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Entering a new era of digital transformation, Industry 4.0 (I 4.0) promises to revolutionize the way business has been done, providing unprecedented opportunities and challenges. This study aims to investigate empirically and comparatively analyse the benefits, challenges and critical success factors (CSFs) of Industry 4.0 across four continents and developing and developed economies.

This study used an online survey to explore the benefits, challenges and CSFs of developed and developing economies. In order to ensure the validity of the survey, a pilot test was conducted with 10 respondents. A total of 149 participants with senior managerial, vice-presidential and directorial positions from developed and developing economies spanning four continents were invited to take part in the survey.

The study ranks benefits, challenges and CSFs across economies and continents. Further, the benefit of Industry 4.0 helping to achieve organizational efficiency and agility differed across the developing and developed economies. Furthermore, the benefit improves customer satisfaction significantly differed across continents; in terms of challenges, Employee resistance to change had a higher proportion in developing economies. The future viability of I 4.0 also differed across the continents. Regarding CSFs, there was no difference across the developing and developed economies. Finally, change management and project management vary across the continents.

This study contributes to a balanced understanding of I 4.0 by providing empirical evidence for comparative analysis. Moreover, it extends the concept of resource dependence theory to explain how organizations in developing economies and developed economies deploy resources to manage external condition uncertainties to implement I 4.0. Furthermore, this study provides a structural framework to understand the specific benefits, challenges and CSFs of implementing I 4.0, which can be utilized by policymakers to promote I 4.0 in their economies or continents.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no studies have empirically demonstrated the comparative analysis of benefits, challenges and CSFs across economies and continents and distinguish an original contribution of this work.

The purpose of this paper is to explore relative deprivation and implicit bias in library and information science research publications of Africa and other continents.

Research design used for this study is descriptive survey research. Specifically, the study will adopt both web content analysis and survey to collect data. The content analysis covers the whole continents of the world: Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Northern America, Pacific Region and Western Europe; using the Webometrics World Ranking of Universities and the SCImago/Scopus Journal Ranking. Library and information science was used as the search and control parameter. The scopes covered by the research are: 1. Ascertaining the visible publishing and assessment standards of top library and information science (LIS) journals, which was evaluated using Kleinert and Wager (2010)'s study.

It was found out among others that editors making fair and unbiased decisions as policy is seen in 33% of the journals, which is very poor. All the structural disparities, such as presence ranking, impact ranking, excellence ranking, etc. were favouring Europe and the Americas mainly. As much as rejection is getting to these respondents, research generally is also suffering by missing out on some untapped knowledge and ideas from these deprived populations. Many authors are losing faith in their capabilities and are now afraid of venturing into tedious research exercises because it will most likely be rejected either ways.

It is an established fact that social media gains research impact and attracts international collaborations. In support, studies such as Hassan et al. (2019) reported the fact that tweet mentions of articles with positive sentiment to more visibility and citations. They claim that cited articles in either positive or neutral tweets have a more significant impact than those not cited at all or cited in negative tweets. In addition, Hassan et al. (2020) equally highlighted tweet coupling as a social media methodology useful for clustering scientific publications. Despite the fact that social media have these influences on research and publications visibility and presence, the context of the present research did cover this scope of study. The study focused mainly on sources from Scopus as well as results from responses. Further studies can be carried out on this area.

Research studies linking “Black Articles Matter” to relative deprivation and implicit bias in research publications, especially in library and information discipline, are very rare. Also, the scope of approach of the study is quite different and interesting.

This paper aims to examine the possible link among the African Development Bank (AfDB), Results Measurement Framework 2016–2025 and the research published at institutions of higher education on the continent in the last five years. The unregulated commercialisation of higher education in most African countries has been prone to large-scale abuse through wanting curriculum development and processes accruing to competence, skills needy and job market disoriented graduates.

This study took a qualitative literature review analysis where research papers published in the last five years on higher education in Africa were searched. These were from Google and Semantic scholar and these were categorised in a detailed concept matrix.

Findings indicate that there is hardly a connection between the AfDB Group development agenda on the continent and the research conducted and published by institutions of higher learning on the continent.

