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Understanding that benchmarking is a collection of approaches, rather than a single tool, is fundamental to its successful use. By water has developed a framework which steers users toward the most appropriate approach.

The governmental public health workforce provides essential public health services to communities from public health agencies operations at the local, state, and federal levels of government. The roles and duties of public health workers range from infectious disease tracking and control to healthy eating promotion to checking food service establishments for safety. Unfortunately, most of the time, the general public is unaware of, and unconcerned with, public health’s primary mission of disease prevention. This behind-the-scenes, service-oriented workforce has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by working long hours, extra days, and ever-changing job roles, all while becoming targets of political attacks and enduring substantially elevated psychological distress and burnout. Though this workforce is not well enumerated, existing studies indicate that public health workers face higher anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and burnout than other frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic response. Several strategies have been suggested to address these vulnerabilities, including increasing the amount and stability of available funding, implementing organizational-level policies and programming to boost resilience, and providing individual-level social support, both instrumental and emotional, to protect against burnout and other psychological distresses.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the inconsistent use of terminology in international collaboration, and develop a clearer typology that reflects the commercial and practical realities of modern business.

A critique of existing typologies provided the basis for the development of a more practical framework. The new typology was populated with the most prominent collaborative forms to emerge from the analysis of academic research and commercial practice.

“Structure” and “purpose” emerged as the most logical determinants in differentiating and classifying collaborative forms. Actual commercial ventures mapped on to the new typology demonstrate a good fit between these two considerations and the collaboration strategies adopted.

This work contributes much needed clarity in differentiating and classifying forms of collaboration. The key determinants of structure and purpose reflect more accurately the commercial and practical realities of modern business, and offer practitioners and researchers a logical means of mapping and analyzing collaboration strategy.

Large-scale farm management in China has developed rapidly in recent years. Large-scale farmers face substantial operating risks, requiring extensive price risk management. However, the agricultural insurance and futures markets in China are incomplete. This study aims to analyze the price-risk-management behaviors of large-scale farmers under incomplete market conditions, with a focus on the interconnections between large scale farmers' subjective preferences (risk preferences, time preferences), liquidity constraints and their price risk management.

The authors construct an analysis framework to reveal the impact of large-scale farmers' risk preferences, time preferences and liquidity conditions on their price-risk-management behaviors under incomplete market conditions. Using data from field surveys and subjective preference experiments involving 409 large-scale grain farmers in China, an empirical analysis was conducted using the bivariate probit model.

The results show that risk-averse farmers will use risk transfer (such as contract farming) and risk diversification (such as multi-period sales) to avoid price risk. However, farmers subject to liquidity constraints and strong time preferences will not choose risk diversification, and the interaction between time preferences and liquidity constraints will strengthen this decision. The larger the farm-management scale, the greater the impact.

The authors focus on rapidly developed large-scale farm management in China. Appropriate price risk management is required by large-scale farmers due to their substantial operating risks. Considering the incomplete conditions of agricultural insurance and futures markets, the results of this study will help identify behavioral characteristics of large-scale farmers and optimize their price-risk-management strategies, further stabilizing large-scale farm management.

This chapter offers a dynamic model of authentic leadership that links authentic leadership to situational leadership theory and shows how dynamics in the academic environment, one of the most difficult settings that leaders face, can be addressed. Kindsiko and Vadi detail the concept of situational authenticity, which reveals how authentic leadership takes place via forms of sensing – sense-giving, sense-making, sense-breaking and sense-keeping – in work-related situations. The authors highlight questions for future research: Is sensing the key to success? Are situational ethics valid if they adapt to evolving circumstances? Are situational ethics, in effect, just another way of expressing relativism? If so, can that be reconciled with authentic leadership theory?

This article is an investigation of attitudes of White Americans towards Black Americans using General Social Survey data collected by the National Opinion Research Center from 1972 through 1980. Two trends emerge from the data. One trend, predicted by the literature, is one of liberal change among items based on the desirability of racially mixed social contact. A second trend suggests that through the seventies, White Americans become increasingly less willing to condone government spending to alleviate conditions of racial inequality. This inconsistency raises the issue of question validity, which is addressed by an analysis of response patterns of three items in full predictive models. The results suggest that in measuring racial prejudice in a society becoming generally more conservative, questions focussing on public policy should be considered in addition to questions of social contact.

