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The experience of leaving the real world and entering a virtual service environment makes many individuals happy. This study heeds the call by multiple researchers to conceptualize, interpret and illustrate the impact of the perceived service experience in the metaverse in a holistic way. In particular, this study aims to understand how the consumption of experiences is perceived in a metaversal space.

The authors analyze mega virtual live events with famous artists broadcast in virtual worlds. The authors take a big data approach and include two studies to gain insight into the online public audience’s perceptions and experiences in the metaverse. In the first study, the authors analyze text from YouTube with Leximancer. In the second study, the authors go one step further to refine the conceptual model from Study 1. The authors scrutinize additional Facebook comments using seeded Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).

The findings reveal that the meta service experience (MEX) encompasses four dimensions: immersion, metascape, immediacy and hedonism.

This research provides important guidance not only for consumer behavior scholars but also for service marketers and event planners. The study proposes research opportunities to advance service experience research in the metaverse.

School social work, in various forms, is well established internationally and has a growing evidence base. Yet existing research focuses on professional perspectives rather than those of students. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring secondary school student perspectives of having social workers in schools (SWIS). It was undertaken in England as part of the SWIS trial, which tested whether secondary school-based social workers could improve child safety and well-being, identify issues more quickly and reduce the need for statutory services.

A mixed-methods approach comprised a survey (n = 1,998 students) and interviews (n = 27 students). Surveys included questions on awareness, understanding, interaction with and attitudes towards the school-based social workers. Interviews involved a Q-sort activity followed by semi-structured questions on general attitudes and experiences. The Q-sort characterised prominent perspectives and how many students subscribed to them.

Students were broadly positive about having a social worker in their school in the survey and interviews. Two prominent perspectives on SWIS were identified. The first (n = 17) was defined by students feeling positively overall and strongly agreeing that they trusted the social worker. The second (n = 4) was mixed in sentiment, defined by some anxiety about working with the social worker. In interviews, students relayed that social workers were easily accessible, offered emotional support and acted as a bridge between school and home.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to quantify student perspectives on having social workers at school and evidence attitudes and experiences about school-based social work as practiced during the SWIS trial.

The data used to present this case was collected from secondary data sources. These sources included media reports associated with Michael Jordan and his trajectory since entering the sport, as well as specific information published about his time at the Chicago Bulls. Another key source of information is the ESPN documentary conducted specifically on Jordan’s relationship with his National Basketball Association (NBA) team.

The case follows the story of Michael Jordan, who took his team, the Chicago Bulls, to fame in a rather controversial manner. To do so, Michael Jordan had to alter his leadership style over the years to be respected as a leader and motivate his team to win one NBA championship after another. On 20th April 2020, ESPN’s “The Last Dance”, a 10-part documentary about Michael Jordan and his time playing for the Chicago Bulls was released to much acclaim. The documentary became highly noted as Jordan himself, both directed and starred in the documentary. Jordan’s great achievements stood out, but so did the conflicts that the basketball star had with The Bulls’ management team and mainly, his teammates. Relationships between teammates were far from harmonious, which led to questions around whether Michael Jordan was as good a leader, as he was a star player. Cultural change within the organisation was primarily linked to the often-contested leadership of Jordan.

The case can be used at UG, MSc and MBA levels. It works for in-person teaching and for online teaching. It is most suitable in leadership, strategy and strategy in practice courses. However, it is critical to note that the case can shed light on the dynamics that leaders and teammates have within their teams. Therefore, this case may be valuable to students studying courses where they themselves must work in groups and oftentimes encounter challenges in managing their team. These challenges can arise at all levels of experience. As such, the case provides particularly useful reflection for decision makers who may be beginning to develop their leadership skill (UG), those who have already experienced working in teams (MSc) or leading teams themselves (MBA, Executive MBA). The case addresses the challenges associated with achieving high team motivation and performance. It also sheds light on the challenges associated with leading a cultural change within a team and the approaches of different actors involved. It may be best to introduce the case in the context of a (1.5–2 h) workshop once students understand the basic frameworks and tools used to analyse leadership styles and their characteristics.

The measurement of women's economic welfare and exploring its underlying factors have been undervalued in the context of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. This study addressed this gap by focusing on assessing women's subjective economic welfare and its socioeconomic and cultural determinants in the education and health sectors within Mardan, Northern Pakistan.

