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Widespread news coverage, politicised debate and social media commentary have given prominence to COVID-19 as an unparalleled threat to global health and mortality, intensifying panic and insecurity worldwide. In response, the endorsement and amplification of false claims about the pandemic has proliferated, in many cases, by public figures in the online ‘wellness’ realm. Using COVID-19 as a case study, this chapter interrogates observed connections between digital wellness cultures and informational disorders in times of crisis. The authors discuss the bourgeois liberal-individualist ideals that increasingly underpin much of this communication, exemplified through the co-option of social justice rhetoric and narratives of the ‘persecuted hero’. The authors also recognise the growing number of wellness influencers openly resisting pandemic-related mis/disinformation, and note the forms of anti-individualist, mutual care demonstrated in these ‘debunking’ efforts. The authors argue that these practices reflect a form of networked solidarity – enacted alongside a discursive distancing from individualist modes of thinking – that can be understood by applying a social ecological framework for understanding ‘resilience’.

Vulnerabilities in subsistence marketplaces arise from the multifaceted deprivation that characterizes poverty. Associated with low income is low literacy, leading to vulnerabilities in terms of thinking, feeling, and coping. We review literature on vulnerability and on subsistence marketplaces, bringing out the confluence of vulnerabilities consumers in these contexts face. We also describe marketplace literacy, a way of addressing vulnerabilities and developing capabilities. We provide a case study of women in agriculture and conclude with a discussion of implications for research, education, and practice.

There is evidence that both hypnotherapy and virtual reality (VR) can be helpful in reducing perceived stress in the general population. This is a feasibility and acceptability trial of an intervention combining hypnotherapy and VR to establish its acceptability in students. This study aims to establish whether students found the experience acceptable, described any adverse effects and whether they reported feeling calmer after the experience.

The study was testing the hypothesis that students would attend the sessions and find the experience acceptable. A secondary hypothesis was that preliminary qualitative and quantitative evaluation of measures of stress and wellbeing would signal potential improvements.

All participants completed all three sessions. No side effects were reported. Visual analogue scales recorded each day assessing the immediate effect improved. At the end of the intervention, there was an increase in wellbeing of 2.40 (95% CI: 1.33, 3.53, p = 0.006), and a decrease in depression of 0.73 (95% CI: 0.40, 1.07, p = 0.010), reflecting large effect sizes of 0.76 and 0.83, respectively. Qualitative feedback was generally very positive.

This study is small with just 15 students and was over a short period of time. The recruitment method meant there was no way to establish whether the volunteer students were representative of the general student population in terms of mental wellbeing. There was no control arm.

The preliminary results suggest that a larger controlled trial is justified.

This VR experience may have benefit to university students and to the wider population.

This described the evaluation of a novel intervention for perceived stress combining hypnotherapy and virtual reality in a group of healthcare students, with promising results suggesting further evaluation is needed.

This study empirically examines the nonlinear effects of mimicking peer firms' cash holdings on shareholder value, with consideration of macroeconomic conditions.

An instrumental variable approach for nonlinear models is estimated for a large sample of US firms over the period 1991–2019. This approach addresses the reflection problem in examining peer effects, whereby it is impossible to separate the individual's effects on the group, or vice versa, if both are simultaneously determined.

The authors find an inverted U-shaped association between shareholder value and mimicking intensity of peer firms' cash holdings. This result suggests that mimicking peer firms' cash holdings is subject to diminishing returns. It is more beneficial at lower levels of mimicking intensity but less so or suboptimal at higher levels. Further evidence indicates that this inverted U-shaped shareholder value-mimicking intensity nexus is asymmetric. Specifically, it is salient for decreases relative to increases in cash holdings and, more importantly, in good relative to bad macroeconomic states. The findings are robust to several concerns and have important implications for liquidity management policies.

The authors provide new empirical evidence of the nonlinear effects of mimicking peer firms' cash holdings on shareholder value, which varies with macroeconomic conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between company reputation and dividend policy.

In this study, sample of 98,809 firm-year observations from 22 countries covering 2005–2016 were used.

Firm reputation concerns are associated with higher propensities to pay dividends and payout ratios. Further, this positive effect is more pronounced for firms with high free cash flows, high information asymmetry and low institutional monitoring. The results are robust to an instrumental variable approach, propensity score matching and the Heckman two-stage correction approach while addressing endogeneity concerns.

These findings have significant implications for various stakeholders, such as existing and potential investors, managers, policymakers and regulators, by providing insights into the relationship between corporate reputation and firm dividend payout decisions. Corporate reputation is highlighted as crucial for accessing finance, emphasizing the role of national regulators and policymakers in facilitating firms' efforts to improve their reputation. The study highlights the dynamics of corporate reputation and dividend payout, calling for proactive engagement from regulators and policymakers. Crafting policies conducive to reputation-building can enhance firms' financial prospects, indicating the need for strategic interventions at managerial, regulatory and policy levels. Understanding the influence of economic context is crucial for firms to tailor reputation management strategies and optimize funding opportunities in different economic environments.

