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This study aims to create actionable guidelines for pricing decision-making by employing game a theory matrix to forecast the correlation between the average daily rate and the latest ambiance of hotels.

Utilizing a vector error correction model, the research employs game theory to assess the influence of the average daily rate on the hotel's newest atmosphere during both peak season (April–September) and valley season (October–March).

Findings indicate that during the peak season, when the average daily rate rises in resorts and falls in suburban areas, the hotel’s newest atmosphere is at its best in both types of accommodations. During the off-peak season, the hotel’s newest atmosphere is achieved when both resorts and suburban accommodations increase their average daily rates.

There are two study constraints. One is the assumption that hotel guests in both parties prefer not to change hotels, but in fact they would. Two is a limited sample of two resort and suburban markets.

This suggests that the hotel’s newest atmosphere can draw both leisure and business travelers to suburban areas during the low season and more leisure travelers to resorts during the high season.

The study’s findings have implications for revenue related to the hotel’s newest atmosphere and cleanliness for both suburban and resort hotels, particularly when promoting tourism collaboratively.

The study provides valuable insights for hotel managers in analyzing pricing strategies using matrices.

This author reflects on her academic career spanning three decades as a Black woman in higher education. Ironically, the elders' sayings she heard and detested as a child resonated throughout her career. While in eighth grade, her grandmother admonished her for being deceptive and trying “to pull one over” on her and said that this author would need “to get up ‘fore day in the mornin’” to accomplish that feat. “Fore day in the mornin” must have been the time before her grandmother was fully alert, astute, and had the most clarity. For Black women to succeed in the academy, we must remain alert and recognize when faculty, administrators, and students attempt to pull one over with microaggressions and other forms of resistance. Microaggressions and resistance were perpetrated across race and gender lines, and occasionally by those who look like her. Having been reared in urban and low-income communities, the author acknowledged the investments she received throughout her schooling and career from both members of the academy and from Black communities. Consequently, her mission to improve outcomes in schools and communities, much like those in which she grew up, has not changed in 33 years. Understanding race and culture in self-definition and identity are discussed, followed by embracing opportunities and return on investments. There are increased calls for reciprocal and culturally responsive mentor–protégé relationships and successful strategies for tenure and promotion. The author makes meaning of both successful and challenging critical incidents in the academy.

This paper explores intergenerational perceptions of kindness in the context of Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the COVID-19 global pandemic. The purpose of this exploratory study is to investigate perceptions of kindness in the context of traumatic events and its potential value in authentic allyship in organizational environments.

Authors interviewed 65 individuals (31 self-identifying as non-racialized and 34 self-identifying as Black, Indigenous and People of Colour aka BIPOC). Participants included Generation Z (Gen Z; born between 1997–2012/5) and Generation Y (Gen Y; also referred to as Millennials, born between 1981 and 1994/6) across North American, Europe and Africa. Millennials currently represent the largest generation in the workplace and are taking on leadership roles, whereas Gen Z are emerging entrants into the workplace and new organizational actors.

The paper offers insights into how to talk about BLM in organizations, how to engage in authentic vs performative allyship and how to support BIPOC in the workplace. The study also reveals the durability of systemic racism in generations that may be otherwise considered more enlightened and progressive.

The authors expand on kindness literature and contribute theoretically and methodologically to critical race theory and intertextual analysis in race scholarship.

The study contributes to the understanding of how pro-social behaviours like kindness (with intention) can contribute to a more inclusive discourse on racism and authentic allyship.

Authors reveal the potential for kindness as a pro-social behaviour in organizational environments to inform authentic allyship praxis.

School counselors are committed to serving students' social-emotional, postsecondary, and academic needs while they navigate primary and secondary school (American School Counselor Association, 2019). Much has been said about the ways in which school counselors can impact postsecondary outcomes and social emotional health. It is important that we also address the ways school counselors can impact positive academic outcomes as it is intertwined in postsecondary options and success. For Black males, academic success has traditionally been met with systemic barriers (i.e., school-to-prison pipeline, lower graduation rates, lower incomes, higher unemployment rates, and lower college going rates (National Center for Edcuation Statisitics, 2019a, 2019b, 2020a, 2020b) and low expectations. School counselors are charged to be leaders and change agents for social justice and equity in our schools by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA, 2019) and can impact systemic change. This chapter will explore ways in which school counselors can impact positive academic outcomes for Black males. School counselors as change agents and advocates are positioned to make a real impact for Black male academic success. The authors will also provide some recommendations and best practices for elementary, middle, and high school counselors as they work with students, teachers, and families from an anti-deficit model as outlined by Harper (2012).

Instructional leadership is a school leadership approach that places great emphasis on enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. This study explored the enabling factors of instructional leadership in subject coordinators.

The participants in this qualitative study were 24 subject coordinators in elementary schools in Israel. Data collection was based on semi-structured interviews, and data analysis included three stages: sorting, coding and categorizing.

