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This paper aims to investigate the nonlinear relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and economic policy uncertainty (EPU).

This paper uses panel regression techniques to examine a sample consisting of UK-listed non-financial companies during 2000–2018.

The authors found that EPU increases corporate social responsibility which suggests that firms become more socially proactive during the period of heightened EPU. Such countermeasure enhances CSP and is likely a part of a competitive strategy and an insurance mechanism to protect firms against uncertainty in long-term. Further analysis shows a nonlinear relationship between the two factors, suggesting that in a heightened uncertain business environment, the insurance benefit generated by CSP is neutralised by the corresponding cost and, therefore, the positive relationship between EPU and CSP reverses.

This paper is the first to find a nonlinear relationship between CSP and EPU, indicating that too much uncertainty in macroeconomic policies deteriorates the benefits of CSP to the point that the CSP – EPU relationship becomes negative. The results suggest that policy uncertainty has both the bright side and the dark side where too many cooks eventually spoil the broth.

Large class sizes are becoming the norm in higher education against concerns of dropping learning qualities. To maintain the standard of learning and add value, one of the common strategies is for the course convenor to proactively monitor student engagement with learning activities against their assessment outcomes and intervene timely. Learning analytics has been increasingly adopted to provide these insights into student engagement and their performance. This case study explores how learning analytics can be used to meet the convenor’s requirements and help reduce administrative workload in a large health science class at the University of New South Wales.

This case-based study adopts an “action learning research approach” in assessing ways of using learning analytics for reducing workload in the educator’s own context and critically reflecting on experiences for improvements. This approach emphasises reflexive methodology, where the educator constantly assesses the context, implements an intervention and reflects on the process for in-time adjustments, improvements and future development.

The results highlighted ease for the teacher towards the early “flagging” of students who may not be active within the learning management system or who have performed poorly on assessment tasks. Coupled with the ability to send emails to the “flagged” students, this has led to a more personal approach while reducing the number of steps normally required. An unanticipated outcome was the potential for additional time saving through improving the scaffolding mechanisms if the learning analytics were customisable for individual courses.

The results provide further benefits for learning analytics to assist the educator in a growing blended learning environment. They also reveal the potential for learning analytics to be an effective adjunct towards promoting personal learning design.

In recent years, the demand for garments has significantly increased, requiring manufacturers to speed up their production to attract customers. Cut order planning (COP) is one of the most important processes in the apparel manufacturing industry. The appropriate stencil arrangement can reduce costs and fabric waste. The COP problem focuses on determining the size combination for a pattern, which is determined by the length of the cutting table, width, demand order, and height of the cutting equipment.

This study proposes new heuristics: genetic algorithm (GA), symbiotic organism search, and divide-and-search-based Lite heuristic and a One-by-One (ObO) heuristic to address the COP problem. The objective of the COP problem is to determine the optimal combination of stencils to meet demand requirements and minimize the total fabric length.

A comparison between our proposed heuristics and other simulated annealing and GA-based heuristics, and a hybrid approach (conventional algorithm + GA) was conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed heuristics. The test results show that the ObO heuristic can significantly improve the solution efficiency and find the near optimal solution for extreme demands.

This paper proposes a new heuristic, the One-by-One (ObO) heuristic, to solve the COP problem. The results show that the proposed approaches overcome the long operation time required to determine the fitting arrangement of stencils. In particular, our proposed ObO heuristic can significantly improve the solution efficiency, i.e. finding the near optimal solution for extreme demands within a very short time.

This paper aims to investigate the linkage between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and earnings quality (EQ) in the context of Vietnam, an Asian emerging economy characterized by high growth for decades and a socialist orientation. As CSR firms are expected to have high EQ, there arise concerns that corporate managers of CSR firms may use the reputation of the firm as a protection mechanism against the cost of earnings management.

The study uses a unique sample of Vietnamese CSR firms listed on Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchanges from 2015 to 2019. Several econometric tests are conducted to investigate whether corporate managers of CSR-active firms actively engage in earnings management and reduce the firms' EQ.

The empirical results show a negative impact of CSR on EQ, meaning that, in general, corporate managers of CSR firms in Vietnam opportunistically manage earnings. This confirms the paradox of the CSR–EQ relationship. In line with an emerging strand of research in the CSR literature, the finding suggests that the agency problem arises in CSR firms where corporate managers use their managerial discretion over accrual accounting to manipulate reported earnings.

The finding has practical implications for market participants and policymakers in improving monitoring mechanisms and enhancing the information environment in developing capital markets.

This is the first study in the literature that investigates and shows the paradox of the CSR–EQ relationship in the context of Vietnam, a new emerging economy that follows socialist orientation.

