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The purpose of this paper was to develop a quantitative classroom observation method that is able to analyse the school day to identify Time-on-Task losses comprehensively and systematically, at a level of detail that can be used by teachers and principals to stimulate and focus practical improvement efforts.

The novel Time-on-Task Analysis (TOTA) model was developed by triangulating the conceptual framework of the Overall Equipment Effectiveness metric with the semantics and structure of the target domain. Once developed, the model was tested structurally against a time-series classroom observation data set, after which the resulting TOTA was presented to a sample of 52 education stakeholders, who then gave their perspectives of the analysis in a structured survey.

The ontological model was found to be accurate, complete and without conceptual incongruencies, and its output novel and useful by the sample of education stakeholders. Of the participants, 90.3% found the analysis to provide a new perspective, 94.2% reported that the analysis triggered improvement ideas and 80.8% thought that their school(s) could benefit from a TOTA study.

The TOTA model introduces a time-loss-focused perspective to the field of quantitative classroom observation studies, which is dominated by more sociologic- and pedagogic-focused topics. Its grounding in Overall Equipment Effectiveness also gives it a more detailed and systematic approach than the few Time-on-Task studies done to date, resulting in a model made for the “Gemba”: the school classroom.

As responsibilities of high school principals continue to expand, their workweeks become longer, and their attention is stretched in multiple directions. How principals from various school types use their time is influenced by their organizational structures and external policies. To gain deeper insights into the workload, priorities and constraints faced by high school principals, this study examines principal time use (PTU) patterns across different school types, including traditional public schools (TPSs), charter schools, Catholic schools and non-Catholic private schools.

Drawing on the national representative data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 in the USA, this study examines and compares PTU in various leadership tasks across different school types, controlling for school and principal characteristics.

Among various high school types, principals in TPS had the longest workweeks. However, the extended workweek did not necessarily result in significantly more hours or a larger proportion of their time dedicated to instructional leadership. Instead, TPS principals allocated more time to administrative tasks and student affairs than principals in other school types.

By examining PTU of different school types, this study adds new evidence on the influence of contextual factors on leadership behavior. It also offers policy implications to enhance principals’ capacities, alleviate their workload and to prioritize time use in different leadership domains.

In contrast to prior studies examining burnout in academic employees, this paper explores how academic employee agency mitigates burnout risks in the context of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) and how this agency facilitates research productivity and influences well-being in the face of changes in learning and teaching practices.

The authors use collaborative auto-ethnography (CAE) in the higher education (HE) sector to probe how an employee productivity group supported the group's members during the pandemic.

Thematic analysis revealed four emerging themes: burnout, beneficial habits for research productivity, blocking-out-time and belonging. The authors' findings suggest that by acknowledging and legitimising employee-initiated groups, feelings of neglect can be combatted. Purposeful employee groups have the potential to create a therapeutic, safe space and, in addition to the groups' productivity intent, diminish the negative effects of a crisis on organisational effectiveness.

This paper contributes to the literature by utilising a CAE approach to provide greater insight into how academics enact agency by creating digital research workspaces, attending to the spatial dimensions of well-being especially during turbulent times.

School-level leaders are suffering. They are experiencing a well-being crisis after years of working long work hours, managing an unrelenting workload, and navigating shifting policy contexts. School leaders that are experiencing work intensification and highly stressful work environments can suffer personal and professional consequences. On a professional level, school-level leaders are immersed in intensified work environments that mute the power and potential increasingly associated with their role. This chapter describes challenges that threaten school-level leaders' productivity, job satisfaction, happiness and well-being, such as work intensification, burnout, stress as well as loneliness and isolation. In these ways, the emotional aspects of their work can influence school-level leaders' ability to lead happy and healthy lives, while also having the supplementary effect of making the position less attractive for the next generation of school leaders. Research conducted in jurisdictions around the world is discussed throughout the chapter to demonstrate that the well-being crisis experienced by school leaders is an international phenomenon. I also use this discussion of the challenges facing contemporary school-level leaders to encourage them to reconnect with the reasons why, and the emotions they felt, when first pursuing a position in K-12 school-level leadership.

