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This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Major themes included are creating a transformative space for healing, greater willingness to be vulnerable, overcoming fear, listening and attending to others more deeply, and being more fully present.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The aim of this chapter is to define and explore the group of emotions known as self-conscious emotions. The state of the knowledge on guilt, shame, pride, and embarrassment is reviewed, with particular attention paid to research on these four self-conscious emotions in work and organizational settings. Surprisingly little research on self-conscious emotions comes from researchers interested in occupational stress and well-being, yet these emotions are commonly experienced and may be a reaction to or even a source of stress. They may also impact behaviors and attitudes that affect stress and well-being. I conclude the review with a call for more research on these emotions as related to stress and well-being, offering some suggestions for areas of focus.

Professional touching behavior (PTB), defined as intentional touching behavior that occurs between organizational members and that falls within the boundaries of appropriateness and professionalism in the workplace, is prevalent in organizations. Scholars from multiple disciplines, including human resources researchers, have acknowledged the importance of physical contact for facilitating interpersonal communication and relationship-building. However, PTB may not only elicit positive reactions from those who receive it but also negative reactions as well, with implications for social dynamics in organizations. PTB can, on the one hand, fulfill employees’ desires for interpersonal connection; at the same time, such physical contact at work can represent a threat to employees’ health. To explain the nature and implications of these divergent effects of receiving PTB, the authors draw upon sociometer theory and behavioral immune system (BIS) theory to model the emotional, cognitive, and physiological processes via which, and the conditions under which, receiving such behavior will result in socially functional responses and prompt subsequent prosocial behavior, and when PTB will be perceived as a health risk and prompt withdrawal behavior. The theoretical framework of this chapter expands our conceptual understanding of the consequences of interpersonal physical contact at work and has important human resources management (HRM) implications for organizational managers.

Citizens are substantial stakeholders in every e-government system, thus their willingness to use and ability to access the system are critical. Unequal access and information and communication technology usage, which is known as digital divide, however has been identified as one of the major obstacles to the implementation of e-government system. As digital divide inhibits citizen’s acceptance to e-government, it should be overcome despite the lack of deep theoretical understanding on this issue. This research aimed to investigate the digital divide and its direct impact on e-government system success of local governments in Indonesia as well as indirect impact through the mediation role of trust. In order to get a comprehensive understanding of digital divide, this study introduced a new type of digital divide, the innovativeness divide.

The research problems were approached by applying two-stage sequential mixed method research approach comprising of both qualitative and quantitative studies. In the first phase, an initial research model was proposed based on a literature review. Semi-structured interview with 12 users of e-government systems was then conducted to explore and enhance this initial research model. Data collected in this phase were analyzed with a two-stage content analysis approach and the initial model was then amended based on the findings. As a result, a comprehensive research model with 16 hypotheses was proposed for examination in the second phase.

In the second phase, quantitative method was applied. A questionnaire was developed based on findings in the first phase. A pilot study was conducted to refine the questionnaire, which was then distributed in a national survey resulting in 237 useable responses. Data collected in this phase were analyzed using Partial Least Square based Structural Equation Modeling.

The results of quantitative analysis confirmed 13 hypotheses. All direct influences of the variables of digital divide on e-government system success were supported. The mediating effects of trust in e-government in the relationship between capability divide and e-government system success as well as in the relationship between innovativeness divide and e-government system success were supported, but was rejected in the relationship between access divide and e-government system success. Furthermore, the results supported the moderating effects of demographic variables of age, residential place, and education.

This research has both theoretical and practical contributions. The study contributes to the developments of literature on digital divide and e-government by providing a more comprehensive framework, and also to the implementation of e-government by local governments and the improvement of e-government Readiness Index of Indonesia.

Brands are increasingly reflecting social values, and many brands have begun to embrace equality and inclusivity as a marketing strategy. Accordingly, consumers are increasingly being exposed to brands associated with different social groups. This paper aims to examine how consumers who have experienced pride respond to brands associated with dissociative out-groups.