Vaccination is widely conceded as a pivotal measure to achieve community immunization and eradicate COVID-19. The purpose of this paper is to understand vaccination behavior based on the association between the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and health belief model (HBM).

A self-administered questionnaire was designed to collect data from 438 participants through social media in Vietnam and later analyzed using SPSS and AMOS to examine the research model.

The results indicated that attitude toward vaccination is positively influenced by perceived risk and perceived benefits. Additionally, background constructs of TPB (i.e. social norms, attitude and perceived behavioral control) and HBM (i.e. perceived risk, response efficacy, perceived benefits and knowledge about COVID-19) are underlying motivations for individual intention to receive vaccine. Moreover, age is a demographic predictor of vaccination intention. Finally, vaccination intention facilitates COVID-19 vaccination.

The findings will assist health-care bodies and authorities to understand public perceptions, attitude and behaviors and encourage their participation in vaccination campaigns.

To date, this is the first investigation of how disease knowledge and perceived benefits drive vaccination intention in Vietnam. Moreover, this study may be initially successful in adding current health-care behavior literature by combining TPB with HBM. With most studies on vaccination intention at the early stage of COVID-19 outbreak in developed nations, this work provides new insights by testing vaccination behavior in the fourth wave of COVID-19 outbreak and in a developing nation.

Drawing from emotional labour (EL) and emotion regulation (ER) theories, this paper aims to identifiy what helps and what hinders the emotional intelligence (EI) practice of Vietnamese hotel workers. Researching EI qualitatively from a novel context highlights the influence of culture on EI.

The critical incident technique (CIT) was adopted as the qualitative methodological approach using a self-administered form and semi-structured interviews to collect empirical data from a sample of 34 Vietnamese hotel workers in 19 different hotels.

The findings show that following Joseph and Newman’s (2010) cascading model of EI would help hotel workers in their practice. The research also found different factors hindering the EI practice from the individual and organisational levels. Vietnamese culture was believed to guide deep-acting and meditation. Language barrier and manager support emerged as significant factors that could help or hinder their EI practice.

The research proposes a conceptual framework addressing the factors that could help or hinder the EI practice and provides implications for HR practices and management. Caution could be taken when applying the research implications because of the small sample as a nature of qualitative research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to appraise the EI practice adopting the CIT as a qualitative methodological approach in an under-research context and add evidence to the theoretical links between EI, EL and ER.

The paper aims to examine the impact of tighter banking regulation on banks’ loan loss provisioning in an emerging market context.

The authors exploit the adoption of the Basel II Accord in Vietnam as a quasi-natural experiment and use Difference-to-Difference (DiD) method to examine the impact of tighter banking regulation on Vietnamese banks’ provisioning during the period of 2010–2019.

The paper finds that affected banks (i.e. those taking part in the pilot adoption programme) manage to reduce their provisions significantly compared to their control peers in the post-adoption period. More importantly, this paper further finds that the affected banks manage their provisions primarily for incomes smoothing and signalling. This paper also finds that those banks expand their lending significantly and experience an increase in financial performance in the post-adoption period. Overall, the results provide supports for the “borrowing from the future” proposition that banks may perceive that a tighter banking regulation provides them with growth opportunities, so they have the tendency to manipulate their provisions to facilitate their current income.

This paper contributes to the established literature on the manipulation of bank provisioning as well as the impact of banking regulation, and especially Basel II on bank economic decisions. As compared to prior literature, the adoption of Basel II in Vietnam provided an ideal shock for us to conduct a DiD design to estimate the causal impact of tighter banking regulation on banks’ provisioning practices.

This study aims to investigate the effect of spray drying temperature and maltodextrin addition on the contents of phenolics, flavonoids, anthocyanins and antioxidant activities (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl [DPPH] radical scavenging activity, ferric reducing antioxidant power and reducing power) of karonda powder.

Over the past few decades, the demands for application of natural colorants in food production have been attracting the attention of academic research and food industry. Anthocyanins, a red pigment commonly found on plants, show high potentials in the preparation of spray-dried pigment powder. This study, therefore, was conducted using full factorial design with two factors, namely, inlet temperature (150°C and 160°C) and soluble solid concentration (10, 15 and 20°Brix) with maltodextrin as carrier to produce pigment powder from karonda, an anthocyanin-rich fruit which is native to southeast Asia.

Increasing soluble solid content from 10 to 15°Brix resulted in a 42%–57% reduction in phenolic, flavonoid and anthocyanin contents. However, when increasing the amount of maltodextrin from 15 to 20°Brix, a lower reduction (approximately 11%–19%) was observed. In samples with the same °Brix, there was no significant variation in antioxidant contents and activities, especially at high maltodextrin ratios. In addition, the reducing power of samples dried at higher temperature (160°C) was higher than that of samples dried at lower temperature. Karonda spray-dried powder showed a good positive correlation (p < 0.01) between antioxidant contents and DPPH• activity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, in this study, for the first time, the effect of spray drying conditions on the quality of karonda powder was investigated.

