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The main goal of the one semester long intervention for first-year Bachelor of Social Services students was to enable them to increase their awareness of a variety of cultures and practices encountered in social pedagogical work and to support the development of their ability to interact empathically with clients.

The aim of this article is to describe an educational intervention focused on teaching Qualified Empathic skills to social work students in higher education at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Finland. We introduce the concept of Qualified Empathy to describe professional empathic working skills and define it as: Qualified Empathy requires compassion for empathic action and it includes the ability for professional self-reflection, emotional skills and a healthy set of boundaries. Qualified Empathy encompasses the ability to tell the difference between sympathy and empathy, as it includes the capacity to use compassion to act in an empathic way in professional contexts (Raatikainen et al., 2017). The study was a case study, designed to explore the students' experiences of their one semester long educational intervention (n = 20). Our research question was: How do students construct Qualified Empathy as a dimension of their own professional expertise?

The results of the study demonstrate the progress areas of the students' Qualified Empathy skills. The development stages in the three progress areas are: (1) from emotional reaction to emotional response, (2) from understanding to empathic acting and (3) from client perspective to a more systemic approach. Implications of the results for Social Services students are discussed.

In this study, as in all studies, some limitations need to be taken into account. One limitation of this study is the size and “nature of data”. Secondly, challenges with the concept of Qualified Empathy need to be addressed and more research is needed to define it more concretely. Even so, as it is a new concept, we need more discussion on the differences in the definition of empathy and Qualified Empathy. However, this study offers one new perspective for discussion which is the need for empathy training, in social work education practices and in the field. An important ethical aspect of research emphasizes that its implementation must not be to the detriment of the people being researched (Juuti and Puusa, 2020, pp. 168).

Our findings demonstrate that educational interventions can improve students' empathy skills to more qualified skills. We emphasized that maintaining the skill demands continuous reflection as a lifelong process. This article provides an overview of an educational intervention to improve students' Qualified Empathy skills and suggests a definition for educators to frame the teaching of professional empathy or empathy in a professional context – especially in the social work context. Furthermore, with this educational intervention in social work, we offer a way to support the students to – not only – have a more professional approach to empathy but also to find a way to establish a more emotionally sustainable environment for professionals in social services. It is essential for social work education to focus on the growth of Qualified Empathy in students through supervision and guidance which supports their professional competence. By doing so, we contribute to the development of more sustainable working environments in the social work context.

Professional empathy is seen as an important factor in building a socially sustainable society from the perspectives of employees, clients and patients. We noticed that it is important to allow time and space for the learners to internalize the concept of Qualified Empathy. When we allow for this, students begin to recognize and assign more value to it and, as we suggest, they become more adept in their interactions and work with clients.

The study was a case study, designed to explore the students' experiences of their one semester long educational intervention (n = 20). Our research question was: How do students construct Qualified Empathy as a dimension of their own professional expertise? The results of the study demonstrate the progress areas of the students' Qualified Empathy skills. The development stages in the three progress areas are: (1) from emotional reaction to emotional response, (2) from understanding to empathic acting and (3) from client perspective to a more systemic approach. Implications of the results for Social Services students are discussed.

This paper aims at investigating the contemporary trend toward regional consumption from the perspective of consumers’ search for brand authenticity. In particular, the paper joins literature on brand authenticity from the marketing literature and literature on the local food movement to investigate consumers’ response to authenticity claims in the competition of local and global food brands.

The paper engages in a series of three experimental studies; one of which uses a Becker–DeGroot–Marschak lottery to assess individuals’ willingness to pay for authenticity claims of (non)global brands.

Findings show that authenticity perceptions lead to higher brand value independent of brand globalness; while global brands can mitigate competitive disadvantages in localized consumer markets by actively authenticating their brand image.

This paper reveals the usefulness of authentic brand positioning for global beverage brands when competing with local beverage brands to overcome the liability of globalness. To sustainably benefit from the local food movement, local brands thus will require to build up brand images beyond associations of mere authenticity.

Acknowledging that housing forms a large part of households’ and country’s long-term wealth, the South African Government has implemented various housing-related policies towards that end. Among these, the government has extended transfer duty exemption to house buyers – both individuals or natural persons and companies or other parties – to enable them buy houses of their choices since January 1950 to date. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between historical transfer duty exemption and housing demand in the City of Johannesburg (CoJ) over a longer period, where a comprehensive data set on house sales and other predictors was available.

