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This study explores whether and how Buddhism impacts corporate cash holdings. Buddhist culture affects investors' perception of how cash is deployed and then influences corporate cash holdings. This study first examines the impact of Buddhism on corporate cash holdings and then investigates whether formal governance mechanisms such as legal institutions and institutional ownership influence the relationship between Buddhism and corporate cash holdings.

The authors conduct empirical tests with data on Chinese listed companies between 2006 and 2019. Buddhism is measured with the natural logarithm of the number of Buddhist temples within a radius of a certain distance around a firm's headquarters. The authors adopt the OLS method to regress and take the 2SLS method, Heckman selection model and FEVD approach to address the endogeneity issue.

The results show a positive relationship between Buddhism and corporate cash holdings. This positive relation is more prominent for firms located in regions with weak legal institutions and for firms with low institutional ownership. Further analysis shows that Buddhism works through the channel of alleviating agency problems and finally improves the value of cash to investors.

The authors’ findings have important implications. First, this study provides inspiration for incorporating the ethical values of traditional cultures, such as Buddhism, into the corporate governance system. Second, the findings imply that informal institutions can influence corporate financial decisions beyond the effect of formal institutions, suggesting that informal systems should be emphasized when dealing with business affairs in countries where legal institutions are relatively weak. Third, the results suggest the significance of encouraging research on religious culture to explore its active role in corporate governance.

This study illustrates the positive value of religious culture in advancing corporate governance by relating Buddhism to corporate cash holdings based on the explanation of investors' perception. It makes a marginal contribution to the literature that investigates the determinants of cash policies and explores the firm-level consequences of religious culture, adding to the research area of culture and corporate finance.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, low-cost carriers grew rapidly in many low- and middle-income economies. In this chapter, we examine the geography and network structure of low-cost carriers in such economies across Asia in 2018. We use these analyses to explore the relationship between budget airlines and economic development. Levels of disposable income and infrastructure adequacy help to account for the significance of low-cost airlines in some middle-income economies. And in turn, these airlines by fostering higher levels of accessibility and personal mobility may help catalyze faster development. However, the environmental externalities associated with aviation, especially atmospheric emissions, raise concerns about the sustainability of this mode. We assess these concerns and focus in particular on the development of low-cost carriers fleets in Asia. We ask whether the acquisition of more fuel-efficient aircraft will ameliorate aviation's environmental impact.

This paper aims to systematically analyse the publications in the field of integrated reporting (IR) and to present an overview of the current publication trends in IR based on the data obtained from the Scopus database.

Selected bibliometric indicators and bibliometrix R-packages are used in examining metrics like annual publication trends, authors with the most produced work, papers that are often cited, top productive countries, top productive affiliations, frequently mentioned journals, frequently mentioned keywords, analysis of co-citation, analysis of collaboration and analysis of co-word.

The findings from the bibliometric review indicated that the trend of IR literature had increased from 2017 to 2020, specifically from 2017 to 2019. The findings also indicated that several publications on IR entailed several authors’ collaboration and were published in various languages. Moreover, around 148 institution-affiliated researchers from 40 institutions in 20 countries contributed to the IR publication.

This paper offers a comprehensive overview of the current development in IR. It is useful to help emerging scholars identify and understand current trends in IR based on different countries, authors and languages.

This paper contributes to the literature on IR by highlighting the trends of IR publications from the Scopus database using bibliometric analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to assess how we implement new ways of managing relational risk at the operational level of outsourced projects and to provide guidance to project management (PM) policy makers and practitioners seeking to ensure project operations consistently deliver project relational risk management (PRRM) strategies.

Through exploratory study data were obtained from a panel of six experts in PM and from a pilot survey of PM practitioners. The data reveal future directions and vectors for scholarship and research activity in terms of the impact of PRMM-related mechanisms and deliverables on project success and the implementation process to enhance PRRM as a key PM capability.

Deliverables for PRRM need to part of a multidimensional framework that includes mechanisms besides the contract. Such a framework enables the codification of PM knowledge so that PRRM contributes to project success. With knowledge codified, PRRM strategies can be consistently delivered at the operational level. The framework is novel in that it integrates hereto disparate elements that are encompassed under the broad umbrella of relational governance mechanisms.

