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The exceptional COVID-19 crisis has shown the fragility of the health supply chain and the need for its digital transformation. However, digitization initiatives for healthcare supply chain have focused mainly on the hospital as a central point of consumption as well as on the relationship between the hospital and its suppliers. Thus, unlike previous studies that have focused on the digitalization of the internal supply chain of hospitals, this article is centered on the digitalization of external trajectories, particularly, the home care medical supply chain. This perspective complements the hospital-centric model, in which logistics activities are analyzed only from the point of view of the focal actor, which is the hospital. In order to understand this contemporary phenomenon embedded in a local context, we have conducted an in-depth case study. Based on an enriched model of the digital supply chain developed by Queiroz et al. (2021), this article offers for the first time a deep understanding and digitalization initiatives of the home care medical supply chain. The research proposals can guide logistics managers and nurses on their initiatives of digitalization of the home care medical supply chain, and further strengthen the healthcare development. This article draws the attention of healthcare stakeholders to the importance of efforts in the digitalization of external trajectories, thus allowing the healthcare system to adapt to the growing needs of elderly people and people with physical or mental disabilities.
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PurposeUsing science mapping analysis approach and co-word analysis, the present study explores and visualizes research fields and thematic evolution of the coronavirus. Based on this method, one can get a picture of the real content of the themes in the mentioned thematic area and identify the main minor and emerging themes.Design/methodology/approachThis study was conducted based on co-word science mapping analysis under a longitudinal study (from 1988 to 2020). The collection of documents in this study was further divided into three subperiods: 1988–1998, 1999–2009 and 2010–2020. In order to perform science mapping analysis based on co-word bibliographic networks, SciMAT was utilized as a bibliometric tool. Moreover, WoS, PubMed and Scopus bibliographic databases were used to download all records.FindingsIn this study, strategic diagrams were demonstrated for the coronavirus research for a chronological period to assess the most relevant themes. Each diagram depended on the sum of documents linked to each research topic. In the first period (1988–1998), the most centralizations were on virology and evaluation of coronavirus structure and its structural and nonstructural proteins. In the second period (1999–2009), with due attention to high population density in eastern Asia and the increasing number of people affected with the new generation of coronavirus (named severe acute respiratory syndrome virus or SARS virus), publications have been concentrated on "antiviral activity.” In the third period (2010–2020), there was a tendency to investigate clinical syndromes, and most of the publications and citations were about hot topics like "severe acute respiratory syndrome,” "coronavirus” and "respiratory tract disease.” Scientometric analysis of the field of coronavirus can be regarded as a roadmap for future research and policymaking in this important area.Originality/valueThe originality of this research can be considered in two ways. First, the strategic diagrams of coronavirus are drawn in four thematic areas including motor cluster, basic and transversal cluster, highly developed cluster and emerging and declining cluster. Second, COVID-19 is mentioned as a hot topic of research.
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Conventional learning management systems are not usually designed for children-based audiences. The recent COVID-19 pandemics brought the urgency about thinking on dedicated design of learning environments for this kind of public, considering the impact that remote teaching brought to children in scholar ages all around the world. The present work aims to understand the usability of the child audience under systems and interfaces aimed at remote education, through research, bibliographic references, and practical examples. Its main objective is the development of a children-oriented Moodle interface that has been tested by teachers and pedagogical experts. © 2022 IEEE.
