Search results

The potential applications of information and communication technologies in the workplace are wide-ranging and, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, have increasingly found their way into the field of electronic performance monitoring (EPM) of employees. This study aims to examine the influence of EPM on individual performance considering the aspects of privacy invasion, organizational trust and individual stress within an organization. Thus, important insights are generated for academia as well as business.

A theoretical framework was developed which conceptualizes perceived EPM as independent variable and individual performance as dependent variable. Moreover, the framework conceptualizes three mediator variables (privacy invasion, organizational trust and individual stress). Based on a large-scale survey (N = 1,119), nine hypotheses were tested that were derived from the developed framework.

The results indicate that perception of EPM significantly increases privacy invasion, reduces organizational trust, increases individual stress and ultimately reduces individual performance. Moreover, it was found that privacy invasion reduces organizational trust and that this lowered trust increases individual stress. Altogether, these findings suggest that the use of EPM by employers may be associated with significant negative consequences.

This research enriches the literature on digital transformation, as well as human–machine interaction, by adopting a multidimensional theoretical and empirical perspective regarding EPM in the workplace context, in which the influence of EPM perceptions on individual performance is examined under the influence of different aspects (privacy invasion, organizational trust and individual stress) not currently considered in this combination in the literature.

This chapter provides an introduction to the world of family companies and family constitutions from a legal perspective. It first studies the legal types of business organizations that family firms have chosen across time and jurisdictions. It then illustrates how early predecessors of family constitutions evolved in the late Middle Ages and what modern family constitutions look like in different countries today. Further considerations are devoted to the governance framework of family firms. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential legal effects of family constitutions under German company and contract law.

This paper investigates the integration of leadership training into IT curricula to develop current and future skills needed by the IT job market. The technical and non-technical skills required for IT professionals are presented and a conceptual model for including leadership training in technical courses is outlined. To implement this model, we adopted the Problem-Based Learning approach to teach an IT course. Qualitative and quantitative data were gathered, through a survey, from 52 undergraduate students in the College of Information Technology at Zayed University. Our results show that our adopted approach was successful in teaching IT skills as well as developing leadership skills. Given these findings, we highlight the importance and feasibility of integrating leadership development on a daily basis within technical courses to develop both the technical and non technical skills required by the job market.

Transportation infrastructure asset management has long been an active but challenging problem for agencies, which urges to maintain a good state of their assets but faces budgetary limitations. Managing a network of transportation infrastructure assets, especially when the number is large, is a multifaceted challenge. This paper aims to develop a life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) based transportation infrastructure asset management analytical framework to study the impacts of a few key parameters/factors on deterioration and life-cycle cost. Using the bridge as an example infrastructure type, the framework incorporates an optimization model for optimizing maintenance, repair, rehabilitation (MR&R) and replacement decisions in a finite planning horizon.

The analytical framework is further developed through a series of model variations, scenario and sensitivity analysis, simulation processes and numerical experiments to show the impacts of various parameters/factors and draw managerial insights. One notable analysis is to explicitly model the epistemic uncertainties of infrastructure deterioration models, which have been overlooked in previous research. The proposed methodology can be adapted to different types of assets for solving general asset management and capital planning problems.

The experiments and case studies revealed several findings. First, the authors showed the importance of the deterioration model parameter (i.e. Markov transition probability). Inaccurate information of p will lead to suboptimal solutions and results in excessive total cost. Second, both agency cost and user cost of a single facility will have significant impacts on the system cost and correlation between them also influences the system cost. Third, the optimal budget can be found and the system cost is tolerant to budge variations within a certain range. Four, the model minimizes the total cost by optimizing the allocation of funds to bridges weighing the trade-off between user and agency costs.

On the path forward to develop the next generation of bridge management systems methodologies, the authors make an exploration of incorporating the epistemic uncertainties of the stochastic deterioration models into bridge MR&R capital planning and decision-making. The authors propose an optimization approach that does not only incorporate the inherent stochasticity of bridge deterioration but also considers the epistemic uncertainties and variances of the model parameters of Markovian transition probabilities due to data errors or modeling processes.

