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The rapid adoption of social media has resulted in a fundamental shift in the way communication and collaboration take place. While social media is recognized as an important marketing communication tool, it has become overlooked how social media marketing activities (user-generated and firm-generated content) influence brand equity creation in the higher education sector. Drawing from social identity theory, this study identifies how higher education institutions develop customer-based brand equity using social media marketing and social brand engagement, taking cross-comparison between high and low subjective norms.

A survey was used to collect data from a sample of 936 undergraduates of private higher education institutions in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. These data were gathered using purposive sampling, and in testing the hypothesis and structure among the variables, structural equation modeling was used to determine the relationship between the study variables.

For the conceptual framework, the authors found that the structural equation model complies with the empirical data. The structural equation model shows that social brand engagement mediates the relationship between user-generated content, firm-generated content and brand equity. Further, the subjective norms were found to moderate the relationship between user-generated content, firm-generated content and social brand engagement, highlighting that the lower the subjective norms the higher the influence on social brand engagement as students receive low pressure and influence from external parties.

The study was conducted at private higher education institutes in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Future research could benefit from the perceptions of undergraduates in public higher education institutes. Future researchers could widen the diversity of service settings in the sample and replicate this investigation to discover if the results are consistent across the whole services sector.

The current research contributes to the services marketing and branding literature in the higher education context. The paper presents the crucial elements in building brand equity for higher education institutes to fill the existing gaps in higher education branding literature. The findings of the current study provide strategies to improve the higher education sector.

The purpose of this study was to obtain valuable insights into students’ engagement and experiences within the virtual learning environment, especially in the context of crises. Among the innumerable challenges people throughout the world faced during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, those of students in institutions of higher education needing to engage in online academic studies are of special interest. Using an online survey, this study could predict students’ online engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic through three theoretical frameworks: the students’ academic motivation to study, the Big Five personality traits, and loneliness, and with a new tool measuring the participation in the Zoom platform.

To examine the psychological and technological factors predicting the students’ engagement, this study surveyed 547 students from different academic institutions of higher learning.

Findings show that the less lonely the students felt, the less neurotic they were, and the higher they scored in levels of extroversion, agreeableness, consciousnesses and openness to experience, the greater their engagement in their academic studies. In addition, students who were older, more educated, with higher intrinsic motivation and lower lack of motivation were more engaged in their online academic studies. Finally, participating in classes through the Zoom platform and experiencing it positively was a significant predictor of higher academic engagement.

Recognizing these factors can enable educators, institutions of higher learning, counselling services and students to obtain tools for higher engagement in online learning.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of servant leadership on work engagement and affective commitment among academics in higher education. Moreover, the paper highlights the role of job satisfaction as an intervening mechanism among the examined variables.

Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to academics working in the Palestinian higher education sector. We used structural equation modelling to examine the hypotheses.

A positive relationship was found between servant leadership and affective commitment. The relationship between servant leadership and work engagement is fully mediated by job satisfaction, whereas partial mediation was found between servant leadership and affective commitment. Both work engagement and affective commitment have a positive impact on academics’ job performance.

The paper provides a fertile ground for higher education managers concerning the role of leadership in stimulating work engagement and organisational commitment among academics.

First, the paper is one of the few studies that empirically examines servant leadership in higher education using data coming from a non-Western context because most of the servant leadership research is conducted in the Western part of the world (Parris and Peachey, 2013). Second, we empirically provide evidence for the argument that servant leadership is needed in higher education. Third, the paper contributes to the limited body of research on work engagement and commitment in the higher education sector.

The faculties are crucial to education. They should have enough training facilities and be encouraged to actively contribute to high-quality education and successful learning. Faculty engagement and development activities should be explored and included in learning organizations and employee engagement in India. This paper aims to describe higher education as a learning organization. The research will also assess how faculty development programs affect faculty engagement behaviors in these institutions and if professional development mediates this effect, which has not been previously examined.

This study was conducted with quantitative data collected from 267 faculties through reliable and validated adapted questionnaires. Semistructured interviews were conducted with heads and professor-level faculties to gain insights into faculty development and engagement. Partial least squares structural equation modeling technique (PLS-SEM 3.3.6 version) was used to test the conceptually drafted model.

Faculty professional development programs shown to improve higher education faculty engagement and professional progress. The studies also showed that higher education institutions must prioritize faculty development to become learning organizations. Professional development reduced the direct effects of faculty development program (FDP) on faculty engagement. This suggests that professional growth mediates the research.

This research emphasizes and professional development to boost teacher involvement in B-Schools. Management must design faculty development programs to construct professional development and learning organizations, according to the results. Developing and writing rules that encourage faculty engagement in such internal and external programs would also enhance their academic and administrative abilities and assist higher education institutions become learning organizations.

The study is one of the few to examine the impact of faculty development programs and professional development on faculty engagement in higher education institutions, particularly B-Schools, and its competitive mediating role.

