Search results

This paper aims to explore challenges and opportunities associated with young carers' employment in Australia.

Using a multi-stakeholder approach, this study captures the reflections of stakeholders (n = 8) and young carers (n = 10) about opportunities for, and experiences of, paid employment for young carers.

Despite many organisations internationally increasingly pushing diversity agendas and suggesting a commitment to equal opportunity experiences, this study found that young carers' work opportunities are often disrupted by their caring role. For young carers to be successful in their careers, organisations need to provide further workplace flexibility, and other support is required to attract and retain young carers into organisations and harness their transferrable skills for meaningful careers.

The paper highlights important implications for human resource management practitioners given the need to maximise the participation of young carers as workers, with benefits for young carers themselves, employers and society.

The research adds to the human resource management and work–family conflict literature in examining young carers through drawing on Conservation of Resources theory to highlight resources invested in caring leads to loss of educational and work experience resources. This leads to loss cycles and spirals, which can potentially continue across a lifetime, further contributing to disadvantage and lack of workplace and societal inclusion for this group of young people.

The purpose of this qualitative, single-case study was to explore the development of Jamaica’s maritime education and training (MET) curriculum within the local education context. In this research, the story of the development and sustainability of the local MET curriculum in its 40-year journey from 1980 to present (post 2020), as communicated by various maritime stakeholders and archival documents, is chronicled.

The study utilized a qualitative orientation and was an embedded single-case study in its design. The entire local MET institution community and those legislatively and operationally allied to its sustained viability constituted the general population of this study. Non-probability sampling techniques were used to arrive at a maximum variation sample. Three sources of data were used in this study: individual interviews, focus group discussions and documents.

The Jamaican (local) MET curriculum was the brainchild of local perspicacity that was empowered by international benevolence. It was developed to satisfy market demands that existed at the time of its inception. These market requirements of the maritime industry are what impacted the development of the local MET curriculum over four decades. Several other factors led to the sustained viability of the local MET curriculum. These included the ability of the local MET curriculum to meet direct market needs and maintain its fitness for purpose.

It is the view of the researcher that the findings of this study were limited by the fact that the voices of current students and employers from the four decades of the curriculum's existence are not represented in this initial study. The perspectives from these two sources would have broadened the description presented in this study.

This research has shown that specialized higher education (HE) institutions are better served in their business when they maintain a symbiotic relationship with the industry for which they are producing graduates.

The treatment of HE as a service industry has gained traction globally. This would suggest that ‘product placement' in specialized HE is important to the growth, development and longevity of that course of study within the society in which it exists.

There is a dearth of national research on Jamaica's four-decades-old MET curriculum and the elements that lend to the sustained viability of same. This discussion of sustainability of the MET curriculum will benefit maritime educators and policymakers, who must continue to hone this curriculum so that it is fit for purpose. The study will also identify some of the elements of a sustainable, specialized HE curriculum. The elements identified herein can serve as exemplars and conceptual starting points for other contexts where the discussion of the sustainability of curriculum needs to be had.

Implementing sustainable practices in multi-tier supply chains (MTSCs) is a difficult task. This study aims to investigate why such endeavours fail and how MTSC partners can address them.

A single-case study of a global food retail company was used in this study. Semi-structured interviews with the case firm and its first- and second-tier suppliers were used to collect data, which were then qualitatively analysed using thematic analysis.

Major barriers impeding the implementation of sustainability in multi-tier food supply chains were revealed such as the cost of sustainability, knowledge gap, lack of infrastructure and supply chain complexity. Furthermore, the findings reveal five possible solutions such as multi-tier collaboration and partnership, diffusion of innovation along the chain, supply chain mapping, sustainability performance measurement and capacity building, all of which can aid in the improvement of sustainability practices.

Future research should investigate how specific barriers and drivers affect specific aspects of sustainability, pointing practitioners to specific links between the variables that can aid in tailoring sustainability oriented investment.

