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This paper draws on two studies from a wider research program exploring the long-term graduate outcomes of Australia’s international development scholarships, the Australia Awards. The paper’s focus is on exploring how soft power can be identified through international scholarships and outlines conditions for success in achieving such outcomes.

This article discusses a mixed-methods sequential design that uses a quantitative online survey to identify themes to explore in a case study using a quantitative social networks approach.

The research identified two outcomes linked to the soft power of international scholarships, these are: (1) The value of existing connections – exposure and opportunity for scholarship recipients to build professional networks while in-country, influences the likelihood of alumni actioning these positive experiences by developing partnerships with host-country organisations after returning home; and (2) The value of alumni interconnectivity – the critical mass of peer-to-peer alumni relationships is a soft power asset that donors can harness to influence their international development and diplomacy objectives. Together, these findings also provide evidence that soft power attraction engendered in international scholarship participants can have longevity.

This article builds on early literature examining the effectiveness of international scholarships for developing countries in achieving soft power for scholarship donors. It provides a new view of these outcomes by looking at alumni networks individually and as a critical mass, to demonstrate how these contribute to achieving the diplomacy objectives of this type of state-sponsored student mobility program.

The Australian Government has long used its international scholarship programs as an instrument of soft power in international diplomacy. The paper examines an international scholarship program and its role in Australia’s soft power efforts during a period in recent history.

The Australia in the Asian Century White Paper of 2012 is used as a lens to reveal how the Australian Government viewed the role of international scholarship programs in international diplomacy at a specific point in the recent past, and compares it with research revealing what was contemporaneously happening with one key government-funded scholarship program.

This paper is based on a comprehensive case study of the Australian Government’s Endeavour Scholarships and Fellowships program (2004–2019). Endeavour was an ambitious and expensive merit-based program with 6,600 recipients in numerous and diffuse sub-categories. The program was complex and cumbersome and lacked clear priorities, particularly in its lack of geographic focus. It missed opportunities to connect with the political zeitgeist, largely due to opaque priorities and inadequate evaluation regimes which focused entirely on outcomes for individual recipients rather than on relationships for Australia.

This research draws on the first academic study of the Endeavour program. Other scholarship programs (for example Australia Awards and the New Colombo Plan) have attracted considerable scholarly interest. The Endeavour research provides an additional counterpoint for studies of Australian scholarship programs and their contribution to international diplomacy. It is timely to consider this in 2024 when Australia is putting a new focus on its investment in international scholarships.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ending of fee-free higher education in Australia for overseas students in the 1980s, and the ways in which the government managed the diplomatic relationships that were affected by this policy shift. The introduction of fee-free higher education in Australia in 1974 was incredibly popular, and the end of the program in the late 1980s created difficulties for individuals, families and diplomatic relationships.

Using a mix of secondary sources and archival documents, this paper has a historiographical element, and an element of analysis.

This research finds that the ending of fee-free education created significant diplomatic issues with a number of Australia’s regional neighbours. It also created issues for individual students and families. The solution to these problems was, in large part, a scholarship scheme called the Equity and Merit Scholarship Scheme (EMSS). The EMSS was designed, in part, to address the issues created by the end of the fee-free program. However, the design of the scholarship scheme also created its own diplomatic issues with a different cohort of nation states.

There is limited scholarly research into the history of international education policy in Australia. This research draws on the work of some scholars of international scholarships, as well as historians of universities and education more broadly. This research adds to a growing body of work in the field of Australian international education history.

In the era of digital intelligence, individuals are increasingly interacting with digital information in their daily lives and work, and a growing phenomenon known as digital hoarding is becoming more prevalent. Prior research suggests that humanities researchers have unique and longstanding information interaction and management practices in the digital scholarship context. This study therefore aims to understand how digital hoarding manifests in humanities researchers’ behavior, identify the influencing factors associated with it, and explore how they perceive and respond to digital hoarding behavior.

Qualitative research methods enable us to acquire a rich insight and nuanced understanding of digital hoarding practices. In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 humanities researchers who were pre-screened for a high propensity for digital hoarding. Thematic analyses were then used to analyze the interview data.

Three main characteristics of digital hoarding were identified. Further, the research paradigm, digital affordance, and personality traits and habits, collectively influencing the emergence and development of digital hoarding behaviors, were examined. The subtle influence of traditional Chinese culture was encountered. Interestingly, this study found that humanists perceive digital hoarding as a positive expectation (associated with inspiration, aesthetic pursuit, and uncertainty avoidance). Meanwhile, humanists' problematic perception of this behavior is more widely observed — they experience what we conceptualize as an “expectation-perception” gap. Three specific information behaviors related to avoidance were identified as aggravating factors for digital hoarding.