This chapter discusses the institutional contextual narratives provided as part of the evaluation of universities in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in England. The purpose of the TEF is to allow differentiation between higher education institutions on the basis of teaching quality, but the equality challenge unit has expressed reservations about the TEF’s ability to make sense of, or reflect, diverse student experiences of being taught. The authors follow the methodology of critical policy ethnography using higher education and government policy documents as a field of anthropological data and contend that, in order to understand large-scale transformations, such as the educational experience of students, the authors have to examine the ‘policy field’ and then locate more precise sites, in this case the TEF, for understanding the larger environment. The authors have systematically determined our search terms and used text-mining tools to search all the institutional narratives and obtain a broad ‘policy field’; we then select some key examples to analyse particular cases in more detail. This provides us with evidence from the statements to determine both how the perspective of students has been included in preparing the TEF contextual narratives and how diversity is being addressed.

This paper aims to examine the development and piloting of a novel European framework for community engagement (CE) in higher education, which has been purposefully designed to progress the CE agenda in a European context.

The proposed framework was co-created through the European Union (EU)-funded project towards a European framework for community engagement in higher education (TEFCE). The TEFCE Toolbox is an institutional self-reflection framework that centres on seven thematic dimensions of CE. This paper follows the development of the TEFCE Toolbox through empirical case study analysis of four European universities and their local communities.

The findings in this paper indicate that the TEFCE Toolbox facilitates context-specific applications in different types of universities and socioeconomic environments. Incorporating insights from engagement practitioners, students and community representatives the TEFCE Toolbox was successfully applied in universities with diverse profiles and missions. The process facilitated the recognition of CE achievements and the identification of potential areas for improvement.

Despite a range of international initiatives, there remains an absence of initiatives within the European higher education area that focus on developing tools to comprehensively support CE. The TEFCE Toolbox and case-study analysis presented in this paper address this gap in knowledge. The broader societal contribution and social responsibility of higher education have become increasingly prominent on the European agenda. The TEFCE Toolbox represents an innovative, robust and holistic European framework with the potential to support universities in reflecting upon their pursuit of addressing grand societal challenges, whilst promoting CE.

Drawing from the literature on internationalization, higher education marketing and place branding, this paper aims to link the internationalization of higher education to country branding. It explores the impact of internationalization within the higher education system on Egypt’s destination brand equity. This investigation offers insights for decision-makers in both the higher education and country branding sectors.

This empirical paper adopts an exploratory approach and serves as an initial step for researchers. It utilizes a quantitative methodology, employing a survey with 366 responses, to examine the effects of internationalization efforts in higher education on country brand equity.

The results reveal a direct correlation between student engagement and the brand equity of international branch campuses (IBCs), as well as a link between IBCs and Egypt’s brand equity. Notably, the study highlights the mediating role of IBC brand equity in the relationship between student engagement and the overall brand equity of Egypt.

This paper is innovative in its method of assessing the impact of internationalization efforts in higher education, specifically at IBCs in Egypt, on Egypt’s destination brand equity. Additionally, the study identifies student engagement as an antecedent to IBC brand equity.

While being largely studied in organizational research, job engagement has rarely been empirically investigated in the context of higher education. In this study, this paper aim to examine the effects of leader performance expectation and coworker pressure on research engagement of lecturers and the moderation of achievement value.

The authors based the survey on the data collected from public higher educational institutions in Vietnam.

The findings contribute to the literature of job engagement in higher education from an organizational behavior perspective by explaining the mid-level impacts of departmental factors affecting research engagement.

The authors develop an organizational behavior perspective related to middle-level factors to understand factors influencing one specific research job of lecturers in higher education in a non-Western developing nation.

In this chapter, we take up the distinction between applied and general fields of study in order to consider how patterns of gender stratification between them may differ. Purporting to offer industry- and firm-specific skills, applied fields of study are often differentiated from general education pathways that are offered within the university sector. However, as our research demonstrates, there is considerable interplay between these two forms of education when higher education engagement over the life course is examined. Using sequence and cluster analysis, we illustrate five ideal-typical higher education pathways in a sample of males and females over a 22-year period in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The gendered patterns of how individuals choose and move between general and applied fields of study offer a deeper account of stratification within general and applied skill acquisition and provide nuance concerning how vocational education can be conceptualised in relation to the actual higher education pathways students undertake. In Canada, where a high percentage of students gain university-level credentials, vertical and horizontal gender stratification within applied and general fields of study is distinctive and highlights system-specific engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to extend existing engagement research in two directions: first, it operationalizes the dynamic nature of the engagement process within a customer-brand dyad and, second, it tests the interrelationships with other network actors in a triadic network setting.

A 2×2 experimental design models the iterative nature of the engagement process based on repeated measures at three points in time, considering the contextual effects of connections with other customers and crowding-in effects based on monetary incentives.

This research demonstrates that in a utilitarian service setting, customer engagement does not emerge per se in the dyadic interaction between the customer and the brand. For high levels of engagement behavior to occur, incentives and ties to other network actors are essential. Further, the findings suggest a non-linear relationship between engagement behavior and its antecedents and consequences: engagement behavior must overcome a certain intensity threshold to unfold its effect.

Further research is needed to explore the dynamic nature of the engagement process in experiential and interactive service settings, and more complex network settings that may involve more actors and more complex relationships.

By facilitating connections between customers and compensating for low intrinsic interest, managers can facilitate actual engagement behavior even in utilitarian service contexts. Once engagement behavior has been triggered, an increased engagement disposition, higher satisfaction, higher involvement and higher loyalty follow.

This study empirically tests the dynamic nature of the engagement process within and beyond the dyad, and has revealed a non-linear pattern of customer engagement behavior within its nomological network.