This study aims to investigate the research productivity in terms of publications count of the top four premiers Indian Institute of Management (IIM) institutions and to explore the current research trends.

Bibliometric techniques were employed to assess the performance in terms of research productivity of authors affiliated with IIMs. The Elsevier Scopus database was selected as a tool to extract the prospective publications data limiting the time frame for 2010–2021. The IIM-Ahmedabad, IIM-Bangalore, IIM-Calcutta and IIM-Lucknow have been selected for the study. The harvested data were analyzed by using the standard bibliometric indicators and scientometric parameters to measure the research landscape such as average growth rate, compound average growth rate, relative growth rate, doubling time, degree of collaboration, collaborative index, collaborative coefficient and modified collaborative coefficient. VOSviewer 1.6.17, BibExcel and Microsoft Excel were used for data analysis and visualization.

The research productivity of selected four IIMs has shown an upward trend during the study period from 2010–2021 and accrued 4,397 publications with an average of 366 publications per year. The authorship patterns demonstrate the collaborative trends as most of the publications were produced by the multiple-authors (81.03%). IIM-Ahmedabad has produced the maximum number of publications (32.20%). The research productivity of IIMs has come out in collaboration with the 125 nations across the world and the USA, the UK, Canada, Germany and China are the front runners with IIMs in the collaborative network. The high magnitude and density of collaboration are evident from the calculated mean values of the degree of collaboration (0.82). The mean values of the collaborative index (2.64), collaborative coefficient (0.51) and modified collaborative coefficient (0.51) demonstrated a positive trend, but indicate the fluctuation in the collaborative pattern as time proceeds.

The study is limited to the publications data indexed in the Scopus database, therefore the outcome may not be generalized across other databases available in the public domain like Web of Science (WoS), PubMed, Dimensions and Google Scholars.

The findings of the study may aid academics and library professionals in identifying research trends, collaboration networks and evaluating other academic and research institutions by using the current advancement in data analysis.

The present study is the first effort to evaluate the research productivity of IIMs. The expanding literature will make an important contribution to identifying patterns and evaluating current research trends on a worldwide scale.

This study examines whether the gains from export sophistication is conditional on the level of globalisation. Previous studies have shown that the impact of export sophistication on growth varies depending on the level of a country's economic development. The authors argue that globalisation plays an important role in influencing the gains from export sophistication, mainly through the competition and scale effects. The competition effect disincentivises domestic firms to engage in export markets, while the scale effect incentivises knowledge accumulation and innovation.

The authors employ data from 163 economies from 1995 to 2018. The authors re-estimate values for export sophistication using ordinary goods from 1995 to 2018 and estimate a growth model using the generalised method of moments (GMM) to control for endogeneity and simultaneity issues.

The results show that the gains from export sophistication and globalisation is greater for economies with higher levels of economic development compared to economies with low levels of economic development. Moreover, the authors find that the gains from export sophistication are conditional on the level of globalisation. The authors’ results show that the marginal impact of export sophistication diminishes as developing economies become more globalised, while advanced economies gain more from export sophistication when globalisation precedes at a higher level.

Previous studies have generally examined the conditional growth effects of export sophistication on trade, economic development and other structural factors. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of globalisation, and the authors exploit the multidimensional concept of globalisation to test the hypothesis.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-01-2023-0001.

Employee satisfaction is critical in any workplace. Research suggests that the environment that people work in can contribute greatly to levels of satisfaction as well as productivity. Limited research exists, however, on how the aesthetics of a workplace impact both employee satisfaction and well-being. This paper aims to identify whether the aesthetics in a workplace environment at one university influences employee satisfaction and well-being.

This paper shares data from a survey that determined whether the workplace environment at one university in Queensland, Australia supports its workers’ job satisfaction and well-being. The survey was distributed amongst all staff at three campuses with a total of 73 usable responses.