PM policy makers and practitioners recognise the importance of effective relationships to deliver projects successfully, yet they lack practical solutions to address the negative effects of dysfunctional relationships. The authors provide a list of PM deliverables for effective PRRM, including deliverables besides those related to the contract, which can be used in practice to bring the gap between PRRM strategy development and implementation. This will enable client organisations that outsource their projects to an external contractor to enhance their PRRM capability and increase the likelihood of project success.

The authors provide insights into how PRRM is practised at the project operations’ level where PM is outsourced. These insights lead to three pathways of impactful Operations Management (OM)/PM scholarship and research, namely, the following: 1) How PM deliverables act as a key success factor for effective PRRM? 2) How the duality of roles carried out by PM actors influences PRMM practices? 3) How companies innovate to enhance their PRMM capability? These pathways will enable PM research and scholarship to address disconnects between PRMM strategy and operations and hence go beyond answering “what” PRMM is to encompass “how” it is implemented.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a new and useful formulation of relevance.

This paper is formulated as a conceptual argument. It makes the case for the utility of considering relevance to be function of use in creative processes.

There are several corollaries to formulating relevance as a function of use. These include the idea that objects by themselves cannot be relevant since use assumes interaction; the affordances of objects and how they are perceived can affect what becomes relevant but are not in themselves relevant; relevance is not an essential characteristic of objects; relevance is transient; potential relevance (what might be relevant in the future) can be distinguished from what is relevant in use and from what has been relevant in the past.

The paper shows that its new formulation of relevance brings improved conceptual and terminological clarity to the discourse about relevance in information science. It demonstrates that how relevance is articulated conceptually is important as its conceptualization can affect the ways that users are able to make use of information systems and, by extension, how information systems can facilitate or disable the co-production of creative outcomes. The paper also usefully expands investigative opportunities by suggesting relevance and creativity are interrelated.

This piece explores the philosophical origins of sense-making as defined in Brenda Dervin’s methodology.

This conceptual paper locates the origins of sense-making's rich ontological, epistemological and etymological heritage to the Classical Greece and the Pre-Socratic period. The Greek origins of sense-making‘s philosophical undercurrents surface again in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit before the idea is picked up again in twentieth century philosophy and library science.

This is a conceptual paper and no empirical findings are presented.

This paper makes an original contribution to the study of information seeking and to sense making theory and methodology.

This study explored whether the critical incident management systems (CIMS) model can predict the EMS performance in the COVID-19 context. Past research has established the significance of early detection and response (ER) in the context of Ebola virus disease (EVD), prompting a question of whether the model can also be helpful in the COVID-19 context. Consequently, the authors assessed whether ER influences the impact of communication capacity (CC), reliable information channel (RC) and environment (EN) on COVID-19 EMS performance. Assessing these relationships will advance emerging infectious disease (EID) preparedness.

The authors employed standardized measurement instruments of the CIMS model (CC, ER, RC and EN) to predict the performance of COVID-19 EMS using structural equation modeling (SEM) in a study of 313 participants from frontline responders.

The results show that the relationship of ER and EN with COVID-19 EMS performance is positive, while that of EN on CC is negative. The relationship between EN and COVID-19 EMS performance was insignificant. Contrary to the hypothesis, CC was negatively significant to COVID-19 EMS performance due to poor communication capacities.

The authors acknowledge some limitations due to challenges faced in this study. First, Data collection was a significant limitation as these questionnaires were built and distributed in June 2020, but the response time was prolonged due to the recurring nature of the pandemic. The authors had wanted to implore the inputs of all stakeholders, and efforts were made to reach out to various Ministry of Health, the local CDC and related agencies in the region via repeated emails explaining the purpose of the study to no avail. The study finally used the frontline workers as the respondents. The authors used international students from various countries as the representatives to reach out to their countries' frontline workers. Second, since the study was only partially supported using the CIMS model, future studies may combine the CIMS model with other models or theories. Subsequent research reassesses this outcome in other contexts or regions. Consequently, further research can explore how CC can be improved with COVID-19 and another future EID in the region. This may improve the COVID-19 EMS performance, thereby expanding the lesson learned from the pandemic and sustaining public health EID response. Additionally, other authors may combine the CIMS model with other emergency management models or theories to establish a fully supported theoretical model in the context of COVID-19.