In response to growing concerns over the negative consequences of Internet addiction on adolescents’ mental health, coupled with conflicting results in this literature stream, this meta-analysis sought to (1) examine the association between Internet addiction and depressive symptoms in adolescents, (2) examine the moderating role of Internet freedom across countries, and (3) examine the mediating role of excessive daytime sleepiness.

In total, 52 studies were analyzed using robust variance estimation and meta-analytic structural equation modeling.

There was a significant and moderate association between Internet addiction and depressive symptoms. Furthermore, Internet freedom did not explain heterogeneity in this literature stream before and after controlling for study quality and the percentage of female participants. In support of the displacement hypothesis, this study found that Internet addiction contributes to depressive symptoms through excessive daytime sleepiness (proportion mediated = 17.48%). As the evidence suggests, excessive daytime sleepiness displaces a host of activities beneficial for maintaining mental health. The results were subjected to a battery of robustness checks and the conclusions remain unchanged.

The results underscore the negative consequences of Internet addiction in adolescents. Addressing this issue would involve interventions that promote sleep hygiene and greater offline engagement with peers to alleviate depressive symptoms.

This study utilizes robust meta-analytic techniques to provide the most comprehensive examination of the association between Internet addiction and depressive symptoms in adolescents. The implications intersect with the shared interests of social scientists, health practitioners, and policy makers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent the economic interdependence can affect the likelihood of conflict between States. Specially, over the past few decades, there has been a huge interest in the relationship between economic interdependence and political conflict. Liberals argue that economic interdependence lowers the possibility of war by increasing the weight of trading over the alternative of aggression; interdependent states would rather trade than invade; realists dismiss the liberal argument, arguing that high interdependence increases rather than decreases the probability of war. In anarchy, states must constantly worry about their security.

This paper highlights the content and level of economic interdependence between China and the USA since the beginning of China’s economic reform in 1979 and examines the impact of economic interdependence between them on their relationship toward Taiwan since 1995 and the probability of conflict.

Economic interdependence is proved to significantly decrease the onset of conflict between the two parties. This can be shown by comparing the number of armed conflicts during the pre-interdependence period to the number of armed conflicts after the economic interdependence there was an overage of 0.79 militarized interstate disputes (MIDs)/year, compared to 0.26 MIDs/year following China’s economic reforms; also, the length of the hostilities was longer during the pre-interdependence period (with an average of 11.13 months versus 5.33 months).

This means that economic interdependence does not completely prevent the outbreak of international conflicts, but it also plays a major role in influencing the conflict in terms of the conflict’s intensity, the use of armed force and the number of conflicts that occur between the economic interdependence states.

This study aims to characterize the June 2020 COVID-19 outbreak at San Quentin California State Prison and to describe what made San Quentin so vulnerable to uncontrolled transmission.

Since its onset, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the profound health harms of carceral settings, such that nearly half of state prisons reported COVID-19 infection rates that were four or more times (and up to 15 times) the rate found in the state’s general population. Thus, addressing the public health crises and inequities of carceral settings during a respiratory pandemic requires analyzing the myriad factors shaping them. In this study, we reported observations and findings from environmental risk assessments during visits to San Quentin California State Prison. We complemented our assessments with analyses of administrative data.

For future respiratory pathogens that cannot be prevented with effective vaccines, this study argues that outbreaks will no doubt occur again without robust implementation of additional levels of preparedness – improved ventilation, air filtration, decarceration with emergency evacuation planning – alongside addressing the vulnerabilities of carceral settings themselves.

This study addresses two critical aspects that are insufficiently covered in the literature: how to prepare processes to safely implement emergency epidemic measures when needed, such as potential evacuation, and how to address unique challenges throughout an evolving pandemic for each carceral setting.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the disciplinary divide between international finance and international business (IB) to realign academic research with business reality in which strategy and finance align to determine firms’ success or failures.

