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In the online environment, consumers increasingly feel vulnerable due to firms’ expanding capabilities of collecting and using their data in an unsanctioned manner. Drawing from gossip theory, this research focuses on two key suppressors of consumer vulnerability: transparency and control. Previous studies conceptualize transparency and control from rationalistic approaches that overlook individual experiences and present a unidimensional conceptualization. This research aims to understand how individuals interpret transparency and control concerning privacy vulnerability in the online environment. Additionally, it explores strategic approaches to communicating the value of transparency and control.

An interpretivism paradigm and phenomenology were adopted in the research design. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 41 participants, including consumers and experts, and analyzed through thematic analysis.

The findings identify key conceptual dimensions of transparency and control by adapting justice theory. They also reveal that firms can communicate assurance, functional, technical and social values of transparency and control to address consumer vulnerability.

This research makes the following contributions to the data privacy literature. The findings exhibit multidimensional and comprehensive conceptualizations of transparency and control, including user, firm and information perspectives. Additionally, the conceptual framework combines empirical insights from both experiencers and observers to offer an understanding of how transparency and control serve as justice mechanisms to effectively tackle the issue of unsanctioned transmission of personal information and subsequently address vulnerability. Lastly, the findings provide strategic approaches to communicating the value of transparency and control.

Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are complex and have multifaceted effects on countries in an unpredictable and unprecedented manner. While both COVID-19 and the climate crisis share similarities, they also have some notable differences. Being both systemic in nature with knock-on and cascading effects that propagate due to high connectedness of countries, COVID-19, however, presents imminent and directly visible dangers, while the risks from climate change are gradual, cumulative and often distributed dangers. Climate change has more significant medium and long-term impacts which are likely to worsen over time. There is no vaccine for climate change compared to COVID-19. In addition, those most affected by extreme climatic conditions have usually contributed the least to the root causes of the crisis. This is in fact the case of island economies. The chapter thus investigates into the vulnerability and resilience of 38 Small Islands Developing States (SIDs) to both shocks. Adopting a comprehensive conceptual framework and data on various indices from the literature and global databases, we assess the COVID-19 and climate change vulnerabilities of SIDs on multiple fronts. The results first reveal a higher vulnerability across all dimensions for the Pacific islands compared to the other islands in the sample. There is also evidence of a weak correlation between climate change risk and the COVID-19 pandemic confirming our premise that there are marked differences between these two shocks and their impacts on island communities.

Assessing project criticality in a project portfolio (PP) is of great practical significance to improve robustness from damage. While project criticality assessment has increased diversity in approaches, the understanding of vulnerable project impacts is still limited. To promote a better understanding of assessing project criticality, a vulnerability measurement model is constructed.

First, integrating the tasks, projects and corresponding relationships among them, a project portfolio network (PPN) is constructed. Second, the project's vulnerability is measured by combining the topological structure and functional attributes. Third, project criticality is assessed by the vulnerability measurement results. Lastly, the proposed model is applied in a numerical example to illustrate its suitability and effectiveness.

For academia, this study provides a novel perspective on project vulnerability measurement and expands project criticality assessment tools. For practitioners, the straightforward model provides an effective tool for assessing project criticality and contributes to enhancing project portfolio management (PPM).

The impact of the task on the project is considered in this study. Topological structure and functional attributes are also integrated for measuring project vulnerability due to the impact of random attacks in an uncertain environment, providing a new perspective on the requirements of project criticality assessment and the measurement of project vulnerability.

Pakistan is one of the most climate change and natural disaster-affected countries in the globe, where the lives and livelihoods of people are repeatedly affected due to these natural disasters. Over the past few decades, the country has been impacted by numerous devastating floods, droughts, and storms. As a result, households face enormous complications, particularly those dwelling in disaster-prone areas. Therefore, this study intends to explore the status of household vulnerability and resilience practices of hazard-prone communities in Pakistan from existing literature. This study has identified the 17 most relevant documents. It argues that household vulnerability is increasing consistently with the increasing rate of disaster intensity. Frequent flooding, landslide, erosion, and crop loss are the leading causes of household vulnerability. This study reveals five types of household vulnerability components which look into several livelihood vulnerability indicators of Pakistani households. Moreover, the study unfolds that the main causes of disaster vulnerability are widespread crop loss, a lack of water, loss of soil fertility, and low socioeconomic situations. The major vulnerability components of dwellers are exposure (increasing summer duration, the rapid increase of population house build-up in the riparian areas, and increasing occurrence of hailstorms), sensitivity, low access to education facilities, human loss, diseases infestation, food insecurity, and social conflict), and less adaptive capacity (social networks, migration, poor emergency services, multiple income sources, and less access to the health facility). To address the household vulnerability, this study has also identified four key aspects of resilience, like social resilience, economic resilience, institutional resilience, and physical resilience. The findings will effectively help to understand the dynamics of household vulnerability and resilience and its measurement and management strategy from developed indicators.

