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China is the world’s largest user market for digital technologies and experiencing unprecedented rates of rural-urban migration set to create the world’s first “urban billion”. This is an important context for studying nuanced adoption behaviours that define a digital divide. Large-scale studies are required to determine what behaviours exist in such populations, but can offer limited ability to draw inferences about why. The purpose of this paper is to report a large-scale study inside China that probes a nuanced “digital divide” behaviour: consumer demographics indicating ability to pay by electronic means but behaviour suggesting lack of willingness to do so, and extends current demographics to help explain this.

The authors report trans-national access to commercial “Big Data” inside China capturing the demographics and consumption of millions of consumers across a wide range of physical and digital market channels. Focusing on one urban location we combine traditional demographics with a new measure that reflecting migration: “Distance from Home”, and use data-mining techniques to develop a model that predicts use behaviour.

Use behaviour is predictable. Most use is explained by value of the transaction. “Distance from Home” is more predictive of technology use than traditional demographics.

Results suggest traditional demographics are insufficient to explain “why” use/non-use occurs and hence an insufficient basis to formulate and target government policy.

The authors understand this to be the first large-scale trans-national study of use/non-use of digital channels within China, and the first study of the impact of distance on ICT adoption.

Based on theories related to coopetition, the purpose of this paper is to examine the patterns of business-to-business digital referrals inscribed in businesses’ digital content.

A complete industry-wise digital data set is formed by extracting digital referrals in all the content pages. The authors outline how digital referrals are strategically used among peer businesses in the peer-to-peer digital network and in the augmented digital network, taking into consideration geographical framing and physical distance.

The authors reveal how geographical framing and physical distance influence peer-to-peer referral patterns in the digital space. Quite counter-intuitively, businesses are more likely to give digital referrals for peers residing in the same region, as well as for peers located in closer proximity. Further, results from the augmented digital network show that peer businesses in closer proximity exhibit greater strategic similarity in their digital referring strategy.

The findings extend the understanding of business-to-business coopetition to the digital space and suggest that geographical framing and physical distance can induce reciprocated relationships between peers by offering each other digital referrals.

The findings shed light on the formation of a business-to-business digital coopetition strategy using digital referral marketing.

This study highlights the impact of digital referrals in business-to-business relationship management, especially in the digital coopetition context.

This study aims to explore Twitter posts of Turkish government agencies and the public under a specific hashtag, #NotHolidayButDistanceEducation, specifically related to online distance education during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This study used a thematic analysis on 22,547 original tweets posted by 6,970 users during the first month of online distance education in Turkish K-12 schools. Based on like and retweet counts, the study further explored the extent of stakeholders’ engagement with the observed themes.

The findings showed that government agencies and citizens used Twitter to provide technical and psychological support, appreciate and motivate stakeholders, demonstrate sample distance education activities, share information and offer suggestions about the ongoing online distance education. It was also observed that the hashtag has been used for expressing negative views about online distance education and for political purposes. A positive relationship was found between social media engagement and providing technical support or sharing information for online distance education.

This study highlights the role of social media in providing practical and emotional support to education stakeholders in times of crisis. Thus, governments can use social media to provide evidence-based psychological and physical health support to their citizens during a pandemic. Social media can serve to improve education practices in schools through the interactions between the public and policymakers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study can be considered unique because it demonstrates the civic use of social media for educational crisis management. This study highlights the influence of social media in educational policy and practice development in the contemporary era.

The highly contagious coronavirus and the rapid spread of COVID-19 disease have generated a global public health crisis, which is being addressed at various local and global scales through social distancing measures and guidelines. This is coupled with debates about the nature of living and working patterns through intensive utilisation of information and telecommunication technologies, leading to the social and institutional acceptability of these patterns as the “new normal”. The primary objective of this article is to instigate a discourse about the potential contribution of architecture and urban design and planning in generating knowledge that responds to pressing questions about future considerations of post pandemic architecture and urbanism. Methodologically, the discussion is based on a trans-disciplinary framework, which is utilised for conceptual analysis and is operationalized by identifying and discoursing design and planning implications. The article underscores relevant factors; originates insights for areas where future research will be critically needed, through key areas: a) Issues related to urban dynamics are delineated from the perspective of urban and human geography, urban design and planning, and transportation engineering; b) Questions that pertain to socio-spatial implications and urban space/ urban life dialectics stem from the field of environmental psychology; and c) Deliberations about new environments that accommodate new living/working styles supervene from ethnographical and anthropological perspectives. The article concludes with an outlook that captures key aspects of the needed synergy between architectural and urban education, research, and practice and public health in a post pandemic virtual and global world.

