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The purpose of this research is to investigate sustainable strategies for skills development that is specific to the youth of South Africa. International and South African data are statistically analysed and quantified to provide inputs for the systems dynamics (SD)-based predictive skills model. The skills model simulates the impact of barriers and drivers on youth skills development towards identification of focus areas for improvement.

The research adopts a mixed-methods approach. The study begins with an explorative literature study on skills development, with the findings applied in developing (1) South African specific research instruments for small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) and skills programme grant recipients and (2) a conceptual framework of the SD predictive skills model. The responses to the South African specific instruments are analysed via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), which quantifies the input coefficients to the system dynamics model. To quantify the global inputs for the SD model, an in-depth literature review of the global skills development initiatives is conducted. The SD model output on skills, for the South African inputs, is comparatively evaluated against global inputs.

The paper details the results of the literature analysis, instrument analyses, CFA and SD model. The instrument results rank experience, skills and interactions with experts and work-based learning as most important. South African and global learners identify networking as the primary medium for identifying training and employment opportunities. South African and global learners also identify qualifications and work-based experience as key to finding employment. The quantified results of the SA and global analysis are used as inputs in the SD model to deliver a forecasting tool. The SD model finds that the global data provide for better development of the skills base than the South African inputs. The key focus areas identified for improvement in South Africa include networking, work-based experience and a reduction in administrative requirements.

The research's originality resides in the ability to predict the impact of drivers and barriers on skills development. This research sought to transform qualitative global and South African inputs into a consolidated, predictive systems-based model. The SD model can be adopted as an indicator of drivers and barriers focused towards the optimisation of skills development.

There is a growing awareness of the dangers of climate change and global warming due to increasing energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Campus universities are critical for implementing low-carbon development efficiently, given the large population and socio-economic activities concentrated on campus. This paper aims to explore the existing campus management initiatives and recommends holistic driving elements towards successful low-carbon campus development.

This study’s triangulation of information was supplemented by contributions from 116 respondents on the UiTM Shah Alam campus and eight professional interviews with stakeholders involved in low-carbon campus projects.

The study reported that low-carbon strategies had been implemented on the UiTM Shah Alam campus, with most existing programmes and activities focusing on low-hanging fruit initiatives. Moreover, the findings indicate that financial, cultural, behavioural, organisational and physical constraints are critical challenges to effectively implementing low-carbon approaches. The proposed techniques suggest that generating green funding, defining clear targets, developing standard procedures for carbon assessment and monitoring, also boosting education and outreach programmes lead to the improvement of low-carbon campus efforts.

The outcomes of this paper offer perspective to campus administration and community into an evaluation of current approaches and strategies for merging low-carbon systems. The effectiveness of low-carbon implementation was ensured by addressing issues concerning low-carbon uptake and fostering low-carbon improvement.

Besides providing a better understanding of techniques to implementing low-carbon development in Malaysia, the critical hurdles and driving factors, the output from this study adds to the existing knowledge available concerning the campus community’s existing comprehension.

The concept of sustainable development (SD) is a popular response to society’s need to preserve and extend the life span of natural resources. One of the 17 goals of the SD is “education quality” (Fourth Goal of Sustainable Development [SDG-4]). Education quality is an important goal because education is a powerful force that can influence social policies and social change. The SDG-4 must be measured in different contexts, and the tools to quantify its effects require exploration. So, this study aims to propose a statistical model to measure the impact of higher education online courses on SD and a structural equation model (SEM) to find constructs or factors that help us explain a sustainability benefits rate. These proposed models integrate the three areas of sustainability: social, economic and environmental.

A beta regression model suggests features that include the academic and economic opportunities offered by the institution, the involvement in research activities and the quality of the online courses. A structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis allowed selecting the key variables and constructs that are strongly linked to the SD.

One of the key findings showed that the benefit provided by online courses in terms of SD is 62.99% higher than that of offline courses in aspects such as transportation, photocopies, printouts, books, food, clothing, enrolment fees and connectivity.