The findings deepen the understanding of digital hoarding behaviors and personal information management among humanities researchers within the LIS field, and implications for humanities researchers, digital scholarship service providers, and digital tool developers are discussed.

The complex world in which we reside is calling for more critical approaches to address the precarity experienced by the most marginalized in social systems. However, human resource development (HRD) lacks empirical data to describe, define and project the objectives and future directions of Critical HRD in today’s turbulent and volatile times. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the historical and contemporary progression of Critical HRD, as described by nine of its most well-known scholars.

Data were collected through semistructured interviews, and a constructivist grounded theory coding approach was applied during analysis to identify themes and patterns.

The findings of this study highlight the persistent scholarship versus practice divide among Critical HRD scholars, suggesting that Critical HRD may merely be an academic undertaking and something not practiced within the public domain. The authors call for an evolution of Critical HRD toward more practice- and action-oriented approaches to scholarship and teaching so that meaningful changes can take place in actual organizations and workplaces.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study was the first to empirically show that there is a real research–practice gap, particularly among Critical HRD scholars. Critical HRD scholars need to take these findings seriously as an opportunity to reflect on how they can take Critical HRD to the next level beyond academic discourse.

The paper explores the notion of worker voice in terms of its implications for supply chain justice. The paper proposes the value of the recognition perspective on social justice for framing workers’ experiences in global supply chains and identifies opportunities for the advancement of the worker voice agenda with recognition justice in mind.

The paper adopts a conceptual approach to explore the notion of worker voice in supply chains in terms of the recognition perspective on social justice.

Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) scholarship has considered worker voice in terms of two key paradigms, which we term communication and representation. To address recognition justice for workers in global supply chains, the worker voice agenda must consider designing worker voice mechanisms to close recognition gaps for workers with marginalised identities; the shared responsibilities of supply chain actors to listen alongside the expectation of workers to use their voice; and the expansion of the concept of worker voice to cut across home-work boundaries.

The paper offers conceptual clarity on the emerging notion of worker voice in SSCM and is the first to interrogate the implications of recognition justice for the emergent worker voice agenda. It articulates key opportunities for future research to further operationalise worker voice upon a recognition foundation.

Despite the popularity of gig employment amid the changing business landscape, gig scholarship is somewhat limited and the untold reality about gig is yet to be fully revealed. This study aims to critically address the nature of gig employment, its ambiguities, evolution, theoretical premises and the appropriate future road ahead.

This paper adopts a dual analytical approach – bibliometric and thematic analyses. After incorporating the exclusion–inclusion criteria, the authors identified 2,135 articles for the bibliometric analyses by using VOSviewer. Additionally, for the deep-delving synthesis, the authors conducted thematic analyses following Braun and Clarke (2006), based on 351 papers.

The findings revealed that gig work, in its different forms, is emerging as an alternative work arrangement with respect to the future of work. This study also identified multilevel perspectives of gig employment along with its holistic nomological network. Finally, this study offers some critical research directions that should help enhance the theoretical and practical strengths of this nascent scholarship in future.

The review findings are limited in nature owing to the paucity of quality research papers published in the said domain.

The paper brings more clarity to what gig is and isn’t, along with its critical perspectives from multilevel lenses.

This paper identifies critical perspectives related to gig work and suggests appropriate directions for future gig work related scholarship.

Nature’s contribution to people (NCP) is a concept that specifically recognizes the relationship of “humans and the natural environment” similarly to concepts of “cultural landscapes” and consistent to “heritage.” These concepts are essential in incorporating a diverse range of stakeholders from different scales, which is important for policy and practice. The paper aims to review the existing peer-reviewed papers in the Philippines, using meta-analysis and systematic review. We addressed the significant interlinkages that help facilitate the transition and strengthen the correlation of cultural ecosystem services (CES) and NCP in a cultural landscape setting.

To distinguish and support claims for NCP from CES, we conducted a meta-analysis and systematic review based on the 30-existing peer-reviewed articles on the Philippine cultural ES in the lenses of “heritage” and “cultural landscape.”

