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This study argues that online user comments on social media platforms provide feedback and evaluation functions. These functions can provide services for the relevant departments of organizations or institutions to formulate corresponding public opinion response strategies.

This study considers Chinese universities’ public opinion events on the Weibo platform as the research object. It collects online comments on Chinese universities’ network public opinion governance strategy texts on Weibo, constructs the sentiment index based on sentiment analysis and evaluates the effectiveness of the network public opinion governance strategy adopted by university officials.

This study found the following: First, a complete information release process can effectively improve the effect of public opinion governance strategies. Second, the effect of network public opinion governance strategies was significantly influenced by the type of public opinion event. Finally, the effect of public opinion governance strategies is closely related to the severity of punishment for the subjects involved.

The theoretical contribution of this study lies in the application of image repair theory and strategies in the field of network public opinion governance, which further broadens the scope of the application of image repair theory and strategies.

This study expands online user comment research to network public opinion governance and provides a quantitative method for evaluating the effect of governance strategies.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2022-0269

Drawing on managerial innovation model proposed by Abrahamson (1991), this chapter tries to gain a better understanding of how the UN SDGs have impacted the practice of sustainability reporting of Spanish public universities. Data were collected from a variety of sources, such as: several email structured interviews with university managers, an examination of the Chancellor letters of sustainability reports of Spanish public universities, a detailed reading of some sustainability reports and a consultation of the website of each Spanish public university. The findings reveal that there has been an increasing number of Spanish public universities that have started to publish stand-alone sustainability reporting since the appearance of the UN SDGs. According to Abrahamson's framework, our findings reveal that governmental-policy forces have shaped the sustainability reporting landscape in the Spanish public university setting, and their behaviour is mostly explained by the forced-selection and fad/fashion perspectives.

This study aims to investigate the facilitating conditions (FCs) and how these FC affect institutional repository (IR) sustainability practices in public universities in Nigeria.

A survey research design was adopted in this study. The study population comprised 542 librarians from public universities that have IRs across Nigeria. A sample size of 230 librarians was determined using Taro Yamane’s formula. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to select the respondents in three stages, which were purposive, stratified and purposive sampling. A structured, validated questionnaire was used for data collection. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential (simple and multiple regression) statistics at a 5% level of significance.

The result revealed that the availability of FCs (ßeta = 0.459, t(211) = 7.719, p = 0.000) has a positive and significant influence on IR sustainability in public university libraries in Nigeria. The F-test (1, 223) value of 59.582 shows that there is sufficient evidence to substantiate the model’s usefulness in explaining IR sustainability. The R² (0.211) indicates that 21.1% of the variation in IR sustainability is explained by the availability of FCs in public university libraries in Nigeria. The finding suggests that the availability of FCs is a vital predictor of IR sustainability in public university libraries in Nigeria. The result also depicts that out of the eight parameters that measure the availability of FCs, it was current awareness of IR that had a positive and significant influence on IR sustainability.

This study concluded that ICT skills and FCs are contributory factors to IR sustainability practices by librarians in public university libraries in Nigeria. It was recommended that university administrators formulate policies that promote the sustainability of IR and provide adequate funds to support IR sustainability. Furthermore, the library management in public university libraries in Nigeria should drive content recruitment and create awareness of the IRs among students and faculty to ensure continued use.

Relying on institutional theory and Oliver’s (1991) strategic responses framework, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the different strategies adopted by Spanish public universities to respond to institutional pressures for sustainability reporting.

Data were collected from a variety of sources, such as a series of email-structured interviews with key personnel from universities, a qualitative analysis of sustainability reports and a consultation of the website of each Spanish public university.

The findings reveal that Spanish public universities have responded to institutional pressures for sustainability reporting by adopting acquiescence, compromise, avoidance and defiance strategies. The variety of strategic responses adopted by Spanish public universities suggests that these organizations have not fully adhered to institutional pressures.

The results of this paper would be useful for practitioners since it tries to demonstrate whether universities, which are facing increasing institutional pressures and demands from stakeholders, have been developing sustainability reporting practices.

Universities have a remarkable social impact that could be used to promote sustainability practices. This paper investigates how these organizations can contribute to sustainability reporting as they should reproduce social norms.

The sustainability reporting context is in a phase of change. This paper tries to contribute to the accounting research by analyzing the extent to which universities are engaged in sustainability reporting. Relying on these premises, Oliver’s (1991) framework might be an insightful theoretical perspective to examine the responses provided by universities to institutional pressures.