The authors discuss theoretical differences between the fields of international finance and IB strategy that caused the fields to develop in isolation with little fertilization across disciplines. The authors review scarce interdisciplinary contributions between the fields. Finally, the authors identify complementarities that suggest fruitful avenues for future research.

The authors find a persistent disconnect between finance and strategy/IB literature that can be explained by fundamentally different aims and assumptions about the markets. While finance theory seeks to explain typical effects under functioning markets, strategy and IB theories focus inherently on exceptional effects and market inefficiencies.

The fundamental theoretical differences that isolate finance and strategy/IB create avenues for interdisciplinary research that harness the complementarities of the two disciplines. These include strategic aspects of capital structure, internal capital market inefficiencies, corporate governance, capital market liability of foreignness and institutional aspects of financial management.

With this paper, the authors not only bring academic researchers in finance and strategy closer to corporate practice. The theoretical discussion also challenges the functional blind spots of practitioners and encourages more holistic decision-making.

Challenging market functioning and recognizing market inefficiencies using strategy and IB foundations connects financial economics with non-market topics such as environment, society and governance or impact investing.

The value and originality of the paper come from the qualitative, epistemological approach to study and analyse the divide between international finance and strategy/IB scholarship.

This paper explores the historical roots of accounting for biodiversity and extinction accounting by analysing the 18th-century Naturalist's Journals of Gilbert White and interpreting them as biodiversity accounts produced by an interested party. The authors aim to contribute to the accounting history literature by extending the form of accounting studied to include nature diaries as well as by exploring historical ecological accounts, as well as contributing to the burgeoning literature on accounting for biodiversity and extinction accounting.

The authors’ method involves analysing the content of Gilbert White's Naturalist's Journals by producing an 18th-century biodiversity account of species of flora and fauna and then interpretively drawing out themes from the Journals. The authors then provide a Whitean extinction account by comparing current species' status with White's biodiversity account from 250 years ago.

This paper uses Gilbert White's Naturalist's Journals as a basis for comparing biodiversity and natural capital 250 years ago with current species' status according to extinction threat and conservation status. Further the paper shows how early nature diary recording represents early (and probably the only) forms of accounting for biodiversity and extinction. The authors also highlight themes within White's accounts including social emancipation, problematisation, aesthetic elements and an example of an early audit of biodiversity accounting.

There are limitations to analysing Gilbert White's Naturalist's Journals given that the only available source is an edited version. The authors therefore interpret their data as accounts which are indicative of biodiversity and species abundance rather than an exactly accurate account.

From the authors’ analysis and reflections, the authors suggest that contemporary biodiversity accounting needs to incorporate a combination of narrative, data accounting and pictorial/aesthetic representation if it is to provide a rich and accurate report of biodiversity and nature. The authors also suggest that extinction accounting should draw on historical data in order to demonstrate change in natural capital over time.

Social implications include the understanding gleaned from the authors’ analysis of the role of Gilbert White as a nature diarist in society and the contribution made over time by his Journals and other writings to the development of nature accounting and recording, as well as to one’s understanding and knowledge of species of flora and fauna.

To the authors’ knowledge this is the first attempt to analyse and interpret nature diaries as accounts of biodiversity and extinction.

Background: The study focuses on the challenges encountered during the distribution of food and face-mask items during the first COVID-19 lock-down by various relief supply chain actors.

Methods: Data were collected from forty (40) relief actors through online (via Zoom and telephones) and face-to-face interviews, between January 2021 to March 2021. Data was coded based on per-determined themes after which it was further processed using Atlas ti. v7.57 to generate patterns.

Results: The study established challenges related to needs identification, procurement, warehousing, transportation, handling, beneficiary verification, and last-mile distribution. Additionally, the media and politics coupled with the emergence of new actors and governance issues were part of the challenges identified.

Conclusions: The identified challenges were internal and external to the relief supply chain; hence actors could have control over some while others were beyond their control. The findings could inform practitioners and policymakers on what challenges are likely to affect their operations, especially during a pandemic, and design appropriate coping mechanisms.