The findings identified three significant enabling factors of instructional leadership in subject coordinators: pedagogical knowledge, relationship capability and support from the principal.

This study suggests that the enabling factors of instructional leadership in subject coordinators differ from those of instructional leadership in principals because of their different places in the school structure and explains the enablers of instructional leadership in subject coordinators as middle leaders.

Applying mitigation measures during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in ‘locking down’ of economies, and disrupted agri-food markets worldwide. Income losses and food price increases negatively affected food security. The ‘stay-at-home’ policy led some households towards a positive shift in eating habits and maintaining these changes could contribute to better nutrition. The Russia–Ukraine war and soaring energy and food prices contributes further to the pressure on the global food system and urgency to consider longer term resilience capacities of national food systems.

The aim of the chapter is to identify and review food security challenges that governments and societies have faced during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond, with specific emphasis on Poland.

The methodological approach was to undertake a narrative literature review and to analyse a number of indicators relating to food security at the national level. These were quantified using data from Economist Impact, the World Bank, the European Commission, FAOSTAT and Statistics Poland.

The 2019–2022 Global Food Security Index for Poland remained quite stable, but the number of food insecure people increased significantly. Hence, urgent government measures are needed to ensure food security for all. Since 2021, high food inflation has reduced food affordability and is expected to remain high due to the Russia-Ukraine war, market pressures on energy prices and climate-related weather conditions. Greater food self-sufficiency in Poland is a key strategy to build up the resilience of the national food system.

Insufficient internal financing capacities and challenges to accessing external finance are crucial to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) investment and growth. This study aims to investigate how SME leverage of bank financing is related to the investment decision.

Using Heckman’s two-step econometric modelling to correct for sample selection bias, this study investigates the effect of entrepreneur characteristics, firm characteristics and performance on firms’ capital structure choices conditional on new investment decisions.

The main results reveal that larger firms with growth aspirations tend to make new investments. In the second stage equation, empirical results demonstrate that among SMEs who made a new investment, those SMEs with highly educated owner/managers, on average, use more external financing (i.e. banks loan) rather than internal funds – also, the smaller the company, the less bank leverage. Compared to the limited liability legal form, SMEs registered as individual businesses have less bank financial leverage. These results confirm that internal capacities for funding new investments are limited, and hence small firms must rely on external finance.

This study provides a unique empirical investigation and evidence based on a sample of SMEs in Kosovo. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to empirically analyse investment behaviour in relation to capital structure for SMEs in Kosovo and one of the few, in general, to consider the sample selection bias issues underpinning the other studies in this field. The analysis corrects for sample selection bias, using growth aspiration as an instrumental variable.

A humanoid intelligent robot (HIR) possessing a human-like appearance can undertake human jobs, interact, communicate and even transmit emotions to human beings. Such robots have gradually been integrated into people's daily life and production scenarios. However, it is unclear whether and by what mechanism HIRs can stimulate people’s risk perception and its impact on consumption attitudes. Based on the risk decision theory, this study aims to take the social value substitution attribute of a HIR as the incentive and analyzes the influence of social value substitution and risk perception on the customers’ consumption attitudes.

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the related questions about the social value substitution attribute of a HIR, its impact on risk perception and the customers’ consumption attitudes.

The results reveal that physical labor, intellectual labor, friendship, kinship and the ego constitute the hierarchical elements of social value substitution. Among them, physical labor and intellectual labor pertain to the dimension of social function value substitution, while friendship, kinship and ego pertain to the dimension of social presence value substitution; social function value substitution and social presence value substitution affect the subjects’ risk perception positively, but the latter arouses a stronger risk perception; the 2 (risk perception of social function value: security/danger) × 2 (risk perception of social presence value: security/danger) condition corresponds to diverse consumption attitudes.

The results enrich the theories of the “cha-xu pattern” and “uncanny valley” and provide reference for the healthy development of the HIR industry.

In the face of widespread opposition and hostility, trans and nonbinary athletes, from recreational to professional levels, continue to resist exclusion and oppression by daring to compete, participate and play. The long-standing binary thinking that characterizes sport poses particular challenges for trans women, who are positioned by advocates of trans exclusion as an alleged threat to women's sport.

As context for this discussion, Lenskyj examines how social psychologists have contributed to understandings of belonging and community and the implications for trans and nonbinary athletes' rights to share the benefits that sport offers. The concept of ‘deliberative freedoms’ – including freedom to live one's life without having others view certain traits as ‘costs’ – provides a framework for investigating resistance.

Greey then draws on a sociological understanding of gender to argue that inclusion is not synonymous with belonging. Belonging for trans athletes, Greey argues, requires more than the ‘letter of the law.’ Belonging requires recognition from teammates, coaches and other sport community members. An overview of terminology is presented, followed by an overview of chapters, summarizing the key themes and findings.