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The textile industry contributes 2 and 3% to the global and Indian Gross Domestic Product (GDP), respectively. India supplies a quarter of global cotton yarn. Yet, most yarn manufacturing companies use outdated methods and lack organisational skills and strategies. Improvement in processes in India could significantly help the industry worldwide.

The variables that influence the performance of the system were identified. Their interrelationships and impact were identified from the employees in the chosen case study, a yarn manufacturing industry. A System Dynamics (SD) approach was employed to study the benefits of implementing 5S lean strategies. The impact of each variable on various performance measures such as throughput, Work In Progress, processing time, waiting time, idle time, over-processing and scraps was analysed.

Improvement in outcomes reflected an enhanced adoption of leanness in the industry. The decision-makers can utilise this study to optimise the necessary parameters in the system and attain the desired productivity levels. Better resource management and reduced processing time helped increase the despatch rate by 9.735% and decrease the WIP by 23.01%. Time management helped to reduce the inventory, idle time and waiting time. Over-processing, defects and scraps were minimised, indicating a shift towards lean.

This study pioneers the use of SD simulation models for optimising yarn manufacturing using lean strategies. Improvement in performance measures by integrating these strategies opens avenues for future research using multiple approaches to address a problem.

Implementing 5S lean principles and simulations enhances productivity, reduces waste and optimises resource management for the yarn manufacturing industry. Decision-makers can employ simulation to witness the outcomes of their changes without investing cost and time and without associated implementation risks.

The use of a simulation model to witness the benefits of incorporating lean strategies in yarn production has not been explored. This approach could help the managers and policymakers understand their existing system's shortcomings and critical areas that require improvement.

Recent archiving and curatorial practices took advantage of the advancement in digital technologies, creating immersive and interactive experiences to emphasize the plurality of memory materials, encourage personalized sense-making and extract, manage and share the ever-growing surrounding knowledge. Audiovisual (AV) content, with its growing importance and popularity, is less explored on that end than texts and images. This paper examines the trend of datafication in AV archives and answers the critical question, “What to extract from AV materials and why?”.

This study roots in a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of digital methods and curatorial practices in AV archives. The thinking model for mapping AV archive data to purposes is based on pre-existing models for understanding multimedia content and metadata standards.

The thinking model connects AV content descriptors (data perspective) and purposes (curatorial perspective) and provides a theoretical map of how information extracted from AV archives should be fused and embedded for memory institutions. The model is constructed by looking into the three broad dimensions of audiovisual content – archival, affective and aesthetic, social and historical.

This paper contributes uniquely to the intersection of computational archives, audiovisual content and public sense-making experiences. It provides updates and insights to work towards datafied AV archives and cope with the increasing needs in the sense-making end using AV archives.

This paper aims to explore the significance of videoconferencing in blended learning, using the technology acceptance model to investigate students’ perceptions and its impact on course engagement, student satisfaction and future technology use intention. In addition, it examines the role of teacher support in fostering interactive virtual learning experiences.

This study focuses on a cohort of international students regarding blended courses amid the COVID-19 pandemic when the conventional face-to-face components were substituted with virtual classrooms through videoconferencing. It aims to investigate how to facilitate connectivity between Southeast Asian students and their professors located in a Southern state in the USA.

This study reveals that the perceived usefulness of videoconferencing predicts future intention to use, emphasizing the vital role of teacher support in engaging students in virtual classrooms and contributing to student satisfaction.

The small sample of international students in blended courses with an American university during the COVID-19 pandemic may limit the generalization of the findings.

Videoconferencing can be a valuable tool to enhance connectedness in digital learning post pandemic.

Videoconferencing in blended learning can bridge geographical barriers and provide access to diverse learners who might otherwise have limited educational opportunities.

This study supports the integration of videoconferencing as a mechanism for providing high-quality digital learning experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.

Using a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.

The paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.

The paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.

Avatars, which are used as a technology and marketing tactic, can embody consumer-facing employees and mimic their real-life roles on companies' websites, thereby playing a key role in enhancing the relationships between consumers and brands in the online environment. Academics and practitioners have increasingly acknowledged the significance of the consumer-brand relationship in both traditional and online contexts. However, the impersonal nature of the online environment is considered to be a hindrance to the development of these relationships. Despite the importance of this technology, little attention has been paid to the investigation of the avatar concept from a marketing perspective. This paper explores the nature of the avatar concept, including its main characteristics, dimensions, and conditions as well as the attitudinal and behavioural consequences of avatar users.

Adopting the qualitative design, a taxonomy was developed from interviews. In total, 42 interviews were conducted with current university students. 30 participants participated in the exploratory interviews. A total of 12 interviews were conducted during the in-depth stage based on findings in the preceding research.

Based on the qualitative data analysis, a taxonomy was developed. The idea of the taxonomy is summarized in that different dimensions of the avatar are considered the main base (first phase) of the taxonomy. There are consequential three parts: the attitudinal consequences related to the website; the attitudinal consequences related to the brand; the behaviours towards the brand. These behaviours represent the final phase of the taxonomy.