Findings showed that there is a strong need for an aesthetically pleasing workplace and its positive impacts on employees. In addition, an aesthetically pleasing workplace was perceived to have a positive impact on the respondents’ likelihood of spending more time at work, hence, a greater sense of satisfaction. The respondents indicated a moderate level of satisfaction with the aesthetics of their workspace and environment including feeling safe.

Implications show that further improvements could be attained in the workplace through the addition of natural lighting, plants and artwork. The employees also indicated they would like more control over the aesthetics of the work environment.

This research is original as it was not known whether aesthetics in the workplace influenced worker satisfaction and/or well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to measure technical efficiency and examine its determinants while disentangling unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity from actual inefficiency using comprehensive household-level panel data.

This paper estimates technical efficiency based on the true random-effects stochastic production frontier estimator with a Mundlak adjustment. By utilising comprehensive panel data with 4,694 observations from 39 districts of four major maize-producing regions in Ethiopia, the author measures technical efficiency and examine its determinants while disentangling unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity from technical inefficiency. By using competing stochastic production frontier estimators, the author provides insights into the influence of farm heterogeneity on measuring farm efficiency and the subsequent impact on the ranking of farmers based on their efficiency scores.

The study results indicate that ignoring unobservable farmer heterogeneity leads to a downwards bias of technical efficiency estimates with a consequent effect on the ranking of farmers based on their efficiency scores. The mean technical efficiency score implied that about a 34% increase in maize productivity can be achieved with the current input use and technology in Ethiopia. The key determinants of the technical inefficiency of maize farmers are the age, gender and formal education level of the household head, household size, income, livestock ownership, and participation in off-farm activities.

While the findings of this study are critical for informing policy on improving agricultural production and productivity, a few important things are worth considering in terms of the generalisability of the findings. First, the study relied on secondary data, so only a snapshot of environmental factors was accounted for in the empirical estimations. Second, there could be other sources of unmeasured potential sources of heterogeneity caused by persistent technical inefficiency and endogeneity of inputs. Third, the study is limited to one country. Therefore, future research should extend the analysis to ensure the generalisability of the empirical findings regarding the extent to which unmeasured potential sources of heterogeneity caused by persistent technical inefficiency, endogeneity of inputs and other unobservable country-specific features – such as geographical differences.

This paper contributes to the literature on agricultural productivity and efficiency by providing new evidence on the influence of unobservable heterogeneity in a farm efficiency analysis. While agricultural production is characterised by heterogeneous production conditions, the influence of unobservable farm heterogeneity has generally been ignored in technical efficiency estimations, particularly in the context of smallholder farming. The value of this paper comes from disentailing producer-specific random heterogeneity from the actual inefficiency.

Assessing the research performance of researchers offers inducement toward excellence in research. This study aims to analyze the research productivity of the most prolific authors of Pakistan considering their trends toward publications, citations and collaboration.

Top 100 authors from the top 10 Pakistani universities from Web of Science over the 10 years with the rigorous data cleaning process were selected. Scientometric analysis techniques were carried out to evaluate the research profile of these authors.

The findings revealed that majority of the productive authors were male working in the position of Professor in the physical sciences area. The publications and citations gradually increase with time. They preferred to collaborate for their publications, while first authorship publications were found less in number. Moreover, the propensity to collaborate at the international level increases double-fold from the first five years to the next five years period. In addition, the position of the authors was explored among different performance metrics. The finding exhibits variation in the ranking of authors among them. The impact of numbers of authors, funding status, publication of articles, presence of collaboration and international collaboration on the dependent variable and citation count was insignificant. However, the publication of review papers has a significant impact on the citation counts.

Findings have significant implications for policymakers to make maximum opportunities for researchers to strengthen linkages for collaboration and increase the funding prospects.

Studies on this topic are scarce, and therefore, this study provides useful recommendations to researchers and institutes to improve research productivity.