Overall, results suggest that reputation serves as a disciplining mechanism, where firms will pay dividends to maintain their reputations.

This paper aims to extend our understanding of the concept of crisis leadership based on perceptions of 48 Australian leaders drawn from various sectors including Australian politics, higher education, not-for-profit and corporate sectors.

This qualitative study employed semi-structured virtual interviews of 48 leaders from Australian politics, higher education, not-for-profit and corporate sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Leximancer text analytics program was used for data analysis.

Participants perceived effective leadership during a crisis as encompassing four macro themes: leadership as power, leadership as emanating from people, leadership as management and leadership as specific to the organization. While these findings reinforced extant literature on facets of effective leadership, leaders from different sectors differed on the relative importance of some leadership themes and their relevance to specific sectors.

While the data were collected from a convenient sample, our findings from multiple sectors in Australia extend our knowledge on crisis leadership by revealing differences in sectorial perspectives of crisis leadership. Further, these findings help refine the extant traditional explanations of leadership and especially offer an enhanced understanding of leadership during a crisis. Consequently, our findings support future research that could help identify specific attributes of leaders navigating organizational crises. Such future research could subsequently help develop a theory on crisis leadership based on a valid and reliable measurement for assessing crisis leadership effectiveness in diverse organizational settings.

Our study is based on multi-sector data and consequently lays a solid foundation for extending the conceptualization of leadership during crisis, and the need to reconceptualize effective leader attributes useful in crisis contexts. Theoretically, the current study extended recent research on crisis leadership, by examining the conceptualizations of crisis leadership within specific Australian sectors.

Blockchain is an emerging digital technology proposed and trialled among different built environment professions. The technology has been proposed to introduce transparency, security and trust in property transactions. Despite this proposition, few studies have analysed the barriers and prospects in property valuation, especially in markets plagued by low transparency and a lack of stakeholder trust. Using Nigeria as a case study, this study assesses the barriers and prospects for adopting blockchain technology in property valuation.

Data was collected from 180 valuers practising in Nigeria through an online survey, and the data was analysed using mean score ranking and the chi-square (χ²) test of independence.

Firstly, there was a low awareness of the application of blockchain technology and an association between the number of valuation jobs executed annually and awareness of the application of blockchain technology. The most important barriers revolved around the knowledge, technical know-how of blockchain and the cost of implementing such technology. The prospects for blockchain are very high as all identified prospects were considered important, with transparency being the most crucial factor for its adoption, followed by the monitoring activities in real time and the permanence in storing records.

This study's implications lie in the potential benefit of transparency identified for blockchain, which could act as a tool to introduce transparency into valuation industries that battle key issues surrounding transparency and trust. Furthermore, this study can be utilised by policymakers and property industry players in mapping strategies to adopt the beneficial use of blockchain as one among the suite of proptech tools disrupting the property valuation scene, in their practice. This also presents an opportunity to draw upon insights from this study to better prepare for using blockchain in property valuation.

This study appears to be the first to empirically assess barriers and prospects for blockchain in property valuation practice. It contributes to the literature by identifying key factors that will deter and/or promote the application of blockchain, an emerging and disruptive digital technology.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented small-to-medium size enterprises (SMEs) with a massive and unexpected challenge that has caused many to adjust their operational standards. Perhaps the biggest change has been the shift to remote work and away from traditional office spaces. Thus, this study aims to explore the implications of this shift within the context of customer participation in the new product development (NPD) process.

Our study surveys 218 small-to-medium size business-to-business firms in the USA on a variety of questions revolving around their NPD processes, customer collaboration and the shift to remote work. The authors use structural equation modeling in the AMOS program to analyze the data.

The findings indicate that both customer participation breadth and customer participation depth positively impact new product performance. Furthermore, these relationships are found to be contingent upon whether firms rely on remote work during the collaboration process. The results show that accessing a broader variety of explicit customer insights (i.e., breadth) has become easier in the increasingly remote collaboration environment. However, as face-to-face customer participation in NPD has decreased, the prospect of gaining deep, tacit customer knowledge relevant to product development (i.e., depth) has become more challenging.

This study contributes to the knowledge-based view of the firm and the customer participation literature, and it also has implications for managers adjusting to the shift to remote work following the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings provide additional evidence that customer participation is an effective strategy for SMEs (Morgan et al., 2018), but remote work has both positive and negative implications regarding the type of external knowledge that is acquired during customer participation in NPD.