This chapter examines the internationalisation of public higher education in Brazil using the theoretical triptych of internationalisation as developed by leading scholars in the field: internationalisation at home (IaH), internationalisation abroad (IA), and internationalisation at a distance (IaD). This framework – while rooted in knowledge, systems, and scholarship from researchers and institutions in the Global North – is a constructive tool for categorising and understanding internationalisation at Brazil’s higher education institutions (HEIs) when coupled with an exploration of the history, context, policy, and dynamics of internationalisation efforts. The chapter then summarises and underscores recent and important scholarship by Brazilian researchers and others in the Global South that describes the history of the nation’s internationalisation efforts. It also critiques the powerful influence that Global North-centred objectives and priorities for internationalisation have on the process at Brazilian HEIs. Following a discussion of the theoretical framework and relevant literature, the chapter provides a case study of internationalisation efforts and initiatives of an elite public university, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). Content analysis of UFMG’s website and publicly available reports and data demonstrates a high level of institutional internationalisation that has unfolded in recent years, stimulated by federal funding and guided by a strategic framework developed within the Ministry of Education. An analysis of UFMG’s mission, partnerships and programmes finds that the institution serves as an example of internationalisation in Brazil’s public higher education context, as its programmes and initiatives exemplify the overarching objectives of internationalisation in Brazilian higher education.

This paper aims to assess the level of compliance of the Integrated Management Reports of four Brazilian public universities with the International Integrated Reporting Framework.

The authors carried out documentary research on the management reports of four Brazilian public universities for the period 2018–2020. For the analysis, the authors developed a Disclosure Index (DI) that analyzes the content of the reports and allows them to verify the quality of these institutional documents.

The results show that two universities present low quality of their reports with a disclosure rate lower than 50%, while the other two demonstrate evolution in the quality of reporting over the years. In addition, the findings point to the need for greater conciseness in the preparation of reports and accessibility of disclosures, as well as inclusion of the impacts of organizations’ activities on society and the environment.

This research brings relevant contributions by identifying points of improvement in the dissemination of information by management reports from an Integrated Reporting approach and by identifying the need to adopt strategies that expand the understanding and knowledge of the preparers about this new approach.

The authors adapted a DI to measure the adhesion of the management reports of Brazilian universities to the Integrated Reporting approach. The results will be of interest to public organizations that seek to improve information disclosure based on an Integrated Reporting approach.

This study aims to explore the configuration of a public university service innovation: the phenotypic evaluation of self-declared black and brown applicants for access to college undergraduate courses through racial quota in a Brazilian federal higher education institution (HEI).

By using qualitative methods and collecting data through semistructured interviews, this case study raises new explanatory aspects about service innovation in a noncommercial context.

Diversity in team composition and users’ sense of belonging emerged as unprecedented aspects of service innovation. The present study also coined another concept not verified in the literature: service cross-coproduction.

Regarding the limitations of the study, the technological dimension, despite having been shown to underlie the political–administrative process of innovations in services, given its importance reinforced by the literature and the current temporal context itself, did not emanate from the data collected. In addition, the fact that the service innovation investigated has occurred recently prevented longitudinal research that could detail the effects of phenotypic evaluation on institutional performance indicators.

The ethical–methodological care used in the interaction and preservation of the psychological integrity of the users in the case study proved to be subject to systematization and has great potential to enhance the service experience of the users through the humanization of the service delivery process. The linkage of the user’s perception to the phenotypic diversity of people working in the new service provision highlights the importance of incorporating themes such as the diversity of teams’ composition and representative bureaucracy to the scientific production of service innovation and their role in coproduction. The findings suggest that the resource allocation supply of basic goods and services needed to provide the new service reduces the individual risk of academic community members involved with innovation. Further studies could explore this relation.

Among the internal factors that influenced the configuration of service innovation, the idea of diversity in the team’s composition stood out. It based the phenotypic evaluation commission’s diverse constitution on gender, race, occupation and even nationality. It conferred greater legitimacy on service innovation, increasing the representation of groups that may not feel represented in public service delivery processes.

The results of the phenotypic evaluation case point to a new coproduction form emanating from the constitutive diversity of the phenotypic evaluation board members. This new type of coproduction is directly related to the complex, integrated and interdependent nature of the services that complement each other to enable the achievement of the objectives of a public university.

This study examines the management practices and alignment features needed to develop academic staff’s careers, mainly focusing on teaching competencies in the evolving landscape of Cambodian public universities.

