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This paper aims to develop a richer, more complete understanding of how firms define and consider customer engagement on social networks. The research builds from the theoretical backdrop of customer engagement. The research then uses a qualitative interview approach to understand the firm perspective.

Qualitative data were collected using in-depth interviews with employees at a variety of companies including Facebook, Google, another leading social networking site, a higher education institution and a start-up company.

Companies view engagement with social media as measureable metrics of consumer interactions with the platform. These metrics could include growth and interaction on the platform, number of users, subscribers to the site or page views. Propositions are developed around how customer engagement is defined, the breadth and depth of social media and when social media is used as a push or a pull strategy.

Findings from this research are limited by the sample size and convenience of sampling. However, results from this grounded theory approach enabled propositions that can focus on larger datasets and testing.

Engagement indicates meaningful information that can propel a company’s position forward. To companies, this meaningful information is in terms of metrics that can be used as information and evidence for future decision-making.

This research suggests that firms need to better define what engagement means and to assess the best platforms for creating an ecosystem of engagement with customers.

Many researchers are exploring engagement within the context of social media networks. This research, however, is one of the first to explore this from a firm level perspective.

The increased use of checks in nonlocal payments at the end of the nineteenth century presented problems for their clearing and collection. Checks were required to be paid in full (at par) only when presented directly to the drawn-upon bank at its counter. Consequently, many, primarily rural or small-town, banks began to charge remittance fees on checks not presented for collection in person. Such fees and the alleged circuitous routing of checks in the process of collection to avoid them were widely criticized defects of the pre-Federal Reserve payments system. As the new Federal Reserve established its own system for check clearing and collection, it also took as an implicit mandate the promotion of universal par clearing and collection. The result was a bitter struggle with non-par banks, the numbers of which initially shrunk dramatically but then rebounded. A 1923 Supreme Court decision ended the Fed’s active (or coercive) pursuit of universal par clearing, and non-par banking persisted thereafter for decades. Not until the Monetary Control Act of 1980 was universal par clearing and true monetary union, in which standard means of payment are accepted at par everywhere, achieved.

Understanding the key locational and neighbourhood determinants and their accessibility is a topic of great interest to policymakers, planners and property valuers. In Northern Ireland, the high level of market segregation means that it is problematic to understand the nature of the relationship between house prices and the accessibility to services and prominent neighbourhood landmarks and amenities. Therefore, this paper aims to quantify and measure the (dis)amenity effects on house pricing levels within particular geographic housing sub-markets.

Most hedonic models are estimated using regression techniques which produce one coefficient for the entirety of the pricing distribution, culminating in a single marginal implicit price. This paper uses a quantile regression (QR) approach that provides a “more complete” depiction of the marginal impacts for different quantiles of the price distribution using sales data obtained from 3,780 house sales transactions within the Belfast Housing market over 2014.

The findings emerging from this research demonstrate that housing and market characteristics are valued differently across the quantile values and that conditional quantiles are asymmetrical. Pertinently, the findings demonstrate that ordinary least squares (OLS) coefficient estimates have a tendency to over or under specify the marginal mean conditional pricing effects because of their inability to adequately capture and comprehend the complex spatial relationships which exist across the pricing distribution.

Numerous studies have used OLS regression to measure the impact of key housing market externalities on house prices, providing a single estimate. This paper uses a QR approach to examine the impact of local amenities on house prices across the house price distribution.

Agricultural production in Honduras was devastated by the impact of hurricanes Eta and Iota in November 2020, placing people depending on agriculture in a vulnerable and food insecure situation. In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn in the country, these extreme events are forcing more people to leave and head to North America in migrant caravans. Over the last decades, Honduras has been impacted by severe climate change events, including droughts and extreme tropical storms. According to the Global Climate Risk Index (CRI), developed by Germanwatch (Eckstein et al., 2019), Honduras was the second most affected country by climate change over a period of 20 years, from 1998 to 2017. Extreme rainfall and tropical storms, droughts, variation in rainfall patterns, and soil loss make agriculture more difficult, thus placing low-income rural families at the edge of hunger and food insecurity. In terms of migration policy, much focus has been given to economic instability, weak governance, violence and crime as push factors for migration, but the effect of food insecurity and climate change impact is often overlooked in this narrative. Agricultural areas in Honduras, traditionally the backbone of food production, have been identified as climate out-migration hotspots. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the most relevant data to understand the interactions between climate change, food insecurity and the current migration crisis in Honduras.

