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1 – 10 of 23Angela Yung Chi Hou, Christopher Hong-Yi Tao, Kyle Zi-Wei Zhou, Arianna Fang Yu Lin, Edward Hung Cheng Su and Ying Chen
In 2022, the International Network for Quality Assurance (QA) Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) published the new guidelines by adding three QA modules in response to the…
Abstract
Purpose
In 2022, the International Network for Quality Assurance (QA) Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) published the new guidelines by adding three QA modules in response to the changing higher education landscape. The paper aims to investigate the transformative focus of quality assurance in higher education globally as well as Asian response to three new QA modules according to the INQAAHE ISGs.
Design/methodology/approach
The research conducted a quantitative approach for data collection. An on-line survey was conducted to perceive QA practices, perceptions toward new emerging QA modules and challenges encountered. In total, there were 26 responses from 18 territories with 22 QA agencies. A total of 13 out of them have a national qualifications framework in place.
Findings
Three are three major findings in the study. First, national policy and criteria and standards in distance education have been developed in the majority of Asian nations. Second, non-signatories of the Tokyo Convention had a higher proportion of having related policies, regulations and criteria in CBHE and distance education. Third, national policies and regulations; and lack of professional staff are two common challenges implementing QA in new types of providers.
Originality/value
The findings are of value for policymakers, QA agencies and universities to advocate the new QA model as a systematic approach in response to changing higher education landscape in the post pandemic era.
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This paper aims to explore the interplay between methods and methodologies in the field of international relations (IR) over the 100 years of its lifetime reflecting on the…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the interplay between methods and methodologies in the field of international relations (IR) over the 100 years of its lifetime reflecting on the relationship between the rise of new research methods and the rise of new methodologies.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper looks in retrospect into the field’s great debates using a historiography approach. It maps chronologically the interplay of methods and methodology throughout the stages of the development of the study of IR.
Findings
This paper argues that inspite of narratives of triumph being common in the field, the coexistence of competing research methods and methodologies is the defining feature of the field. All theories, all methods and all methodologies have undergone a process of criticism, self-criticism and change. New methodologies have not necessarily accompanied the rise of new research methods in the field.
Originality/value
Drawing a map of the field’s methodologies and methods reveals necessarily its dynamism and its plurality. An honest map of the field is one that highlights not only theoretical differences but also ontological, epistemological and methodological differences embedded in the field’s debates.
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İrem Taştan and Zeynep Ozdamar Ertekin
This study aims to explore how a postmodern tribe enacts and re-interprets ideologies as a part of consumers’ collective experience, to enhance our understanding of consumer…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore how a postmodern tribe enacts and re-interprets ideologies as a part of consumers’ collective experience, to enhance our understanding of consumer communities in conjunction with ideological capacities.
Design/methodology/approach
The community of “presenteers” is conceptualized as a self-organized tribe with heterogeneous components that generate capacities to act. Netnographic observation was conducted on 18 presenteer accounts and lasted around six months. Real-time data were collected by taking screenshots of the posts and stories that these users created and publicly shared. Data were analysed by adopting assemblage theory, combining inductive and deductive approaches. Firstly, a qualitative visual-textual content analysis of the tribe’s defining components was conducted. Then, the process continued with the thematic analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the tribe’s enactments.
Findings
Findings shed light on the ways in which consumer communities interpret the entanglement of religious, political, and cultural ideologies in shaping their experiences. In the case of the presenteers tribe, findings reflect a novel ideological interplay between neo-Ottomanism, post-feminism and consumerism.
Research limitations/implications
The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.
Originality/value
The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.
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The purpose of this article is to posit an alternative learning design approach to the technology-led magnification and multiplication of learning and to the linearity of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to posit an alternative learning design approach to the technology-led magnification and multiplication of learning and to the linearity of curricular design approaches such as a constructive alignment. Learning design ecosystem thinking creates complex and interactive networks of activity that engage the widest span of the community in addressing critical pedagogical challenges. They identify the pinch-points where negative engagements become structured into the student experience and design pathways for students to navigate their way through the uncertainty and transitions of higher education at-scale.
Design/methodology/approach
It is a conceptual paper drawing on a deep and critical engagement of literature, a reflexive approach to the dominant paradigms and informed by practice.
Findings
Learning design ecosystems create spaces within at-scale education for deep learning to occur. They are not easy to design or maintain. They are epistemically and pedagogically complex, especially when deployed within the structures of an institution. As Gough (2013) argues, complexity reduction should not be the sole purpose of designing an educational experience and the transitional journey into and through complexity that students studying in these ecosystems take can engender them with resonant, deeply human and transdisciplinary graduate capabilities that will shape their career journey.
