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This paper examines the drivers of brain gain by investigating the motivations of migrants who plan to return and contribute to their home country. It focuses on highly skilled Sudanese migrants in Japan, including a group of “plan-to-return” migrants (P-group), who intend to gain knowledge abroad that they will use to contribute to their homeland upon their return.

The participants are 24 highly skilled Sudanese migrants in Japan, 10 of whom are part of the P-group. To understand their motivation to contribute to their home country, the study applies the qualitative life course approach, using Elder's four life course themes: lives in time and space, the timing of lives, linked lives and human agency.

The P-group is characterised by a high level of motivation for self-development, which motivates them to study abroad. The analysis finds that the P-group's drive to contribute had been nurtured by a spirit of mutual aid in Sudanese society, which emphasises Islamic values and social ties. Religious norms, personal interactions and emotional ties to Sudan are especially influential on the P-group's motivation to contribute to their home society.

This study identifies drivers that lead to brain gain. Whereas previous studies have noted the relationship between return intentions and willingness to contribute to the home countries; they have not investigated influences on motivations to contribute. The results suggest that Sudan might already possess a system for local human resource development to encourage brain gain.

The aim of this research is to provide insight into how organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of customers experiencing vulnerabilities, thereby paying attention to their organizational practices (i.e. recursive or routinized patterns of organizational actions and behaviors).

To investigate, this research relies upon a multiple case study in a group of nursing homes in Flanders that had the ambition to engage family members in service journeys of their loved ones while measuring their value perceptions as a performance indicator (here, satisfaction with nursing home services).

The case evidence shows that nursing homes co-create value with family members through caring practices that focus on their role as secondary customers (i.e. welcoming, connecting and embedding) and empowering practices that focus on their role as partial employees (i.e. teaming up, informing and listening practices). However, the way in which the different caring and empowering practices are enacted by the nursing home and its staff affects their value co-creation potential.

By focusing on the practices with which organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of their loved ones, this research bridges the service literature with its attention for value co-creation practices and the literature on customers experiencing vulnerabilities with its focus on extended customer entities.

As home users are increasingly responsible for securing their computing devices and home networks, there is a growing need to develop interventions to assist them in protecting their home networking devices, which are vulnerable to attack. To this end, this paper aims to examine the motivating factors that drive South African fibre users to protect their home networking devices.

Using the protection motivation theory as the primary framework, a measurement instrument comprising 53 questionnaire items was developed to measure 13 constructs. The study collected empirical data from a sample of 392 South African home fibre users and evaluated the research model using structural equation modelling.

The evaluation showed a good fit, with 12 out of 15 predicted hypotheses being accepted for the final research model, contributing to the understanding of the factors that motivate home users to protect their home networking devices.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to model the factors that drive South African home fibre users to protect their home networking devices. Knowing these factors could help home internet service providers and security software vendors of home products to develop security interventions that could assist home fibre users to secure their home networking devices.

Home-based commercial hospitality (HBCH) is the focus of this study. This community-based tourism (CBT), which has received little research attention, is examined to reveal the meaning of commercially hosting visitors in private homes for experiential meetings on a variety of topics such as food, art, culture, folklore and various workshops.

A qualitative research method was adopted, using semi-structured, in-depth interviews with HBCH providers in the desert town of Arad, located in southern Israel.

The study reveals the impact of this unusual occupation on the host's quality of life, the factors that encourage and suppress involvement in this entrepreneurship, as well as the positive and negative consequences of HBCH on the local environment.

The findings could offer important guidelines to municipalities and local governments seeking to encourage CBT and sustainable micro-enterprises.

HBCH is a recent phenomenon and, as such, has been little researched. This study of one community raises issues that may be shared by HBCH enterprises. The findings could contribute to developing such initiatives elsewhere, avoiding the obstacles faced in this pioneering effort.

Children and youth who enter the care system have lower educational outcomes and university participation rates than their peers. This study aims to understand trend exceptions by examining the background of care-experienced undergraduates attending a research-intensive university in Canada.

Informed by social affordance theory, this study examined the presence of four indicators of stability (home, household occupants, school and legal status) during participants’ final three years of secondary education. Care-experienced undergraduates (N = 30) completed an online questionnaire. Associations between stability indicators, child welfare involvement in the final year of high school, educational outcomes and routes into higher education were analysed.

Stability across three to four indicators was experienced by 40% of participants, while 47% reported changes across three to four indicators. Only 20% had a change of school as compared to 47%–60% for other indicators. During their final year of high school, 73% of participants were supported by the child welfare system, with 50% being supported via a support program specifically for 16- to 18-year-olds. Stability scores were significantly lower for this latter subgroup compared to those who spent time in foster or group care and those who did not receive child welfare support during the final year of high school. Ninety percent of participants graduated from high school, 67% with the grades required to attend university. Three trajectories into undergraduate study were identified but could not be predicted using regression models.

This paper focuses on what has supported progression into a research-intensive university for care-experienced young adults and highlights the role of support programs for 16- to 18-year-olds.

The aim of this study is to develop a better understanding of how the transferability and recognition of host country professional experience and educational credentials impact the repatriation intentions of long-term self-initiated expatriates (SIEs). To that end, the study interviews a sample of American-educated French long-term SIEs in the United States (US) to assess how both their higher education and professional experience influence their social identity in their home country, France and their perceived repatriation opportunities.