This research supports managerial comprehension of MTSC sustainability, pointing out ways to improve sustainability performance despite the complex multi-tier system of food supply chains.

The research on MTSC sustainability is still growing, and this research contributes to the debate about how MTSCs can become more sustainable from the perspective of the triple bottom line, particularly food supply chains which face significant sustainability challenges.

This study aimed to develop a method to calculate the mattress indentation for further estimating spinal alignment.

A universal indentation calculation model is derived based on the system theory, and the deformation characteristics of each component are analyzed by the finite element (FE) model of a partial air-spring mattress under the initial air pressure of 0.01–0.025 MPa. Finally, the calculation error of the model is verified.

The results indicate that the indentation calculation model could describe the stain of a mattress given the load and the constitutive model of each element. In addition, the FE model of a partial air-spring mattress can be used for further simulation analysis with an error of 1.47–3.42 mm. Furthermore, the deformation of the series system is mainly contributed by the air spring and the components directly in contact with it, while the top component is mainly deflection deformation. In addition, the error of the calculation model is 2.17–5.59 mm on the condition of 0.01–0.025 MPa, satisfying the engineering application. Finally, the supine spinal alignment is successfully extracted from the mattress indentation.

The limitation of this study is that it needs to verify the practicality of the indentation calculation model for the Bonnier spiral spring mattress. The main feature of the Bonnier spring mattress is that all springs are connected, so the mattress deflection and neighborhood effect are more significant than those of the air-spring mattress. Therefore, the applicability of the model needs to be tested. Moreover, it is worth further research to reduce the deformation error of each component.

As part of the series of studies on the intelligent air-spring mattress, the indentation-based evaluation method of spinal alignment in sleep postures will be studied for hardness and intelligent regulation based on this study.

The results of this research are ultimately used for the intelligent adjustment of air-spring mattresses, which automatically adjusts the hardness according to the user's sleep postures and spinal alignment, thus maintaining optimal spinal biomechanics. The successful application of this result could improve the sleep health of the general public.

Based on the series system theory, an indentation calculation model for mattresses with arbitrary structure is proposed, overcoming the dependence of parameters on materials and their combinations when fitting the Burgers model. Further, the spinal alignment in supine posture is extracted from the indentation, laying a theoretical foundation for further recognition and adjustment of the spinal alignment of the intelligent mattress.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.

This research explores the historical nexus between accounting and gender to illuminate male hegemonies within accounting. It examines the nature of that hegemony at the boundary between the female domain of household and philanthropic activities and the male domain of business and finance.

A qualitative research approach is used for this historical research. The primary source was digitised newspapers from the National Library of Australia. Newspapers have been used in previous historical accounting research and are relevant in this instance because they provide the only surviving data about the All Nations’ Fair. Given that newspapers were published daily, the depth of coverage is not replicated by other archival sources, and at that time provided a strong community voice.

Women undertook the management of and accounting for the All Nations’ Fair, a philanthropic activity designed to rescue the Geelong Cricket and Football Club from its parlous financial position. Despite women undertaking the work, the management of and accounting for, the Fair was attributed to men. This reflects a gendered construction of accounting that overpowers the reality of who undertook the work.

This research demonstrates only a single example of women’s philanthropic accounting, so is not generalisable. It suggests however that male hegemonies have exerted and continue to exert power over women.

The value of this paper is that historical examples serve as a corrective to histories that have ignored women’s contribution to accounting, particularly in philanthropic activities. The relationship between women’s accounting and gender also has contemporary significance. Gendered disadvantage and subjugation to a dominant masculine hegemony remain recurring themes in accounting research because they continue to impact adversely on the experiences of many women in accounting.

This study aims to examine newcomers experiencing maladjustment due to cognitive diversity, specifically, how maladjustment affects their turnover intentions; the mediating role of reported workplace bullying; and the buffering effect of perceived inclusive practices in the hospitality sector.