Four studies were conducted. Study 1 tested the basic effect of how the experience of different facets of pride affects consumers’ brand attitudes toward a brand associated with a dissociative out-group. Studies 2 and 3 examined the underlying mechanism of consumers’ psychological endorsement of egalitarianism using both mediation and moderation approaches. Study 4 derived implications of our findings for marketers.

The results show that consumers respond differently to a brand associated with a dissociative out-group based on the facets of pride they experience. When consumers experience authentic (vs hubristic) pride, they exhibit a more favorable attitude toward the brand associated with the dissociative out-group. This is because authentic (vs hubristic) pride increases consumers’ psychological endorsement of egalitarianism, which enhances consumers’ brand attitudes toward the brand associated with the dissociative out-group.

The findings suggest that brand managers should think about ways to elicit consumers’ authentic pride to minimize the potential backlash from consumers when promoting equality and inclusivity in their brand communications, particularly when such communications contain cues of dissociative out-groups.

This paper contributes to the branding literature by identifying pride as an important determinant that can help brands overcome the negative impact of dissociative out-groups on consumers’ brand reactions, enriches the literature on pride by documenting a novel effect of the two facets of pride on consumer behavior and extends the literature of egalitarianism by demonstrating pride as a driver of consumers’ psychological endorsement of egalitarianism.

This review integrates and builds linkages among existing theoretical and empirical literature from across disciplines to further broaden our understanding of the relationship between inequality, imprisonment, and health for black men. The review examines the health impact of prisons through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology interact with prisons to potentially contribute to deleterious health effects and the exacerbation of race/ethnic health disparities.

This review finds that there are documented health disparities between inmates and non-inmates, but the casual mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well-understood. Prisons may interact with other societal systems – such as the family (microsystem), education, and healthcare systems (meso/exosystems), and systems of racial oppression (macrosystem) – to influence individual and population health.

The review also finds that research needs to move the discussion of the race effects in health and crime/justice disparities beyond the mere documentation of such differences toward a better understanding of their causes and effects at the level of individuals, communities, and other social ecologies.

What effect does strategic frame adaptation have on movement continuation and popularity? Using a comprehensive online dataset from three North American cities, we show how SlutWalk’s continuous strategic adaptation of frames in response to criticisms and changing political and social climates has influenced its popularity over the past three years. SlutWalk’s initial “Shame-Blame” and “Slut Celebration” frames conveyed powerful messages that catalyzed protests and generated outrage mostly from young feminists during its formative phase. However, meanings of the term “slut” varied widely across racial, cultural, and generational contexts, causing the “Slut Celebration” frame to be problematic for some micro-cohorts of feminists and leading to a decline in protest participation after initial enthusiasm waned. The campaign responded to the criticisms by minimizing the use of the word “slut” and emphasizing the more transnationally resonant “Shame-Blame” and “Pro-sex, Pro-consent frames,” resulting in increased participation and continued prominence of the SlutWalk across North America.

Improving the performance of recommender systems (RSs) has always been a major challenge in the area of e-commerce because the systems face issues such as cold start, sparsity, scalability and interest drift that affect their performance. Despite the efforts made to solve these problems, there is still no RS that can solve or reduce all the problems simultaneously. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide an effective and comprehensive RS to solve or reduce all of the above issues, which uses a combination of basic customer information as well as big data techniques.

The most important steps in the proposed RS are: (1) collecting demographic and behavioral data of customers from an e-clothing store; (2) assessing customer personality traits; (3) creating a new user-item matrix based on customer/user interest; (4) calculating the similarity between customers with efficient k-nearest neighbor (EKNN) algorithm based on locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) approach and (5) defining a new similarity function based on a combination of personality traits, demographic characteristics and time-based purchasing behavior that are the key incentives for customers' purchases.

The proposed method was compared with different baselines (matrix factorization and ensemble). The results showed that the proposed method in terms of all evaluation measures led to a significant improvement in traditional collaborative filtering (CF) performance, and with a significant difference (more than 40%), performed better than all baselines. According to the results, we find that our proposed method, which uses a combination of personality information and demographics, as well as tracking the recent interests and needs of the customer with the LSH approach, helps to improve the effectiveness of the recommendations more than the baselines. This is due to the fact that this method, which uses the above information in conjunction with the LSH technique, is more effective and more accurate in solving problems of cold start, scalability, sparsity and interest drift.

