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This research paper aims to examine the influence of greater female participation on the board of directors on the environmental transparency of companies.

To achieve the purpose of this study, the authors analyzed the environmental transparency of 412 companies in the energy sector, headquartered in 19 countries, during a four-year period (2016 to 2019).

The data reveal that gender diversity has a positive effect on the environmental transparency of companies in developed countries and on the total model. Furthermore, after removing the US companies, the results remained the same, indicating that companies with more women on the board tend to have greater environmental transparency. Regarding corporate governance variables, the results show that companies that have a corporate social responsibility committee tend to have greater environmental transparency, both in emerging countries and in developed countries.

The findings indicate that if companies aim to have greater environmental transparency, they must encourage female participation on boards, giving them equal opportunities for professional growth. Organizations must deconstruct the ideology that women are fewer valuable members of their boards, which limits their contribution to organizational success. Additionally, regulators can encourage greater female participation on boards through the implementation of quota laws.

The authors’ evidence indicates that the presence of women on board is an antecedent of greater quality in the dissemination of environmental information. Thus, managers of companies in the energy sector must understand that diversity on the board affects communication with its stakeholders through environmental transparency.

The importance of teacher leadership in enhancing school outcomes is recognized, but there remains a scarcity of research addressing the conditions for principals to nurture such leadership. This study examined how school contextual factors, i.e. faculty trust and academic emphasis, moderate the impact of principals' distributed leadership lon teacher leadership.

A nationwide survey was conducted among junior high school teachers in Taiwan. The sample encompassed schools from different geographical regions and sizes, yielding a total of 1,340 valid responses. Hierarchical regression analyses were employed to analyze the potential moderating effects of interest.

There were interactive effects of principals' distributed leadership and school contextual factors on teachers' adoption of leadership roles. The impact of principals' distributed leadership on teacher leadership was amplified in environments marked by elevated levels of trust relations and reduced academic emphasis.

This study uncovers the critical prerequisites principals must address to cultivate teacher leadership. To effectively encourage heightened teacher engagement in leadership, principals must place a premium on nurturing trusting relations with their teaching staff and acknowledge that the influence of their leadership might be lessened in an environment where credentialism holds sway.

The exploration into faculty trust and academic emphasis yields insights into the conducive conditions for principals to foster teacher leadership. The identified attenuating impact of academic emphasis on principal effect within an Asian societal context highlights its significance not only as an organizational property but also as a manifestation of national cultural values.

This study examines the use of dark humor in brand-to-brand communications on social media and its impact on consumers' brand perceptions. In particular, this study looks at roasting messages in which a brand humorously insults its peers.

The authors used a sampling method to recruit 286 participants from the United States. They employed an ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc analysis to test the hypotheses, as well as Hayes' PROCESS to test the mediation and moderation effects, including Johnson–Neyman procedure.

The authors found that not all customers find roasting messages funny. Rather, consumers' personality and age will influence their perceived humor of the messages and their brand evaluations. Customers who are young and extroverted are likely to believe roasting messages to be funny. They thus perceive the brand to be cooler and more sincere when using such a communication approach, compared to when the brand neutrally interacts with others. Meanwhile, brands may find less success with old and introverted customers.

This research sheds light on how the consumers' perception of humor in a roasting type of brand-to-brand communication has an impact on consumers' psychological perceptions of brand coolness and brand sincerity. To guide practitioners, it explored how the interaction between a consumer's personality and age moderates the aforementioned relationship.

This paper explores how platforms reconfigure versatile digital resources to achieve marketing agility in international markets.

We draw on a case study of a Chinese digital platform to explore the processes and mechanisms of reconfiguring during marketing agility development. Data from different sources are collected, including interviews, informal dialogue and archival data.

Versatile digital resources create productive applications for previously less amendable marketing and nonmarketing resources to be malleable, editable and reconfigurable in marketing agility development. This study identifies and clarifies three versatile digital resource-enabled reconfiguration activities in marketing agility building: recombining digital artifacts, repurposing human capital and cross-pollinating markets.

Since our study adopts a case study method, future research can extend our insights by using quantitative methods to test and verify our theoretical framework.

