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Extensive studies from the fields of mentoring, coaching and associated collegial relationships attest to the efficacy of professional partnerships in building capability and enhancing the practice and professional expertise of the participants. In particular, partnerships between staff across faculty, as well as across administrative and academic roles, can lead to shifts in student achievement, advanced practice in teaching and learning, and strategic alliances both within and external to the institution. In the current climate of challenge and uncertainty for tertiary institutions, it is crucial that the investment in students, campuses and a raft of delivery options is accompanied by a deliberate creation of opportunities for an institution's most significant resource – and expense – its people. This chapter includes vignettes of three deliberately constructed, interdisciplinary workplace relationships which comprised part of the authors’ research in 2007. Each relationship sought to combine complementary expertise, although the discourse and focus of engagement differed considerably. The three selected relationships evidenced successful primary outcomes in different areas: student success and retention; an enriched curriculum and pedagogy; and institutional gain. They also illustrate the distinctive nature of New Zealand's bicultural heritage operating in an educational setting. Through telling these stories, it is hoped that emerging threads and themes can contribute to a shared understanding of the multifarious benefits of interdisciplinary practice in higher education.

This study aims to model repurchase intention among smartphones users by using structural equation modelling. The model was used to determine the impact of service quality measured by convenience, functionality and perceived usefulness on users’ satisfaction and repurchase intention. The study also examined the mediating role of users’ satisfaction on repurchase intention.

A survey research design was adopted to gather data used for this study through questionnaire administration. In total, 500 copies of the questionnaire were administered to smartphones users in Nigeria, and 486 copies of the questionnaire were found usable for data analyses. The data obtained were analysed using different statistical tools such as mean, standard deviation, correlation, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling through the use of Analysis of Moment Structures software.

The study revealed that users’ satisfaction is significantly influenced by convenience, functionality and perceived usefulness. Similarly, repurchase intention is significantly impacted by perceived usefulness. The results further showed that there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between users’ satisfaction and repurchase intention. However, convenience and functionality were found to have positive but statistically insignificant relationship with repurchase intention.

This study contributes to the emerging discourse on the perception of smartphone users with respect to convenience, functionality, perceived usefulness, satisfaction and repurchase intention in the Nigerian context. It presents a latest attempt and useful insights on the service quality–users’ satisfaction–repurchase intention nexus among smartphone users in Nigeria.

Providing high-quality e-banking services is considered a basic strategy for attracting and retaining customers with electronic-banking platforms. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate a comprehensive moderated mediated mechanism for enhancing customer loyalty toward e-banking platforms via e-banking service quality (EBSQ) practices. Reliability, website design, privacy and security and customer service and support are the dimensions of EBSQ.

Data were collected through structured questionnaires from a sample of 1,028 e-banking users in India. To test the hypotheses, a structural equation modeling approach was used.

The findings showed that of the EBSQ dimensions, reliability along with privacy and security enhanced customer loyalty to e-banking. The initial trust in e-banking mediates the effects of EBSQ dimensions on customer loyalty except for website design. The mediation effects of initial trust varied between high and low-involved consumers.

This study was conducted with e-banking users in one country using cross-sectional data. Hence, the model should be replicated among e-banking users in other countries and with the longitudinal data.

Establishing a loyal customer base is an important goal for banks. This study demonstrates which specific EBSQ dimensions banks should emphasize to enhance consumers’ initial trust and loyalty toward e-banking services.

This study suggests a moderated mediated mechanism for enhancing customer loyalty to e-banking, which incorporates initial trust as a mediator and consumer involvement as a moderator. It applies cognitive-motivation-relational theory to link EBSQ dimensions with customer loyalty. Thus, this study enables a better understanding of this theory in the e-banking context.

This study aims to explore the factors influencing the intention to use e-democracy. The literature depicted conflicting results regarding such domain and especially in the Middle East, where the authors aim at establishing a solid view of the discipline.

A research model was developed based on the theory of planned behavior, technology acceptance model and unified theory for acceptance and use of technology-2. The model hypothesized that perceived public value (PPV), ease of use and enjoyment are major antecedents of attitudes, and subjective norms (SNs), perceived behavioral control (PBC) and attitudes are significant predictors of behavioral intentions. A quantitative cross-sectional design was used. A questionnaire was used to explore Jordanian citizens’ perceptions regarding the research model constructs. A sample of 302 Jordanian citizens filled the surveys based on their awareness of e-democracy concepts and their willingness to participate in the study. This study uses the structural equation modeling approach with partial least square as an analysis method.

Findings indicated that PPV, perceived ease of use and enjoyment jointly determine the attitudes of citizens toward e-democracy. Results also suggest that attitudes, PBC and SNs have a significant effect on citizen’s intention to use e-democracy. Finally, this research supported the role of enjoyment as the most significant determinant of citizen’s attitude toward using e-democracy.

This study is limited by its small sample size and newly developed Arabic instrument. Still, results imply that more research is needed to replicate and validate the instrument and support the role of the selected research constructs. Public institutions are required to make e-democracy applications enjoyable and easy to use. They also need to demonstrate its value to the public.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the few studies to explore e-democracy and the first to conduct an empirical study (survey-based) in Jordan. The foundation of the study depended on three robust theories in the technology adoption theories.

