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The involvement of stakeholders such as employers, alumni, and students has always been considered a key element in improving the higher education (HE) system. While considering stakeholders as key players in serving the market and in improving HE instruction, a two-sided collaborative involvement should aim at satisfying the mutual interests and overcoming existing barriers. Quality assurance systems have always supported crossing these barriers to link with the external stakeholders. However, many of the external quality assurance agencies (EQA) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region specify a group of external holders, limiting the various types of key stakeholders needed to enhance the academic programs. On the other hand, there are encountered risks in involving stakeholders if left with no objective guidance, especially that quality agencies are formidably urging the universities to consider the external stakeholders’ inputs to satisfy the quality assurance standards. The main objective of this chapter is to investigate the types of stakeholders’ and their levels of involvement within the local higher education institutions (HEIs). The chapter aims to provide an insight to invest in this involvement and utilize it to further improve the programs and their graduate attributes and suggests actions that would proficiently and truly enhance the involvement of external stakeholders. The outcomes of this chapter are expected to guide the EQAs and the HEIs to develop new practices in involving stakeholders, such as curriculum input, collegiate internships, aligning graduate attributes to market needs, financial support through endowments, professional development, and partnerships in service-level agreements.

Every organization must deal with new challenges such as automation, digitization, or structural transformation, which requires a highly resilient and engaged workforce to stay competitive. Strong leadership in a firm and specific abilities of the leader are necessary to manage uncertainties and to be able to react to certain changes. Various studies regarding organizations and resilience focus on large enterprises, while studies on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are lacking. SMEs account for 99.6% of all companies in Austria and are largely run by entrepreneurial owners and their families. Based on transformational theory, the theory of resilience as well as positive psychology, we investigate five SME owners and their personal resilience in an exploratory study. The owners were selected by purposive sampling with the aim to develop a framework with recommended actions for the personal resilience of SME leaders.

This study explores the influence of police coercive actions during Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) encounters on citizen complaints of police misconduct in 76 precincts in New York City.

Using data from NYPD's SQF reports, Citizen Complaint Review Board, and demographic measures, the analysis focuses on specific coercive actions (frisk, search, summons, physical force, and arrest) and their association with citizen complaints (excessive force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, and offensive language).

Bivariate and multivariate analyses revealed frequent lower-level coercive actions, such as frisks and summons, are linked to increased citizen complaints. Surprisingly, higher levels of coercive actions involving force and arrests do not substantially impact complaints, challenging conventional assumptions.

The research underscores the importance of transparency, accountability, and positive police-community relations. Addressing precinct-specific characteristics influencing the relationship between coercive actions and citizen complaints is crucial for fostering a more constructive and accountable policing approach in New York City precincts.

This study challenges assumptions by providing a distinctive perspective on the impact of police coercive actions during SQF encounters on citizen complaints. The unexpected finding that higher levels of coercive actions, typically involving force and arrests, do not substantially impact complaints contributes to the discourse on police-community interactions, offering a nuanced understanding of the relationship between specific coercive actions and citizen complaints.

Professional football clubs, like other businesses, need to make investments in both human capital and fixed capital. We examine how investments in players, managers and stadiums drive football club performance.

Using data from the English Premier League (EPL) from 2012 to 2021, we use a lag model to relate investments in the past two years to the current financial and sporting performance of clubs.

We find that investments in new players are associated with better subsequent sporting performance. A £100 million increase in transfer expenditure is associated with 12 more points and 4 better table positions over the following two seasons. Investments in stadiums are associated with better subsequent financial performance. An increase in stadium capacity by 10,000 seats is associated with an extra £26 million in profits over the next two seasons. Manager changes are associated with better sporting performance in non-Big Six clubs, but worse sporting and financial performance in Big Six clubs.

These results have implications for optimal investment strategies at professional football clubs. For example, we find that new managers in Big Six clubs need to be complemented by additional transfer expenditure of at least £135 million to maintain the same level of sporting performance.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the influence of budgeting process elements (budget participation, preparation, implementation and evaluation) on budget performance of government.

A cross-sectional survey was administered among budget officers from government agencies, departments, and units in Malaysia. Descriptive and regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between the budgeting process and budget performance.

The findings revealed the significant influence of the two predictors: (1) budget participation and (2) budget implementation and evaluation, on budget performance. Both have positive and significant impacts on budget performance. However, budget preparation appeared to have no significant relationship with budget performance, although there is positive effect.

This study provides empirical evidence on the budgeting process factors that influence budget performance. The findings hopefully are of interest to government officials, especially frontline bureaucrats, who seek to ensure that budget performance meets expectations in Malaysia and other countries.

This study scrutinizes the attitudes of postgraduate students specializing in education toward research at one University of Education in Myanmar.

Having collected data from 121 Master in Education (MEd) students in three education departments, the study validated Papanastasiou's (2014) Revised-Attitude toward Research (R-ATR) scale by performing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A one-way MANOVA was used to establish the significance of mean differences between groups and ANOVA was used for the same purpose among groups.