First, we provide insights into how organizations can reconfigure versatile digital resources to achieve the benefits of marketing agility in international markets. Second, while recruiting new employees during internationalization is vital, we suggest that assisted by digital artifacts, firms can repurpose the existing workforce, such as via multitasking, swift task-switching and flexible job redirecting to satisfy dynamic international business requirements with lower adjustment costs. Third, we offer two localization approaches in which firms can use digital artifacts as the enabler to remix sociocultural elements with local adaptations to develop glocal content and decentralize content production to generate inclusive local content.

We provide a process model that specifies how platforms reconfigure versatile digital resources to achieve marketing agility in international markets. Furthermore, we provide novel insights into the literature on marketing agility in international markets and localization.

This study aims to investigate the integration of blockchain technology into the food supply chain within the restaurant industry. It focuses on how blockchain can be applied to enhance transparency and trust in tracking food sources, ultimately impacting customer satisfaction.

A service design workshop (Study 1) and three between-subjects experiments (Studies 2–4) were conducted.

Results indicate that blockchain adoption significantly improves traceability and trust in the food supply chain. This improvement in turn enhances customer satisfaction through perceived improvements in food safety, quality and naturalness. This study also notes that the effects of blockchain technology vary depending on the type of restaurant (casual or fine dining) and its location (tourist destinations or residential areas).

The findings offer practical insights for restaurant owners, technology developers and policymakers. Emphasizing the benefits of blockchain adoption, this study guides decision-making regarding technology investments for enhancing customer service and satisfaction in the hospitality sector.

This research contributes novel insights to the field of technology innovation in the hospitality industry. It extends the understanding of signaling theory by exploring how blockchain technology can serve as a tool for signal transmission in restaurant food supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates’ response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character’s body. This paper explores how readers’ meaning making was influenced when reading prose versus comics. This paper adds to a corpus of scholarship about the relationships between young adult literature, comics, bodies and reader response theory.

At the time of the study, participants were enrolled in a teacher education program at a Midwestern University, meeting monthly for a voluntary book club dedicated to reading and discussing young adult literature. To examine readers’ responses to comics and prose featuring fat-identified protagonists, the author used descriptive qualitative methodologies to conduct a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, written participant reflections and researcher memos. Analysis was grounded in theories of reader response, critical fat studies and multimodality.

Analyses indicated many readers reject textual clues indicating a character’s body size and weight were different from their own. Readers read their bodies into the stories, regarding them as self-help narratives instead of radical counternarratives. Some readers were not able to read against their assumptions of thinness (and whiteness) until prompted by the researcher and other participants.

Although many reader response scholars have demonstrated readers’ tendencies toward personal identification in the face of racial and class differences, there is less research regarding classroom practices around the entanglement of physical bodies, body image and texts. Analyzing reader’s responses to the constructions of fat bodies in prose versus comics may help English Language Arts (ELA) educators and students identify and deconstruct ideologies of thin-thinking and fatphobia. This study, which demonstrates thin readers’ tendencies to overidentify with protagonists, suggests ELA classrooms might encourage readers to engage in critical literacies that support them in reading both with and against their identities.

Growing recognition of the metaverse has implied its far-reaching impacts on the tourism and hospitality industry. This paper sets out to detail the status of metaverse-related research in tourism and hospitality, propose intriguing directions for future studies and highlight multiple areas that call for immediate attention from practitioners in navigating the metaverse phenomenon.

This viewpoint paper referenced the extant academic discussion on the metaverse, based on which timely suggestions for academia and practices are proposed.

This viewpoint paper presents an account of the metaverse and discusses the status of metaverse-related research in hospitality and tourism. It then proposes intriguing avenues for future research around the topics of marketing, reconceptualizing service quality, attitude and behaviors, electronic customer-to-customer interactions, transformative impacts on the society well-being and research methodology. Multiple areas that call for immediate attention from practitioners in navigating the metaverse phenomenon are also highlighted. Both scholars and industry organizations are called upon to assume some responsibility for mapping out protocols to guide the appropriate development, use and governance of metaverse worlds. Governments and policymakers are further encouraged to consider the ramifications of metaverse development for individuals and society and to devise proactive mitigation strategies.

