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The purpose of this article is to examine the expectations, challenges and tensions officers describe while engaged with public schools to demonstrate that officers engage with students in public schools in a conscious, goal-oriented process to establish and maintain useful relationships.

Data collection involved 104 semi-structured interviews (including follow up interviews) and 31 focus groups, conducted between 2014 and 2018 with police officers working in rural areas of a province in Atlantic Canada.

Utilizing the concept of social capital, we analyze practices of investments alongside the understanding of rurality as socially interconnected and the rural school as a particular site of interconnectedness for police officers. We demonstrate how, while accumulating social capital, officers face role tension and fundamental barriers when trying to integrate into rural school communities.

By demonstrating the specificities of building social capital in schools and community environments in a rural setting, we contribute to understandings regarding the unique opportunities and challenges faced by police in rural schools in integrating effectively into schools and responding to youth-specific problems.

This paper aims to provide a living tribute to the leading autoethnographer, Alec Grant.

Alec provided Jerome with a list of names of people he might approach to write a tribute on his behalf.

The accounts describe the influence that Alec has had both as an educator and as a trusted colleague for the people approached.

While this is a living tribute, it is about one man and could, therefore, be described as a case study. Some people wonder what can be learned from a single case study. Read on and find out.

Alec has carved out a path for himself. In many senses, he chose “The Road Less Travelled”. He has never shied away from challenging “The System” and defending the rights of the marginalized and socially excluded. It is not a road for the faint-hearted.

For systems to change, radical thinkers need to show the way. “Change keeps us safe” (Stuart Bell).

Alec was a well-known and highly respected cognitive behavioural academic practitioner and the author of key textbooks in the field. He then decided to reinvent himself as an autoethnographer. This has brought him into contact with a much more diverse group of people. It has also brought him home to himself.

As a by-product of the production process, emissions can follow output fluctuations. Hence, disregarding the relationship between economic fluctuations and emissions could result in undesirable environmental outcomes. This study aims to investigate the environmental and economic effects of abatement subsidies on overall emissions during business cycles in Australia.

A real business cycle (RBC) model is devised and parameterised in this paper. RBC models have been recently introduced to environmental policy analysis, and this study contributes to the literature by investigating the effects of a potential subsidy policy in an RBC framework. The model is also calibrated and provides solutions for the Australian economy.

The authors find that under a steady-state situation, supporting abatement can result in reducing emissions by 6.45% while it imposes welfare costs to the economy (by 0.61%). Simulation results show that an optimal abatement policy should be pro-cyclical, with the abatement subsidy increasing during expansions and decreasing during recessions. As well, in a subsidy policy setting, emissions would react pro-cyclically, i.e. emissions increase (decrease) when the gross domestic product increases (decreases). The abatement reaction by firms, however, is different, because when a positive productivity shock occurs, firms reduce abatement and allocate resources to production. Nonetheless, as time passes, the increased subsidy provides a strong enough incentive to allocate resources to abatement and, subsequently, abatement increases.

This paper investigates how an emission reduction subsidy should be adapted to macroeconomic fluctuations so that it can limit variations in emissions.

This paper investigates gender disparity in investment decisions within the popular American TV show Shark Tank.

The research uses a comprehensive dataset of 925 pitches from 14 seasons and 316 episodes, covering August 2009 to May 2023.

Contrary to previous studies, the findings indicate that female entrepreneurs do n'ot face discrimination in terms of their pitching success rates, regardless of their industry affiliation. However, the authors did observe that female entrepreneurs tend to receive lower valuations, both self-assessed and in final deals. This suggests a self-imposed gender gap in venture capital and angel investing, likely stemming from lower entrepreneurial aspirations among women.

To tackle this issue, the authors propose promoting female venture capital by increasing the representation of female entrepreneurs and business angels on Shark Tank. Such role models can inspire aspiring women in these fields. Additionally, the authors believe that mixed-gender founder teams, comprising both men and women, can play a significant role in developing promising startups with viable business models.

The main purpose of this paper is to establish the mediating effect of credit counselling in the relationship between access to microcredit and survival of micro small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa post COVID-19 pandemic with data collected from rural Uganda.

Structural equation modelling (SEM) through SmartPLS 4.0 was used to generate the standardized parameters to test whether credit counselling mediates the relationship between access to microcredit and survival of MSMEs in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa post COVID-19 pandemic with data collected from rural Uganda.

The SEM bootstrap results revealed that credit counselling enhances access to microcredit by 27% to promote survival of MSMEs in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa post COVID-19 pandemic with data collected from rural Uganda.

The current study focused only on women MSMEs. Future studies may possibly collect data from all the MSMEs to draw better generalization of the findings within the sector.

The findings can help public finance policy to ensure provision of credit counselling to microentrepreneurs who borrow from different financial institutions to reduce the problem of loan defaults and delinquency rampant in lending. This could be done through conducting routine business education and counselling sessions for microentrepreneurs who often need credit to grow their businesses.

