the findings from this research, there were some limitations. While the researchers considered implementing this study in eight Caribbean countries, approvals were received for only four countries. This will affect the ability to generalize the findings to the wider Caribbean countries. One of the strengths of this research was the use of mixed methods for data collection. However, the qualitative component of the findings may be limited by the number of focus groups conducted, notwithstanding the richness of the data collected.

The findings can be used as a framework from which the health system in developing countries can begin to examine practical solutions to developing 21st century leadership competencies in nursing. While there may be remanence of the colonial past in the way systems function, the complexity of health systems requires leadership that is rooted in competence that is multidimensional.

This paper provides an important contribution to the literature on leadership and competencies from the perspective of low- to middle-income resource settings. The qualitative component of the research added richness to the nuances and understanding of the phenomenon of competencies for nurse leaders.

The chapter will describe the genealogy of the international social movement “Zero Waste (ZW)” and highlights its role of cultural, organizational, and scientific reference point for the waste management, in particular the public one in Italy. The chapter proposes to interpret ZW as a part of a wider social movement on “common goods” that in Italy proposed a radical critics of the neoliberal governance of local public services. The climax of this movement was the referendum of 2011, when 27 millions of Italian citizens voted against the privatization of waste, water, and transport management at an urban level. By door-to-door recycling, composting of community, pay as you throw system (PAYT), reuse centers, and environmental communication, ZW movement succeeded to create an apparatus of driver concepts for the management of waste. In particular, some of the proposed case studies were the actors that implemented the ZW strategy findings on the territory, experimenting new organizational and social practices aimed at increasing recycle and at converting the local economy into a circular one.

This paper aims to analyze the impact of DARQ technologies (distributed ledger, artificial intelligence, extended reality, quantum computing) in the financial sector, focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) applications in personalized banking, which consists of treating every customer as a segment of one. The research has two main goals. First, providing a complete and organic analysis of the DARQ technologies framework currently missing in the literature. Because this research focuses on the financial sector, more attention is dedicated to DARQ technologies in this industry. Second, studying applications of one of the DARQ technologies, AI, in personalized banking, where it appears to have a great potential impact.

The research analyses both the supply side, collecting secondary data from documentation, reports and research studies to study the major trends and results obtained by leading banks, and on the demand side, collecting primary data through a dedicated survey and elaborating opinions and preferences of potential customers. Using this information, a detailed go-to-market plan based on the framework elaborated by Bain and Co. in 2012 is developed, considering the hypothesis of a well-known universal bank, operating globally, with an established brand and access to modern AI technologies, which decides to invest in this field as a priority.

In addition to giving a detailed overview of DARQ technologies from a technical and a business perspective, the results related to the hypothetical case of the study help to understand which would be the most suitable target for the launch phase, which value proposition should be offered and how to deliver it, but also how to evolve the project to attract more customers and strengthen the relationship with the existing ones. Nevertheless, this research could be a starting point for future studies and updates, considering related evolutions, investigating more representative demand samples or analyzing how the combination of more DARQ technologies could be applied to the financial sector.

Some limitations affect this work. First, the topics studied are evolving rapidly and partially dependent on other innovations under development; therefore, they may become obsolete and less significant in the next years. As regard the data collection, the supply-side analysis involves strategical information kept private by companies; therefore, the collected data probably miss some useful details. As concerns primary data, the sample could have been larger and more heterogeneous and biases and misinterpretations could have affected the answers. A compromise has been found between the time and resources available and the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the sample.

This research could be a tool for financial companies interested in investing in AI for personalized banking, but it also provides useful insights about the whole DARQ framework, which could be interesting for all the financial and nonfinancial firms. Applying AI effectively and efficiently could offer great benefits, both economic and noneconomic, to financial firms but also to their customers, who could benefit from hyper-tailored services at a reasonable and affordable price, whereas in the past, they were reserved only for very important person clients. This win-win situation could lead the way to further investments and consequent innovations in the future.

Some issues still exist, mainly about data security and privacy, but also the social risk linked to the labor market due to the AI substitution for some tasks and the related shift in professionals required by employers, which could negatively affect the salary gap among workers with different levels of educations, tightening up existing inequality problems. An effort by public and private subjects will be required to make this transition inside the labor market smoother. Despite this, the research shows that AI applications in personalized m-banking could mutually benefit both the demand and the supply of the market.

Apart from the organic overview offered on DARQ technologies and their related business applications, currently missing in the literature, which could be useful for a better comprehension of the topic and could also give interesting insights to firms, this research presents an original and concrete roadmap to follow for financial companies interested in delivering a personalized mobile banking service leveraging on AI. Every step presented in the output of this work is based on an in-depth analysis of past, and present actions carried out and result obtained by competitive firms on the market and on needs and preferences observed among potential customers.