The SEM model needs large sample sizes to have consistent estimations. Thus, despite the obtained estimations in the proposed SEM model being reliable, the authors consider that a limitation of this study was the required time to collect data corresponding to the estimated sample size.

This study proposes two novel and different ways to estimate the sustainability benefits rate focused on SDG-4, and machine learning tools are implemented to validate and gain robustness in the estimations of the beta model. Additionally, the SEM model allows us to identify new constructs associated with SDG-4.

As the role of AI on human teams shifts from a tool to a teammate, the implementation of AI teammates into knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing (KI-C) contest teams represents a forward-thinking and feasible solution to improve team performance. Since contest teams are characterized by virtuality, temporality, competitiveness, and skill diversity, the human-AI interaction mechanism underlying conventional teams is no longer applicable. This study empirically analyzes the effects of AI teammate attributes on human team members’ willingness to adopt AI in crowdsourcing contests.

A questionnaire-based online experiment was designed to perform behavioral data collection. We obtained 206 valid anonymized samples from 28 provinces in China. The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model was used to test the proposed hypotheses.

We find that the transparency and explainability of AI teammates have mediating effects on human team members’ willingness to adopt AI through trust. Due to the different tendencies exhibited by members with regard to three types of cognitive load, nonlinear U-shaped relationships are observed among explainability, cognitive load, and willingness to adopt AI.

We provide design ideas for human-AI team mechanisms in KI-C scenarios, and rationally explain how the U-shaped relationship between AI explainability and cognitive load emerges.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the coherence between sustainability conceptualization (the “what”) and its implementation (the “how”) in terms of implemented actions and stakeholders’ interactions. The paper proposes a grid approach for the simultaneous evaluation of sustainability conceptualization and implementation.

This research is based on a multiple case study conducted in ten Italian Universities. In-depth interviews with general directors and administrative staff responsible for sustainable activities have been conducted together with documents and websites analysis.

The coherence between sustainability conceptualization and its implementation showed heterogeneity of practice. Results propose a grid approach, which highlights six different approaches to explain the connection between the “what” and the “how” of sustainability.

The research is focused on Italian universities and may have overlooked approaches to campus sustainability specific of other countries.

Understanding the coherence between the “what” and the “how” of sustainability can provide university managers with a practical tool of analysis when approaching and evaluating the sustainable campus.

While higher education scholars are widely exploring the conceptualization of a sustainable campus and its implementation, little is known about the coherence between these two realms, despite their importance to facilitate the transition of sustainability vision into real practice. This study contributes to this area by proposing a grid approach to evaluate the coherence between sustainability conceptualization and implementation.

Intangible capital (IC) is an important factor for economic growth and firm performance. The role IC has played has become even more crucial in recent decades, possibly influencing debt capacity and default risk assessment. This paper studies how entrepreneurial and employee-based IC affects financial leverage.

Employer–employee unbalanced panel data provided by Statistics Finland that refer to Finnish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are used. Intangibles are measured with an expenditure-based method. Employee-based IC and entrepreneurial knowledge are used to explain debt financing in SMEs.

The findings imply that IC-intensive firms have less debt capacity due to weak pledgeability and asymmetric information between borrower and lender. Entrepreneurs with managerial or financial knowledge increase the firm's debt capacity compared to other entrepreneurs, especially in knowledge-intensive services (KIS). One explanation is that the entrepreneurs are more competent in negotiating with lenders as the entrepreneurs possess better financial skills. Entrepreneurs with technical knowledge decrease the firm's debt capacity in all industries.

While some earlier research focused on the IC–financial leverage relationship, hardly any study has looked at entrepreneurial IC. This paper provides new insights by including entrepreneurial IC alongside employee-based IC.

Literature in the entrepreneurial marketing (EM) field continues to flourish with a noted increase in publications in recent years. This study aims to conduct a bibliographic analysis of EM literature, to examine the intellectual landscape of the field and assess scientific productivity and impact.