Structural explanations of racial stratification are weakened by a failure to in‐corporate attitudinal and ideological factors into their theories. But attitudinal researchers have tended to focus on racial prejudice and tolerance and neglected non‐racially specific beliefs that support white dominance. This article reviews the limits of each approach, discusses the problem of ideology for race relations theory and explores how, through the analysis of ideology, attitudinal and structural analysis might be synthesised. Findings on the relation between adherence to individualist explanations of poverty, perceptions of racial discrimination in employment and attitudes toward affirmative action programs are used to exemplify the power of class ideologies in shaping beliefs about racial inequality and vice versa. An exploration of ideologies of local autonomy and attitudes toward public housing and residential desegregation might elicit similar findings.

This study aims to address the following research questions: Do the two types of service firms (individual or aggregator) have similar competitiveness on online search ads? How should the two types of service firms select optimal branded keywords to improve search performance? In addition, how do consumers’ search queries influence the service search performance of the two types of service firms?

In this study, the authors conduct an empirical analysis by building a two-stage choice modeling on the process of search engine ranking and consumer click-through decisions. The authors estimate the parameter coefficients and test the hypotheses using maximum likelihood estimation in the logistic regression model.

The empirical findings suggest that consumer response rates are highly dependent upon three aspects (service types, branded keyword strategy and consumer search query). First, the authors found that service aggregators receive greater consumer responses than individual service providers. Second, depending upon the various branded keyword strategies (e.g. generic vs branded, “within-type” vs “cross-type”) implemented by service aggregators or individual firms, the expected consumer responses could be quite different. Finally, customer’s search query, being either generic or branded, also has direct effect and interactive effect with service type on how consumers would response to the sponsored ads in the service search process.

The limitation of the research is twofold. First, conversion rate is not considered in the model estimation due to the nature of the data set. Second, the discussion about the keywords selection strategies is focusing on the hospitality industry. Future research shall further validate the generalizability into other industries.

First, given this competitive advantage, service aggregators should take an aggressive approach to adopting paid search strategy in acquiring new users and enhance its brand salience in the service ecosystem. Second, when considering other competitor’s brand names to include, if a firm is a service provider (e.g. hotel), a strategy that can help it receive higher consumer response would be to use “within-type” rather than “cross-type” branded keyword strategy. If a firm is a service aggregator, a better branded keyword strategy would be to use “across-type” instead of “within-type” approach. In addition, given that consumer’s brand awareness can influence the effectiveness of branded keyword strategy, online service search should target consumers in earlier stages of a decision journey.

The authors believe their theoretical framework can provide actionable solutions to service firms to ease customer’s search process, increase customer’s stickiness using search engines and add value to the customer relationships with all services entities within the digital ecosystem.

This study is the first to expand online search marketing into granule examinations (main and interactive effects of three key factors) in the service search domain. First, the authors differentiate service firms into two categories – online travel aggregators and individual hotels in the model. Second, the authors introduce two sets of new classifications of branded keywords for online service search research (i.e. own versus other brand and “cross-type” versus “within-type” branded keywords). Third, this study integrates service consumers’ search word specificity into the conceptual framework which is often missing in previous online search research.

This paper aims to identify the role of internet of things (IoT) in water supply chain management and helps to understand its future path from the junction of computer science and resource management.

The current research was studied through bibliometric review and content analysis, and various contributors and linkages were found. Also, the possible directions and implications of the field were analyzed.

The paper’s key findings include the role of modern computer science in water resource management through sensor technology, big data analytics, IoT, machine learning and cloud computing. This, in turn, helps in understanding future implications of IoT resource management.

A more extensive database can add up to more combinations of linkages and ideas about the future direction. The implications and understanding gained by the research can be used by governments and firms dealing with water management of smart cities. It can also help find ways for optimizing water resources using IoT and modern-day computer science.

This study is one of the very few investigations that highlighted IoT’s role in water supply management. Thus, this study helps to assess the scope and the trend of the case area.