Search results

The digitalization of schools has intensified in recent years. It is reflected in policy documents as well as in extensive investments in digital technology and professional development initiatives to promote digitalization. At the same time, attempts are being made to “tame” the same digitization sometimes by regulations banning smartphones in class. This study aims to examine how smartphones are interpreted by vocational teachers in Sweden using the theoretical lens of technological frames.

The data consist of ten semi-structured interviews with vocational teachers, representing eight vocational programs in Sweden.

The results show breadth in how teachers understand, interpret and relate to the smartphone in vocational education. The authors show how the smartphone often forms an integral part of professional work and is thus difficult to separate from vocational teaching and nurturing vocational competencies.

The authors’ contributions include using technological frames to explore how smartphones are interpreted and understood by vocational teachers by demonstrating how they relate to the nature of the smartphone, the strategy for the smartphone and the smartphone in use. The theoretical framework is used to interpret restrictions on technology use, in this case a smartphone, in education. The results could be of interest to researchers as well as to teachers, school leaders and policymakers.

The COVID-19 lockdown severely impacted organizations in the cultural and tourist business as their products all of a sudden “disappeared”. This study aims to explore if and how the unexpected and disruptive nature of the pandemic accelerated the development of new communication strategies on their social media.

The study draws on data from 24 midsize cultural institutions and tourist attractions in Denmark over the first two months of the lockdown in 2020. Approximately 900 posts on Facebook were collected and analyzed through the netnographic method. The analysis followed a two-layered qualitative approach. First, open coding to identify typologies and enable a comparison with established strategies from the literature review. Then, an exploratory examination was conducted across the typologies.

Nine different content categories were identified in the data and subsequently assessed and discussed in relation to the literature on strategies and dialogic intentions. This resulted in the emergence of two new overarching strategies: hope and host.

While hope is particularly relevant in crisis situations, the utilization of employees in the host role presents an opportunity for further development and engagement. Further, the results call for future research that breaks with the traditional quest for ideal strategies for the benefit of exploring the notion of “strategic doers”.

The identification of the hope and host strategies, along with the analysis of content categories and their alignment with various strategic intentions, contributes to the existing knowledge in this field. Further, the classic perception of engagement as driven by explicit interaction and dialogue is also challenged.

In business-to-business interactions, conflicts are inevitable, and conflict-handling strategies that consider different variables improve the decision-making process of actors. This study aims to reveal the role of power and criticality in conflict-handling research in logistics service networks.

A 2 × 2 between-subject experimental design with four different scenarios was used. One hundred sixty logistics service actors completed an online questionnaire. Data were analyzed with ANOVA and paired sample t-tests using the SPSS 28.0 program.

In comparative scenarios involving high and low power dynamics, individuals with high power and high criticality situations are more inclined to favor the dominating strategy compared to low-power and low-criticality contexts. However, when faced with specific circumstances characterized by both high power and high criticality, actors tend to prioritize the integrating strategy initially, followed by the dominating and obliging strategies in that order. Notably, the statistical analysis revealed no significant interaction effect between criticality and power concerning the integrating, obliging and dominating conflict-handling strategies.

This study used an experimental approach to investigate criticality and power as contextual elements in determining conflict-handling strategies in an inter-firm environment within logistics service networks. This study is particularly groundbreaking in its knowledge of the relationship among power dynamics, conflict criticality and conflict-handling strategies.

Sexual harassment on public transport puts women at risk of mental health problems, apart from disrupting their lives and the harmful social consequences. This is especially the case for Pakistani women, for whom sexual harassment has been on the rise for the past decade. This study aims to explore how Pakistani women use strategies to cope with sexual harassment when using public transport and its mediating role in their issues with mental health.

Given that the data collection task on such a culturally sensitive topic was crucial, a mobile application for anonymized data collection was used, which appeared to be an effective strategy. Using the mobile application, 1,054 women who use public transport submitted their responses; however, the analysis is based on 250 usable responses. Their experience of harassment was measured using the Sexual Harassment Experience Questionnaire, their mental health using the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales and their coping strategies by the Brief Cope Inventory.

The results indicate that adaptive coping is a significant negative mediator between sexual harassment and mental well-being, whereas maladaptive coping is non-significant. Adaptive coping, i.e. “Acceptance” to admit the reality that the problem exists with all, and “Religion” to seek help spiritually to deal with the problem. Unfortunately, the findings show no suitable coping means to deal with the impact of sexual harassment on women who travel on public transport. This study also illustrates that using the right technologies can encourage participants to submit responses for culturally sensitive topics.

This study provides insight into the experience of street harassment in Pakistani women and how it is related to mental health. This study also explores the role of adaptive and maladaptive coping as an intervening variable between street harassment and mental health.

This paper aims to identify and provide a theoretical explanation for the barriers that hinder the adoption of emerging technologies in the architecture, engineering and construction industry, irrespective of the company’s size, specialization or geographical location. In addition, the paper proposes potential areas for future research in this domain.

