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The purpose of this paper is to detail the perceived influence of early gaming habits toward media production from seven students enrolled at a university in the Southeastern US. Participants identified as heavily involved in creating media such as anime, videos, fanfiction, webcomics, games, and digital music.

This exploratory study used qualitative research, thus data collection and analysis included questionnaires, interviews, and artifacts identifying and categorizing six main themes: game play preferences, persistence, early connections between game play and media, support and feedback, creations inspired by games, and significance of games in current lives.

The study found that most participants believed game play in childhood influenced increasingly complex media production habits. Six of the seven believed game play influenced their career path. The paper concludes with implications for education including games as conduits to personalized learning and career paths.

Results from this study extend prior research on the value of games to promote media production and meet personal and professional goals. This is significant as prior research linking early game play to media production influencing career goals is sparse.

The physical internet (PI) is an emerging logistics and supply chain management (SCM) concept that draws on different technologies and areas of research, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and key performance indicators, with the purpose of revolutionizing existing logistics and SCM practices. The growing literature on the PI and its noteworthy potential to be a disruptive innovation in the logistics industry call for a systematic literature review (SLR), which we conducted that defines the current state of the literature and outlines future research directions and approaches.

The SLR that was undertaken included journal publications, conference papers and proceedings, book excerpts, industry reports and white papers. We conducted descriptive, citation, thematic and methodological analyses to understand the evolution of PI literature.

Based on the literature review and analyses, we proposed a comprehensive framework that structures the PI domain and outlines future directions for logistics and SCM researchers.

Our research findings are limited by the relatively low number of journal publications, as the PI is a new field of inquiry that is composed primarily of conference papers and proceedings.

The proposed PI-based framework identifies seven PI themes, including the respective facilitators and barriers, which can inform researchers and practitioners on future potentially disruptive SC strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to understand why people shop at small retailers in their community. The authors investigate the influence of consumers’ civic commitment, measured at behavioural and perceptual levels, on small-retailer patronage (SRP).

Data from 984 respondents represent four French cities that host common town-centre shopping streets and large out-of-town retail parks. A structural equation model applied to the theoretical framework tests the relationships between civic behavioural commitment (CBC), civic perceptual commitment (CPC) and declared SRP.

The more an individual consumer exhibits civic behavioural commitment (CBC) to his/her community, the greater his/her small-retailer patronage (SRP). Furthermore, consumers who express strong civic perceptual commitment (CPC) prefer to patronise small retailers. Results show that CPC has a stronger impact on SRP than CBC does.

If the CPC has stronger effects on SRP than CBC does, town managers can catch people’s attention by communicating civic commitment to enhance CPC. Solidarity could be developed through large-scale social projects to send a strong signal to consumers regarding retailers’ commitment in the community. Finally, the study highlights the role businesses, retailers and consumers play in building communities. Partnerships across all local stakeholders should be built.

This paper is the first to define civic behavioural commitment within consumers’ life place based on social capital theory. Moreover, it offers a new framework for understanding perception of commitment within a community, and its impact on SRP. This measurement scale allows more efficient capturing of civic commitment to communities.

This lesson plan uses Amelia to Zora as an anchor book for an extended unit to discuss women’s contributions to the modern world. The lesson plan provides an annotated bibliography of biographies about the women profiles in the book as well as women selected by the instructor and students. The lesson plan is recommended for use in grades 5 and above and emphasizes social interaction among students in the whole process.

In academics and industry, significant efforts have been made to lead planners and control teams in evaluating project performance and control. In this context, numerous control metrics have been devised and put into practice, often with little emphasis on analyzing their underlying concepts. To cover this gap, this research aims to identify and analyze a holistic list of control metrics and their functionalities in the construction industry.

A multi-step analytical approach was conducted to achieve the study’s objectives. First, a holistic list of control metrics and their functionalities in the construction industry was identified. Second, a quantitative analysis based on social network analysis (SNA) was implemented to discover the most important functionalities.

The results revealed that the most important control metrics' functionalities (CMF) could differ depending on the type of metrics (lagging and leading) and levels of control. However, in general, the most significant functionalities include managing project progress and performance, evaluating the look-ahead level’s performance, measuring the reliability and stability of workflow, measuring the make-ready process, constraint management and measuring the quality of construction flow.

This research will assist the project team in getting a comprehensive sensemaking of planning and control systems and their functionalities to plan and control different dynamic aspects of the project.

In the era of new technological revolution, seeking to survive and guarantee business sustainability in their digital internationalization, enterprises choose to become environmentally oriented. The need for new green business models has become evident in recent years, and enterprises offer green services in creative and eco-friendly ways. However, does the display of a green label on hotels' websites really promote the eco-conscious tourists' online booking intention? This study aims to examine the impact of the perceived label on the online sustainable hotel booking intention of the eco-conscious tourists, using the foundations of signal theory.

This study adopted a structural equation model to integrate several constructs with a sample of 349 validated responses.

The empirical results highlight, the importance of the green label perception on the eco-conscious tourists' booking intention of online sustainable hotel and the role that green trust and green perceived risk play as a mediating variable between the perception of the exposed label and the booking intention. Indeed, when booking a sustainable hotel online, the tourists may be sensitive to the exposure of a green label. Therefore, this signal decreases the perceived risk of unsustainability and ultimately increases the trust in hotel's sustainability.