Universities should prioritise a needs-based research agenda in their strategic planning and this implies commitment in terms of funding, human resource competency empowerment and partnerships with development agencies on the continent. African institutions of higher learning have not emphasised applied research practices to tackle pervading knowledge needs on the continent. Just like findings indicate, research in most of these institutions has been donor driven.

This study brings to speed the fact that if transforming Africa is going to take a strategic direction in the post-COVID-19 era, then partnerships between higher education institutions and development agencies operating on the continent will be an inevitable venture.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore how Africa has been branded, and to suggest ways the continent could be re‐branded to attract both international and domestic investments.

An extensive review of literature that encapsulates branding, nation branding, place/destination branding, foreign direct investment and issues associated with investment opportunities in Africa was conducted towards exploring how Africa has been branded and could be re‐branded.

This paper finds that the extant literature is replete with publications that essentially associate Africa, as a brand, to poverty, underdevelopment, corruption, doom, pestilence and several other inauspicious features. Nonetheless, the article also shows that there are several existing virtues especially in the form of business opportunities in several sectors that could be accorded extensive publicity to espouse the continents' brand equity. These range from agriculture, to tourism, to real estate, to sports and several existing foreign direct investments already thriving in several parts of the continent. Hence, the suggestion for re‐branding Africa as a viable continent for global business transactions is strongly emphasised in the article.

This paper has a significant implication for positioning Africa as a relevant business partner in the global marketplace by echoing the extensive business opportunities that await both the indigenous and foreign investors in the continent.

The article espouses the brand equity of Africa as a continent and suggests avenues for constantly communicating the inherent virtues of the content to the world towards maintaining her rightful position in the international business community.

The concomitance of black-skinned student-populated colleges and universities on the African continent has created a quiescence regarding whiteness, racism, and disparity in African higher education. Resultantly, scant attention has been paid to the role and possibilities for Black populated colleges across the African continent to transform the political, social, and economic realities of African nation-states. In fact, the confluence of Western imperialism, slavery, genocide, and the contemporary frame of terrorism is highly correlated with the seeming permanence of war, oppression, and poverty across the African diaspora in general and on the African continent in specific.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how internationalization has impacted the composition and performance of global companies. Trends among continents, countries and across industries are shown in order to further understand the effects of internationalization on these prominent organizations in our world economy.

This is a descriptive study using a cross‐sectional design. The unit of analysis consists of the companies comprising the world's largest 500 companies as reported by Fortune Magazine in 2009. Secondary data covering more than 30 variables and 500 cases were collected pertaining to these large organizations. The “world's largest 500 companies” is further divided by continents and countries in order to provide detailed cross tab analysis.

Utilizing the Global Industry Standard Classification (GICS), the authors categorized the diversity of firms based upon the type of products or services rendered by the world's largest 500 companies. It was found that these influential global organizations fall under ten broad classifications for industry sectors, with the financial sector being the dominant classification among 101 multinational firms. The results indicated that the USA dominated in all GICS sectors, except for energy. Europe is producing the largest amount of total global revenue at $10 trillion and employs the greatest number of workers, employing some 18,907,256 global employees.

The analysis was not designed to make a generalization for the population of all global organizations.

The authors' research not only identifies and describes these characteristics, but is intended to increase awareness of how internationalization has changed the composition and performance of the world's largest 500 companies over the five‐year period spanning 2005 through 2009.

This paper aims to review the status of development of building information modelling (BIM), its trends and themes across the six continents of the world.

A total of 914 journal articles sought from the search engine of Web of Science (WOS) based on the country/region option of the WOS to group them into continents. A best-fit approach was then applied in selecting the suitable software programmes for the scientometric analysis and comparisons and deductions were made.

The findings revealed that there are differences in the development of BIM across the six continents of the world. South America and Africa are lagging in the BIM research and Australia and Asia are growing, whilst Europe and North America are ahead. In addition, there exist differences in the research themes and trends in these continents as against the single view presented in extant studies.

This study introduced a new approach to carry out a comparative and taxonomic review and has provided both academic researchers and industrial practitioners with a clear status of development of BIM research and the trend across the six continents of the world.