In their book Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene (1990) stated that one of the ten “megatrends for the 1990's would be the rise of “The Age of Biology.” One of the central forces behind this societal shift which is occurring right now, they say, is research into understanding human genetics and the rise of biotechnology. The scientific knowledge regarding human genetics and the technology to examine an individual's genetic makeup have grown at a rapid pace, especially in the last decade as a result of the Human Genome Project. This venture has been labelled alternatively as “mediocre science” (Roberts, 1990b: p. 804) and as “biology's Holy Grail,” (Nelkin and Tancredi, 1989: p. 14). It is indisputably a monumental scientific undertaking, likened to the drive to put a man on the moon in the sixties (“The Geography of Genes,” 1989). This knowledge and the resultant trends will likely prove to be important factors not only in our future economy, but also in the nature of how we understand ourselves.

Do female CEOs face a compensation gap? The purpose of this paper is to examine whether gender affects the total compensation of today’s CEOs, and whether it moderates ten factors influencing their total compensation.

Taking the 54 female CEOs cited in the US 2014 Fortune’s 1000 report, a matched sample of male CEOs was selected, matched according to the crosstab of age by education and by the sizes of the companies directed by these female CEOs.

Using four years’ worth of Fortune reports, between 2013 and 2016, this matched sample indicates that female CEOs are not discriminated against in terms of total compensation. However, eight factors do show a significant effect on total compensation. Using moderation analysis, the present study reveals how gender interacts with company size, sector, membership of outside boards and nature of previous experience.

This paper addresses an important and under-researched gap, with contradictory findings in the existing literature, by compiling and testing the characteristics of male and female CEOs which are not cited in Fortune 1000 reports.

Arguably, this is therefore one of the first papers to study gender differences in total compensation among Fortune 1000 CEOs using a matched sample technique, based on a larger number of female CEOs and a larger number of years than any previous research.

Investigates the differences in protocols between arbitral tribunals and courts, with particular emphasis on US, Greek and English law. Gives examples of each country and its way of using the law in specific circumstances, and shows the variations therein. Sums up that arbitration is much the better way to gok as it avoids delays and expenses, plus the vexation/frustration of normal litigation. Concludes that the US and Greek constitutions and common law tradition in England appear to allow involved parties to choose their own judge, who can thus be an arbitrator. Discusses e‐commerce and speculates on this for the future.

This study is to examine and develop sector skills strategies and action plans for the textile and apparel (T&A) sector.

The paper used a participatory action qualitative method anchored on the Skills for Trade and Economic Diversification (STED) framework, utilising the workshop-based approach with 24 key stakeholders of the sector. Content analysis was used with the help of Nvivo software.

The findings revealed that there are skills shortages, skills gaps, skills mismatches and skills diversification programmes available through higher education and work-based learning. Further, there are labour supply challenges such as national skills policy and strategy, government and stakeholder coordination, funding, relevance of curriculum and qualifications, access to practicals and the absence of a clear national vision for the sector.

This study possesses an inherent limitation in terms of generalising the findings derived from qualitative research.

This research is among the first of its kind to assess skills needs and gaps through the lens of STED framework, which has been overlooked in previous literature. Importantly, this study provides vocational insights into skill needs in the sector.

Bradley J. Alge is an associate professor of Management at Purdue University's Krannert School of Management. He received his Ph.D. in business administration from The Ohio State University, and an MBA from Kent State University. Professor Alge received his BBA from the University of Notre Dame, where he majored in MIS and was also a member of the 1988 Division I NCAA National Championship football team. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a consultant for Accenture. Professor Alge studies issues of human–technology interaction (e.g., electronic monitoring, virtual teams) and the effects of technology on individual and group attitudes and behaviors on the job. He has published in leading management and psychology journals including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between board diversity and total directors’ remuneration in Malaysia. The authors have operationalised two variables to represent board diversity: the proportion of women directors on the board, to present gender diversity and the proportion of Bumiputras directors, to represent ethnic diversity.

This study has used a panel least squares to test the relationship between board diversity and total directors’ remuneration.

Based on a 1,094 firm-year sample from 2007 to 2009, the authors found a positive and significant relationship between gender-diverse boards and remuneration, but a negative and significant relationship between ethnically diverse boards and remuneration. The interaction between gender and ethnically diverse boards results in a weaker negative relationship between ethnically diverse boards and remuneration with an increased presence of women directors. Finally, the authors found a positive and significant impact on remuneration when there are at least three women and three Bumiputras directors. The findings are robust after controlling for corporate governance variables, institutional variables and firm characteristics.

The main implication of this finding is the positive effect of firms hiring more women in top management roles on remuneration. In addition, the negative effect of Bumiputras suggests that their role is to offer political expedience to the board and thus provide economies of scale through their status to the country.

This study tests the effect of both gender and ethnicity simultaneously on directors’ remuneration.