This viewpoint paper proposes several directions for future business practices in the areas of co-creation, experiential consumption, and emerging critical issues in healthcare, human resources, and social media services. It expects to inspire more discussion about the potential impacts of metaverse on the wider society. Its practical significance will further expand the theoretical foundation of the metaverse research and makes this viewpoint paper an intriguing prospect.

The nascent stage of academic discussion intended to guide the development of metaverse is noteworthy, which forms a notable contrast with the growing recognition of its potential of co-creating transformational experiences in hospitality and tourism. This viewpoint paper joins the current academic conversations acknowledging this phenomenon in hospitality and tourism. Provided the notable topicality and empirical relevance, the expanded scope and rich content the present viewpoint paper provides for metaverse will offer a fruitful ground for future research to tap further into currently underrepresented areas.

Consumers nowadays are no longer bystanders in the process of production but are proactive collaborators with the power to co-create value with brands. This study aims to explore the impact of social commerce on the co-creation process of brand value in a social commerce setting.

A questionnaire survey was conducted online to gather 300 eligible responses. The data were empirically validated using the partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) method.

The results indicated that brand engagement (BEN) is vital to brand co-creation (BCC) in social commerce, which could be driven by social-hedonic value (SHV) and social information sharing (SIS).

This study stresses the influence of consumer autonomy in the process of BCC by probing the role of SIS. Moreover, by considering the prevailing trend in social media, this study offers a nuanced perspective on the values of social commerce from the viewpoint of SHV.

This study may serve as a useful guide for practitioners to improve their digital outreach strategy on social commerce to forge stronger relationships, encourage further engagements and promote value co-creation within their brand community.

This examines the effect of relationship quality (RQU) and BEN on BCC through a relational viewpoint.

This paper aims to straighten out the research progress in the field of maker education, summarize the research hotspots and frontiers of maker education at home and abroad and provide path optimization suggestions for the research and development of this field.

In total, 751 pieces of domestic and the foreign maker education research literature from 2014 to 2021 are retrieved and screened, and literature analysis methods such as keyword analysis and clustering map analysis are used to quantitatively analyze the quantity distribution, published journals, core authors, research institutions and subject keywords of the maker education literature.

It is found that research in this field is still in the development stage, but the pandemic has severely inhibited maker education and related research. Frontiers at home and abroad have begun to pay attention to the impact of humanistic care on maker education. Strengthening the dialog between multidisciplinary theories requires cross-disciplinary research. Regional and cross-field cooperation and fully grasping the actual situation and constraints of the development of maker education are the cornerstones of bold innovation in maker education research.

This paper uses bibliometric analysis to reveal the severe challenges to the development of maker education due to the normalization of the epidemic. By excavating the research hotspots and research frontiers in this field, it fills the gap that the current research in the field of maker education has not yet formed a complete theoretical framework and evaluation system.

The purpose of the research is to analyze the factors that determine the intention of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt the Metaverse. For this purpose, the analysis of the effort expectancy and performance expectancy of the constructs in relation to business satisfaction is proposed.

The analysis was performed on a sample of 182 Spanish SMEs in the technology sector, using a PLS-SEM approach for development. For the confirmation of the model and its results, an analysis with PLSpredict was performed, obtaining a high predictive capacity of the model.

After the analysis of the model proposed in this research, it is recorded that the valuation of the effort to be made and the possible performance expected by the companies does not directly determine the intention to use immersive technology in their strategic behavior. Instead, the results obtained indicate that business satisfaction will involve obtaining information, reducing uncertainty and analyzing the competition necessary for approaching this new virtual environment.

The study represents one of the first approaches to the intention of business behavior in the development of performance strategies within Metaverse systems. So far, the literature has approached immersive systems from perspectives close to consumer behavior, but the study of strategic business behavior has been left aside due to the high degree of experimentalism of this field of study and its scientific approach. The present study aims to contribute to the knowledge of the factors involved in the intention to use the Metaverse by SMEs interested in this field.