The study used stratified random sampling techniques for the selection of sample respondents and collected data through a well-structured questionnaire. To measure women’s economic welfare, the study utilizes Lorenz curves, the Gini index, the Sen Social Welfare function and an individual's gross monthly income. Furthermore, the ordinary least squares method was utilized to analyze the determinants of economic welfare.

The findings show greater income inequality and a lower welfare level for women in the education sector compared to the health sector. Likewise, the study identifies several key determinants, such as age, educational qualification, job experience, respect for working women, outside and work-place problems and the suffering of family members of working women for their economic well-being.

This study makes valuable contributions to the literature by focusing on the cultural perspective of Pakhtun women in Mardan and providing a context-specific understanding of subjective economic welfare. Additionally, the authors collected first-hand data, which gave an original outlook on working women's current economic welfare level. Furthermore, this study undertakes a comparative analysis of working women's welfare in the health and education sectors. This comparison offers a more accurate portrayal of the challenges and opportunities specific to these occupations.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2023-0246

This study aims to examine the relationship between managerial supportive communication, CEO relational communication and symmetrical internal communication. It specifically investigates the mediating role of symmetrical internal communication and employee advocacy, as well as the moderating influence of proactive personality on the link between employee advocacy and employee creativity.

A survey was conducted involving 290 full-time employees, and a Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) statistical approach was used to assess the proposed relationships.

Both managerial supportive communication and CEO relational communication were found to be positively associated with symmetrical internal communication. Furthermore, results indicated that symmetrical internal communication and employee advocacy acted as strong mediators in the hypothesized relationships. Notably, the study also found that the impact of employee advocacy on employee creativity was significantly amplified in cases where employees exhibited a higher degree of proactive personality.

By emphasizing managerial supportive communication, enhancing CEO relational communication and promoting symmetrical internal communication and employee advocacy, organizations can create an environment conducive to innovation and creativity among employees. Additionally, recognizing the buffering effect of proactive personality on employee advocacy's impact on creativity enables organizations to better tailor their strategies for fostering creativity.

This research presents a novel contribution to the field by exploring the less-explored relationships between these critical communication factors and employee creativity. It uncovers the mediating and moderating mechanisms, shedding new light on how internal communication dynamics influence creativity. This unique approach provides an original perspective on the role of communication in promoting creativity at workplace.

International Entrepreneurs (IEs) increasingly cross borders to internationalize their activities, yet the various motives driving them into foreign markets are insufficiently understood vis-à-vis the public agencies striving to attract them. Our study proposes a consideration of their interplay by contrasting the various mobility rationales of IEs with those of the investment agencies striving to capture their talent.

Empirically, we concentrate on firms selected for funding in the French Tech Ticket, a competitive program designed to incentivize international start-ups to set up business in regional clusters across France. Using a longitudinal qualitative approach, we conducted two separate rounds of semi-structured interviews with IEs, public agency managers, and incubator staff members using thematic analysis of participant narratives on mobility.

Our findings point to diverging narratives on mobility, with an overarching opportunity-centrism on the part of the entrepreneurs and a general location-centrism emanating from the regional agencies. These contrasting visions of mobility are not mutually exclusive but rather present along a mobility continuum that generates contrasting logics.

Implications for policy and practice are provided for the investment agencies crafting policies and committing resources to attract mobile international entrepreneurs. While past IE mobility may correlate with the likelihood of present and future movement, our dual settler-explorer continuum model demonstrates that a binary separation of explorers and settlers is too simplistic: explorers may be subject to settler impulses and settlers can still be drawn to exploration and nomadism. We also provide insights for IEs seeking support in their international development and mobility and the particular advantages a given host economy can offer by identifying an overarching proximity-to-distance rationale for explorers, including the common “host-as-stopover” intermediary rationale.

We theorize this incommensurability as an expression of the current complexity of international mobility and policymaking, revealing a “next-frontier” expansionism in cross-border movement that requires more deliberate consideration.

Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.

Responding to calls for deeper analysis of the conceptual foundations of service infusion in manufacturing, this paper examines the underlying assumptions that: (i) manufacturing firms incorporating services follow a pathway, moving from pure-product to pure-service offerings, and (ii) profits increase linearly with this process. We propose that these assumptions are inconsistent with the premises of behavioural and learning theories.