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Currently, the implementation of chatbots or virtual assistants presents great benefits for the companies or institutions that use them, since their use allows the user to establish a communication through a program that is integrated to a certain messaging system. Virtual assistants are programmed to communicate with the client and solve their doubts without a person attending them, and their main advantage is that they are always available to interact with users at any time the person requires it. This research aims to evaluate how it affects the use of chatbots in the process of counseling students of the Technical University of Manabi, since with all the technological advances that have been occurring over the years with the implementation of chatbots in the area of education has increased, the application of these virtual assistant systems in schools and universities has increased its popularity of implementation in these times, where virtual education is widely used as a result of the pandemic of covid-19, a situation that has faced the vast majority of countries worldwide. The methodology used for this research is quantitative, bibliographic and experimental. Bibliographic because a research is carried out on works related to the proposed topic. Experimental because it is based on the development of a chatbot in Telegram, which will be executed and subsequently evaluated through a Likert scale survey that aims to determine the QoS of users with respect to the chatbot. The results obtained from the student surveys show a high level of acceptability and satisfaction with the chatbot service, therefore, it is recommended that this service be incorporated at the institutional level, in order to provide information support to users without time constraints. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Can TV advertising affect societal outcomes beyond traditional marketing outcomes such as sales and brand awareness? The authors address this question in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing daily advertising and mobility data for 2,194 counties across 204 designated market areas in the United States. By employing a border identification strategy that exploits discontinuities across television markets, the authors find a significant positive causal relationship between TV ads from brands containing COVID-19 narratives and people's social distancing behavior, while controlling for government policy interventions (e.g., shelter-in-place, mask mandates). The estimated effects are almost 11 times larger in counties without government policy interventions compared with counties with policy interventions. Notably, while the overall impact of government ads on social distancing behavior is nonsignificant, the effect becomes significantly negative (positive) in the presence (absence) of policy interventions. The results are robust to alternative model specifications, variable operationalizations, and other data considerations. The findings underscore the critical role that spillover effects from brand-sponsored TV ads can play during major public crises, including mitigating the lack of local governments' policy interventions. The findings bear substantive implications for managers and policy makers regarding how advertising strategies may help improve public health outcomes or advance social good.
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The integration between virtual learning environments of recognized individual success, such as the PhET project and the Moodle Platform, presents itself as a path to be explored in the context of Instrumental Orchestration (IO), due to the broad benefits that this type of junction can bring to STEM teaching and learning. In this perspective, we conducted a purely interpretive study to investigate the role of IO, in different resources, on the academic success of students in a Bioengineering course, by comparing two activities, corresponding to the extremes of their scores, in electromagnetism laboratory practices, converted to Hybrid Teaching, by means of the COVID19 pandemic. For this, an evaluative framework was built based on the bibliographic reference, which underwent refinements adapting it to the available data, to finally analyze the IO dimensions referring to PhET, Moodle, proposed activities and interactions among participants. The main contribution of the research refers to the need for a better orchestration between simulated activities and laboratory practices, naturally accompanied by more productive interactions. This kind of research also contributes to the elaboration of new pedagogical practices, anchored in facts concerning the different approaches of IO and the way students learn. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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PurposeThe manufacturing sector is well known for its significance in upholding the economic prosperity of many nations. However, in today's unprecedented environment, the resilience of this sector has become vulnerable to relentless catastrophic events, thus gaining a serious concern among the economies driven by this sector. Albeit the various determinants, human capital emerges as the widely accepted core factor that holds the key to proliferate organisational resilience. Therefore, the present systematic literature review seeks to intensify the understanding of the link between human capital and organisational resilience in the manufacturing context.Design/methodology/approachThis paper systematically reviews the studies converging human capital and organisational resilience in the context of manufacturing from the year 2011 to 2021 based on the PRISMA protocol. A bibliographic coupling analysis was carried out using VOSviewer software to expose the main research themes and trends concerning the relationship.FindingsThe bibliographic coupling analysis discovered links between publications to produce a framework outlining a holistic state-of-art of the literature intersecting human capital and organisational resilience. The analysis identified main research themes by clustering the prior studies into seven groups, which describe the direction of the literature.Originality/valueThis study offers a novel framework and in-depth understanding to the research community to delve into the interrelationship between human capital and organisational resilience research. Guided by the gaps in the literature, a set of outstanding avenues for the forthcoming studies are also proposed.