The results generated a few numbers of the Philippine CES studies, yet it has increased cumulatively year by year consistent with previous international studies. We found that most studies are focused on topics associated with “Indigenous People, Ancestral Domains, Protected Areas/Landscapes, and Indigenous and Local Knowledge” on the linkages concurrently distinguishing NCP to CES, and may signify stronger economic valuation in uncovering the sociocultural dimensions of these scholarships through its relational values in the lenses of cultural landscape and heritage.

The authors limited the search to peer-reviewed journal articles published from online databases and did not consider Philippine University based and local publications to have a systematic review. This is to prevent underestimating the vast amount of CES literature and avoid gray literature that is not peer-reviewed; hence, being able to analyze and produce focused, yet, credible data.

In a generalizing perspective, NCP 1, 6, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17 and 18 have the most realized positive correlations of the reporting categories to the Philippine CES studies. The majority of the context-specific perspective NCP has strong conceptual claims in the existing Philippine CES literature through the studies’ variables aside from NCP 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 11 that are still mostly in the nature of generalizing perspective.

In conclusion, our results imply that the previous and existing CES studies in the Philippines harbor more attributes presented by the NCP reporting categories. This is deemed more suitable, and may signify stronger economic valuation in uncovering the sociocultural dimensions of these scholarships through its relational values in the lenses of cultural landscape and heritage.

The enrolment rates of students with special needs (SwSN) decrease from primary to secondary education and decline steeply in higher education. The incessant impact of stigma and misconceptions about their capability in academic performance acts as a major roadblock for students with mental health conditions (SwMHC) while seeking and pursuing higher education, in addition to the host of other challenges faced by all SwSN. SwMHC are the least represented in higher educational institutions (HEIs) and are seldom considered when it comes to the provision of support and accommodation. Policies across countries aim to make education accessible and inclusive for SwSN, including India. This study aims to appraise the current policies and legislation in terms of the support they provide for SwMHC.

This study is a “document analysis” of all policies, legislation, schemes and guidelines that impact the higher education of SwMHC to recognize the existing provisions that are likely to impact the higher educational outcomes for SwMHC.

The issues of access, accommodation, equity, inclusion, and financial support are appropriately handled by the current policies and legislation. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 serves as a holistic guidebook and the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (RPDA) 2016 provides the legislative framework for realizing education as a ‘right for all.’ The RPDA ensures open gateways of HEIs for all SwSN through reservations and mandating necessary support and accommodation. NEP guides inclusion and equity in higher education. The ‘University Grants Commission’, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Education, is a crucial stakeholder in achieving the vision of supportive policies by formulating requisite guidelines and monitoring their implementation.

The study involved document analysis spanning macro to micro level, i.e. from national policies and legislation to policies and guidelines of autonomous or statutory organizations to institutional-level policies and documents.

This study investigates the progress of the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Act 2003, and its associated Chartered Accountancy Profession Sector Code. In doing so, we explore why B-BBEE affirmative action has not yet achieved the Code's representational intentions, including systemic subtleties inhibiting this success.

Using semi-structured interviews, we explore the lived experiences of Black aspirant Chartered Accountants (CAs) undertaking articles in global audit firms. The experiences are thematically analysed, embracing a comprehensive theoretical approach that encompasses professional and social closure, as well as boundary work, to adequately understand why affirmative transformational endeavours persistently face uphill tasks. The utilisation of multifaceted theorisation is deemed essential for a more nuanced portrayal of the intricacies inherent in the CA profession in South Africa.

The narratives presented by Black aspiring CAs unveil a complex web of exclusionary practices entrenched in institutionalised historical, professional, and social contexts. The multifaceted nature of closures, symbolised by racial, cultural, and linguistic factors, significantly impacts the experiences of Black trainees. The findings furthermore show that deliberate intervention beyond compliance with the Government’s framework is necessary for meaningful transformation.

The paper brings to the fore the current lived experiences of underrepresented Black CAs in global auditing firms. In doing so, these firms are empowered with incremental knowledge of the prevailing challenges and can thus make tangible improvements towards authentic transformation. Additionally, the results help in tracking the advancements made through affirmative action, acting as a feedback loop for future developments in transformation policy.

Contributing to the critical accounting literature, our study extends scholarship on the barriers faced by CAs and the limitations in their capacity to challenge these obstacles within global audit firms. We offer practical policy-focused recommendations that, if implemented, can address the complex socio-political realities obstructing the success of affirmative action. By sharing first-hand accounts, our study aims to empower auditing firms and other related stakeholders with actionable insights, enabling them to improve genuine inclusivity and foster equitable representation in the accounting profession.