The purpose of this study results and recommendations will have a paramount significance for policymakers, policy advocates, development planners and practitioners who may be in need of such information for reconsideration, evaluation and inclusion into their respective development and humanitarian programming and operational strategies. Above all, the study result has further provided the local community with viable adaptation strategies to climate-induced changes in the study area.

This study was conducted to measure the livelihood vulnerability of Borana pastoralists to climate change and variability in southern Ethiopia. Pastoralists’ households were sampled using multistage sampling techniques. A total of 27 socio-economic and biophysical indicators were used to reflect vulnerability components: adaptive capacity, exposure and sensitivity. Principal component analysis was used to develop weights for indicators and to produce livelihood vulnerability index to classify households according to their level of vulnerability. Ordinal logistic regression was used to identify the determinants of vulnerability to climate-induced stresses.

The results showed that 24.4% of households were highly vulnerable, 60.3% were moderately vulnerable and 15.3% of households were less vulnerable to climate-induced stresses. Factor estimates of the logistic model further revealed that early warning information, bush encroachment, coping strategy, temperature, drought frequency, provision of humanitarian services and food shortage during the normal season of the year have a significant influence on vulnerability in the study area.

The study’s results and recommendations will be of great significance to policymakers, development planners, and practitioners who require such information for reconsideration, evaluation, and inclusion in their respective development and humanitarian program and operational strategies. Most importantly, the study’s findings have provided the local community with practical adaptation strategies to climate-induced changes in the study area.

The study explored pastoralist perception of climate change and variability and measured the livelihood vulnerability of pastoralists’ households to climate change and variability and finally investigated viable adaptation and coping strategies in the study area.

A zero-day vulnerability is a complimentary ticket to the attackers for gaining entry into the network. Thus, there is necessity to device appropriate threat detection systems and establish an innovative and safe solution that prevents unauthorised intrusions for defending various components of cybersecurity. We present a survey of recent Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) in detecting zero-day vulnerabilities based on the following dimensions: types of cyber-attacks, datasets used and kinds of network detection systems.

Purpose: The study focuses on presenting an exhaustive review on the effectiveness of the recent IDS with respect to zero-day vulnerabilities.

Methodology: Systematic exploration was done at the IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, RAID, ESCORICS, Google Scholar, and other relevant platforms of studies published in English between 2015 and 2021 using keywords and combinations of relevant terms.

Findings: It is possible to train IDS for zero-day attacks. The existing IDS have strengths that make them capable of effective detection against zero-day attacks. However, they display certain limitations that reduce their credibility. Novel strategies like deep learning, machine learning, fuzzing technique, runtime verification technique, and Hidden Markov Models can be used to design IDS to detect malicious traffic.

Implication: This paper explored and highlighted the advantages and limitations of existing IDS enabling the selection of best possible IDS to protect the system. Moreover, the comparison between signature-based and anomaly-based IDS exemplifies that one viable approach to accurately detect the zero-day vulnerabilities would be the integration of hybrid mechanism.

Preventative health services are keen to identify how to engage men and increase their participation, thus improving health, well-being and life expectancy over time. Prior research has shown general gender norms are a key reason for men’s avoidance of these services, yet there is little investigation of specific gender norms. Furthermore, masculinity has not been examined as a factor associated with customer vulnerability. This paper aims to identify the relationship between gender norm segments for men, likely customer vulnerability over time and subjective health and well-being.

Adult males (n = 13,891) from an Australian longitudinal men’s health study were classified using latent class analysis. Conditional growth mixture modelling was conducted at three timepoints.

Three masculinity segments were identified based on masculine norm conformity: traditional self-reliant, traditional bravado and modern status. All segments had likely customer experience of vulnerability. Over time, the likely experience was temporary for the modern status segment but prolonged for the traditional self-reliant and traditional bravado segments. The traditional self-reliant segment had low subjective health and low overall well-being over time.

