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Theoretical constructs serve important roles in facilitating information and knowledge flows among, between and within information systems researchers and practitioners. In order for the benefits of constructs to be fully exploited, they must be appropriately applied and operationalized. Describes a controlled field study, examining users′ satisfaction with a decision support system, undertaken to point out the dangers of misapplying constructs and their measurement scales. Particular consideration is given to the risks associated with the use of general instruments in situations where more narrowly focused and context‐specific instruments are preferred.

Career planning quickly becomes a search for information. This information is likely to be found in different locations throughout a community, school system, or college campus, and the library is one of these. While the library may not be the focus of career planning services, it plays a strong complementary role to established services. In particular, libraries can provide information that helps high school or college students or recent graduates explore their career options. This article will present a method for building library collections in career planning and suggest sources that help meet diverse student needs.

Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong Region are undergoing transformations because of increasing engagement in international trade, alongside economic growth, dietary change and urbanisation. Food systems approaches are often used to understand these kinds of transformation processes, with particular strengths in linking social, economic and environmental dimensions of food at multiple scales. We argue that while the food systems approach strives to provide a comprehensive understanding of food production, consumption and environmental drivers, it is less well equipped to shed light on the role of actors, knowledge and power in transformation processes and on the divergent impacts and outcomes of these processes for different actors. We suggest that an approach that uses food systems as heuristics but complements it with attention to actors, knowledge and power improves our understanding of transformations such as those underway in the Mekong Region. The key transformations in the region include the emergence of regional food markets and vertically integrated supply chains that control increasing share of the market, increase in contract farming particularly in the peripheries of the region, replacement of crops cultivated for human consumption with corn grown for animal feed. These transformations are increasingly marginalising small-scale farmers, while at the same time, many other farmers increasingly pursue non-agricultural livelihoods. Food consumption is also changing, with integrated supply chains controlling substantial part of the mass market. Our analysis highlights that theoretical innovations grounded in political economy, agrarian change, development studies and rural livelihoods can help to increase theoretical depth of inquiries to accommodate the increasingly global dimensions of food. As a result, we map out a future research agenda to unpack the dynamic food system interactions and to unveil the social, economic and environmental impacts of these rapid transformations. We identify policy and managerial implications coupled with sustainable pathways for change.

Applying sociological and developmental theoretical perspectives to educational policy issues, this study analyzed data from 7,710 children from low-income families in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. The goal was to examine how much the association between phonics instruction in kindergarten classrooms and children’s reading achievement during the first year of school in the low-income population would depend on whether children had previously attended preschool as well as the socioeconomic composition of their elementary schools. Lagged linear models with a series of sensitivity tests revealed that this association was strongest among children from low-income families who had not attended preschool and then enrolled in socioeconomically disadvantaged elementary schools and among children from low-income families who had attended preschool and then enrolled in socioeconomically advantaged elementary schools. These findings demonstrate how insights into educational inequality can be gained by situating developing children within their proximate ecologies and institutional settings, especially looking to the match between children and their contexts. They are especially relevant to timely policy discussions of early childhood education programs, classroom instructional practices, and school desegregation.

This paper aims to provide an in-depth examination of the emergent state of financial technology (fintech), particularly emphasizing capital-raising innovations and their implications for international business.

Using the highly influential articles published in fintech, the authors identify the advantages and disadvantages of each significant fintech in the credit, deposit and capital-raising services sector. The authors assess the adoption of these services and the international firm-level implications of their use.

This study highlights fintech’s role in fostering entrepreneurial internationalization, with a particular focus on the impact of crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending and online banking. A thorough analysis of Google Scholar citations uncovers research gaps and unveils emerging trends bridging international business and fintech. Furthermore, the examination of regulatory efforts presents evidence of a robust positive relationship between global e-commerce legislation and fintech adoption, demonstrating the interconnected nature of these elements in the world of international business.

Fintech research in international business has only taken off in the last five years. Innovations and regulatory developments are continuously evolving.

This study emphasizes the significance of fintech in international business research, addressing its implications on regulatory environments, entrepreneurial internationalization and multinational corporations’ global strategies. By investigating the synergies and applications of various fintech types, the research provides valuable insights for scholars and practitioners, contributing to the advancement of knowledge in the field of international finance.

The aim of this paper is to provide a framework to measure the response of blue‐collar workers to new technology in manufacturing and to establish the relationship between learning culture and that response.

The data were collected with a survey questionnaire from 12 manufacturing sites that were implementing a number of diverse new technologies. The dimensions of worker response were identified with exploratory factor analysis and the relationship between these factors and learning culture was established with path analysis.

Factor analysis identified seven dimensions of worker response: disgruntlement, job‐security concerns, accommodation, informal learning, resistance, discussion, and formal learning. Learning culture had a large, statistically significant relationship with disgruntlement and medium, statistically significant relationships with job‐security concerns, accommodation, informal learning, and formal learning.