The continent of Antarctica consists of 14 million km², roughly equivalent to the whole of South America, and is of immense interest to humanity, in particular to the countries of the Antarctic Treaty. The Antarctic continent is the continent of superlatives: it is almost isolated from the rest of the continents, and is severely cold, windy, and dry. In winter, the Antarctic area increases to nearly 32 million km², because of formation of a 1,000km wide ice‐belt. The average depth of ice on the continent is in the order of 2,000m, and in the transantarctic region this depth is 4,800 meters. Antarctica is the biggest sweet water reservoir of the planet earth. Icebergs are common and huge ones (190km in length and 130km wide) have also been observed. The minimum temperature recorded (–89.2°C) at Vostok (Russian base) on 21 July 1983 is also the minimum recorded environmental temperature on the planet earth. Because of extreme temperature variations the Antarctic winds have high velocity. The environment is very dry and at the center of the continent the dryness is of the same magnitude as in the driest desert anywhere on the planet. This is the only uninhabited continent of the planet, except for some 50 research bases which cover an insignificant area located on the continent and the Antarctica Peninsula. Because of its economic, strategic, geopolitical, scientific, meteorological, and oceanographic importance and possible exploitation in the future, Antarctica has been attracting greater attention every day. Antarctica is basically concentrated around the South Pole and it touches the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Brazil, in common with many other nations, has geopolitical interests and in untapped mineral deposits (considerable deposits of coal, petroleum, gas). In the south, where the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans meet, the cold water of Antarctica is the habitat housing hundreds of species of sea life. Unrestricted and unbalanced exploitation of Antarctica could cause changes in the meteorological and oceanographic balance. In the present paper, the Brazilian Antarctic Program, and summarized results of studies of Antarctic soil, rocks, and sediments are reported.

The objective of this chapter is to advocate a relevant and balanced curriculum of European Studies as a discipline that African and European teachers and learners can embrace. This will be achieved through critical documentary analysis of existing curricula on the subject as well as critique of relevant literature. Europe and Africa are the two most contiguous continents that share centuries of relations. Despite the existence of many forms of diplomatic relations, knowledge flows and exchange between the continents have been very minimal at best and apparently unidirectional. The troubled history of relations between the two continents continue to affect way knowledge production and curricular are defined. The gap in knowledge fosters mutual suspicion, distrust, and lack of cooperation. European Studies as a distinct academic discipline has recently made its way in the teaching and learning curricula of universities and research centers around the world. Some institutions in Africa are also introducing European Studies. A key aspect of European Studies vis-á-vis Africa is the content and quality of curriculum. The turn in discourses on decolonization and race relations in the world of the early twenty-first century makes this period a unique opportunity for the review of European Studies curricula in Europe and Africa. The authors find that deepening Euro-African relations will require a new curriculum that would reflect changes that have taken place over the years in Africa.

Surging global natural disasters provide incentive for risk-reducing policies and strategies. In this light, the African Union (AU) engaged a multi-stakeholder policy formulation process between 2002 and 2006, to develop a continent-wide disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategy. Drawing from secondary data, this chapter assesses the process and applies qualitative analysis instruments to critically assess the AU’s disaster policy. Linkages to the 2005 international Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) are also highlighted. The analysis reveals that Africa’s policy formulation process was belated for over a decade, with respect to international expectations. The formulation process was however largely African owned and led, culminating in a strategy document that reflected African contextual reality at the time, and aligned well with HFA fundamental goals. The applied multi-stakeholder approach enhanced a spirit of participation across levels and was central to the largely successful policy formulation process. However, targeted policy outcomes were not explicit, and poorly formulated indicators marred short- and long-term policy evaluation. Based on these results, we conclude that the African-wide DRR policy formulation processes were belated but participatory, systematic and very successful. Belated policy formulation reflects an initial inertia on the African continent, justified by past negative policy experiences and the desire to succeed. A replication of this policy formulation approach in Africa is recommended, albeit exercising more caution on policy timing, the elaboration of better monitoring and evaluation instruments and criteria. Participation should further embrace modern, risk-free (anti-COVID-19-friendly) information and communication technologies.