This study is amongst the first few studies to establish the mediating effect of credit counselling in the relationship between access to microcredit and survival of MSMEs in developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic with data collected from rural Uganda. There is a dearth in literature and theory on the rehabilitative and preventive role of credit counselling in reducing repayment defaults amongst borrowers within the credit market to spur survival of MSMEs seen as the main enabler of economic growth, especially in developing countries. In fact, credit counselling acts as a safety net by substituting financial literacy and education to solve the rampant problem of overindebtedness amongst borrowers who are debt illiterate within the credit market.

Studies showed that a proactive delivery system employing innovative artificial intelligence (AI) in urban services might perform better. This has become an important national policy for many countries. Thus, this study aims to explore the influence of AI in urban services in Malaysia.

Official documents such as Structure Plan and Government Transformation Programme Policy Document covering various levels of cities in Malaysia, articles related to urban studies mostly written by researchers regarding urban growth in Malaysia and the Urban Development Bulletin from the Federal Department of Town and Country Planning from 1957 to date were reviewed and analysed.

The findings show that the influence of AI in urban services has long existed and been carefully planned by local authorities since colonial times. The development of global digital technology influences the upgrading of AI in urban services in Malaysia. Also, the success of AI in these municipal services is influenced by the rate of information technology literacy among the urban population. These developments have led to the definition of a conceptual city.

This paper's findings and conclusion were based on reviewed literature but did not compromise the strength of this paper. Thus, as part of the implications for future research, mixed-methods research design has been suggested.

As part of the implications, this article intends to promote AI in urban services in Malaysia and other developing countries with similar urban services challenges.

This paper encourages AI applications in urban services because it enhances service delivery performance. This intends to key stakeholders to promote AI via policies across Malaysia's urban services as part of the study implications.

From book challenges to anti–critical race theory and anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning legislation, US English teachers have been on the receiving end of a considerable amount of far-right conservative pushback. This study aims to explore the effects of conservative pushback on individual English teachers and their classroom practice. What pushbacks have individual English teachers faced? How has pushback impacted their teaching? What strategies have they developed for navigating pushback?

This qualitative study explores secondary English teachers’ reported experiences with conservative backlash as reported in 15 semi-structured interviews conducted between May 2022 and August 2023.

Participants reported feeling the pressure of increased levels of pushback, and many reported censoring their book selections to avoid additional public scrutiny. At the same time, they also described a range of strategies they have developed for protecting themselves and their practice, such as codifying curriculum, increasing transparency, formalizing review processes for challenging books and strengthening their resolve to resist.

This study offers a timely window on a pressing problem affecting the daily practice of English teachers in the USA.

This paper discusses plausible future scenarios for small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs) in the “sun, sea and sand” destination of the Canary Islands (Spain) and assesses to what extent they are prepared to adjust to market changes and technological developments in the light of both sudden disruptions and long-term shocks.

A scenario analysis was made based upon expert interviews, leading to a 2 × 2 scenario matrix.

Although regional, national and European strategies advocate digital transformation as a step towards building resilience and towards a more sustainable future, this study identifies two major uncertainties that can put that transformation at risk: a change of the traditional “sun, sand and sea” visitor to a more conscious, individual and inquisitive traveller or “Promad”, and the business culture of SMTEs.

Resilience for sudden and for slow-paced disruptions poses different challenges for SMTEs. Their next step in the digital transformation must take them form marketing and sales-oriented e-business to growing interconnectivity and innovation across supply chains.

A market change towards the “Promad” type of traveller causes at least a temporary mismatch of demand and supply. As many SMTEs miss either the knowledge or the resources to invest in digital transformation, the process will depend on support and coordination at destination level.

The study identifies, with the example of the Canary Islands, the difficulties for destinations and individual businesses in making the envisioned transition of mass tourism to more competitive forms of tourism with a smaller ecological footprint.

As internet dividends are gradually disappearing, loyalty programs have become the panacea for monetizing traffic, attracting new customers and retaining existing customers. Improving their effectiveness has thus become key to enterprises’ market competitiveness. However, member customers’ hedonic adaptation to this relationship strategy undermines its effectiveness. Based on the hedonic adaptation theory, this study aims to analyze the process of member customers' hedonic adaptation to preferential treatment in loyalty programs and explore the boundary conditions of alleviating this effect.

This study surveyed 271 member customers in China and tested the hypothesized relationships using structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis.

Preferential treatment suffers from hedonic adaptation to member customer engagement and customer gratitude, and customer tenure is a key condition for these effects. Customer gratitude is an intermediary mechanism that explains the hedonic adaptation effect of preferential treatment to member customers engagement. In addition, the structural characteristics of loyalty programs form the boundary condition that alleviates hedonic adaptation. The authors found that high-tier and -payment strategies are more likely to mitigate hedonic adaptation of preferential treatment to customer gratitude.

This study elucidates the factors that influence the effectiveness of preferential treatment and provides constructive insights into customer relationship management and for improving enterprise performance.