This paper uses multi-year data on repeat house sales from 2010 to 2020 and other macro- and socio-economic variables to test the relationship between transfer duty exemption and housing demand in the CoJ, a core part of Gauteng province, South Africa. After cleaning the original data, final analysis was based on 139,121 repeat sales transactions. Data was analyzed in R.

Findings suggest that, when macro-, socio-economic and yearly effects are controlled, transfer duty has a damping effect on housing demand in the CoJ. The results were consistent across all the estimated models. While the motivation behind the implementation of transfer duty exemption in South Africa continues to encourage home ownership, these findings are unexpected because they do not offer support to that policy intention. These unexpected results are partly explained by the prevailing complexities of the housing market and related policies and the progressive tax regime. However, there are welfare effects that all buyers achieve across the housing market ecosystem.

This paper extends work on housing markets research in South Africa through the investigation of mortgage-based housing market in the CoJ that presents one of the densest, developed, bustling and growing housing market in the country. It also presents a fertile ground where all the effects of all the housing policies coalesce – in the statistical sense, one can control the effect of some aspects of housing policies, while appropriately testing the link between a specific policy (in this case, transfer duty exemption) and housing dynamics.

The link between supply chain agility (SCA) and performance has been tested in previous research with different samples and results. The present paper quantitatively analyses and summarises the impact of SCA on performance found in previous empirical papers and determines the influence of several identified moderators.

Using a meta-analysis approach based on a systematic literature review, a total of 63 empirical papers comprising a sample of 14,469 firms were meta-analysed to consider substantive (type of performance and SCA operationalisation) and extrinsic (economic region and industry) moderators.

Results confirm a significantly large, positive correlation between SCA and performance. None of the analysed moderators has enabled the identification of any significant differences between the SCA and performance correlations by subgroup. However, high heterogeneity in total variance, both in the full sample and the subgroups by moderator, demands further rigorously reported empirical research on this topic with clearly conceptualised variables and frameworks and the use of validated scales.

Several research gaps and best practice recommendations have been indicated to improve future empirical research on this topic.

Practitioners in different economic regions and industries will find consistent evidence of improvements in performance through SCA.

No meta-analysis has been found in previous research to estimate the value of the correlation between SCA and performance and the influence of moderating variables.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) rapidly became the “new normal” with profound implications for everyone's daily life. In this paper, emerging psychologists from diverse cultural backgrounds discuss four main ways in which COVID-19 impacted diverse psychological populations.

This paper was written as a reflection on how COVID-19 has impacted diverse psychological populations using authors' academic and personal experiences.

First, the authors explore inaccessible populations with a focus on domestic violence victims living in rural areas. Second, the authors consider consequences of social isolation with a focus on remote workers. Third, the authors investigate the consequences of public (dis)trust in the pandemic with a focus on migrant worker communities. Finally, the authors discuss pandemic-relevant subcultures with a focus on “anti-vaxxers”.

The paper concludes with a discussion of negative implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on diverse psychological populations, both for the present and the future, and ends with an action plan of possible interventions to overcome these limitations.

Overall, the current paper provides a broad overview of how the pandemic has shaped and will continue to shape diverse psychological populations.

International Journal of Emerging Markets (IJoEM) is a leading journal that publishes high-quality research focused on emerging markets. In 2020, IJoEM celebrated its fifteenth anniversary, and the objective of this paper is to conduct a retrospective analysis to commensurate IJoEM's milestone.

Data used in this study were extracted using the Scopus database. Bibliometric analysis, using several indicators, is adopted to reveal the major trends and themes of a journal. Mapping of bibliographic data is carried using VOSviewer.

Study findings indicate that IJoEM has been growing for publications and citations since its inception. Four significant research directions emerged, i.e. consumer behaviour, financial markets, financial institutions and corporate governance and strategic dimensions based on cluster analysis of IJoEM's publications. The identified future research directions are focused on emergent investments opportunities, trends in behavioural finance, emerging role technology-financial companies, changing trends in corporate governance and the rising importance of strategic management in emerging markets.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of IJoEM. The study presents the key themes and trends emerging from a leading journal considered a high-quality research journal for research on emerging markets by academicians, scholars and practitioners.

The purpose of the current study is to investigate occupational stereotypes among a professional sample of recruiters and other employees on the two fundamental dimensions of warmth and competence.

