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Tourism is one of the most notable features of the contemporary globalised world. The tourism industry is becoming increasingly vital to the economy of many developing and developed countries around the globe. The demand of the tourism industry has posed a challenge for tourism training providers to move towards a more responsive and internationalised curriculum to enhance work readiness for tourism graduates who are expected to work with an increased number of international tourists. The purpose of this paper is analyse whether and how internationalisation has been implemented in the tourism training programmes across six institutions in Vietnam.

The research deployed case studies as research strategy with interviews and document analysis as two instruments of data collection.

The major findings show that even though the tourism industry demands graduates to possess global competency, knowledge and skills, the curriculum does not prioritise the internationalisation dimensions and the faculty members are not facilitated to be internationally active in their roles. Overall, internationalisation is still fragmented and ad hoc in these institutions even though the private institutions in this research appear to be more responsive to the trend of internationalisation in education than their public counterparts.

The paper provides recommendations on how to effectively embed internationalisation components into local tourism training programs in Vietnam.

The research bridges the gap in the literature on internationalisation of the local tourism programme in non-English-speaking countries.

University-industry collaboration (UIC) is a symbiosis relationship, brought about through knowledge and resource sharing, with the attendant benefits of innovation and technological advancement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the state of UIC in quantity surveying profession in Nigeria with a view to ascertaining the situation and chatting the way forward.

Using quantitative survey research approach, primary data were collected through the administration of structured questionnaires on quantity surveying academia and practitioners. A total of 126 respondents were sampled: 52 university lecturers and 74 quantity surveying firms. Of these, 32 university lecturers (61.54%) and 34 quantity surveying firms (45.95%) provided valid responses. In all, this amounts to 52.38% response rate. The quantitative data obtained were analysed using mean score, frequency distribution, percentage and Mann Whitney test.

The findings show that collaboration is very strong in the areas of student industrial placement and research cooperation between students and academic researchers. However, collaboration in the areas of funding and staff exchange was found to be lagging behind.

The findings indicate strong collaboration areas (student industrial placement and research cooperation) to be sustained as well as weak areas (funding and staff exchange) to be critically looked into.

The paper represents the first research to empirically assess the state of UIC in quantity surveying profession in Nigeria. In addition, it shows the areas where efforts should be concentrated in maximizing the benefit of UIC.

Building upon a competence-based employability model and a social exchange and proactive perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between learning value of the job and employability among academic staff employees. Moreover, this study also examined whether this relationship was moderated by leader–member exchange (LMX) and a proactive coping style.

An online self-report questionnaire with thoroughly validated measures was distributed among academic staff employees (n=139).

The results partially supported the specific study assumptions. Concrete, learning value of the job was positively related to anticipation and optimization, corporate sense and balance. LMX moderated the relationship between learning value of the job, on the one hand, and all employability dimensions, on the other hand. However, proactive coping only moderated the relationship with anticipation and optimization, flexibility and balance. In all cases, under the condition of high moderator variable levels, the relationship became stronger.

This study extends past employability research by applying an interactionist perspective (person: proactive coping style, context: LMX and learning value of the job) approach for explaining employability enhancement. The results of this scholarly work provide useful insights for stimulating future career development and growth, which is of upmost importance in nowadays’ labor markets.

In 2019, the goal of developing a world-class open university through different stages was put forward by the Open University of China (OUC), which indicated that internationalization for Chinese open universities came to the agenda. However, international activities of open universities are different from those in conventional universities, and how to fulfill the goal of internationalization is a main issue faced by educators in Chinese open and distance education arena. This research aimed to identify ways of internationalization for the OUC system.

A survey was employed as a tool to get feedback from target audience. A questionnaire was released to academics, management staff and researchers to the 44 provincial open universities. A total of 501 samples were collected. Among them, 332 were from academics, which accounted for 66.27%, 152 were from school-level directors and 17 were from university-level leaders.

By analyzing the data collected in the survey, the study proposes four recommendations to fulfill the goal of internationalization for Chinese open universities and these include strengthening top-level strategies, building up professional teams, sharing learning resources and delivering upper-level programs.

The targets of this research were all staff at different levels in the central and local institutions; no students were included in the research. Therefore, this did not reflect a picture from the student perspective, and this will be improved in future research.

Since the establishment of the OUC in 1979, there has been no clear and systematic pathways for the development of internationalization of Chinese open universities. This research proposes a theoretical framework of internationalization for open universities and suggests a direction for future development.

To be able to continuously provide affordable services to consumers, managers of critical infrastructure (CI) maintenance supply networks have to balance investments in resilience with costs. At the same time, CI providers need to consider factors that influence resilience such as the geographical spread or the location of the network. This study aims to contextualize supply chain resilience knowledge by exploring how maintenance resource configurations impact resilience and costs in CI supply networks.

An in-depth longitudinal single case study of a representative CI provider that has centralized its maintenance supply network is used. Data were collected before and after the change to evaluate the effect of the changes on the maintenance supply network.

This study shows that in this specific CI maintenance context, structural resource choices such as the quantity or location of spare parts and tools, the creation and exploitation of tacit knowledge and staff motivation impact both resilience and costs due to geographical spread, network location and other network properties.

This study extends general supply chain resilience knowledge to a new setting (i.e. CI) and shows how existing insights apply in this context. More specifically, it is shown that even in engineered supply networks there is a need to consider the effect of human agency on resilience as the creation and exploitation of tacit knowledge are of immense importance in managing the network. In addition, the relationship between normal accidents theory and high reliability theory (HRT) is revisited as findings indicate that HRT is also important after a disruption has taken place.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how inspection team members work together to conduct surveys of hospitals, the challenges teams may face and how these might be addressed.