This study applies social identity theory to the examination of the combined impact of higher education and work experience abroad on the repatriation expectations of long-term SIEs. The author interviewed twenty-one French SIEs who attended universities in the US and remained there afterward to begin their careers.

The findings of this study confirm that the repatriation intentions of long-term SIEs are strongly influenced by concerns about the ability to maintain their host country standard of living in their home country. It also finds that foreign educational credentials and professional experience can constrain the ability of long-term SIEs to repatriate easily and gain acceptance. To overcome this, long-term SIEs often feel that they must embrace alternative repatriation strategies to maintain the lifestyle that they enjoyed while abroad when returning back home.

This study examines a sample of long-term SIEs from one home country, France, who left to attend university in the same host country, the US. It assesses how the experiences of those who remained in the US afterward to start their careers impacted their repatriation intentions. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on the context of self-initiated expatriation by examining the influence of host-country educational credentials and work experience on the repatriation intentions of long-term SIEs.

While the expatriation literature has explored cultural adjustment in considerable depth, it has largely overlooked the influence of cultural diversity in an expatriate’s home country. This study aims to address this shortcoming by investigating how home-country cultural diversity affects expatriate adjustment.

This study adopts a qualitative, inductive approach based on semi-structured interviews with a small number of Malaysian managers on international assignment in the Greater Brisbane area of Queensland, Australia.

The two key and related observations from the interviews are that, firstly, the existence of sizeable and profoundly distinct ethnic groups in an expatriate’s home country serves as an aid to successful adjustment, as it enhances cross-cultural understanding and communicative skills. Secondly, the positive effects of home-country cultural diversity are particularly felt by expatriates from ethnic minority groups in the home country due to their in-group and out-group interactions at home as well as their additional linguistic arsenal.

Multiculturalism is a polarising and contentious topic in the public debate in many countries around the world, frequently used for differing political purposes. But in a globalising world, it is unlikely to disappear any time soon, making it imperative for academic research to develop a better understanding of the phenomenon, from as many angles as possible, including from an international business perspective.

This study addresses an under-researched topic, namely how cultural diversity within an expatriate’s home country impacts adjustment. From the findings, this study also introduces a theoretical model for use in future research.

The world population over the age of 60 is expected to increase from 900 million in 2015 to two billion by 2050. Retirement homes have emerged as a prominent housing alternative and become a trend for the older adults; however, older population in Malaysia could have a negative view of retirement homes. Different generations could have different perceptions of the value of retirement homes. This study aims to explore the value of retirement homes across diverse age cohorts in Malaysia.

A qualitative approach is adopted for this study. Thematic analysis is used to analyse the interview transcripts obtained from semi-structured interviews.

The results indicated that baby boomers tend to have more negative values towards retirement homes, whereas Generations X and Y demonstrated more favourable and positive values for retirement homes.

This study serves as a useful reference for housing developers, policymakers and the management of retirement homes to better understand how different age cohorts value retirement homes, thereby encouraging relevant housing strategies to enhance the quality and support systems of retirement homes in society.

By comparing regression models, this study aims to analyze the added home value of green sustainability features and green efficiency characteristics, rather than green certifications, in the city of Austin.

The adoption of home green energy efficiency upgrades has emerged as a new trend in the real estate industry, offering several benefits to builders and home buyers. These include tax reductions, health improvements and energy savings. Previous studies have shown that energy-certified single-family homes command a premium in the marketplace. However, the literature is limited in its analysis of the effects of green upgrades and certification on different types of single-family homes. To address this gap, this research collected data from 21,292 multiple listing services (MLS) closed home-selling listings in Austin, Texas, over a period of 35 months.

The analysis results showed that green efficiency features could generally increase single-family housing prices by 11.9%, whereas green sustainability upgrades can potentially bring a 11.7% higher selling price. Although green housing certification did not have significant effects on most housing groups, it did increase closing prices by 13.2% for single-family residences sold at the medium price range, which is higher than the impacts from simply listing the green features on MLS.

The study contributes to the body of knowledge by examining the market value of broadly defined energy efficiency and sustainability features in the residential housing market. The findings can help policymakers, brokerage firms, home builders and owners adjust their policies and strategies related to single-family home sales and mortgage approvals. The research also highlights the potential benefits of capitalizing on green housing features other than certifications.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between weight status and food environments, peer influence and dietary intake among high-school students in Shiraz, Iran.

Applying a case-control design, 406 adolescents (n = 203 overweight or obese and n = 203 normal weight) aged 14–18 years were selected using a multistage cluster random sampling method. Demographic information, physical activity level and anthropometric indices were collected. Dietary intake was determined using a 147-item food frequency questionnaire. Food environment (home and out of home) and peer influence were determined by a validated questionnaire.

The type of food purchased using pocket money was different between adolescents with overweight or obesity and normal weight adolescents (p < 0.001). The out-of-home food environment score was not different between groups, but the home food environment score (p = 0.004) and the peer influence score (p = 0.001) were higher in normal weight adolescents. Adolescents with overweight or obesity consumed higher amounts of carbohydrate (p = 0.006) and lower amounts of protein (p = 0.01) and more sweet junk foods (p = 0.01), nonstarchy vegetables (p = 0.03) and fruits (p = 0.01) compared to the normal weight group.

Home food environment, peer influence, differences in macronutrient intake and dietary patterns may be contributing factors to adolescent weight status.