The authors conducted a survey to collect professionals´ (mostly recruiters´) ratings of preselected occupations. Participants were asked to rate warmth and competence attributes. Factor and cluster analysis were employed to investigate the two-dimensional structure of the warmth/competence space and how and whether occupations cluster as predicted by the stereotype content model (SCM).

Almost all occupations showed a clear two-factorial structure, corresponding to the warmth/competence dimensions. A five-cluster solution was deemed appropriate as depicting how occupations disperse on these dimensions. Implications for stereotyping research, the design of hiring discrimination experiments, and HRM are discussed.

In contrast to previous related research, in which participants select the included occupations themselves, the authors included prespecified common occupations, which should be important for representativeness. In addition, previous research has been conducted in the United States, while the authors conduct this study in a European context (Sweden). Finally, instead of studying students or participants with unspecified work experience, the authors focus on professionals (mostly recruiters).

Nigeria has one of the highest graduate unemployment rates in Africa, and there is no comprehensive policy framework to address it. Evidence shows that integrating craftsmanship into higher education academic programmes can enhance graduate employability. Therefore, there is a need to integrate it into the built environment programmes at institutions in Nigeria. The built environment craftmanship (BEC) in Nigeria's HEIs may have had some challenges, although studies about these challenges are scarce. In this regard, the study investigated BEC's perceived encumbrances and proffered measures to integrate craftsmanship skills in Nigerian HEIs built environment programmes.

The research adopted a qualitative research design using a virtual interview approach to solicit data from 34 experts across Nigeria. An exploratory approach was used to engage selected HEIs in Nigeria and thematic analysis was adopted to analyse the collected data, and saturation was achieved.

The study findings indicate that integrating BEC in built environment programmes will enhance graduate employment. However, possible encumbrances like institutional frameworks, funding, infrastructural development and pedagogical and social-cultural issues were found to be affecting BEC's integration into built environment programmes at higher education in Nigeria.

Future studies should explore more detailed large-scale investigations about integrating craftsmanship into higher education institution (HEI) programmes.

Given the dearth of pragmatic studies on the built environment graduates' unemployment in Nigeria, this research contributes to the academic community debates on reducing graduates' unemployment via BEC in HEIs.

This paper aims to examine how long-lived firms can further develop through digitalisation in terms of actions, conditions and effects from a competitiveness perspective.

This exploratory study follows an inductive approach based on a survey conducted via interviews undertaken with nine long-lived Italian firms. The dimensions of the model (command, continuity, community, connection), elaborated by Miller and Le Breton-Miller (2005) in relation to longevity factors, were chosen to analyse digitalisation’s contribution to these long-lived firms’ development.

The digitalisation implemented by the analysed firms contributed in a variety of ways: (1) improved the efficiency and effectiveness of their business processes, (2) enhanced the understanding of customer experience, (3) supported their craftsmanship and the transmission of the knowledge included in the entrepreneurial path, (4) increased the awareness of the cultural value of the firms’ heritage and (5) allowed for the development of cutting-edge design skills by experimenting with content on different digital platforms and devices.

This study suggests managers of long-lived firms develop digital skills that allow them to interact with the rapid evolution of this context and understand how to effectively implement digitalisation in their specific firm. From this perspective, it is strategic to establish or strengthen collaborative network relationships to acquire such necessary skills.

This study provides novel empirical evidence on how long-lived firms are facing the challenge of digitalisation in terms of actions, conditions and effects to improve their competitiveness and ensure their survival.

As the police service across England and Wales moves towards degree-level study for new recruits as a component of recognising the profession of policing, this paper describes and discusses the introduction of the Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship (PCDA) and the core skills of evidence-based policing (EBP) as an educational theme for solving work-based problems.

Authored by both policing practitioners and researchers, this paper refers to key literature whilst exploring the implementation of the PCDA as a component of a Policing Education Qualifications Framework (PEQF). It highlights some of the challenges faced with its implementation along with the benefits of the adopting this degree-level education and work-based programme where EBP is embedded in to both study and professional practice.

There are significant benefits to the police service of adopting the PCDA as one of the entry routes for new police constables and embracing the educational development and professional application of EBP. However, this does not come without a number of challenges for the service and the professional body for policing.

This paper, co-authored by both policing practitioners and researchers, provides a contemporary view on the introduction of the PCDA as an initial entry route for new police constables and the embedding of EBP within both their learning and professional practice. As the first graduates complete their studies, the paper discusses the opportunities the adoption presents and the challenges it faces both locally and nationally.