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Air pollution is a major risk factor, and it still remains a global cause of death for millions of people. Indoor air quality (IAQ) plays an important role in human health as people spend most of their time in confined spaces. Many studies have recently addressed this issue, but no systematic analysis has been conducted, which is the aim of our study. We present a bibliographic analysis of articles on IAQ in industrial environments from 2010 to 2021. A total of 658 articles were collected, and 409 were used. The NVivo tool was used to analyze the collected documents both quantitatively and qualitatively. This analysis of the literature enables us to identify the most studied working environments and pollutants, the analysis tools, and the types of measurement used to provide a clear overview of the theme, which includes a comparison between the studied working environments and the state of origin of the authors. Our analysis of each working environment and the related frequently cited pollutants provides a clear approach to identifying the specific areas of focus when improving the quality of the air in a specific working environment. In addition, a research gap and future research areas have been identified in the conclusions.
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In October of 2021, after well over a year of COVID-19-related travel restrictions imposed with unusual rigor by authorities in Italy, the two of us (Giancarlo Casale and Cyrus Schayegh) organized a modest one-day symposium at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.1 The event brought together nine PhD students and postdocs from our two institutions (the EUI and the Geneva Graduate Institute), all engaged in research in Middle Eastern history in a variety of periods and geographies, as well as three discussants, Malika Dekkiche (University of Antwerp), Ulrike Freitag (Freie Universität Berlin and Zentrum für Moderner Orient, Berlin), and Jan Hennings (Central European University). To be sure, global history is, in principle, a field created with the intention of pushing beyond Eurocentric understandings of history.3 Nonetheless, in practice it has faced increasing criticism for relying too much on Anglophone bodies of secondary literature and on primary sources mainly in Western languages, particularly English, in ways that are frequently at odds with the methodologies of area studies. [...]rather counterintuitively, the "global" perspective of global history has on the whole not resulted in the kind of deep engagement with non-Western sources and research practices that might disrupt the Eurocentric assumptions upon which traditional historiography has been constructed.4 For institutional reasons, the implications of this methodological challenge were felt particularly acutely by the two of us, both Middle East historians in graduate programs specifically focused on training in global and international history. [...]MENA offers an unusually rich spatial setting to think through, or rethink, historically contingent connections, and to propose new avenues of comparison.8 Second, as a region MENA itself is highly heterogeneous and self-evidently constructed, inviting complex thinking about the definitional role of "regions"-whether maritime or land-based, whether global or world or international or even subnational - as the basic building blocks of global history. [...]due to its physical proximity to Europe, MENA provides an ideal vantage point for "inverting the gaze" and challenging some basic Eurocentric assumptions still implicit in global approaches to history - including Europe's own status as a stable, geographically defined space distinct from other world regions.
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MENA MIGRANTS AND DIASPORAS IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MEDIA The first two decades of the twenty-first century put the 1990s accounts of globalization, multiculturalism, clash of civilizations, and transnational mobility of peoples and ideas through the rigorous tests of the 9/11 attacks and the global war on terror, the information revolution, the Arab uprisings, the "migration crisis," and the COVID-19 pandemic. The contributions in this special issue deal with various media produced in the first two decades of the twenty-first century: social media videos, newspapers, films, poetry, fictional and nonfictional writing, performance, visual art, and graphic novels. [...]the special issue features six critical interventions in their respective areas of inquiry. Additionally, the essay accentuates the importance of the "cultural" in addition to the economic, social, and political layers that have received much of the attention of contemporary scholarship examining South Asian labor in the GCC.2 Dakkak situates these comedic videos within a disruptive sociopolitical milieu that may readily seem to engage the kafeel (sponsor) image as the site for the laborers' experiences with hardship but simultaneously draws attention to the subtlety of these engagements in critiquing state-level institutionalization of antiimmigrant (mis)treatment. Changing the narration from a focus on Turkish chivalry to a focus on Turkish governance, the authors argue, was associated with the changing nature of the Turkish government's restrictions on the newspaper as a venue for the opposition.
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The purpose of the current study was to explore, via interview, how and why women felt their physical activity levels and active lifestyles had been affected by COVID-19. Telephone interviews were conducted with 23 women, aged between 28 and 52 years from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds in the United Kingdom. Based on reflexive thematic analysis, the perceived reduction in exercise and the increase in sedentary behavior that many of these women experienced were felt to be a result of the physical restrictions imposed through gym and leisure-facility closure, the change in circumstance (both work and home life), the perceived risks associated with exercising during a pandemic, as well as a lack of peer support. In contrast, some women experienced increased opportunity and time to exercise, which they felt benefited their health. For any future pandemic-related restrictions, exercise practitioners should consider promoting exercise with others in a safe environment in order to ensure that women’s healthy exercise and lifestyle behaviors are maintained.