The findings have practical implications for incident managers, local CDCs, governments, international organizations and scholars. The outcome of the study might inform these stakeholders on future direction and contribution to EID preparedness. This study unfolds the impact of lessons learned in the region demonstrated by moderating early detection and responses with other constructs to achieve COVID-19 EMS performance. The findings reveal that countries that experienced the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak, were not necessarily more prepared for an epidemic or pandemic, judging by the negative moderating impact of early detection and response. However, these experiences provide a foundation for the fight against COVID-19. There is a need for localized plans tailored to each country's situation, resources, culture and lifestyle. The localized plan will be to mitigate and prevent an unsustainable EID management system, post-epidemic fund withdrawals and governance. This plan might be more adaptable and sustainable for the local health system when international interventions are withdrawn after an epidemic. Public health EID plans must be adapted to each country's unique situation to ensure sustainability and constantly improve EID management of epidemics and pandemics in emergency response. The high to moderate importation risk in African countries shows Africa's largest window of vulnerability to be West Africa (Gilbert et al., 2020). Therefore, they should be in the spotlight for heightened assistance towards the preparedness and response for a future pandemic like COVID-19. The West African region has a low capacity to manage the health emergency to match the population capacities. The COVID-19 outbreak in West Africa undoubtedly inflicted many disruptions in most countries' economic, social and environmental circumstances. The region's unique challenges observed in this study with CC and reliable information channels as being negatively significant highlight the poor maintenance culture and weak institutions due to brain drain and inadequate training and monitoring. This outcome practically informs West African stakeholders and governments on aspects to indulge when trying to improve emergency preparedness as the outcomes from other regions might not be applicable.

This study explored the relevance of the CIMS model in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing different patterns of influence on COVID-19 EMS performance. In contrast to the extant literature on EVD, the authors found the moderating effects of ER in the COVID-19 context. Thus, the authors contribute to the COVID-19 EMS performance domain by developing a context-driven EMS model. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications.

The present paper answers two significant questions: (1) What are the relative consumer and firm-level effects of marketing through metaverse compared to conventional marketing endeavors? (2) What are the current trends in utilizing the metaverse as reported in the recent literature?

This study employs a systematic literature review methodology, utilizing a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flowchart to synthesize existing research. Thirty-five articles written in English were selected and analyzed from two databases, Web of Science and EBSCO Host.

The findings indicate that consumer-level effects of the metaverse include consumer loyalty and brand attachment. The firm-level benefits are decentralization and cost reductions. The paper proposes a framework indicating variables that could attenuate or enhance the association between immersive components of the metaverse and their resultant effects.

This study contributes to understanding the role of metaverse in marketing practices related to the marketing mix components. The study conceptualizes a novel framework for the metaverse and its resultant effects.

This research investigates the presence of communitarian philosophy within contemporary Scottish public library strategy, exploring links between philosophy, politics and practice.

The paper follows a qualitative research approach, combining content analysis and discourse analysis methodologies for the analysis of a corpus of Scottish public library trust documentation according to a thematic framework of communitarian values.

The analysis revealed strong links between trust strategy and communitarian values but also highlighted contradictions within this form of communitarianism which belied a deeper neoliberal philosophical foundation. The research therefore identified a communitarian strategic service shift which introduced benefits of social inclusion, community autonomy and common good but also brought concerns of an inherently weakened communal foundation and the survival of a neoliberal status quo.

The analysis is focused on strategy in Scotland only and thus can only claim to be representative of that country. However, the growth in communitarian strategies in the public sector is informed from the analysis undertaken.

The paper provides a novel analysis of public library strategy and thus contributes to the understanding of public library practice in the modern era.

The impacts of communitarian philosophy in the public sphere are under-researched and how these changes impact the mission of libraries needs to be better understood.

This is the first analysis to consider public library strategy from a communitarian point of view. As such, it provides novel insights into a growing area of public service development.