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The purpose of this study is to identify motivations for the uptake of crowdfunding by micro-entrepreneurs in an emerging economy and the extent to which these vary by entrepreneur characteristics, sector and crowdfunding model.

The authors conduct qualitative analyses of data collected in interviews with 57 micro-entrepreneurs in Morocco, all of whom used crowdfunding in fundraising.

The authors identify six key motives for crowdfunding adoption by micro-entrepreneurs including financing needs, legitimacy seeking, sense of achievement, network-building, entrepreneurial and marketing competence enhancements. They also find evidence for moderation effects of fundraiser characteristics on likelihood of adoption, including gender, age, education, training experience and sectoral affiliation. Furthermore, the authors show that the relative importance of different motives varies by the type of crowdfunding model used.

The original aspects of the study include the examination of adoption motives in an emerging market context and the distinguishing between entrepreneurs’ adoption motives based on different gender, age, education, training experience, sectoral affiliation and crowdfunding model used. Moreover, the authors show that enhancement of competencies is a more dominant motive in the emerging market context than mentioned in earlier studies in developed contexts.

This paper describes an exploratory, international research collaboration that seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the development and experiences of peer leaders in higher education across different international contexts, namely the USA, Canada (CAN), Australasia (Australia and New Zealand) (ANZ), the United Kingdom (UK) and South Africa (SA).

Data are summarized and compared across each of the participating countries, providing a more global context and depth of perspective on peer leadership (PL) in higher education than is currently available in the literature.

The findings highlight some apparent differences between countries in relation to student engagement in peer leader roles and the ways in which PL is supported by higher education institutions, as well as some similarities across the different international contexts, particularly in the way peer leaders view the benefits of their involvement in PL.

These insights provide a valuable addition to the literature on PL and practical information to higher education institutions for supporting student leadership development and involvement.

In order to estimate the value of semi-automated subject indexing in operative library catalogues, the study aimed to investigate five different automated implementations of an open source software package on a large set of Swedish union catalogue metadata records, with Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as the target classification system. It also aimed to contribute to the body of research on aboutness and related challenges in automated subject indexing and evaluation.

On a sample of over 230,000 records with close to 12,000 distinct DDC classes, an open source tool Annif, developed by the National Library of Finland, was applied in the following implementations: lexical algorithm, support vector classifier, fastText, Omikuji Bonsai and an ensemble approach combing the former four. A qualitative study involving two senior catalogue librarians and three students of library and information studies was also conducted to investigate the value and inter-rater agreement of automatically assigned classes, on a sample of 60 records.

The best results were achieved using the ensemble approach that achieved 66.82% accuracy on the three-digit DDC classification task. The qualitative study confirmed earlier studies reporting low inter-rater agreement but also pointed to the potential value of automatically assigned classes as additional access points in information retrieval.

The paper presents an extensive study of automated classification in an operative library catalogue, accompanied by a qualitative study of automated classes. It demonstrates the value of applying semi-automated indexing in operative information retrieval systems.

There is a gap in understanding with regards to the discrimination and prejudice experienced by gay entrepreneurs. To address this, an intersectional perspective is adopted to facilitate a better understanding of how lesbian and gay entrepreneurs may experience heterosexism.

This qualitative study uses semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of 14 lesbian and gay entrepreneurs as they navigate homophobia and heterosexism.

The study contributes novel insights to the field of entrepreneurship, extending the study of lesbian and gay entrepreneurs to include gender and a fine-grained analysis of the experience of heterosexism. Its inclusion of an intersectional perspective of the lesbian-female entrepreneur expands the emerging body of literature examining intersectional identities of minority entrepreneurs.

The authors provide a more nuanced understanding of the impact of heterosexism on LGBT+ entrepreneurial activities. This is facilitated by the authors' adoption of an intersectional perspective which shows how the different axes of identity influenced gender identity performance in relation to the model of perceived neutrality in LGBT+ entrepreneurship. The authors also make an original contribution to minority stress literature through the authors' exploration of one facet of minority entrepreneurship, namely the impact of heterosexism on LGBT+ entrepreneurial activities.

The purpose of this paper is to present the views of people living with dementia in extra care housing (ECH). This is a model of housing with care and support aiming to support older people, including those with dementia, to live independently. Previous research identifies benefits but is predominantly derived from third-party accounts, with the voices of those living with dementia in ECH significantly absent.

This study adopted a qualitative approach conducting 100 interviews across 8 ECH schemes in England. Over half of the interviews were conducted with people living with dementia and their families with the remainder involving staff and commissioners.

Findings suggest there are a range of benefits including owning your own home, having a safe, age friendly location with flexible support, social interaction and continuing to live as a couple. Challenges included availability of staff, flexible resourcing, loneliness and the advancing symptoms of dementia.

Despite efforts to create an inclusive, diverse sample, the participants were all White British. Participants involved were identified by gatekeepers, which may present some bias in the selection.

Whilst ECH offers benefits to people living with dementia, addressing the challenges is essential for effective dementia care. Improving staff training, promoting person-centred care and fostering an inclusive community are critical for enhancing residents’ well-being and quality of life.

This paper explored the lived experiences of residents and family members, providing new insight into the advantages and disadvantages of ECH for people living with dementia.