Machine learning algorithms are applied to test whether a successive process, from a basic to a more advanced offering, creates optimal performance. The data were gathered through two surveys administered to USA manufacturing firms in 2021 and 2023. The first included a training sample comprising 225 firms, whilst the second encompassed a testing sample of 105 firms.

Analysis shows that following the base-intermediate-advanced services pathway is not the best predictor of optimal performance. Developing advanced services and then later adding less complex offerings supports better performance.

Manufacturing firms follow heterogeneous pathways in their service development journey. Non-servitised firms need to carefully consider their contextual conditions when selecting their initial service offering. Starting with a single service offering appears to be a superior strategy over providing multiple services.

The machine learning approach is novel to the field and captures the key conditions for manufacturers to successfully servitise. Insight is derived from the adoption and implementation year datasets for 17 types of services described in previous qualitative studies. The methods proposed can be extended to assess other process-based models in related management fields (e.g., sand cone).

Over time, sustainability and human resource management (HRM) have become inseparable. The duo involves applying the multifaceted idea of sustainability and the United Nations' (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs) to people and work organizations. Lately, green human resource management (GHRM) has emerged as a distinct area to explore organizational initiatives, aimed at sustainable practices. Despite the potential growth of literature in specified domains, there is a dearth of studies focused on synthesizing the literature from sustainability and organizational performance views. The present study aims to review and synthesize extant literature on sustainable and green HRM and their role in organizational performance and propose a future research agenda.

The present study is based on the review of 65 articles on sustainable and green HRM. Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Review (SPAR-4-SLR) and theory, characteristics, context and methodology (TCCM) framework have been applied to synthesize the results. Scopus is used as a major database for retrieving the articles. The publications for this research are selected using CABS ranking (4*, 4 and 3) as the criterion.

Application of the TCCM framework and synthesis of the literature revealed that the introduction of SDGs and emphasis on sustainability has reinvigorated research interest in sustainable HRM and tremendous research being published post-SDGs adoption. GHRM plays an important role in affecting organizational performance The results also revealed the widespread use of resource-based perspective, social identity theory, A-M-O and social exchange theory. Additionally, the quantitative approach has been largely employed for GHRM research. Future research can be undertaken by employing a qualitative approach as current literature due to the dearth of qualitative approaches in contemporary literature.

This study advances the body of knowledge by offering a unified conceptual framework and surfaces the latest trends and future directions in this domain. A conceptual framework can be empirically tested in future studies. The study identifies antecedents, moderators, mediators and outcomes of GHRM. The application of these variables can practically help in achieving sustainability and organizational effectiveness. It can further align organizational efforts toward the achievement of sustainable development goals. The concept establishes the role of GHRM in organizational performance.

Despite the growing literature in the domain of GHRM, knowledge remains diverse and piecemeal. Anchored by several theoretical lenses, the concept of GHRM is a fragmented phenomenon. As a result, this Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is critical in identifying gaps and bringing to light various theories that can enhance the domain's theoretical lens. The role of antecedents, moderators and mediators of GHRM in affecting organizational performance has been established. Furthermore, by synthesizing the methods used to get authentic and robust results, the piece of research will serve as a guide for future researchers.

Building upon the foundational eight dimensions of quality proposed by Garvin (1987), this research formulates a modern meaning of “quality.” This new meaning aligns with and encapsulates the evolving sophistication of consumers, the strategic quality investments made by firms, and the current dynamics of sales.

Due to the complexity of the concept of quality, a triangulation approach is used, which is composed of the following: a review of the literature, an analysis of consumers’ quality dimensions using both qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (survey) methods, as well as a quantitative investigation (survey) of firms’ investments in quality dimensions and the links to sales.

Our findings reveal the existence of 21 new and emerging dimensions through which consumers measure product quality, all of which complement Garvin’s dimensions. These dimensions contribute to a fresh and modern interpretation of quality. Although there are 29 dimensions of quality in total, firms should shape their strategies by focusing on usability, customization, efficiency, innovation, performance, perceived quality, serviceability, pricing, conformance quality, ethics, and sustainability. These dimensions align with consumer wants and positively correlate with firms’ sales.

This research identifies novel and contemporary dimensions of quality, serving to complement the eight dimensions previously delineated by Garvin (1987). Consequently, it contributes to updating the operations management literature on Total Quality Management, 36 years subsequent to the introduction of Garvin’s foundational dimensions.