The purpose of the present study is to examine the general and travel-specific job exhaustion of international business travelers (IBTs). The study employs a JD-R model to explain general and travel-specific job exhaustion (IBTExh) through international business travel as demand and leadership (LMX) as a resource buffering the demands of international business travel.

The study was conducted among Finnish service company employees who had taken at least one international business trip during the previous year. The data (N = 569), collected in 2015, were analyzed with path models.

The results suggest that a higher number of international business travel days is related to a higher level of job exhaustion, especially the exhaustion related to international business travel. Moreover, a high-quality LMX was found to be linked to lower levels of both types of exhaustion. Interestingly, for those IBTs' with a low-quality LMX, even a high number of long-haul international business travel days was not connected with IBTExh

The contribution of our study is threefold. First, this study contributes to JD-R theory and the ill-health process by focusing on a job-specific well-being indicator, IBTExh, in addition to general exhaustion. Second, specific job demands related to international business travel, particularly the duration of business travel spent in short-haul and long-haul destinations, contributes to the literature on global mobility. This study sheds light on the potential effects on IBTs of different types of business travel. Third, our study contributes to the leadership literature and the importance of acknowledging the context in which LMX occurs.

As the world faces a new health crisis threatening people with the spread of Covid-19, this study aims to summarize the key information of Covid-19 related to disease characteristics, diagnosis, treatment and prevention along with the lessons learned from Thailand.

The narrative review was synthesized from various sources such as the World Health Organization; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Ministry of Public Health and other related news; articles in ScienceDirect, PubMed, Google Scholar; and the author's perspective regarding the lessons learned from Thailand with keywords of “Covid-19” and “Coronavirus” from January to August 2020. Google Trends was used to set common questions.

Covid-19 is the seventh family of coronaviruses that cause various symptoms related to respiratory systems. The disease can be treated through general and symptomatic treatment, by using antiviral drugs. As of July 2020, there are four potential vaccine candidates ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, mRNA-1273, Ad5-nCOV and BNT162b1. The recommendations for Covid-19 prevention are physical distancing, face masks, eye protection and hand washing. Thailand is now considered as low-risk for Covid-19 possibly because of (1) soft policy by government actions, (2) village health volunteers, (3) integration of technology and (4) fact-based communications.

This study summarized the key points about Covid-19, clarified some misunderstandings and shared strategic actions from Thailand, which can be adapted according to the different capacities and situations in other countries.

In this opinion article, the authors share their experiences with and perspectives on course design requirements and barriers when applying challenge-based learning (CBL) in an online sustainability education setting. CBL is an established learning approach for (higher) sustainability education. It enables teachers to engage students with open, real-life grand challenges through inter-/transdisciplinary student team collaboration. However, empirical research is scarce and mainly based on face-to-face CBL case studies. Thus far, the opportunities to apply CBL in online educational settings are also underinvestigated.

Using the TPACK framework, the authors address technological, pedagogical and content knowledge related to CBL and online sustainability education. The integration of the different components is discussed, providing teachers and course designers insight into design requirements and barriers.

This paper supports the promising future of online CBL for sustainability education, especially in the context of inter-/national inter-university collaboration, yet emphasizes the need for deliberate use of online collaboration and teaching tools.

This paper aims to provide a bibliometric meta-analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on international franchising. Franchising is a model for businesses to achieve scale with limited resources. International franchising is a mode of entry that allows firms to develop new markets with relatively little risk but also little control.

Using a systematic approach, the paper identifies all articles in the ISI Web of Science from 1970 to 2018 that includes the term international franchising (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 131 articles. This paper used HistCite software to analyze the bibliometric data.

Four major research clusters in the international franchising literature are identified. In addition, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, theories and methodologies from the 1970s through 2018. The paper presents the most influential articles, authors and journals.

From the analyzes, this study develops a conceptual framework of international franchising and suggest avenues for future research.

The wake of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had caused substantial disruptions to the usual delivery of healthcare services. This is because of restrictive orders that were put in place to curb the spread of the infection. Palliative care services in Brunei also face challenges to deliver effective services during this period. However, the impact of advanced illnesses on patients' health and end-of-life care are issues that cannot be planned, postponed or cancelled. Hence, the palliative care team needs to continue to deliver effective palliative care services. As Brunei faced its second pandemic wave in August 2021, crucial adaptations were made to ensure palliative care service was not disrupted. This reflective case study aims to discuss the adaptations made in providing palliative care during this era of disruptions.