A list of barriers hindering the adoption of emerging technologies was identified and clarified using a systematic literature review of various scientific sources.

Twenty-five barriers were recognized and explained and some suggestions for future research studies were provided.

The barriers related to a specific country or region or to a specific technology were excluded.

By providing a deeper comprehension of the barriers hindering the adoption of emerging technologies, this review is expected to encourage their adoption in the industry. Furthermore, it could prove valuable in devising effective strategies for the successful implementation of these technologies.

The importance of metacognitive awareness in learning, on the one hand, and the necessity of considering demographic variables, on the other hand, have encouraged the researchers to conduct this research. This research aims to initially determine the relationship between the level of metacognitive awareness and demographic variables of students from three Lithuanian universities, such as age, gender and area of study.

The quantitative research strategy was applied in this study using the survey with the students scoring the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI). The research involved 296 students from three universities in Lithuania. Data were analysed using statistical analysis methods to compare different groups of subjects according to selected criteria.

It became evident that two demographic variables of age and the field of study had a relationship with knowledge of cognition. Conditional knowledge had a positive relation with the variables of age and the field of study. Procedural knowledge was the second area which had a relation with the area of this study. Therefore, it maybe be concluded that under specific circumstances, declarative and procedural knowledge is at the same level of performance while conditional knowledge revealed the highest relation with metacognitive awareness. Furthermore, no statistically significant difference was found with gender in all metacognitive subcomponents despite the initial assumption.

One of the limitations of this study is that the research did not address the actual application of metacognitive strategies during teaching and learning. The research would benefit from in-depth class observation and triangulation of data from various sources. The teaching model should be tested in a larger population to obtain aggregated results for a vast population.

Results are significant in identifying students' cognitive abilities which can be attributed to various factors such as creativity, which in turn may efficiently foster students' potential. Metacognitive awareness can be developed by explicitly informing students about the importance of metacognition and life-long learning. Lecturers' role-modelling induce students to continuously assess, monitor, plan and reflect on their own learning process as well as to recognize cognition along with metacognitive prompts, questions, checklists, reports and discussion of topics in the learning process.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse innovation policies in India from 1958 to 2020. A policy tools framework was developed to compare the innovation policies in India. India developed and implemented four innovation policies from 1958 to 2013. The recent policy change was brought in the year 2020 with releasing the draft of the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP 2020). The authors analysed the recent draft of STIP 2020 with the earlier four innovation policies.

Innovation policies implemented from 1958 to 2013 in India were studied and analysed in the “text as a data approach” and a comparative policy analysis tool was designed for this purpose. The recent draft of STIP 2020 was evaluated and the provisions of the fifth draft of STIP 2020 were compared with the previous four innovation policies' design and formulation. The CPA tool design consists of five broad themes Awareness and capacity building; Finance and infrastructure; Resource management and governance; Outreach and networking; and Policy implementation and evaluation.

Draft STIP 2020 has many features similar to earlier policies. However, policy has focused on bringing in more clarity about national challenges, goals and objectives, yet it needs better implementation to achieve stated outcomes more effectively and efficiently. New initiatives include strengthening the innovation system with open science, improving STI education, expanding the financial landscape, establishing national STI observatory acting as a central repository of all data related to the STI ecosystem and accountable research ecosystem, promoting translational and foundational research of global standards, promoting entrepreneurship, self-reliance, mainstream science communication and public engagement and decentralised institutional mechanisms. Thus, the STIP 2020 is ambitious in its approach to promoting STI in India and needs a supportive mechanism to achieve the stated objectives.

Current comparative policy analysis focused only on identifying similarities and differences among innovation policies implemented in India from 1958 to 2020 and its evolutionary changes in policy and its instruments choice. The recent draft STIP 2020 is not approved and has no update regarding its approval and implementation by the government. The revised and yet to implement STIP 2020 may have variances in the policy instruments. The earlier policies are so broad and without specific problem statements. They were released as statements and resolutions which makes it is challenging to understand the impact of each policy. Similar policy tools in STI 2013 and STIP 2020 were only considered to observe the policy instrument choice. The achievements of the innovation policies implemented before STIP 2020 are not included. Evolutionary changes in the problem statements and policy tools prescribed in innovation policies are studied.

Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, released a draft of STIP in 2020. The draft of STIP was evaluated with previous Innovation Policies. To the authors’ understanding, this is the first attempt to evaluate the STIPs of India using the “text as a data” approach. The tool can be validated by using it for CPA of innovation policies of other emerging, developed and least developed economies to understand cross-country variations in policy instrument choice by policymakers.