Practitioners can tailor services to gender norm segments, enabling self-reliant men to provide expertise and use the “Status” norm to reach all masculinity segments.

The study of customer vulnerability in a group usually considered privileged identifies differential temporal experiences based on gender norms. The study confirms customer vulnerability is temporal in nature; customer vulnerability changes over time from likely to actual for self-reliant men.

In recent years, due to fast growth of Kabul city in Afghanistan, newest construction has been taking place in unplanned ways and entailed illegal squatting on land and mountains. Such unplanned urban expansion, without any type of urban infrastructure and insufficient drainage systems, has created many problems including an increasing number of urban floods. Recent reports show that the number of female victims is higher than that of males affected by floods. First, this chapter highlights the country overview of the disaster and vulnerability, and then particularly focus on the vulnerability factors of urban women who are affected by floods and living in Kabul city. Data for this study were obtained through focus group discussions with urban women, and men and face-to-face interviews with governmental and non-governmental organizations (GOs-NGOs) at the local as well as national levels in Afghanistan. Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) was used to map the relationship among factors, and to stratify factors according to their importance. Findings show that the lack of education on disaster management and the lack of protective measures play an important role in increasing women’s vulnerability during disasters. Furthermore, the study finds that cultural issues represent a dominant vulnerability factor which affect women. The comparative results show that the women affected by the cultural norms during the flood are less important than the post-disaster. The study also found that the perception regarding these cultural norms and how they affect women’s behaviour during disasters differs between men and women. This chapter concluded some policy recommendations towards resilient livelihoods.

Cyber risk has significantly increased over the past twenty years. In many organizations, data and operations are managed through a complex technology stack underpinned by an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system such as systemanalyse programmentwicklung (SAP). The ERP environment by itself can be overwhelming for a typical ERP Manager, coupled with increasing cybersecurity issues that arise creating periods of intense time pressure, stress and workload, increasing risk to the organization. This paper aims to identify a pragmatic approach to prioritize vulnerabilities for the ERP Manager.

Applying attention-based theory, a pragmatic approach is developed to prioritize an organization’s response to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Vulnerability Database (NVD) vulnerabilities using a Classification and Regression Tree (CART).

The application of classification and regression tree (CART) to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Vulnerability Database identifies prioritization unavailable within the NIST’s categorization.

The ERP Manager is a role between technology, functionality, centralized control and organization data. Without CART, vulnerabilities are left to a reactive approach, subject to overwhelming situations due to intense time pressure, stress and workload.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is original and has not been published elsewhere, nor is it currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. CART has previously not been applied to the prioritizing cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Disruptive shocks significantly compromise service contexts, challenging multidimensional value (co)creation. Recent focus has been on consumers experiencing vulnerability in service contexts. However, the susceptibility of service firms, employees and other actors to the impacts of disruptive shocks has received little attention. Since resource scarcity from disruptive shocks heightens tensions around balancing different needs in the service system, this paper aims to propose a framework of balanced centricity and service system resilience for service sustainability.

Adopting a conceptual model process, the paper integrates resilience and balanced centricity (method theories) with customer/consumer vulnerability (domain theory) resulting in a definition of multiactor vulnerability and related theoretical propositions.

Depleted, unavailable, or competed over resources among multiple actors constrain resource integration. Disruptive shocks nevertheless have upside potential. The interdependencies of actors in the service system call for deeper examination of multiple parties’ susceptibility to disruptive resource scarcity. The conceptual framework integrates multiactor vulnerability (when multiactor susceptibility to resource scarcity challenges value exchange) with processes of service system resilience, developing three research propositions. Emerging research questions and strategies for balanced centricity provide a research agenda.

A multiactor, balanced centricity perspective extends understanding of value cocreation, service resilience and service sustainability. Strategies for anticipating, coping with and adapting to disruptions in service systems are suggested by using the balanced centricity perspective, offering the potential to maintain (or enhance) the six types of value.

This research defines multiactor vulnerability, extending work on experienced vulnerabilities; describes the multilevel and multiactor perspective on experienced vulnerability in service relationships; and conceptualizes how balanced centricity can decrease multiactor vulnerability and increase service system resilience when mega disruptions occur.