Research limitations/implications
The paper is theoretical in nature (although underpinned by rigorous evaluation of practice). There are limitations in scope in part defined by the amorphous definitions of scale. It is also limited to the contexts of higher education although it is not bound to them.
Originality/value
This paper challenges the dialectic that argues for a complexity reduction in higher education and posits the benefits of complexity, connection and transition in the design and delivery of education at-scale.
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Dean Neu and Gregory D. Saxton
This study is motivated to provide a theoretically informed, data-driven assessment of the consequences associated with the participation of non-human bots in social…
Abstract
Purpose
This study is motivated to provide a theoretically informed, data-driven assessment of the consequences associated with the participation of non-human bots in social accountability movements; specifically, the anti-inequality/anti-corporate #OccupyWallStreet conversation stream on Twitter.
Design/methodology/approach
A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach as well as XGBoost machine learning algorithms are applied to a dataset of 9.2 million #OccupyWallStreet tweets in order to analyze not only how the speech patterns of bots differ from other participants but also how bot participation impacts the trajectory of the aggregate social accountability conversation stream. The authors consider two research questions: (1) do bots speak differently than non-bots and (2) does bot participation influence the conversation stream.
Findings
The results indicate that bots do speak differently than non-bots and that bots exert both weak form and strong form influence. Bots also steadily become more prevalent. At the same time, the results show that bots also learn from and adapt their speaking patterns to emphasize the topics that are important to non-bots and that non-bots continue to speak about their initial topics.
Research limitations/implications
These findings help improve understanding of the consequences of bot participation within social media-based democratic dialogic processes. The analyses also raise important questions about the increasing importance of apparently nonhuman actors within different spheres of social life.
Originality/value
The current study is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, that uses a theoretically informed Big Data approach to simultaneously consider the micro details and aggregate consequences of bot participation within social media-based dialogic social accountability processes.
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Katherine Leanne Christ, Roger Leonard Burritt, Ann Martin-Sardesai and James Guthrie
Given the importance of interdisciplinary research in addressing wicked problems, this paper aims to explore the development of and prospects for interdisciplinary research…
Abstract
Purpose
Given the importance of interdisciplinary research in addressing wicked problems, this paper aims to explore the development of and prospects for interdisciplinary research through evidence gained from academic accountants in Australia.
Design/methodology/approach
Extant literature is complemented with interviews of accounting academics in Australia to reveal the challenges and opportunities facing interdisciplinary researchers and reimagine prospects for the future.
Findings
Evidence indicates that accounting academics hold diverse views toward interdisciplinarity. There is also confusion between multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in the journals in which academic accountants publish. Further, there is mixed messaging among Deans, disciplinary leaders and emerging scholars about the importance of interdisciplinary research to, on the one hand, publish track records and, on the other, secure grants from government and industry. Finally, there are differing perceptions about the disciplines to be encouraged or accepted in the cross-fertilisation of ideas.
Originality/value
This paper is novel in gathering first-hand data about the opportunities, challenges and tensions accounting academics face in collaborating with others in interdisciplinary research. It confirms a discouraging pressure for emerging scholars between the academic research outputs required to publish in journals, prepare reports for industry and secure research funding, with little guidance for how these tensions might be managed.
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Andrés Salas-Vallina, Alma Rodríguez Sánchez and Manoli Pozo-Hidalgo
This study explores the phenomenon of compassionate leadership, a promising concept in management literature. Despite significant contributions towards the understanding of its…
Abstract
Purpose
This study explores the phenomenon of compassionate leadership, a promising concept in management literature. Despite significant contributions towards the understanding of its antecedents and consequences, the specific role of compassion concerning the leader behavior under extreme pressure remains unexplored.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing empirically on the case of three banks under three different logics, the authors trace how heads of banking branches, namely, middle managers, deal with the paradoxical phenomenon of integrating their human nature with the coetaneous need to achieve aggressive objectives. The authors analyzed interviews using the interpretive research method (Hatch and Yanow, 2003).
Findings
The authors identified that the logic of savings banks and credit cooperatives, together with specific human elements, created a healthier environment to develop compassionate behaviors compared to commercial banks. The authors found coherence when linking the institutional message of putting the spotlight on a personalized treatment of customers, and the middle manager compassionate actions towards customers and subordinates.