A multiple-case research design was adopted to collect data from interviews with 11 academic leaders and focus-group discussions (FGDs) with 13 academic teachers at two public universities in provincial Cambodia. A thematic approach was performed to code and analyse data to address the research questions.

This study found that the management of academic careers in the selected universities was hybrid, deregulating state control to relative institutional autonomy for contracted employees but rather centralised management for civil servants. However, weak institutional leadership and negligence in formulating comprehensive institutional guidelines for strategic human resource management (HRM) have caused misalignments of management practices to develop academic careers in the studied contexts.

This case study limits its findings to two universities in provincial Cambodia. Nevertheless, this study adds to the scarce literature on the research topic in Cambodian public universities and opens a path for cross-institutional and national comparative studies on similar foci.

This is a ground-breaking study set in the evolving space of Cambodian public higher education, where attention to the research area remains limited.

Teachers at all levels of the education system are expected to model leadership qualities to students. Leadership qualities of level advisers (LAs) are regarded as charismatic, pragmatic, ideological and innovative (CPII) in this study. This study compared the leadership qualities of LAs in universities in Nigeria as perceived by students. The purpose of this paper is to compare the leadership qualities of LAs in universities in Nigeria as perceived by students.

A survey-comparative design of a quantitative research approach was used. Two universities were purposively selected and the convenience sampling method was applied to select 207 participants.

Findings revealed that LAs of the private university exhibit a slightly higher level of leadership qualities than those from the public university based on the students' assessment (t (207) = 2.19 and ρ = 0.029 < 0.05).

The study concluded that universities should organise regular workshops for LAs on innovative leadership to stimulate 21st-century learners to achieve their educational objectives.

It is therefore recommended that universities should organise a regular workshop for LAs on an innovative leadership model that promotes 21st century students to achieve their educational objectives.

In practice, the study of this kind is timely, given that academic advisers or advisers are very influential on student achievement and success. Thus, the outcome will educate the academic advisers on the leadership qualities that will enhance their role in the 21st century. In addition, it will add to the literature on university LAs' leadership skills in Nigeria and other nations of Africa. Most literature available in the context is mainly from America.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of educational service quality (ESQ) on student academic performance via the mediating role of student satisfaction.

To serve the study’s purpose, the study adopted a quantitative research approach. Three public universities representing 30% of the ten public universities located in the Southern part of Ethiopia participated in the study. Questionnaires were the main tools for gathering data. The adapted questionnaire, consisting of 116 items was administered to 400 randomly selected regular undergraduate graduating class students. The quantitative data collected via questionnaire were analyzed using descriptive and advanced inferential statistics.

The quantitative findings revealed that there is a statistically positive association between overall education service quality and students’ satisfaction (r = 0.712). The findings proved that the facets of education service quality accounted for 71.2% of the variations in students’ satisfaction in the universities. The quantitative findings further showed that the education service quality has a statistically indirect effect on students’ academic performance via the mediating role of students’ satisfaction (test statistic = 31.5311573, std. error = 0.00122536 and p-value = 0). The findings further confirmed that the overall education service quality accounted for 12.7% of the variations in students’ academic performance via student satisfaction in the universities.

The present study was conducted in public universities located in the Southern part of Ethiopia. The findings and conclusions of the study may not be generalizable to all Ethiopian public universities. Future researchers and scholars should conduct their study in all Ethiopian public universities by taking a representative sample from the Ethiopian public universities.

The present finding suggests that an improvement in ESQ leads to students’ satisfaction and that could contribute to boosting their academic performance. The findings of the present may help the practitioners who measure higher education service quality by providing how the provision of ESQ indirectly influences the student’s academic performance in the universities.

The findings of this study confirmed that the facets of ESQ are associated with students’ satisfaction and this, in turn, indirectly influences their academic performance. Student academic performance is one of the key indicators of quality education, and it has its influences on the social, political and economic development of a country. The findings of the present research provide valuable insights to higher education management bodies, higher quality assurance agencies and the Federal Ministry of Education to learn the indirect effect of ESQ on students’ academic performance and take necessary measures to improve the Ethiopian higher education quality.

The contributions of ESQ in the higher education sector are enormous. However, the existing service quality literature in higher education mainly focuses on the interrelation among service quality, student satisfaction, loyalty and behavioral intentions. Little is known about the indirect influence of ESQ on student academic performance (one of the key indicators of quality education), principally in Ethiopian higher education, the place of current research. The present study showed the indirect impact of ESQ on student academic performance in Ethiopian public universities. The study, therefore, suggests that university management bodies should actively monitor the quality of their services and commit themselves to boosting students’ learning outcomes.