The sample was limited to manufacturing locations in the southeastern USA and the respondents were almost all male and either White or African‐American.

These findings establish a strong positive relationship between learning culture and behavioral, affective and cognitive responses of workers to new technology. This is key for supporting learning culture in organizations that naturally are inclined to worker isolation and independence.

Empirical work of this nature is limited in manufacturing facilities. These organizations tend to be closed to research because of concerns regarding the security of proprietary information or the personal safety of the researcher.

Households are exposed to a wide array of risks, characterized by a known or unknown probability distribution of events. Disasters are one of these risks at the extreme end. Understanding the nature of these risks is critical to recommending appropriate mitigation measures. A household’s resilience in resisting the negative outcomes of these risky events is indicative of its level of vulnerability. Vulnerability has emerged as the most critical concept in disaster studies, with several attempts at defining, measuring, indexing and modeling it. The paper presents the concept and meanings of risk and vulnerability as they have evolved in different disciplines. Building on these basic concepts, the paper suggests that assets are the key to reducing risk and vulnerability. Households resist and cope with adverse consequences of disasters and other risks through the assets that they can mobilize in face of shocks. Asustainable strategy for disaster reduction must therefore focus on asset‐building. There could be different types of assets, and their selection and application for disaster risk management is necessarily a contextual exercise. The mix of asset‐building strategies could vary from one community to another, depending upon households’ asset profile. The paper addresses the dynamics of assets‐risk interaction, thus focusing on the role of assets in risk management.

This paper aims to describe a professional development workshop designed to enhance teachers' pedagogical content knowledge.

The program draws on a carefully articulated definition of pedagogical knowledge as elaborated by Shulman, and features the work of scholars focused on pushing new interpretations of the meaning of Gettysburg, especially in polarized political times.

Teacher participants have been found to draw new meaning from their visit that, for many, has had a profound impact on the way they make sense of Gettysburg as a historic site of political importance.

The program offers a model for professional development providers interested in enhancing the pedagogical content knowledge of teachers and engaging them in examination of the past for the purpose of re-examining contemporary political concerns.

Private retail and brand-driven sustainable procurement standards are influencing global agri-food markets, shifting trade and export priorities and reshaping food supply chains. Using the case of Australian beef, the authors construct and evaluate three procurement activity “portfolios” and evaluate how these activity sets pull towards or against diverse organisational goals and/or science-based sustainability objectives.

A review of the academic and practitioner literature identified three key pillars for sustainable Australian beef procurement: animal welfare, environmental management and climate change (i.e. emissions). A subset of sustainable beef production activities (n = 100) was identified through this review plus semi-structured interviews with Australian beef retailers and industry bodies. This activity set was filtered (n = 40) and scored by a panel of science experts via a series of workshops and an additional survey. Using these data, the authors use a k-means cluster analysis (k = 3) to consider the strong or weak contributions of each activity portfolio towards typical sustainable beef goals.

A portfolio-based view of sustainable procurement puts the trade-offs between activities and the need for clear sustainability prioritisation into sharp focus. The authors find that individual strategies may be singularly more or less impactful, complex or popular, but when combined as a suite of activities enacted towards a particular goal or set of goals, essential for success. The authors find that obtaining balance across sustainable beef pillars versus within specific pillars can narrow the optimal set of activities that can succeed against multiple sustainability goals.

For procurement managers, the balance between clear focus and multidimensional progress is a difficult challenge. It requires the bold identification and articulation of an organisation’s interlocking corporate, industry or environmental objectives and flexibility on the strategies, tools and resources required. The authors posit that shifting away from a focus on rigid metrics may be useful in breaking the impasse on meaningful action.

Using a set of known activities and strategies that a procurement manager might draw from in operationalising sustainability goals, the authors cluster activities into three discrete activity portfolios. Each portfolio requires differing levels of effort, implementation complexity and potential for within-pillar and cross-pillar impact (i.e. co-benefits). Assessing the evidence and potential for cross-pillar impacts of individual strategies is a complex undertaking, indicative of the systems and tangled interactions that characterise sustainability science more broadly.

By assessing how the procurement function can be leveraged and operationalised towards sustainability goals through a lens of optimal portfolio management, the authors provide a way forward for the procurement managers working within large retailers and agri-food businesses to progress towards multiple sustainability pillars simultaneously.

On April 2, 1987, IBM unveiled a series of long‐awaited new hardware and software products. The new computer line, dubbed the Personal Systems 30, 50, 60, and 80, seems destined to replace the XT and AT models that are the mainstay of the firm's current personal computer offerings. The numerous changes in hardware and software, while representing improvements on previous IBM technology, will require users purchasing additional computers to make difficult choices as to which of the two IBM architectures to adopt.