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Over the past several decades, instructional leadership has gradually gained increasing currency as a key role of school principals throughout much of the world. This is also the case in Malaysia where educational research, policy and practice have brought the instructional leadership role of the principal front and center. The purpose of this paper is to assess the conceptual models, research methods, and foci of scholars in the study of principal instructional leadership in Malaysia over the past 30 years.

Systematic methods were used to identify all studies conducted in Malaysia that had used the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS) (Hallinger, 1982/1990/2015) as the data collection instrument. This search yielded a database of 120 studies completed between 1989 and 2016 written in both English and Bahasa Malay. Common data were extracted from the 120 research reports, coded and entered into a MS Excel spreadsheet for analysis. Quantitative methods were employed to analyze modal trends and synthesize patterns in the data across the studies.

The search identified 120 PIMRS studies, 90 percent of which had been conducted since 2005. This represented a surprisingly large corpus of studies. Over 75 percent of the Malaysian studies of principal instructional leadership had been conducted as graduate (master and doctoral) theses, relatively few of which had achieved publication in journals. The authors’ analysis found that most studies had used lower order (i.e. bivariate, direct effects) conceptual models and relied heavily on descriptive and simple correlational statistical tests. The lack of consistent results within the database of studies was attributed largely to limitations in research design and quality.

The 120 PIMRS studies conducted in Malaysia comprise a surprisingly large corpus of research on principal instructional leadership. Indeed, the Malaysian corpus is second only to the USA in terms of the number of PIMRS studies of principal instructional leadership. Nonetheless, limitations in the research models and methods employed in these studies suggest a need for stronger methodological training before Malaysian scholars can achieve the goal of contributing useful knowledge to the local and global knowledge base. Specific recommendations are offered for strengthening the quality of research.

The recent expansion of higher education in Malaysia – like other developing societies – has yielded progress in the scope of research production. However, numerous challenges remain in transforming the potential for useful knowledge production from graduate research into reality.

This is the first review of research on principal leadership conducted in Malaysia. The review follows efforts by scholars to systematically identify the boundaries of knowledge in educational leadership and management within East Asian societies (e.g. China, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan and Hong Kong). Moreover, this is the first review of research that examines the use of the PIMRS in a single society.

Globally, several studies have shown that hospital building is charged with multiple inherent risks because a large number of users are vulnerable in tragic events. Thus, the need for the fire safety management plan (FSMP) has been proved as an instrument to mitigate fire and related risks in healthcare facilities. In Malaysia, FSMP regarding public healthcare building is yet to be explored in-depth. Therefore, this paper explores the information necessary to develop the FSMP framework for public hospital buildings.

The paper’s objectives were accomplished via a combination of five face-to-face interviews and observations of five selected public hospitals in Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. The five key participants were across the five public hospitals and collated data analysed through thematic analysis with the assistance of MAXQDA 2018.

Findings show that fire safety stakeholders practice system, fire safety action plan and fire risk management were the three main variables that promote fire safety programme and will improve FSMP for Malaysia’s public hospital buildings.

This paper’s data collection is limited to Penang, Malaysia, and a qualitative research approach was used, but this does not deteriorate the strength of the findings. Future studies are needed to consider validating findings from this paper via a quantitative approach.

The suggested framework can be employed by Malaysia’s public hospital authorities as a guideline to mitigate fire hazards in the country’s healthcare facilities.

This paper is encouraging hospital operators and other key stakeholders to improve on their FSMP for healthcare buildings across Malaysia as part of the study implications.

Contractors’ personnel play a prominent role in enhancing the constructability of facilities design, construction and assessment. Looks at the constructability concepts identified by the Construction Industry Institute at Austin, Texas (CII) and represents and describes the constructability concepts in relation to contractors’ personnel. Discusses the role of each of them in enhancing constructability of facilities projects. Concludes that a set of obligations are the answer to the question of “How can the contractor’s personnel enhance the project constructability?”.

The perception of costs and benefits allows residents to carry out an assessment that determines their attitude towards tourism. This study seeks to determine the effect of the perceived benefits and costs (economic, sociocultural and environmental) on the support to the arrival of more tourists, both directly and mediated by overall attitude towards tourism, in the case of Punta del Este. Punta del Este forms part of the Department of Maldonado and is the main sun and beach tourism destination in the Oriental Republic of Uruguay. The questionnaire contained items with five-point Likert scales and sociodemographic questions. The data used (obtained between March and August 2016) are made up of a sample of 420 residents from Maldonado and Punta del Este. The analysis of the data has been carried out through partial least squares (PLS) regression, specifically SmartPLS. Among the results, it should be noted that benefits and costs perceived have no direct effect on the support to the arrival of more tourists; only economic benefits (positive) and sociocultural costs (negative) have a significant effect on the overall attitude towards tourism; the support to the arrival of more tourists depends exclusively on the overall attitude.

