Search results

Globally, climate change governance continues to be a significant challenge to policymakers, environmentalists and politicians despite international summits, conferences and programmes designed to find sustainable solutions to the climate change crises. Climate change continues to be viewed primarily as a challenge for the future, whereas many leaders and administrators globally regard it as an environmental issue rather than a challenge that encompasses all aspects of life. In South Africa, these misleading perceptions of climate change continue to prevail both at national and local levels. The government and private organisations do not attach the required levels of urgency needed to address the climate change crisis. While numerous policies and institutions have been established to address these challenges, they lack financial backing, coordination and synergy that cut across the broad objectives of environmental, social and economic agendas. Additionally, weak, eroding trust and manipulating of institutions continue to hinder effective policy implementation and focus-driven governance. This paper aims to explore the structural and governance weaknesses of climate change administration in the KwaZulu-Natal province and South Africa in general.

This paper used extensive literature reviews and a triangulated approach to investigate the weaknesses of the current governance structure in the context of institutional and capacity constraints.

The findings uncovered that most institutions and organisations mandated to address climate change challenges operate in silos, lack required investment and capacity and have weak accountability mechanisms with a shallow understanding of climate change governance.

This paper recommends better coordination between national, provincial and local governments as well as the private sector towards climate change activities and capacity to ensure that climate change actions are effectively implemented.

Despite the burgeoning popularity of virtual gifting in live streaming, research lacks an in-depth understanding of the drivers behind this behavior. Using para-social relationship (PSR), this study aims to capture viewers’ lively social feelings toward the streamer as the key factor leading to the purchase behavior of virtual gifts. It also aims to establish a theoretical link between PSR and viewers’ holistic experience in live streaming as captured by cognitive absorption and aims to investigates the role of technological features (i.e. viewer–streamer and viewer–viewer interactivity, streamer-level and viewer-level deep profiling and design aesthetics) in shaping viewers’ experience.

Based on 433 survey responses, this study employs a combination of structural equation modeling and neural networks to offer valuable insights into the relationships between the technological environment, viewer experience and viewer behavior.

Our results highlight the salience of PSR in promoting the purchase of virtual gifts through cognitive absorption and the importance of the technological environment in eliciting the viewer experience. This study sheds light on the development of PSR in a technological environment and its relationship with cognitive absorption.

By applying PSR to conceptualize viewers’ perceived connection with the streamer, this study extends the research on purchase behavior in the non-shopping context by providing an enlightened understanding of virtual gift purchase behavior in live streaming. Moreover, by theoretically linking PSR with cognitive absorption, virtual gift purchase and technological features of live streaming, it enriches the theory of PSR and bridges the gap between the design practice of supporting the IT infrastructure of live streaming and research.

Drawing on the example of car manufacturer Tesla and its early investor Elon Musk, the purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between the personal communication activities of influential entrepreneurs on social media, the emergence of parasocial interactions (PSIs) and the related communication outcomes for the company.

This paper conducted an online survey, recruiting 207 participants via purposive sampling. Partial least square path modeling and an independent t-test were conducted to test hypotheses.

The results of this paper show that following entrepreneurs’ personal social media activities amplifies PSIs, which in turn positively impact the company's communication outcomes. Organization–public relationships and purchase intentions are improved by PSI.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies that connects the personal and the organizational level in exploring entrepreneurial marketing. The results show that Elon Musk acts as an influential entrepreneur to effectively promote communication outcomes for Tesla. This paper illuminates the potential of entrepreneurs’ personal social media activities to support the success of their ventures.

