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This chapter explores the ways in which border imperialism, a concept widely attributed to Harsha Walia (2013), interacts with international postsecondary remote learning contexts to open opportunities to both extend and resist border imperialism. Historical and present contexts of border imperialism centered on Canada are consulted, uncovering a connection between technologies of labor and colonial power dynamics. Both temporal contexts serve to highlight the ways in which technologies of labor create a colonial power dynamic enacted through the usage of borders as imperialist tools. The body of literature concerning border imperialism is then reviewed to discern how remote learning contexts facilitate both resistance to and expansion of border imperialism. It is found that these contexts do support narratives of resistance to bodily racism and temporo-economic imperialism, however, in so doing also support neo-racism and unjust soft power dynamics within internationalization. The opportunities for resistance and expansion of border imperialism are then consolidated in pursuit of an ethical path forward with respect to the usage of new remote learning technologies in the context of internationalization.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the development and piloting of a training intervention for social care staff that uses a capable environments framework to improve the quality of staff support.

A single case study was used to evaluate changes in the quality of staff support and in levels of engagement and challenging behaviour for one of the individuals supported.

The case study demonstrates the usefulness of the capable environments framework as a model for training and development of support planning. Staff provided more positive interaction and support to the individual, who displayed increased participation in activities and reductions in the occurrence and episodic severity of challenging behaviour.

Capable environments is a systematic, theoretically-driven approach, which is focussed on the quality of support design and provision for people with intellectual disability. The use of such a framework as an intervention assists staff in the provision of effective personalised supports, a foundation for positive behaviour support.

The purpose of this study is to reduce the semantic distance by proposing a model for integrating indexes of textual and visual features via a multi-modality ontology and the use of DBpedia to improve the comprehensiveness of the ontology to enhance semantic retrieval.

A multi-modality ontology-based approach was developed to integrate high-level concepts and low-level features, as well as integrate the ontology base with DBpedia to enrich the knowledge resource. A complete ontology model was also developed to represent the domain of sport news, with image caption keywords and image features. Precision and recall were used as metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the multi-modality approach, and the outputs were compared with those obtained using a single-modality approach (i.e. textual ontology and visual ontology).

The results based on ten queries show a superior performance of the multi-modality ontology-based IMR system integrated with DBpedia in retrieving correct images in accordance with user queries. The system achieved 100 per cent precision for six of the queries and greater than 80 per cent precision for the other four queries. The text-based system only achieved 100 per cent precision for one query; all other queries yielded precision rates less than 0.500.

This study only focused on BBC Sport News collection in the year 2009.

The paper includes implications for the development of ontology-based retrieval on image collection.

This study demonstrates the strength of using a multi-modality ontology integrated with DBpedia for image retrieval to overcome the deficiencies of text-based and ontology-based systems. The result validates semantic text-based with multi-modality ontology and DBpedia as a useful model to reduce the semantic distance.

This paper aims to examine the effects of high-performance work practices (HPWPs) (participation, training and compensation) on nurses’ job performance (task and contextual) through the mediating role of job satisfaction. As nurses form the bulk of health-care professionals, their performance at work is crucial in determining patient satisfaction regarding care quality. HPWPs have been recognized as having the ability to affect employees’ work attitudes and behaviours positively. Specifically, these practices foster job performance.

Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect the survey data on 639 staff nurses working in large private hospitals in Malaysia. Data were subsequently analysed using the partial least squares method.

The findings indicate that job satisfaction serves to mediate the relationships between the three HPWPs (participation, training and compensation) and the two dimensions of job performance (task performance and contextual performance).

First, as all variables were measured using self-reports, a common-method bias could exist (Podsakoff et al., 2003). Hence, future researchers may want to combine self-assessments and supervisory or peer assessment to improve the validity of the outcomes. Second, the cross-sectional nature of this study limits our ability to make causal inferences. Bias could happen because the study examined both exogenous and endogenous variables at the same time. Thus, a longitudinal approach taken in the future could cross-validate the current findings and provide additional support regarding the causality of the HPWPs-job performance relationship. Third, the data were collected from staff nurses working in large private hospitals in Peninsular Malaysia. Thus, one should be careful to generalize the findings to different health-care professional groups and organizations.

From the practical perspective, it is evident from the findings that as job satisfaction is able to enhance job performance and given the need for nurses to provide quality health-care services, private hospital authorities concerned with encouraging greater job performance among their nursing workforce need to provide adequate support to their employees. This could be achieved through the implementation of HPWPs. Perceptions of the extent of a hospital’s HPWPs in terms of participation, training and compensation, have significant and positive effects on nurses’ level of job satisfaction. Therefore, it would be worthwhile for private hospitals to encourage more opportunities for nurses to participate in decision-making regarding their work. In addition, frequent training activities will be able to enhance nurses’ knowledge, skills and abilities, resulting in greater satisfaction

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to investigate the effects of HPWPs on nurses’ job performance in the Malaysian private health-care context. As studies using Eastern samples are relatively limited, the findings from this study would serve to expand the extant literature from a cross-cultural perspective.