A total of 1,363 EM papers, extracted from the Web of Science database, were identified between 2005 and 2019. Co-authorship, citation, co-citation and keyword co-occurrence were examined, identifying the most-prominent authors, articles, journals and countries of publication, citation and co-citation. Network maps were created using VOSviewer.

The findings indicate that EM has become a thriving, multidisciplinary field that has reached a point of maturity, where exploration is seemingly a major focus of the field’s expansion. This maturity is mirrored in the evolution of the EM operationalisation – moving from a narrowly defined scope to a far broader and encompassing operationalisation. Distinct schools of thought emerging in the literature have been identified and emerging trends guiding the future growth of the EM field have been discussed. The expansion of the field continues to be assembled on the foundation of a number of seminal papers.

This research offers an updated examination of the EM field, in particular, including a period of recent expansion in the field. The incorporation of network maps offers a visual depiction of the intellectual landscape of the field.

This paper aims to analyse the use of level of debt as an external control mechanism against an entrenchment strategy based on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices.

The authors use a database of 1,916 international companies for the years 2002 to 2010.

The evidence obtained confirms in a context of asymmetric information, bounded rationality and divergent interests, the use of debt as a control mechanism of managers’ discretionary comportment. In other words, CSR practices can be used by managers as an entrenchment strategy and self-defence with the aim of decreasing the possibility of being identified by those shareholders and stakeholders whose interests have been damaged. In this context, the market demands higher debt levels to solve agency frictions, playing an active role in monitoring the management. Moreover, the demand of higher debt as a control mechanism that minimises the expropriation risk by managers through CSR is lower in contexts of greater investor protection.

The findings reveal that CSR engagement can be explained by the hypothesis of being a strategy of entrenchment and self-defence. Overall, this study differs from previous literature in this field by taking an alternative approach to CSR practices, in contrast to the conventional wisdom of the benefits of CSR practices. The authors contribute by empirically testing the theoretical model proposed by Cespa and Cestone (2007) who suggest the discretionary use of CSR from an agency perspective. They also give empirical relief showing the use of CSR as an entrenchment strategy. Moreover, they demonstrate that the capital market of debt decreases in a context with a greater degree of investor protection, likewise under CSR promoted as an entrenchment tool, the demand for debt as a disciplinary mechanism is less necessary to control managers. In addition, the study is enriched by the database analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the informational role played by ownership concentration.

The authors use bivariate vector autoregressive models to document the informational role of ownership concentration.

The findings suggest that the returns of firms with concentrated ownership structure lead the returns of firms with dispersed ownership structure in Morocco during the period between 2004 and 2014. The authors argue that this lead-lag relationship arises because a better information environment in firms with concentrated ownership structure enables quick incorporation of relevant information. The results are robust under different information regimes.

The authors believe that this paper is one of the first evidence on the informational role of ownership concentration in Morocco.

The purpose of this paper is to identify a measure of intellectual capital (IC) value which offers new research opportunities for empirical investigations and to examine the determinants of IC value.

In total, 4,488 firm years of German companies are investigated to compare three measures of IC value: market-to-book, Tobin’s q, and long-run value-to-book (LRVTB).

LRVTB is observed to be the IC value measure with the highest explanatory value. This measure provides an approach to empirically test previously untested hypotheses on IC value. The results on testing determinants of IC value indicate that IC value is positively related to leverage and motivational payments to employees and negatively associated with company size. In contrast, recognised intangible assets, research and development (R & D), company age and concentrated ownership show no significant effects.

The findings on IC value measures contribute to IC research as they offer a way to estimate IC value for testing IC-related hypotheses. The findings on IC determinants have implications for IC management as the relevant determinants can be considered for IC value creation.

This paper responds to the challenge posed by previous IC research to develop more creative quantitative approaches to estimate IC value (Marr et al., 2003; Mouritsen, 2006) in order to test IC-related hypotheses by innovatively applying a measure from mergers and acquisitions research to IC.