This study aims to investigate the adoption and use of electronic voting (e-voting) system as an option to credible elections in Nigeria, as well as the factors that could influence the readiness of Oyo state citizens in Nigeria to use the system.

The study adopts the survey research design, while the Technology Readiness Acceptance Model provides the theoretical framework. A two-stage sampling procedure (random and convenience) was used to select 500 Nigerian citizens, who are of voting age, while data were collected with a structured questionnaire.

Findings reveal that the citizens are ready to use the e-voting system if adopted by the Nigerian Government. Optimism and innovativeness are positively correlated, and perceived discomfort and perceived insecurity are negatively correlated, with readiness to use e-voting system by Oyo state citizens. The Technology Acceptance Model constructs (perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use), as well as computer self-efficacy also have positive correlations with readiness to use of e-voting.

The population of the study was limited to only citizens in one state of the federation; hence, the results cannot be generalised to all citizens in Nigeria.

The study contributes to existing knowledge on adoption and use of technology and confirms that optimism and innovativeness are motivators and discomfort and insecurity are inhibitors of intention to use and actual usage of technology. Hence, these constructs should be taken into account and promoted when Nigeria is planning to adopt the e-voting system.

This paper could assist the Nigerian Government on the factors to consider when implementing the e-voting system.

This paper is one of the first pieces of empirical research that attempted to investigate the factors that could promote acceptance and use of the e-voting system in Nigeria.

Hate speech is an expression of intense hatred. Twitter has become a popular analytical tool for the prediction and monitoring of abusive behaviors. Hate speech detection with social media data has witnessed special research attention in recent studies, hence, the need to design a generic metadata architecture and efficient feature extraction technique to enhance hate speech detection.

This study proposes a hybrid embeddings enhanced with a topic inference method and an improved cuckoo search neural network for hate speech detection in Twitter data. The proposed method uses a hybrid embeddings technique that includes Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) for word-level feature extraction and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) which is a variant of recurrent neural networks architecture for sentence-level feature extraction. The extracted features from the hybrid embeddings then serve as input into the improved cuckoo search neural network for the prediction of a tweet as hate speech, offensive language or neither.

The proposed method showed better results when tested on the collected Twitter datasets compared to other related methods. In order to validate the performances of the proposed method, t-test and post hoc multiple comparisons were used to compare the significance and means of the proposed method with other related methods for hate speech detection. Furthermore, Paired Sample t-Test was also conducted to validate the performances of the proposed method with other related methods.

Finally, the evaluation results showed that the proposed method outperforms other related methods with mean F1-score of 91.3.

The main novelty of this study is the use of an automatic topic spotting measure based on naïve Bayes model to improve features representation.

This study empirically examined and investigated the relationship between sustainable manufacturing practices (SMPs) and performance of table water industry (TWI) in Nigeria.

Cross-sectional survey research design was adopted for this study. The population of this study covers all the registered table water firms in Delta and Edo states by National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC). Convenience sampling, a nonprobability sampling method, was used in administering the questionnaire to selected table water firms in the two states used for the study. The sample can be considered as experimental group used for the research and analysis. Data collected through questionnaire administration were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used in estimating the research models, through the use of Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS version 24) software.

The study found that SMPs are adopted by table water firms registered by NAFDAC. It was also found that sustainable packaging and waste management significantly influence the different dimensions of sustainable performance of table water firms.

The study recommends that table water producers should ensure they consistently adhere to NAFDAC standards after product registration and certification to make the products safe for consumption. Also, NAFDAC should promote a regulatory environment with appropriate incentives to table water firms that consistently comply with stipulated regulations that can promote the sustainability of the environment while any table water firms found engaging in unwholesome activities that can undermine the health status of consumers should be severely sanctioned.

The study provides a comprehensive analysis of sustainability practices in the Nigerian TWI by examining four manufacturing practices and how they impact on sustainability performance of the industry. The study will help to reinforce the need for stakeholders in the TWI to be more environmentally conscious.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of service quality and relationship quality on customer loyalty in different stages of the relationship life cycle in online banking services.

A total of 651 Iranian online banking customers participated in the research by completing questionnaires. The research hypotheses were tested using structural modeling technique.

The results showed that the relationship quality on customer loyalty in online banking services is affected by the relationship life cycle. The results also showed that online service quality, in the form of Utilitarian quality and Hedonic quality, has a positive effect both directly and indirectly on customer loyalty through online relationship quality.

In this paper, the relationship dynamics was achieved through adding the relationship life cycle variable to the model. However, the study was a cross-sectional research and different results might be obtained if data was collected longitudinally.

In an online banking service, the role of relationship quality in the prediction of customer loyalty is reduced as the relationship ages. Therefore, marketers need to consider other marketing actions to continue their relationship with the customer in the long run.

This paper examines customer loyalty to online banking services from dynamic perspective by introducing relationship life cycle as a moderating variable for the first time. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper is to develop the relationship marketing literature in the field of relationship dynamics and to challenge the effectiveness of relationship marketing in the long run.