The research data were limited to only one e-clothing store.

In order to achieve an accurate and real-time RS in e-commerce, it is essential to use a combination of customer information with efficient techniques. In this regard, according to the results of the research, the use of personality traits and demographic characteristics lead to a more accurate knowledge of customers' interests and thus better identification of similar customers. Therefore, this information should be considered as a solution to reduce the problems of cold start and sparsity. Also, a better judgment can be made about customers' interests by considering their recent purchases; therefore, in order to solve the problems of interest drifts, different weights should be assigned to purchases and launch time of products/items at different times (the more recent, the more weight). Finally, the LSH technique is used to increase the RS scalability in e-commerce. In total, a combination of personality traits, demographics and customer purchasing behavior over time with the LSH technique should be used to achieve an ideal RS. Using the RS proposed in this research, it is possible to create a comfortable and enjoyable shopping experience for customers by providing real-time recommendations that match customers' preferences and can result in an increase in the profitability of e-shops.

In this study, by considering a combination of personality traits, demographic characteristics and time-based purchasing behavior of customers along with the LSH technique, we were able for the first time to simultaneously solve the basic problems of CF, namely cold start, scalability, sparsity and interest drift, which led to a decrease in significant errors of recommendations and an increase in the accuracy of CF. The average errors of the recommendations provided to users based on the proposed model is only about 13%, and the accuracy and compliance of these recommendations with the interests of customers is about 92%. In addition, a 40% difference between the accuracy of the proposed method and the traditional CF method has been observed. This level of accuracy in RSs is very significant and special, which is certainly welcomed by e-business owners. This is also a new scientific finding that is very useful for programmers, users and researchers. In general, the main contributions of this research are: 1) proposing an accurate RS using personality traits, demographic characteristics and time-based purchasing behavior; 2) proposing an effective and comprehensive RS for a “clothing” online store; 3) improving the RS performance by solving the cold start issue using personality traits and demographic characteristics; 4) improving the scalability issue in RS through efficient k-nearest neighbors; 5) Mitigating the sparsity issue by using personality traits and demographic characteristics and also by densifying the user-item matrix and 6) improving the RS accuracy by solving the interest drift issue through developing a time-based user-item matrix.

The need for entrepreneurs to engage in guerrilla behavior is heavily emphasized by entrepreneurship educators and practitioners. Yet such behavior often has serious ethical implications. The purpose of this study is to establish an assessment framework that provides ethical guidance to entrepreneurs engaged in guerrilla behaviors. A theoretical foundation for assessing the ethics of guerrilla behavior is established. The entrepreneurial context and how it gives rise to the need for guerrilla actions are examined. The guerilla concept is explored and criteria are outlined for labeling a given action or approach as being guerrilla in nature. Different forms or types of guerrilla approaches are introduced. Five primary ethical dimensions to be considered in evaluating a given guerrilla approach are identified. Examples are provided of how these dimensions can be applied to assess the ethics of three different successful guerrilla campaigns. An integrated matrix is introduced for use in evaluating guerrilla campaigns that consider our ethical dimensions together with leading theoretical perspectives on ethical action. Based on how a given guerrilla approach is scored when using the assessment matrix, conclusions are drawn for its appropriateness. By using a mix of the deontological, utilitarian and virtue-based frameworks, it becomes possible to determine the relative ethics of any given guerrilla action once implemented, and actions can be taken to either modify or abandon the action. Further, the concepts developed in this paper can be useful in ensuring new guerrilla actions are more ethical when they are first conceptualized or designed. Four design elements can be systematically applied to decisions that unfold as the guerrilla action is being formulated: resources and providers, disclosure, stakeholder effects, and inferences/conclusions. A number of suggestions for ongoing research are provided based on the work presented here.