In an ever-interconnected world dominated by discourses on the internationalization and marketization of higher education, concerns related to language and employability have been the focus of recent debates. There is, however, a dearth of research investigating how these dimensions relate to one another in recent comparative and international higher education research. By focusing on how issues related to language and employability have been presented in recent higher education research worldwide, this chapter aims to contribute to our understanding of this concern. To achieve this goal, we conducted a scoping literature review using the Web of Science, Scopus, and the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) databases, considering the years 2011–2020. The findings, perhaps not surprisingly, suggested that language skills are perceived to be valued by both graduates and employers though the discussions predominantly focused on one language, English. The research focus on English for employability in Anglophone contexts is understandable. However, the fact that the trend is observed in contexts where the language is not the primary or official language seems to indicate the influence of internationalization of higher education and global labor markets primarily dominated by English. The literature also suggested that (English) language training in higher education programs needs to move from solely linguistic and qualification-related content areas to a broader sphere of English for communication purposes that cover both specialized disciplinary content and broader generic employability skills. Considering this finding, we suggest that higher education systems and institutions incorporate recent developments in English for occupational purposes in their curriculum. We also recommend that there needs to be a shift from the overwhelmingly English language-dominated discussions to more inclusive research that assesses the impact of other dominant languages on employability-related concerns.

This paper aims to present a conceptual viewpoint highlighting the utility of active support in implementing capable environments and to extend this by presenting a three-tiered preventative model of positive behavioural support (PBS) in UK health and social care.

Provision of a commentary on “Building capable environments using practice leadership” by Linda Hume, Nadia Khan and Martin Reilly.

Capable environments and active support should be key, universal and essential PBS tier one supports in UK health and social care. Training staff in Active Support and developing practice leadership help implement capable environments.

The three-tiered PBS model was recently proposed by Leitch et al. (2020) and is worthy of further debate and refinement with the involvement of stakeholders. It has several practical implications including refocussing efforts on early intervention to get tier one supports implemented effectively in recognition that PBS is much wider than intense tier three supports. It could reinforce and motivate existing providers of quality support and indicate where and how other providers can commence the process of implementing PBS. Future research could consider the effectiveness of applying implementation science to the field of learning disabilities and PBS in particular.

Introduction: Interest and action concerning fiscal accountability have surged around the world in recent years, especially among Sub-Saharan African countries, because decision-making in the region has traditionally been shrouded in secrecy, with the general public having almost no access to knowledge on the management of public funds. Limited fiscal transparency has led to government fiscal crises where citizens have begun to call for better governance and participation in public funds.

Purpose: This study examines the impact of e-governance on the overall fiscal performance in SSA, while the specific objectives include the effect of e-governance on the central government’s primary balance and public external debt stock.

Methodology: The study employs annual data across 43 SSA countries to analyse the study from 2000 to 2018 using the panel-corrected standard error (PCSE) method for estimating the models. Overall fiscal performance is generated through principal component analysis (PCA), which involves a linear combination of public external debt stock and central government primary balance.

Findings: The results reveal that there is clear evidence of the effectiveness of e-governance on the overall fiscal performance, even though this is not the same for the public external debt stock in SSA, despite the success recorded in the region’s ICT and telecommunication sectors in recent times. In addition, all other control variables impact fiscal performance except population growth.

In this paper, the author examines how capital structure (relative to target) affects firm innovation.

The author uses cross-sectional OLS regressions (for each year of data) to determine whether a firm is above or below its target debt level (in that year) and then uses fixed effects OLS regressions with panel data to examine the impact of having leverage above or below the firm's target on its innovation activity.

The author shows that firms with below-target debt innovate more in terms of number of patents granted and have better quality innovations in terms of citation counts of patents and in terms of economic value of patents. The results hold for sample splits based on firm age, firm size and access to external finance. The author also shows that the findings are not driven by the negative correlation between leverage and innovation measures. Overall, the results indicate that it is not the actual level of leverage that impacts innovation; the relevant factor that impacts firm innovation is whether a firm is above or below its leverage target.

The author extends the literature on financing innovation by linking leverage target with firm innovation. Findings of this paper also provide supporting evidence that capital structure plays an important role on firm innovation and supplements prior literature that shows the importance of debt in financing firm innovation.