The first limitation is related to the sample employed in this study. Given that most of the participants were residents of France, the results of this study may not be generalized to the entire population. Secondly, a range of other factors can affect the eco-conscious tourists' intentions to book online a hotel with green label, such as their attitude, social media influence, tourists' satisfaction, etc. Indeed, other variables and/or signals could be adopted to study online booking intention in the pandemic era.

In light of these results, theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. The findings make an important contribution to SMEs sustainability and internationalization by exploring new ties. This study considers how SMEs and specifically hotels start following green practices (e.g. adoption of an eco-label) relevant to their international environment where they operate and in response to global pressures. SMEs can survive better in the highly competitive global environment where they need to employ more green practices, however, managers should consider how green trust and green perceived risk can affect customer behavior. It also adds to the existing literature by dealing with customer perceptions about the green label of sustainable hotels and its subsequent effect on booking intention.

This study had shown the importance of the display of green label on the eco-conscious tourist's online booking intention.

The emergence of new manufacturing technologies, spurred by intense competition, will lead to dramatically new products and processes. New management systems, organizational structures, and decision‐making methods will also emerge as complements to new products and processes. This paper attempts to investigate technologies, systems and paradigms for the effective management of networked enterprise (supply chain networks), especially long supply chains. In doing so, the paper presents not only an exhaustive literature review to identify the complexities, gaps and challenges associated with long supply chains but also the emerging enabling technologies to support these gaps and challenges.

The approach takes the form of an interview of industrials, researchers and a literature review.

“Competition in the future will not be between individual enterprises but between competing supply chains.” Business opportunities are captured by groups of enterprises in the same enterprise network. This is due to the global competition that forces enterprises to focus on their core competences.

The paper presents a vision of the future technical issues relating to long supply chains and an insight into the future scientific and industrial advances required to meet future market and public demands.

This research work highlights the research issues and discusses the key enabling features, which will need to evolve and be perfected in industry in the future manufacturing networked enterprises and especially long manufacturing supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the problem of integration of production and maintenance policies. In this context, the authors consider production systems made of parallel machines producing a single product over a finite horizon made of equal periods for which a forecasted demand is known. The authors investigate the impact of switching production in case of failure of any given machine.

A mathematical model is first developed to find an optimal production plan which minimizes the average total storage, shortage and production costs. Then, using this optimal production plan and taking into account the influence of the production rate on the degradation of each machine, optimal preventive maintenance (PM) policies are proposed for the situations with and without switching.

Optimal production rates are determined for each production period and for each machine. Optimal PM periods are also computed for each machine.

Usually, in manufacturing systems, the production rate of a machine influences its failure rate. In case a machine fails, it takes a random time to repair it during which production is lost. The paper attempts to propose a switching policy (SP) according to which the lost production is compensated by all the other machines. The effects of the SP coupled with the PM strategy are shown through a numerical example.

Contrarily to previous works, the authors consider more realistic settings with a non-negligible random time for repairing failed machines. In order to compensate the lost production during the repair of a failed machine, a SP is proposed to transfer the load uniformly to all the other machines. As a result, those machines will produce at a higher production rate and will consequently have their failure rate increased. It will therefore be essential to determine an optimal PM schedule knowing that durations of these activities are not negligible. It is shown that the simultaneous implementation of periodic PM and load transfer in case of failure is the most economical integrated strategy.

Hospital length of stay (LOS) is not only a function of patient- and disease-related factors, but is also determined by other health system-wide variables. Managers and clinicians strive to achieve the best possible trade-off between patients’ needs and efficient utilisation of hospital resources, while also embracing ethical decision making. The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of the hospital’s major stakeholders as to what affects the duration of LOS of inpatients.

Using a data-triangulated case study approach, 50 semi-structured interviews were performed with management, doctors, nurses and patients. Additionally, the hospitals’ standard operating procedures, which are pertinent to the subject, were also included in the thematic analysis.

This study shows that LOS is a multi-dimensional construct, which results from a complex interplay of various inputs, processes and outcomes.

The findings emerging from a single case study approach cannot be generalised across settings and contexts, albeit being in line with the current literature.

The study concludes that a robust hospital strategy, which addresses deficient organisational processes that may unnecessarily prolong LOS, is needed. Moreover, the hospital’s strategy must be sustained by providing good primary care facilities within the community set-up, as well as by providing more long-term care and rehabilitation beds to support the hospital turnover.

The subject of LOS in hospitals has so far been tackled in a fragmented manner. This paper provides a comprehensive and triangulated account of the complexities surrounding the duration in which patients are kept in hospital by key stakeholders, most of whom were hands-on in the day-to-day running of the hospital under study.

This paper studies the preemptive scheduling problem of independent jobs on identical machines. The purpose of this paper is to minimize the makespan under the imposed constraints, namely, the ones that relate the transportation delays which are required to transport a preempted job from one machine to another. This study considers the case when the transportation delays are variable.

The contribution is twofold. First, this study proposes a new linear programming formulation in real and binary decision variables. Then, this study proposes and implements a solution strategy, which consists of two stages. The goal of the first stage is to obtain the best machines order using a local search strategy. For the second stage, the objective is to determine the best possible sequence of jobs. To solve the preemptive scheduling problem with transportation delays, this study proposes a heuristic and two metaheuristics (simulated annealing and variable neighborhood search), each with two modes of evaluation.

Computational experiments are presented and discussed on randomly generated instances.

The study has implications in various industrial environments when the preemption of jobs is allowed.

This study proposes a new linear programming formulation for the problem with variable transportation delays as well as a corresponding heuristic and metaheuristics.