The R-ATR scale is fit with the sample (χ²/df = 1.60), and the students' attitudes toward research are favorable with mean value for research usefulness (5.98), positive research predispositions (5.55) and research anxiety (3.61), despite feeling stressed and anxious. There was a significant difference in the students' attitudes toward research regarding their departments, while no significant difference was found based on their research experience, gender and age.

There should be an effective mechanism in implementing the research course and in online delivery mode, collaboration between the faculties in the process of revision and review of the research courses, effective strategies of improving research instructors' quality and also internationalization to sustain students' positive attitudes toward research and to reduce their stress and anxiety.

This research is empirically novel, and the initiative attempts to first use the R-ATR scale in teacher education in Myanmar.

This systematic review aimed to identify and categorize applications using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to support activities outside of direct healthcare provision.

A systematic electronic search was performed, and 53 studies were included after the selection process.

The results show that FHIR is being used to support (1) clinical research (i.e. clinical research based on interventional trials, data interoperability to support clinical research and advanced communication services to support clinical research), (2) public health and (3) medical education. Despite the FHIR potential to support activities outside of direct healthcare provision, some barriers were identified, namely difficulties translating the proposed applications to clinical environments or FHIR technical issues that require further developments.

This study provided a broad review of how FHIR is being applied in clinical activities outside of direct clinical care and identified three major domains, that is, clinical research, public health and medical education, being the first and most representative in terms of number of publications.

The purpose of this study is to explore how past and future temporal focus of CEOs in the hospitality industry influence their intention to invest in metaverse technology and the underlying mechanism under boundary conditions of perceived competitive pressure.

This multi-informant study collected data over three waves from a sample of 235 CEOs and their subordinates in India’s hospitality industry. A PLS-SEM was applied to the study data. Further, the study also used phenomenological interviews to capture CEOs’ perspectives on the study’s conceptual model.

Findings suggest that the past temporal focus of CEOs decreases technology orientation, and future temporal focus increases the technology orientation of firms, consequently impacting the intention to invest in the metaverse. CEOs’ perceived competitive pressure moderates the mediating relationship, such that the negative impact of past temporal focus on technology orientation is decreased and that of future temporal focus on the CEO is increased.

By exploring the role of a CEO’s past and future temporal focus on influencing technology orientation and, hence, adoption of new technology, the study extends upper-echelon theory to the field of metaverse adoption in the hospitality industry and responds to scholars’ calls to explore the industry’s technology adoption from the lens of the upper echelon.

The study has significant implications for the success of the adoption of metaverse technology in the hospitality industry. Findings imply that the board members should encourage CEOs to have future temporal focus.

The study provides novel insights into the adoption of metaverse technology by the hospitality industry, where CEO attributes such as their temporal focus influence intention to invest in metaverse.

This paper aims to investigate how social media support startups in accessing international markets and interacting with foreign customers and stakeholders, focusing primarily on the social network LinkedIn.

Given the explorative research aim, the paper adopts a multiple case study approach, analyzing seven Italian food tech startups. 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted, also involving startup accelerators and a business angel to deepen the knowledge on the investigated phenomenon. In addition, a content analysis of the LinkedIn pages of the seven selected startups was conducted using NVivo 14 software.

The results of this study show that social media support startups to (1) diffuse brand awareness in international markets, (2) position their offering abroad and (3) develop relationships with international stakeholders to penetrate the local business. Furthermore, the main challenges and difficulties related to the use of social media by startups for these purposes were identified.

This study provides useful managerial implications to enable startups to strategically use social media to access international markets and connect with key foreign networks. Also from a policy perspective, incentives to support the expansion and consolidation of startups into international markets are crucial.

Although a vast literature has dealt with internationalization strategies, this study clarifies the role of social media in changing these dynamics speeding up startups’ access to foreign markets and identifying key local stakeholders.

This study sought to test two competing sets of hypotheses derived from two different theoretical perspectives regarding (1) the effects of leader–follower similarity and dissimilarity in psychological resilience on the follower's absenteeism in times of organizational crisis and (2) the moderating effect of relational demography (gender and age similarity) in these relationships.

Polynomial regression and response surface analysis were performed using data from 510 followers and 149 supervisors in a financial firm in Canada.

The results overall support the similarity–attraction perspective, but not the resource complementarity perspective. Dissimilarity in resilience was predictive of followers' absenteeism, and similarity in surface-level conditions (gender and age) attenuates the relational burdens triggered by resilience discrepancy.

The findings reiterate the importance of developing employees' resilience, while shedding light on the importance for managers of being aware of their potential misalignment with subordinates resilience.

The results (1) suggest that it is the actual (di)similarity with the leader, rather than leader's degree of resilience, that shapes followers' absenteeism and (2) add nuance to the resilience literature.