Reading the political and the familial in The Americans illuminates central features of the New Right. In particular, The Americans provides an opportunity to reconsider the significance of the ‘pro-family’ label to New Right organising, the importance of mothering to the ‘pro-family’ narrative offered by the New Right, and the relationship between this account of mothering and democratic citizenship more broadly. This paper argues: first, the ‘pro-family’ label served to weaponise American families against equality and egalitarian public institutions; second, that this weaponisation of the family was accomplished through a rhetorical and real elevation of the moralised work of mothers in the home; and third, this account of mothering is incompatible with democratic citizenship not only because it reproduces inequality but also because it presents families, particularly mothers, as surrounded by enemies. Surrounded by enemies, their children appear endangered or dangerous should they become products of enemy forces. The pro-family rhetoric of the New Right – with its emphasis on the labour of women, particularly mothers – concealed an insurgent factional bid for power just as the Jennings family concealed an insurgent operation inside the United States. The displacement of law in The Americans mirrors the displacement of law in American conservative politics in the 1980s and law’s replacement by the ideal of sanctified families that the guard republic. The Americans both recognises this reversal in American conservative politics and parodies the reversal of the idea that law protects the family.

Research on knowledge creation within eSports learning is scarce. This study extends the understanding of competition-oriented collaborative learning in eSports by examining the relationship between the dynamics of knowledge creation modes and the continuum of the motivational profile, along with the moderating effects of mutualistic co-presence therein.

Participants were recruited from the community of massively multiplayer online gamers (MMOGs). Through a quantitative survey, their motivations (i.e. self-extrinsic, self-intrinsic, peer-extrinsic and peer-intrinsic motivations), knowledge creation involvements (i.e. internalization, externalization, combination and socialization) and perception of mutualistic benefit of self and peers were captured for hypothesis testing.

Significant and positive direct relationships were observed between four motivations and four knowledge creation modes. The mutualistic co-presence positively moderated the positive relationship between the self-extrinsic, peer-extrinsic and peer-intrinsic motivations and socialization. When mutualistic self-benefit were outweighed, peer-extrinsic motivated gamers became less likely to perform internalization, whereas self-extrinsic and peer-extrinsic motivated gamers were less likely to perform combination.

This study is among the first to rationalize the relationship between motivational profile and the dynamics of knowledge creation in eSports learning. The conceptualization of the new construct – mutualistic co-presence – using the ecological concept of symbiosis is uncommon in prior literature. The findings also demonstrate that the four modes of knowledge creation in eSports learning are continuous and interwoven; they can be initiated at any point and do not necessarily occur in a specific sequence.

Goal setting is a crucial aspect of client-centered practice in occupational therapy (OT) for mental health conditions. However, it remains to be seen how goal-setting has been delivered in mental health, particularly the OT process. The purpose of this scoping review was to explore the nature and extent of goal setting delivered in mental health and informed OT practice.

The authors followed the guidelines of Arksey and O’Malley (2005) and searched three databases using key search terms: “mental disorder,” “goal setting,” and “occupational therapy” and their synonyms.

After excluding duplicate records, the authors initially screened 883 records and resulted in 20 records in total after the screening process. Most of the identified articles used goal-setting delivered by both a health professional and a client (n = 14), and focused on people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (n = 13), but three interventions were delivered by occupational therapists. Further research needs on goal-setting in mental health OT, exploring the reliability and validity of different goal-setting strategies and investigating the effectiveness of goal-setting for promoting behavior change and client engagement across various mental health conditions and settings.

The scoping review has some limitations, such as not investigating the validity and reliability of goal-setting strategies identified, and excluding conference papers and non-English articles.

This scoping review presents a mapping of how goal-setting has been delivered in mental health and informed OT practice. The findings suggest limited research in OT and highlight the need for more studies to address the evidence gap in individualized client-centered OT.

Competitiveness is an individual difference variable that incorporates factors generally associated with the desire to excel in comparison to others and the enjoyment of competition. There is still much debate on whether it is helpful or harmful, which may stem from the scattered ways in which it is studied. Thereby, this study aims to properly synthesize the literature concerning the prevailing correlates, underlying theory and frequent applications of competitiveness and to set forth an outline of domains in need of further research and exploration.