This study aims to understand social media users’ responses to the influencer-endorsed wine short videos on the most popular platform – Douyin, relying on message interpretation process (MIP) framework and identify segmentation differences from gender and the generational cohorts (Gen Z and Gen Y).

Topic modeling, content analysis and quantitative analysis were used to decipher the user-generated content (UGC) data retrieved from 81 wine videos posted by the top 30 social media influencers (SMI) who focused on wine products and consumption experience messages.

The results demonstrate social media users are most inclined to respond to product-related topics, followed by the influencer, emotional, alcohol drinking intent, behavioral and skepticism. Meanwhile, the findings also revealed that the female group was more likely to engage in influencer topics, whereas the male group contributed more to product subjects. Gen Z cohort involved more themes about alcohol drinking intent, whereas Gen Y contributed more to skepticism.

The findings provide hospitality and wine practitioners, SMI and brand sponsors valuable information to use this advanced tactic among various social networking services.

This study is the first to grasp the Douyin users’ perceptions of this newly emerged influencer marketing strategy via UGC data. Originality is established by investigating gender and generational cohorts’ differences underlined by MIP.

顾客在 TikTok（抖音）对网红葡萄酒营销短视频有何见解？探索性别和代际差异

本研究旨在了解社交媒体用户对最受欢迎的平台 - 抖音- 的网红认可的葡萄酒短视频的反应, 依靠消息解释过程 (MIP) 框架, 并识别性别和世代群组的细分差异（Z世代和 Y 世代）。

利用主题建模、内容分析和定量分析来破译从30 名社交媒体网红发布的 81 个葡萄酒视频中关注葡萄酒产品和消费体验信息检索到的 UGC 数据。

结果表明, 社交媒体用户最倾向于回应产品相关话题, 其次是影响者、情绪、饮酒意图、行为和怀疑态度。同时, 调查结果还显示, 女性群体更可能参与有社交媒体网红主题的话题, 而男性群体对产品主题的贡献更大。 Z 世代队列涉及更多关于饮酒意图的主题, 而 Y 世代则表现更多怀疑。

研究结果为酒店和葡萄酒从业者、社交媒体影响者和品牌赞助商提供了宝贵的信息, 以在各种社交网络服务中使用这种先进的策略。

这项研究首次通过 UGC 数据掌握了抖音用户对这种新兴的网红营销策略的看法。通过 MIP 体现性别和代际群体的差异从而体现本研究的原创价值。

Public service provision in the European Union has received great attention in the last decades. Waste management is among the most important public services and challenges for a sustainable world owing to its impact on the environment, economic development, human health, and equity. Throughout Europe, along with the circular economy, the related zero waste (ZW) framework is also rapidly spreading. This introduction provides information about research questions and methodology used to discuss the most relevant and critical issues for good management of waste service provision under the ZW framework.

To some persons, private gardens, public parks, and farms appear to offer a safe way to preserve all of the plants and animals the environment needs. To people who ignore the need for conservation, the idea of paving and pruning and artificially laying out our land from coast to coast seems welcome. Wiser persons perceive that the destruction so imposed on nature would ultimately endanger our existence. The wilderness, with its wealth of animals and plants, holds a treasure from which we already extract the chemicals and genes we need for agricultural breeding, for industrial products, and for healing drugs. What to the layman may look like a disorderly swamp, or a dark forest, or an uninteresting prairie, actually encompasses complicated communities of vegetation and animals of all classes, communities that are held together in a stable balance by their interdependent components. Ecologists are identifying the key principles at work in these ecosystems of wetlands and drylands, forests and prairies. In their search for understanding of how life on our planet functions, they have called attention to the overriding need to preserve and protect the biological diversity that characterizes ecosystems. They have found instances in which short‐sighted human tampering has played havoc with subtle ecological balances. Too frequently entire species have vanished under man's onslaught. Sometimes such a disappearance is an indication that an entire ecosystem is out of balance.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an experiential learning framework for understanding how play can potentially create a unique ludic learning space conducive to deep learning.

The framework is developed by integrating two perspectives. First, from multidisciplinary theories of play to uncover the underlying play principles that contribute to the emergence of the ludic learning space are drawn. Then the formation of a ludic learning space through a case study of a pick‐up softball league where for 15 years, a group of individuals diverse in age group, gender, level of education, and ethnic background have come together to play are examined.

The case study suggests that play in a ludic learning space can promote deep learning in the intellectual, physical, spiritual, and moral realms.

This paper uses the play literature to inform the experiential learning concept of the learning space.