Increased competition amongst the hotel industry players has challenged managers not to focus their attention exclusively on ways to attract and satisfy their customers, but to invest in customer retention strategies with the potential to ensure superior performance of their hotels. This study aims to determine strategies to retain customers in hotels in Ghana, an emerging market. A cross-sectional survey was employed to collect data from 677 hotel employees in 56 Ghanaian licensed hotels. Based on SmartPLS, study findings indicate that customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention embedded in the tangibility and reliability dimensions of the lodging quality index are important for customer retention among hotels in Ghana.

This study focuses on examining the impact of energy consumption, economic structure, population, and manufacturing output on the CO₂ emissions of selected emerging countries by utilizing the Structural Time Series Model (STSM). Based on the annual data ranging from 1970 to 2019, the model is built up using total primary energy consumption, GDP per capita, population and manufacturing value-added, and, finally, a stochastic Underlying Emission Trend as explanatory variables. STSM is extended by the introduction of the notion of Underlying Energy Demand Trend (UEDT) as a factor for exogenous effects, including development in technical progress, energy efficiency improvements, changes in human behaviors, economy, and environmental regulations. In this context, STSM and the notion of UEDT are implemented to form a forecasting model for CO₂ emissions of the selected emerging countries. The model discovers the significant influences of all selected variables of CO₂ emissions. The results suggest that the most forceful factor in CO₂ emissions is the total primary energy supply. Furthermore, while the long-term impact of economic growth on CO₂ emissions is negative for some emerging economies, it is positive for several others. The model also measures the long-term manufacturing value-added elasticity of CO₂ emissions in these emerging economies.

The integrity of heritage and landscape hinges on protection and restoration policies. Such policies are implemented through the determination of buffer zones that most of them are mainly based on the self-absorbed view, which isolates cultural sites from the community, instead of the more inclusive perception-based view. This study used perceptions as a base in identifying buffer zones in Anahita Temple, in comparison with previous study.

Accordingly, two parallel and qualitative methods were implemented. First, the site inventory approach was used to determine physical buffer zone, and then historical and temporal perceptions were used to determine a perception-based one. In addition, integrated buffer zone was defined based on two approaches. Finally, the participatory importance and performance analysis were proposed in order to conservation strategies formulation.

The results indicated that a physical buffer zone isolates the historical site from its landscape, thereby presenting challenges. By contrast, constructing a perception-based one not only maintains the integrity of the landscape but also creates correspondence between the landscape and people's mental map of the site.

Maintaining the site's integrity is expected to encourage participation from the local community and fuel more effective conservation efforts but it also introduces challenges given the need to impose new regulations.

Despite various studies on role of perception in Historical Landscape, less attention has been paid to the role of perception in definition of heritage buffer zone. Therefore, the main goal is to develop a framework to determine the buffer zone of heritage sites by providing a sample.

Tourism and community development are two complementary variables. There are many studies in the literature examining the effects of tourism on society. However, the number of studies focussing on the subject from the perspective of overtourism is still very limited. Although a shrinking in tourism demand is estimated for the next few years due to Covid-19, it is expected that the sector will face an even more intense tourist boom around the world after this health crisis. Therefore, the phenomenon of overtourism remains important. In this context, a conceptual examination was made in the current chapter regarding the observed and possible effects of tourism density on communities. The existing literature clearly shows that being successful in the long term is impossible with a tourism plan that uses natural resources, infrastructure facilities and traditional values of the region to create tourist demand but ignores the wishes and well-being of the community residents.

Environmental degradation is a global concern that results from massive economic activities. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are one of the environmental degradation indicators. This study investigates the impact of population, oil consumption, international tourist arrival, and corruption on CO₂ emissions in ASEAN’s five developing countries of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam from 1998 to 2017. This study employed panel Fixed-effect (FE) regression to estimate the panel data generated by British Petroleum and World Bank. The result revealed that the population has a significant positive effect on CO₂ emissions. Furthermore, oil consumption has a significant positive effect on CO₂ emissions. Meanwhile, the effect of tourism and the corruption perception index (CPI) as a proxy of corruption on CO₂ emissions was positive but not significant. Authorities should construct such policies to reduce CO₂ emissions by applying low-carbon technologies, green mass transport, and creating less corrupt behavior.