This study aims to demonstrate what myths of and about science are reproduced in this popular cultural work (movie – “Oppenheimer”). This is done by examining the unconscious hegemonic positions supported by the reproduction of stereotypical and mythical images of science.

Content/Text Analysis: The conceptual analysis of a cultural text – a film (“Oppenheimer”) – through a theoretical apparatus (B. Latour’s theory).

The film demonstrates its reproduction of three distinct elements. Firstly, it exhibits classic scientistic clichés pertaining to technoscience. Secondly, it highlights the replication of the individualized monomyth about the (super) hero, leading to the exclusion of the intricate conditions of technoscience’s existence. Lastly, the film aligns with the Californian ideology, as proposed by Barbrook.

The value of the text is twofold: (1) To show that the classical approaches of Bruno Latour are still relevant. (2) To show what hidden premises and myths about technoscience are being propagated through a work of pop culture (the film “Oppenheimer”) and, in effect, to show what kind of influence of cultural hegemony is at work here.

Immigration-themed children’s literature can be an important resource in the classroom, especially because some U.S. immigrant groups, including French-Canadians, have received limited curricular representation. Using the qualitative method of critical content analysis, this study aims to examine depictions of French-Canadian immigrants to the United States in contemporary children’s books.

Postcolonialism is employed as an analytical lens with special attention given to the ways immigrant characters are constructed as different from the dominant group (i.e., othering), how dominant group values are imposed on immigrant characters, and how immigrant characters resist othering and domination. Three books comprise the sample: “Charlotte Bakeman Has Her Say” by Mary Finger and illustrated by Kimberly Batti, “Other Bells for Us to Ring” by Robert Cormier, and “Red River Girl” by Norma Sommerdorf.

The findings reveal multiple instances in which French-Canadian immigrants are constructed as Other and few instances in which these characters resist this positioning, and these books reflect the real ways French-Canadians were perceived as subalterns during the mass migration from Québec to the United States between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This study is significant because it examines portrayals of a substantial immigrant group that has been overlooked in the immigration history curriculum. This sample of children’s books may be used to teach children the complexities of immigration history and provide a more nuanced understanding of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Social media has broadened the scope of luxury brand marketing and has emerged as a salient tool for Internet marketing campaigns in the post-pandemic world. Under the theoretical lens of the SOR model, this study aims to explore the nexus between brand social media marketing (BSMM) activities and online consumer brand engagement (CBE) via mediating consumers' emotions in the modest luxury fashion branding post-pandemic context.

This study conducted a post-pandemic survey in five major metropolitan cities in Pakistan with a total of 584 eligible young consumers who follow the fan pages of fashion brands. Structural equation modeling was used to test hypotheses.

The findings reveal that BSMM activities have a significant influence on three emotion states (pleasure, arousal and dominance); however, only pleasure and arousal significantly drive CBE (i.e. affective engagement and activation). Moreover, the results show that pleasure and arousal partially mediate the relationships between BSMM activities and affective and activation dimensions of CBE, while dominance fully mediates the relationship between BSMM activities and cognitive engagement. Interestingly, only affective engagement was shown to be the most potent component of CBE in fostering positive emotions toward luxury fashion brands.

This study contributes to the literature on social media marketing and consumer brand engagement by revealing valuable insights into post-pandemic luxury fashion branding that could assist academicians and marketing practitioners of non-Western markets.

This study aims to provide a more complete picture of blockchain development by combining numerous methodologies with diverse data sources, such as academic papers and news articles. This study displays the developmental status of each subject based on the interrelationships of each topic cluster by analyzing high-frequency keywords extracted from the collected data. Moreover, applying above methodologies will help understanding top research topics, authors, venues, institutes and countries. The differences of blockchain research and new are identified.

To identify and find blockchain development linkages, researchers have used search terms such as co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling, co-citation and co-authorship to help us understand the top research topics, authors, venues, institutes and countries. This study also used text mining analysis to identify blockchain articles' primary concepts and semantic structures.

The findings show the fundamental topics based on each topic cluster's links. While “technology”, “transaction”, “privacy and security”, “environment” and “consensus” were most strongly associated with blockchain in research, “platform”, “big data and cloud”, “network”, “healthcare and business” and “authentication” were closely tied to blockchain news. This article classifies blockchain principles into five patterns: hardware and infrastructure, data, networking, applications and consensus. These statistics helped the authors comprehend the top research topics, authors, venues, publication institutes and countries.

Since Web of Science (WoS) and LexisNexis Academic data are used, the study has few sources. Others advise merging foreign datasets. WoS is one of the world's largest and most-used databases for assessing scientific papers.

This study has several uses and benefits. First, key concept discoveries can help academics understand blockchain research trends so they can prioritize research initiatives. Second, bibliographic coupling links academic papers on blockchain. It helps information seekers search and classify the material. Co-citation analysis results can help researchers identify potential partners and leaders in their field. The network's key organizations or countries should be proactive in discovering, proposing and creating new relationships with other organizations or countries, especially those from the journal network's border, to make the overall network more integrated and linked. Prominent members help recruit new authors to organizations or countries and link them to the co-authorship network. This study also used concept-linking analysis to identify blockchain articles' primary concepts and semantic structures. This may lead to new authors developing research ideas or subjects in primary disciplines of inquiry.