The authors collected time-lagged data from 403 respondents and analyzed the data through hierarchical regression analyses using statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) 25.0.

Role ambiguity, low self-efficacy and social exclusion could each lead to newcomers’ reported workplace bullying (NRB). Perceived inclusive practices buffered the impacts of role ambiguity and social exclusion. NRB negatively mediated the relationships between role ambiguity and NRB; and social exclusion and NRB.

Hospitality practitioners should specify work procedures to minimize role ambiguities and record service processes to correct mistakes, reward veterans who help newcomers improve self-efficacy, invite newcomers to develop inclusive practices and review employee comments on third-party platforms to understand factors responsible for turnover intention.

This study contextualized cognitive diversity into newcomers’ maladjustment-bullying-turnover model in China’s hospitality industry. It highlighted the buffering effect of perceived inclusive practices in the relationships between maladjustment and reported bullying and turnover intentions among newcomers and confirmed the important role of self-efficacy in addressing adverse work events.

Consumers are increasingly choosing social media over other channels and mechanisms for grievance redressal. However, not all social media grievances elicit a response from businesses. Hence, in this research the authors aim to explore the effect of the complainant's social characteristics and the complaint's social and content characteristics on the likelihood of receiving a response to a grievance from the business on social media.

The authors build a conceptual model and then empirically test it to explore the effect of the complainant's characteristics and the complaint's characteristics on the likelihood of response from a business on social media. The authors use data of consumer grievances received by an Indian airline operator on Twitter during two time periods – the first corresponding to lockdown during Covid-19 pandemic, and the second corresponding to the resumption of business as usual following these lockdowns. The authors use logistic regression and the hazard rate model to model the likelihood of response and the response delay, respectively, for social media customer grievances.

Complainants with high social influence are not more likely to get a response for their grievances on social media. While tagging other individuals and business accounts in a social media complaint has negative effect on the likelihood of business response in both the time periods, the effect of tagging regulatory bodies on the likelihood of response was negative only in the Covid-19 lockdown period. The readability and valence of a complaint were found to positively affect the likelihood of response to a social media grievance. However, the effect of valence was significant only in lockdown period.

This research offers insights on what elicits responses from a service provider to consumers' grievances on social media platforms. The extant literature is a plenty on how firms should be engaging consumers on online media and how online communities should be built, but scanty on grievance redressal on social media. This research is, therefore, likely to be useful to service providers who are inclined to improve their grievance handling mechanisms, as well as, to regulatory authorities and ombudsmen.

During the current global epidemic, e-learning and mobile learning have been rapidly developed in the field of entrepreneurship education. The effect of these learning methods remains to be confirmed. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of mobile business simulation games in entrepreneurship education.

From May 2020 to July 2020, the authors adopted a quasi-experimental design to explore the effect of mobile business simulation games in entrepreneurship education. The authors set up an experimental group to participate in mobile business simulation games, with a total of 105 students, and set up a control group of 100 students. At the beginning and end of the experiment, data on entrepreneurial attitude, self-efficacy, entrepreneurial intention and other related variables were collected. Paired sample T-test and regression analysis were used to analyze the results.

The authors found that mobile business simulation games can improve entrepreneurial attitudes and self-efficacy, but cannot change entrepreneurial intentions. The paired sample T-test in the experimental group showed that the entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial self-efficacy of the participants were significantly improved, but the entrepreneurial intention did not change significantly. The above three variables did not change significantly in the control group. The research results also show that flow experience is very important in mobile business simulation games, which can improve entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial self-efficacy.

The authors’ findings confirm the positive effects of mobile business simulation games in entrepreneurship education, which can improve entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. But the disadvantage of mobile business simulation games is that they cannot increase entrepreneurial intention. In addition, the flow experience needs to be valued in mobile business simulation games. The research in this paper has implications for how mobile learning can be used in entrepreneurship education during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, research is of great value on how mobile business simulation games can be improved.