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The performance of public sector institutions has always been contentious – this is as old as the system of government itself and its provision of collective goods, irrespective of whether they are tangible or intangible. In the context of South Africa, with its ever-increasing political competitiveness, this chapter assesses political leadership and the African philosophy of Ubuntu or humanism in improving public sector performance management in the country. It does so by addressing certain distinct questions: What is the state of public sector performance and leadership in South Africa? What have scholars contributed in linking public sector performance, and the politics and public administration dichotomy? Are the Batho Pele principles, underpinned by Ubuntu, a worthy notion on which to pillar African political leadership? By adopting an interpretivist, qualitative research design, the study reflects on the essence of a public administration that is effective in delivering political goods and managing the performance of bureaucracies and the political leadership therein. This chapter argues that the performance of public administrations remains a “wicked” problem in South Africa as political populism is on the rise in the country. However, the argument is made that with “good” political leadership – which naturally and effectively encompasses the philosophy of Ubuntu and which understands and mobilizes statecraft – great strides can be made beyond the current rhetoric.

Customers are important stakeholders for any company; yet, they seem not to be widely discussed in merger and acquisition research. This chapter synthesizes the current body of research on customers in mergers and acquisitions through presenting a systematic literature review. The chapter is based on a systematic literature review resulting from a search in EBSCO Host for any research item that refers to “customer” and “consolidation or merger of corporation.” All articles were coded to specify how customers are described, with a focus on whether customers are expected to affect and/or be affected by the merger or acquisition. Articles were compared with regard to their year of issue and research disciplines of publishing journals. The review indicates how customers continue to be discussed only to limited extent. The customer roles array from them as an acquirable customer base to customers as actors, whose activities become the very reason to merge or acquire. Literature also refers to them as victims and affected by the merger or acquisition, and reacting parties. In addition to the description of welfare transfer from consumers to acquirers in law and economics studies, the different ways of referring to customers extend beyond specific research disciplines. The literature review indicates more multifaceted ways of describing customers in recent research. No systematic literature review on customers in merger and acquisition literature has previously been conducted. The comparison of research disciplines, years of issue, and customer roles provides new insights into developments in the merger and acquisition field of research.

Purpose – Purpose of the research is to make a comprehensive study to elucidate the existing landscape of scientific production of disease outbreaks, pandemics and tourism research. In doing so, authors analyzed scientific production of pandemics and tourism-related studies such as year-wise publications, productive authors, institutes, funding sponsors, thematic areas of research and citation analysis.

Design/methodology/approach – Authors analyzed the research papers indexed in the online Scopus database over 50 years of time starting from 1971 to 2020 by using bibliometrics, and the data are visualized by using data visualization tools like VOSviewer and the Tableau.

Findings – The understanding of disease outbreaks and pandemics in tourism has increased over the years in terms of number of papers, citation, networks and collaborative themes of research.

Research limitations/implications – Data for the study were generated from Scopus online database and limited to English-written journal articles that were produced with search strategy of specific keywords associated with tourism, virus, pandemics and disease outbreak.

Practical implications – Findings of the research provide insights into academia and practitioners on the understanding of disease outbreaks, pandemics and tourism research, coherent development of the concept and understanding the research gap and focussed area of research.

Originality/value – As per authors' understanding, this paper would be one of the first attempts to provide greater understanding of disease outbreaks, pandemics and tourism as a research topic by examining the growth and evolution in an academic context through bibliometric analysis.

Paper type – Review paper.

Space tourism is a rapidly growing sector of capital accumulation. As virtually all space on the Earth has been humanized and populated, outer space is being made by elite groups into the new exotic destination of choice. But the humanization of outer space also reinforces an ancient and powerful worldview concerning society’s relations with the cosmos. It relies on the idea that outer space is an apparently pure and serene “other” place offering a profound sense of awe, wonder, and renewed identity. This hegemonic view of the cosmos and society is a product of a new dominant social bloc, one incorporating pro-space activists, the aerospace industry, the tourism industry, and governments.

Experience sampling methods (ESM) have enabled researchers to capture intensive longitudinal data and how worker well-being changes over time. The conceptual advances in understanding the variability of well-being are discussed. These emerging forms in the literature include affective inertia, affective variability, affective reactivity, and density distributions. While most ESM research has relied on the active provision of data by participants (i.e., self-reports), technological advances have enabled different forms of passive sensing that are useful for assessing and tracking well-being and its contextual factors. These include accelerometer data, location data, and physiological data. The strengths and weaknesses of passively sensed data and future ways forward are discussed, where the use of both active and passive forms of ESM data in the assessment and promotion of worker well-being is expected.

This paper documents and accounts for the globalization of the so-called national bourgeoisie in the late twentieth century. A substantial and growing body of sociological literature holds that firms and investors from the developing world have been denationalized, neutered, or destroyed by their efforts to penetrate international markets – and that cross-national economic competition is therefore giving way to transnational class conflict over time. By way of contrast, I hold that not only peripheral capitalists but their elected and appointed representatives are compelled to undertake large-scale, fixed investments, exploit their competitive advantages, and challenge foreign firms – and their respective representatives – on their own soil by the very logic of capitalist competition, and that the aforementioned challenges will occur on political as well as economic terrain.

Behavior problems are common in toddlers and preschoolers. Richman, Stevenson, and Graham (1975) identified difficulties with eating, sleeping, toileting, temper, fears, peer relations, and activity as typical in this young population. While all young children should be expected to experience behavior problems as part of their normal development, an ongoing challenge in the field has been to determine when these “normal” developmental problems rise to the level of being considered “clinical” behavior problems (Keenan & Wakschlag, 2000). For example, when does a two-year-old child's tantrum behavior, a three-year-old's urinary accidents, and a four-year-old's defiance become clinically significant? To answer these questions, clinicians must examine the frequency, intensity, and durability of these difficulties, their potential to cause injury to the child or others, the extent to which they interfere with the child development, and the degree to which they disrupt the lives of their siblings, caregivers, peers, teachers, and others.

This study seeks to find an interactive effect between ethical leadership (EL) and corporate governance (CG) variables and investigate whether they would affect employee organizational citizenship behavior (EOCB) in a Malaysian organizational setting. The collected data from the 300 accounting/finance department employees were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Partial Least Square–Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM; SmartPLS 3.0). Several primary results confirmed a coherent significant relationship between EL and ethical climate (EC), EL and EOCB, EL and CG, and CG and organizational success. Theoretically, it implies a more enhanced EOCB literature on how it can be infused in an organization. It also offers valuable knowledge by providing organizations with several insights concerning the improvement of EOCB, enabling the organization to achieve its desired success and, more importantly, how the findings could contribute directly and indirectly to emerging markets in terms of their industrial and financial performance.