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The high-frequency establishment survey “Establishments in the Covid-19-Crisis” (BeCovid) started in 2020 and continued until June 2022 to collect monthly data on how businesses in Germany adjusted to the challenges of the pandemic. This article describes the survey design and provides an overview over the topics covered. We further outline the survey’s research potentials, particularly when linked to administrative records.
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The development of information and aommunication technology (ICT), as well as the situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, have encouraged the adoption of nonconventional schemes of work based on virtuality. In this context, leadership becomes one of the main challenges to organizations and teams. The purpose of this paper is to identify the key factors related to virtual leadership and to propose a scheme for analysing and managing teams in virtuality. After a systematic literature review, the main results suggest that leadership in virtual environments should be considered as a shared phenomenon and that the key factors with the greatest impact on virtual leadrrship are communication, trust, and team cohesion. The paper highlights and characteriss these factors, a well as the actions that should be taken to manage them. As a major contribution, a four-phrase scheme is proposed for the analysis and management of leadership in vituality. Finally three future lines of research are suggested.
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[...]articles from the special issue are assigned to three categories: (1) New Organization, (2) New Leadership, and (3) New Learning. [...]studies have shown that such arrangements do not necessarily benefit all groups of workers equally (Kossek & Lautsch, 2017) and may come with new challenges like blurring work-life boundaries or protecting leisure time and psychological detachment. [...]New Work arrangements may require new forms of leadership (Banks et al., 2019;Sheninger, 2019). Ute Rademacher, Ulrike Weber, and Cassandra Zinn focus on informal rules and social practices that are established in the work-related use of smartphones. Since professional use of the smartphone can significantly blur the line between work and leisure, communication rules are important to ensure psychological detachment after working hours. Future work may be dedicated to studying these technological developments, which have the potential to spur profound transformations in a wide range of HR and organization processes. [...]the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an unintended global 'field experiment', and new unforeseen issues have emerged, such as the phenomenon of 'Zoom-fatigue', or the prevalence of psychological problems related to social isolation in virtual settings (Brunsbach, Kattenbach & Weber, 2021).
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The statistics on the records produced for the Italian National Bibliography (BNI) in the last decade evidence a stable development with a growing trend. In the face of that, there has been a decrease of human resources never seen before in the history of the National Central Library of Florence (BNCF), that has drastically reduced the editorial staff of BNI to few units. The institutional tasks of BNCF, provided by law, have not changed though. Among these is the archival function for the Italian bibliographic production and its representation through adequate cataloguing and bibliographic instruments. Therefore, in order to either maintain constant or increase BNI from a quantity point of view, by preserving its quality, some variations of a technical and organizational-managerial nature have been recently implemented, pursuing the following: 1. Rapidity of cataloguing;2. Full implementation of the recommendations of the Central Institute for the General Catalogue of the Italian Libraries and for the Bibliographic Information (ICCU) as regards, for instance, cataloguing regulations, use of the codes of bibliographic qualification, creation and management of the authority files regarding personal names and uniform title;3. Constant attention to the role of BNCF in the cooperation within the National Library Service (SBN). There are plans to intervene in some critical difficulties that still remain. The emergency due to Covid-19 pandemic has imposed a de facto meaningful and unpredictable reorganization of the work management (from the legal deposit to BNI and to the BNCF catalogue) through methods that could certainly be maintained even in future. © 2022, The Author(s).