Data were gathered through an evaluation of a new regulatory model for acute hospitals in England, implemented by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) during 2013-2014. The authors interviewed key stakeholders, observed inspections and surveyed and interviewed inspection team members and hospital staff. Common characteristics of temporary teams provided an analytical framework.

The temporary nature of the inspection teams hindered the conduct of some inspection activities, despite the presence of organisational citizenship behaviours. In a minority of sub-teams, there were tensions between CQC employed inspectors, healthcare professionals, lay people and CQC data analysts. Membership changes were infrequent and did not appear to inhibit team functioning, with members displaying high commitment. Although there were leadership authority ambiguities, these were not problematic. Existing processes of recruitment and selection, training and preparation and to some extent leadership, did not particularly lend themselves to addressing the challenges arising from the temporary nature of the teams.

Conducting the research during the piloting of the new regulatory approach may have accentuated some challenges. There is scope for further research on inspection team leadership.

Issues may arise if inspection and accreditation agencies deploy temporary, heterogeneous survey teams.

This research is the first to illuminate the functioning of inspection survey teams by applying a temporary teams perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal how support services for open and distance students are designed, developed and implemented to ensure successful learning to take place, with specific references to the Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL) and Universitas Terbuka (UT) Indonesia. Success in distance learning is one major challenge for open universities to respond to expectations of students and stakeholders. This study focuses on the strategies of student support services in OUSL and UT, investigating related factors including instructional design and development, learning engagement and motivation, policy and strategy in reducing dropouts, use of OER/MOOCs, and quality assurance.

A qualitative study was employed involving analyses of documents; interviews and focus group discussion with senior administrators, academic staff, students; and on-site observation in locations of teaching and learning.

This research is exploratory in nature. Findings of the study are expected to improve our understanding of student support in distance learning, in which analysis is based on good practices, challenges and rooms for improvement of both OUSL and UT.

Findings of this study reveal practices and lessons learnt that may be useful as reference to open universities, taking into considerations the fact that each open university has been established to address specific challenges in its own unique circumstances.

This research may be adopted as baseline framework for analysis of student support for open universities. Further in-depth study is needed to understand how various aspects of student support contribute to success in open and distance learning.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the formation and composition of “regions” as places of care, both empirically and conceptually.

This paper draws on action-oriented research involving experiments aimed at designing, implementing and evaluating promising solutions to the entwined problems of a burgeoning elderly population and an increasing shortage of medical staff. It draws on ethnographic research conducted in 14 administrative areas in the Netherlands, a total of 273 in-depth interviews and over 1,000 h of observations.

This research challenges the understanding of a healthcare region as a clearly bounded topological area. It shows that organizations and professionals collaborate in a variety of different networks, some conterminous with the administrative region established by policymakers and others not. These networks are by nature unstable and dynamic. Attempts to form new regional collaborations with neighbouring organizations are complicated by existing healthcare governance and accountability structures that position organizations as competitors.

Policymakers should take the pre-established partnerships of healthcare organizations into account before delineating the area in which regionalization is meant to take place. A better alignment of governance and accountability structures is also needed for regionalization to occur in healthcare.

This paper combines insights from valuation studies with sociogeographical literature and provides a framework for understanding the assembling and disassembling of “regions”.

This paper aims to examine the development and piloting of a novel European framework for community engagement (CE) in higher education, which has been purposefully designed to progress the CE agenda in a European context.

The proposed framework was co-created through the European Union (EU)-funded project towards a European framework for community engagement in higher education (TEFCE). The TEFCE Toolbox is an institutional self-reflection framework that centres on seven thematic dimensions of CE. This paper follows the development of the TEFCE Toolbox through empirical case study analysis of four European universities and their local communities.

The findings in this paper indicate that the TEFCE Toolbox facilitates context-specific applications in different types of universities and socioeconomic environments. Incorporating insights from engagement practitioners, students and community representatives the TEFCE Toolbox was successfully applied in universities with diverse profiles and missions. The process facilitated the recognition of CE achievements and the identification of potential areas for improvement.

Despite a range of international initiatives, there remains an absence of initiatives within the European higher education area that focus on developing tools to comprehensively support CE. The TEFCE Toolbox and case-study analysis presented in this paper address this gap in knowledge. The broader societal contribution and social responsibility of higher education have become increasingly prominent on the European agenda. The TEFCE Toolbox represents an innovative, robust and holistic European framework with the potential to support universities in reflecting upon their pursuit of addressing grand societal challenges, whilst promoting CE.

Going beyond the traditional approach of formal and informal institutions as antecedents of entrepreneurship (directly) and development (indirectly), this paper seeks to explore knowledge institutions as a necessary input for entrepreneurship and the development of societies.

Institutional economics lenses are utilized to observe other factors (e.g. the number of R&D staff and researchers from the public sector) that involve laws and socialization processes, which at the same time create knowledge useful for entrepreneurs and society. These ideas are tested through a sample of 281 observations from 17 autonomous communities and two autonomous cities in Spain. The information coming from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), Ministry of Economics, Industry, and Competitiveness, and INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística), was analyzed through 3SLS, which is useful for a simultaneous equation strategy.

Knowledge institutions such as the number of R&D staff and researchers from the public sector are found positively associated with entrepreneurship, which is a factor directly and positively linked to economic development across Spanish regions.

The findings help the operationalization of other institutions considered in institutional economics theory and its application to entrepreneurship research. Moreover, the results bring new insights into the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship in the public sector, in which the institutional analysis is implicit.