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of transformational leadership (TL) on firm's frugal innovation. It also deepens understanding of appropriate mechanisms and conditions to improve specific aspects of frugal innovation namely frugal functionality, frugal cost and frugal ecosystem by examining the mediating role of knowledge management capability (KMC) and moderating mechanism of collaborative culture.

The paper utilized structural equation modeling and cross-sectional design to test hypotheses in the proposed research model using data collected from 351 participants in 112 Vietnamese firms.

The findings indicate that KMC significantly mediates TL's effects on aspects of firm's frugal innovation namely frugal functionality, frugal cost and frugal ecosystem. In addition, the influence of KMC on frugal functionality is different and depended on the extent of collaborative culture in an organization.

The paper has significantly contributed to increasing the understanding of the link between TL and specific aspects of frugal innovation by highlighting the important role of KMC and positive effects of collaborative climate in an organization.

The paper is unique in the attempts to provide the valuable initiatives and integration view of leadership practices for improving specific dimensions of frugal innovation of firms in developing and emerging market.

This study aims to examine the role of mindfulness in promoting customers’ purchase intentions, especially with the mediation effects of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness toward online ride-hailing services. As such, several recommendations for ride-hailing service providers and researchers are suggested for better implementation in a practical and theoretical context.

The data collection process is carried out online during the period of February 2022 to March 2022, with a sample of 237 respondents being analyzed by the covariance-based structural equation modeling approach.

First of all, mindfulness had a direct influence on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, as well as an indirect influence on purchase intention through the mediation role of perceived usefulness. Besides, perceived usefulness is found to have a positive influence on the customer’s purchase intention, while perceived ease of use positively affects both perceived usefulness and intention.

This study just ends with customers’ intentions to adopt ride-hailing services; nevertheless, the actual behavior has not been examined. Further research might consider actual usage as a dependent factor when investigating the topic of ride-hailing services.

This study is notably different from the existing literature by filling the literature gap on the role of mindfulness in promoting customers’ purchase intentions toward ride-hailing services.

Este estudio tiene como objetivo examinar el papel del mindfulness en la promoción de las intenciones de compra de los clientes, especialmente con los efectos de mediación de la facilidad de uso percibida y la utilidad percibida hacia los servicios de transporte en línea. De este modo, se sugieren varias recomendaciones para los proveedores de servicios de transporte en coche y los investigadores para una mejor aplicación en un contexto práctico y teórico.

El proceso de recopilación de datos se lleva a cabo en línea durante el período de febrero de 2022 a marzo de 2022, con una muestra de 237 encuestados que se analizan mediante el enfoque CB-SEM.

En primer lugar, mindfulness tuvo una influencia directa sobre la facilidad de uso percibida y la utilidad percibida, así como una influencia indirecta sobre la intención de compra a través del papel de mediación de la utilidad percibida. Además, se observa que la utilidad percibida influye positivamente en la intención de compra del cliente, mientras que la facilidad de uso percibida afecta positivamente tanto a la utilidad percibida como a la intención.

Este estudio se limita a analizar la intención de los clientes de adoptar los servicios de transporte rápido; sin embargo, no se ha examinado el comportamiento real. En futuras investigaciones se podría considerar el uso real como un factor dependiente a la hora de investigar el tema de los servicios de transporte rápido.

Este estudio es notablemente diferente de la literatura existente al llenar el vacío bibliográfico sobre el papel de mindfulness en la promoción de las intenciones de compra de los clientes hacia los servicios de ride-hailing.

本研究旨在探讨 “正念 “在促进顾客购买意向方面的作用, 尤其是在感知易用性和感知有用性对在线叫车服务的中介效应方面。因此, 本研究为叫车服务提供商和研究人员提出了若干建议, 以便在实践和理论背景下更好地实施这些建议。

数据收集过程于 2022 年 2 月至 2022 年 3 月期间在线进行, 采用 CB-SEM 方法对 237 个受访者样本进行分析。

首先, 正念对感知易用性和感知有用性有直接影响, 并通过感知有用性的中介作用对购买意向产生间接影响。此外, 还发现感知有用性对顾客的购买意向有积极影响, 而感知易用性对感知有用性和购买意向都有积极影响。

本研究仅对顾客采用打车服务的意向进行了分析, 但并未对实际行为进行研究。在研究叫车服务时, 进一步的研究可能会将实际使用情况作为一个因果因素。

独创性 本研究填补了关于正念在促进顾客乘车服务购买意向方面作用的文献空白, 与现有文献有明显不同。