Research limitations/implications
Suggestions for future theorizing and research are advanced, along with constructive practical implications to rehumanize the dark side of banking for both employees and customers.
Originality/value
The findings provided in this paper are original because they provide further evidence of linking business logics with compassionate leadership of middle managers and its impact on employees and customers.
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The global financial crisis (GFC) has undermined the legitimacy of orthodox neo-classical economic assumptions, which nevertheless continue to frame the philosophical assumptions…
Abstract
Purpose
The global financial crisis (GFC) has undermined the legitimacy of orthodox neo-classical economic assumptions, which nevertheless continue to frame the philosophical assumptions of teaching in business schools. The purpose of this paper is to make a case in favour of an expansion of the business school curriculum to incorporate behavioural economics. The paper will also contend that behavioural economics can be connected to social economics, as they are both heterodox in this study and analyse economic phenomenon outside of a neo-classical framework. The aim is to contribute to arguments for an expanded curriculum, beyond the framing assumptions of neo-classical rationalism. This paper will also support its case by reviewing behavioural economics to make the case that this literature can be connected to social economics. This assertion is based on shared connections, including the importance of Kantianism in behavioural economics and in social economics. These connections will be discussed as a common point of reference points, or ties that can serve to broker links between these two economic paradigms. Practical implications (if applicable) the GFC presents an opportunity to re-shape the business school curriculum to acknowledge the centrality of socio-economics and behavioural economics, and consequently to offer an alternative to the dominant ontological assumptions – taken from the economic understanding of rationality – that have previously underpinned business school pedagogy.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents an inter-disciplinary teaching case, which incorporates socio-economic and behavioural economics perspectives. The teaching case concerned a socio-economic understanding of corruption and white-collar crime. It was also inter-disciplinary to include inputs from business history and criminology. The teaching case developed an appreciation among students that corruption, white-collar crime and entrepreneurship can be analysed within a social economics and behavioural economics lens.
Findings
The teaching case example discussed an alternative socio-economic and behavioural economics understanding to core areas of the MBA curriculum with the potential to be included in other academic disciplines. This enabled students to apply a behavioural economic approach to white-collar crime. The findings derived from this case study are that behavioural economics has the potential to enhance the teaching of socio-economics.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper is to apply behavioural economics to a socio-economic teaching case, in core subject areas of the MBA curriculum.
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Iryna Kushnir, Zara Milani and Marcellus Forh Mbah
This article aims to address the response from the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom (UK) to the full-scale war in Ukraine which started in 2022.
Abstract
Purpose
This article aims to address the response from the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom (UK) to the full-scale war in Ukraine which started in 2022.
Design/methodology/approach
Relying on theoretical ideas of neoliberalism and the collection and thematic analysis of relevant official communications from six UK universities, the article uncovers three major ways in which these universities have been responding to the war.
Findings
They include (1) altruistic responses, (2) the promotion of equal treatment of all people and (3) the condemnation of the invasion and its implications for UK’s international cooperation in HE. These responses suggest the strengthening of the liberal ideals in the UK HE sector, heavily dominated by marketisation.
Originality/value
This analysis is significant not only for advancing a very limited scholarship on the topic of HE in the context of this war but also for understanding the development of the neoliberal landscape of UK HE and neoliberalism as a phenomenon in times of crises.
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Family policy is an area where policy transfer has garnered a lot of attention lately. A growing body of research demonstrates policymakers' interest in and willingness to adopt…
Abstract
Purpose
Family policy is an area where policy transfer has garnered a lot of attention lately. A growing body of research demonstrates policymakers' interest in and willingness to adopt foreign family policies. However, previous studies have tended to neglect the second mechanism of policy transfer: resistance. This manuscript aims to address this research gap by exploring both the willingness and resistance to policy transfer in Czech and Korean childcare and leave policies.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employs a qualitative research design, incorporating structured expert interviews instrumental in in-depth thematic analysis.
Findings
The analysis shows that policymakers in both countries demonstrated interest and willingness to transfer family policies, albeit employing different strategies and to varying extents. Moreover, the two countries exhibited significant differences in resistance to family policy transfer, with resistance in the Czech Republic being more frequent and effective. Resistance is directed towards both forced and voluntary transfers, although it isn't always against transfers that require a paradigm change. Policy transfer and non-transfer can concurrently be perceived as threats.
Originality/value
The study concludes that integrating both policy transfer and resistance in the analyses helps to shed light on cross-national differences in family policy change and contributes to a more nuanced portrayal of the world of policy transfer in this policy field.
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