The authors do so by using two methods of analysis on a representative sample of 546 peer-reviewed publications.

The authors find that competitiveness research has and will continue to grow expeditiously, but its complexity and cloudiness have not yet been attenuated.

The study uncovers opportunities for pertinent future research on competitiveness to grow more productively and collaboratively by highlighting salient works and identifying the fragmentations that have led the literature into a state of disarray.

This empirical paper is an endeavor to explore the relationship between social media advertising (SMA) and customers' purchase intention (CPI) in three South Asian countries. SMA was further divided into three relevant dimensions: perceived relevance (PR), perceived informativeness (PI) and perceived credibility (PC). Furthermore, the authors incorporated a single mediator: customers' brand consciousness (CBC) to test the mediating effects on the direct relationships.

The authors purposively selected 1937 fashion-conscious individuals based on a cross-sectional survey design. The authors applied SPSS 25 for explanatory statistics and structural equation modeling (SEM) (through AMOS 25) for testing the hypothesized relationships.

Based on the responses and the application of statistical measures, the authors revealed that all of the three dimensions of SMA have significant positive relationships with CPI. CBC is also significantly and positively related to CPI. Regarding the mediating effects, CBC was identified to have full mediation effects on the relationships between PR and CPI and PI and CPI. On the contrary, the same variable was found to have partial mediation on the relationship between PC and CPI.

South Asia is a growing business hub and the largest consumer market in terms of population. This empirical study was undertaken to reveal the role of SMA on CPI in the three highly populated South Asian countries, which is rare in academia. The outcomes of this empirical study are expected to be useful for further research attempts regarding SMA and consumer behavior. Businesses and policymakers are also expected to benefit from formulating SMA-related strategies to retain present buyers as well as attract the prospective ones.

The purpose of this study is use a bibliometric analysis to explore the relational nature of knowledge creation in WFM in operations. Companies live under constant pressure to find the best ways to plan their workforce, and the workforce emangement (WFM) is one of the biggest challenges faced by managers. Relevant research on WFM in operations has been published in a several range of journals that vary in their scope and readership, and thus the academic contribution to the topic remains largely fragmented.

To address this gap, this review aims to map research on WFM in operations to understand where it comes from and where it is going and, therefore, provides opportunities for future work. This study combined two bibliometric approaches with manual document coding to examine the literature corpus of WFM in operations to draw a holistic picture of its different aspects.

Content and thematic analysis of the seminal studies resulted in the extraction of three key research themes: workforce cross-training, planning workforce mixed methods and individual workforce characteristics. The findings of this study further highlight the gaps in the WFM in operations literature and raise some research questions that warrant further academic investigation in the future.

Likewise, this study has important implications for practitioners who are likely to benefit from a holistic understanding of the different aspects of WFM in operations.

There is a growing need for methodological plurality in advancing operations management (OM), especially with the emergence of machine learning (ML) techniques for analysing extensive textual data. To bridge this knowledge gap, this paper introduces a new methodology that combines ML techniques with traditional qualitative approaches, aiming to reconstruct knowledge from existing publications.

In this pragmatist-rooted abductive method where human-machine interactions analyse big data, the authors employ topic modelling (TM), an ML technique, to enable constructivist grounded theory (CGT). A four-step coding process (Raw coding, expert coding, focused coding and theory building) is deployed to strive for procedural and interpretive rigour. To demonstrate the approach, the authors collected data from an open-source professional project management (PM) website and illustrated their research design and data analysis leading to theory development.

The results show that TM significantly improves the ability of researchers to systematically investigate and interpret codes generated from large textual data, thus contributing to theory building.

This paper presents a novel approach that integrates an ML-based technique with human hermeneutic methods for empirical studies in OM. Using grounded theory, this method reconstructs latent knowledge from massive textual data and uncovers management phenomena hidden from published data, offering a new way for academics to develop potential theories for business and management studies.