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The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented slump caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This systemic risk like no other at a time of record-breaking debt levels, especially among non-financial firms across the world, could exacerbate corporate vulnerabilities, deepen macro-financial instability, and cause long-lasting damage to economic potential. Using data on more than 3.7 million non-financial firms from 58 countries during the period 1997–2019, we develop a two-pronged approach to investigate the relationship between corporate leverage and fixed investment spending. The empirical analysis, robust to a battery of sensitivity checks, confirm corporate leverage is highly vulnerable to disruptions in profitability and cash flow at the firm level and economic growth at the aggregate level. These findings imply that corporate debt overhang could become a strenuous burden on non-financial firms, especially if the COVID-19 pandemic lingers and global downturn becomes protracted.
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Degrarization and de-peasantization have been the dominant trends in the agrarian history of neoliberal capitalism. These phenomena have been inherent to the installation of a global agri-food system, supported by agribusiness and corporate agribusiness. This system has shown extensive vulnerabilities, which were evidenced in the international economic and food crisis unleashed in 2007. The COVID-19 pandemic has once again exposed the vulnerabilities of the corporate agri-food system, while it has narrowed its capacities to guarantee security food. The international peasant movement grouped in Via Campesina, since its foundation, has opposed the commodification of food and has struggled to place the peasantry at the center of the discussion on food systems. He has proposed that the right to food can only be ensured by the peasants who, in turn, will be guarantors of Food Sovereignty. For this, it is imperative to advance re-peasantization, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Through the discussion of recent bibliography on the matter, this article presents the peasant option for re-peasantization as an alternative to corporate and neoliberal control of food production and distribution an d, more broadly, as a horizon for the construction of a world future post-pandemic.
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Effective software requirements elicitation plays a vital role in the success or failure of a project. However, ambiguity in the requirement’s statements indicate the presence of a tacit knowledge, which ultimately act as a root cause of critical complications in later stages of software development as user’s needs might remain hidden. Additionally, the existence of numerous stakeholders escalates the problem as their perceptions may contrast mainly due to their experiences and roles in a specific application domain. Hence, witlessness of relevant stakeholder(s) and ambiguous requirements cause the compromise for a product quality. Eventually, it paves the way towards the failure of a project. Furthermore, COVID-19 has affected all walks of life, more specifically requirements elicitation process as it heavily depends on human-to-human interaction. Motivated by this, current study aims at identifying the requirements elicitation techniques and challenges through a systematic literature review protocol. Furthermore, we have performed an exploratory study to identify the traditional elicitation techniques that can be used specifically for eliciting the tacit requirements. Additionally, we validate the top 15 critical challenges in a normal and pandemic scenario. To validate the result’s authenticity and legitimacy, appropriate statistical tests have been applied on the obtained results. Based on the attained results, it is observed that transfer of tacit knowledge remains a most crucial challenge. To effectively handle the tacit knowledge challenge, we propose a novel conceptual model supporting COVID-19 context. Similarly, we employ expert-validation mechanism for empirically evaluation of the proposed conceptual model. Moreover, the current study provides the guidelines for the practitioners to mitigate the highlighted effects on the requirements elicitation process during current pandemic time. Finally, we believe that proposed conceptual model supports the practitioners in effectively gathering the tacit-knowledge based requirements in the COVID-19 context. Author
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Facing many challenges of division in all aspects (social distancing, political and social divisions, remote work environments), University of South Florida Libraries took the lead in exploring how to overcome these various separations by providing access to its high-quality information sources to its local community and beyond. USFs purchases were informed by work at other institutions, such as the University of Minnesotas antiracism reading lists, which has in turn grown into a rich resource that includes other valuable resources like the Mapping Prejudice Project and a link to the Umbra Search.2 The Triad Black Lives Matter Protest Collection at the University of North Carolina Greensboro is another example of a cultural institution reacting swiftly to document, preserve, and educate.3 These new pages and lists being generated by libraries and cultural institutions seem to be curated by hand using tools that require human intervention to make them and keep them up to date. Umbra Search is a tool that aggregates content from more than 1,000 libraries, archives, and museums.4 It is also supported by high-profile grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. Despite enthusiasm from libraries and other cultural institutions, new purchases and curated content are not going to reach the world as fully as hoped. [...]libraries adopt open data formats in favor of locking away content in closed records like MARC, library and digital content will remain siloed from the internet.