For many years, universities have been confronted with the rise of a managerial logic, in line with the new public management movement. They have been encouraged to implement new accounting tools such as cost calculations. Literature shows mixed results regarding the institutionalization of such tools, and the logic they try to support. In most studies, the agency of actors is examined to explain the institutionalization of accounting tools and only few studies consider the specific characteristics of these accounting tools to understand this process. To enrich the literature on institutionalization, this article examines how the affordances of costing tools affect the institutionalization of these tools and the institutionalization of new logics in pluralistic organizations such as universities.

The data were collected at a French university which is considered as an example of successful institutionalization of the tool and is cited as a model to follow. The data include a four-month participant observation and 18 interviews. Access to internal and external documents was also available. The analysis of the data is based on a framework proposed by Jarzabkowski and Kaplan (2015), which draws on the concept of affordance of tools, to investigate how the possibilities and constraints of costing tools shape the selection, application and outcomes of cost calculations.

The results show that the affordances of cost calculations facilitate the institutionalization of a new logic and its coexistence with previous logics. Technical affordances are mobilized by actors aiming to bring in a new logic without directly confronting the old ones. Role affordances also play a major role in the institutionalization by facilitating the adhesion of the actors through multiple applications of the tool. Finally, value-based affordances reinforce the institutionalization of a managerial logic by emphasizing the values shared with the other logics and thus facilitating the coexistence of the three logics at stake in the university.

This research provides three main contributions. First, it contributes to the literature on the institutionalization of accounting tools. It shows the relevance of the concept of affordance (Leonardi and Vaast, 2017) to unpack the characteristics of accounting tools (including the constraints and the possibilities they offer) and to achieve a better understanding of the institutionalization of accounting tools. Second, this paper contributes to the literature dealing with the role of accounting tools in the institutionalization of logics. The results suggest that the institutionalization of tools and the institutionalization of logics are two different phenomena that move at different speeds. However, these phenomena interact: the institutionalization of accounting tools can facilitate the coexistence of different logics in pluralistic organizations. Third, this paper contributes to the literature on affordances. The data reveal several types of affordances for accounting tools: technical affordances that refer to the technical possibilities to shape and tweak the tool; role affordances that refer to the various roles and purposes that the tool can fulfill and value-based affordances that refer to the plasticity of the values and beliefs that the tool can convey. The study shows that each type of affordance is prevalent at a different time of the process of institutionalization and that the combination of these affordances contributes to the institutionalization of the tool and of new logics.

The question of whether and how communication departments contribute to organizational value creation has rarely been addressed in research. Such evidence is crucial, however, as communications compete internally with other functions (e.g. marketing and human resources (HR)) for budgets and staff. This article fills the gap by applying the business model concept, an established approach from management theory and practice, to communication units.

Based on an interdisciplinary literature review, the authors propose the Communication Business Model (CBM) as a new management approach for communications. To this end, pertinent definitions, frameworks and typologies of business models are analyzed and combined with insights from corporate communications literature.

The CBM outlines the generic architecture of business models for communication departments. Such models describe the basic principles of how such a unit operates, what services and products it provides, how it creates value for an organization and what revenues and resources are allocated.

The approach stimulates the debate on communication units as objects of observation when researching communication management practices. Further research with appropriate empirical methods is needed to identify and study different types of business models for communications.

The CBM can be used as a management tool to analyze, explain and innovate communication management in organizations. It is a fertile approach for communication practitioners to make the work of their department visible and to position themselves internally and externally.

Transferring a well-known concept from general management to communication management enriches the value creation debate in theory and practice. It allows communication leaders to align their work with organizational goals and make it accessible to top management and other decision-makers in the organization. It also opens up new avenues for research and education.

The purpose of this study is to explore the antecedents of uncaptured sustainable value and strategies to generate opportunities to capture it in the circular supply chain of post-consumer used clothing.

This study is based on an inductive analysis of 21 semi-structured interviews conducted with various stakeholders in the circular clothing supply chain (for-profit and not-for-profit) using the value mapping approach, as previously applied in the literature on sustainable business models.

Fifteen antecedents of uncaptured sustainable value, and thirteen value opportunity strategies were revealed that hinder or generate multi-dimensional value types. Economic value is impacted the most, while there is lack of explicit understanding of the impact of these antecedents and strategies on environmental and social value capture. From a multi-stakeholder perspective, the ecosystem is emerging as new for-profit actors are developing novel process technologies, while not-for-profit actors are consolidating their positions by offering new service options. There is also an emerging “coopetition” between the different stakeholders.

More granularity in the different types of uncaptured value could be considered, and external supply chain stakeholders, such as the government, could be included, leading to more detailed value mapping.

This research provides practitioners with a value-mapping tool in circular clothing supply chains, thus providing a structured approach to explore, analyse and understand uncaptured value and value opportunities.

This extended value perspective draws upon the value-mapping approach from the sustainable business model literature and applies it in the context of the circular clothing supply chain. In doing so, this research illustrates circular clothing supply chains in a new way that facilitates an improved understanding of multi-dimensional and multi-stakeholder value for embedded actors.