By developing a taxonomy of using avatars on brands' websites, the authors advance the understanding consumer-brands relationships. Using avatars' verbal interactions helps in shaping consumers' cognitive, affective, attitudinal and behavioural responses and add vital empirical evidence to the increasing body of research and practices involving avatar usage in the interactive marketing area.

This paper aims to understand how immigrant entrepreneurs use digital opportunities to overcome the liability of newness and foreignness and how an immigrant's ethnicity can be digitally performed as an asset in business.

The study adopts an inductive multiple case study approach using social media content. The data consist of over 3,500 posts, images and screenshots from Facebook, Instagram and the webpages of seven successful Vietnamese restaurants in Sweden. Grounded content analysis was conducted using NVivo.

The findings suggest that digitalising ethnic artifacts can mediate and facilitate three digital performances that together can turn ethnicity from a liability to an asset: (i) preserving performance through digital ethnicising, (ii) embracing performance through digital generativitising and (iii) appropriating performance through digital fusionising. The results support the introduction of a conceptual framework depicting the interwoven duality of horizontal and vertical boundary blurring, in which the former takes place between the offline and online spaces of immigrant businesses, and the latter occurs between the home and host country attachment of the immigrant businesses.

This study responds to calls for understanding how immigrant entrepreneurs can overcome the liability of foreignness. It offers a fresh look at ethnicity, which has been seen in a negative light in the field of immigrant entrepreneurship. This study illuminates that ethnicity can be used as a resource in immigrant entrepreneurship, specifically through the use of digital artifacts and digital platforms.

The authors argue that privacy is integral to the well-being of consumers and an essential component in not only corporate social responsibility (CSR) but what they term uniquely as social media responsibility (SMR). A conceptual framework is proposed that delineates the privacy issues companies should pay attention to in artificial intelligence (AI)-fueled social media environments.

The authors review literature on privacy issues in social media and AI in the academic and practitioner literatures. Based on the review, arguments focus on the need for an SMR framework, proposing responsible use of consumer data that is attentive to consumers' privacy concerns.

Implications from the framework are a path forward for social media companies to treat consumer data more fairly in this new environment. The framework has implications for companies to reduce potential harms to consumers and consider addressing their power and responsibility. With social media and AI transforming consumer behavior so profoundly, there are a variety of short- and long-term social implications.

Since AI tools are becoming integral to social media company activities, this research addresses the changing responsibilities social media companies have in securing consumers' data and enabling consumers the agency to protect their privacy effectively. The authors propose an SMR framework based on CSR research and AI tools employed by social media companies.

This study proposes a novel method utilising a speech-word pair bipartite network to examine the correlation structure between members of parliament (MPs) in the context of the UK- China relationship.

We construct MP-word pair bipartite networks based on the co-occurrence relationship between MPs and words in their speech content. These networks are then mapped into monopartite MPs correlation networks. Additionally, the study calculates correlation network indicators and identifies MP communities and factions to determine the characteristics of MPs and their interrelation in the UK-China relationship. This includes insights into the distribution of key MPs, their correlation structure and the evolution and development trends of MP factions.

Analysis of the parliamentary speeches on China-related affairs in the British Parliament from 2011 to 2020 reveals that the distribution and interrelationship of MPs engaged in UK-China affairs are centralised and discrete, with a few core MPs playing an integral role in the UK-China relationship. Among them, MPs such as Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, David Cameron, Lord Hunt of Chesterton and Lord Howell of Guildford formed factions with significant differences; however, the continuity of their evolution exhibits unstableness. The core MP factions, such as those led by Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon and David Cameron, have achieved a level of maturity and exert significant influence.

The research has several limitations that warrant acknowledgement. First, we mapped the MP-word pair bipartite network into the MP correlation network for analysis without directly analysing the structure of MPs based on the bipartite network. In future studies, we aim to explore various types of analysis based on the proposed bipartite networks to provide more comprehensive and accurate references for studying UK-China relations. In addition, we seek to incorporate semantic-level analyses, such as sentiment analysis of MPs, into the MP-word -pair bipartite networks for in-depth analysis. Second, the interpretations of MP structures in the UK-China relationship in this study are limited. Consequently, expertise in UK-China relations should be incorporated to enhance the study and provide more practical recommendations.

Firstly, the findings can contribute to an objective understanding of the characteristics and connotations of UK-China relations, thereby informing adjustments of focus accordingly. The identification of the main factions in the UK-China relationship emphasises the imperative for governments to pay greater attention to these MPs’ speeches and social relationships. Secondly, examining the evolution and development of MP factions aids in identifying a country’s diplomatic focus during different periods. This can assist governments in responding promptly to relevant issues and contribute to the formulation of effective foreign policies.

First, this study expands the research methodology of parliamentary debates analysis in previous studies. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the UK-China relationship through the MP-word-pair bipartite network. This outcome inspires future researchers to apply various knowledge networks in the LIS field to elucidate deeper characteristics and connotations of UK-China relations. Second, this study provides a novel perspective for UK-China relationship analysis, which deepens the research object from keywords to MPs. This finding may offer important implications for researchers to further study the role of MPs in the UK-China relationship.

This study proposes a novel scheme for analysing the correlation structure between MPs based on bipartite networks. This approach offers insights into the development and evolving dynamics of MPs.